Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

to escape from by trying to find something on which everything else supervenes. In considering the view from eternity, we hit against another conundrum in our search. There is — as we’ve seen above — the need for The Many before there can be relation. In The One there can be no relation, so hence the notion that The One must be intrinsically inexplicable to us — for whom relation is the only way we can see things.

Some way back in our discussions, I mentioned the possibility that the wider scales of emergence — scales such as eco-systems, or indeed individual living things — may have an effect on the less complex scales of emergence below them. This I called ‘downwards causation’, in contrast to ‘upwards emergence’. Here we can attempt to incorporate this into what’s been said above about the view from eternity — or simply the universe when taken as a whole. Simply put, we might consider the two processes to be two sides of the same coin. Emergence from the bottom up could be considered the same as causation from the top down. This all hinges on whether the ‘view from eternity’ — that is, seeing the universe from outside time — has any literal reality, or is instead something that we can sort of imagine hypothetically, but is otherwise not a reality. It gives us these options:

There is an established order, outwith time and space, which causes the universe and/or regulates how the universe operates. (The order here might simply be the laws of nature, or it may be God, or something else that we cannot define.) The universe itself however strictly

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