The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

by William Egginton

Both sides of the antinomy imagine an ideal, ultimate cause, outside space and time, as a precondition for either assigning or denying responsibility. In an analogous way, those favoring either of the anthropic answers to the question of the initial settings of the universe imagine an ideal, ultimate cause, outside space and time. One version imagines a conscious intent to that cause in the form of God’s design, the other an infinite store of real universes so as to deny design. In both anthropic principles, the otherworldly scenarios are invoked to avoid the embarrassment of accounting for the existential fact that we find ourselves in this universe and these are the values that we derive from our measurements. Likewise, otherworldly scenarios to implant a free soul into a mechanistic world or to deny all responsibility to human agents fall on the same strategy. They create an uncaused cause outside space and time and then pretend it has real purchase on the here and now. They also do so for the same reason—to avoid the embarrassment of accounting for an existential fact. We are physical beings whose every move occurs in the mechanistic flow of space-time, and we are rational agents who can visualize options and choose which one to take.