Pillars of Belief
The Cosmological Question:
How did our physical universe first come into being, and what are the physical laws that govern its past, present, and future functioning?
Adherents to the First Paradigm Worldview believe that we live in an inherently chaotic and entirely random (and therefore meaningless) universe. Adherents to the Second Paradigm Worldview believe that we live in a perpetually oscillating universe in which all actions are totally predetermined by purely mechanical physical forces. This oscillating dialectic dynamic of the second paradigm lends a clear mechanical dialectical dynamic which constitutes at least some meaning or direction in which one can act, though only in response to some purely physical predetermined tropism, to an otherwise entirely chaotic and meaningless universe. In contrast, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview hold the cosmological belief that an individual, through the exercise of mind, is able to modify the otherwise rigidly-absolute mechanical dialectical cosmology of the Second Paradigm Worldview, and the otherwise entirely chaotic cosmology of the First Paradigm Worldview.
Adherents to the Third Paradigm (Right Middle-Marginalist) Worldview hold the cosmological belief that, through an exercise of mind, each individual human being can existentially escape from this predetermined or utterly chaotic physical universe, although the purely physical universe always exists outside of the human mind. The exercise of the human mind in such a way enables each human being to make choices as though he or she were free.
According to Immanuel Kant, while unavoidably and unalterably conditioned by his or her physically predetermined talents, specific cultural conditioning, unique personal experiences, and uniquely conditioned perspective on reality, each human being still possesses some degree of human freedom from these preconditions to enable each such person to choose relatively freely between alternative choices, even if those choices are limited by one’s culture, historical time period, and experiences.
The nature of this peculiar degree of freedom is discussed by Kant in his Critique of Judgment in which he argues (somewhat unconvincingly to some) that an individual human being is capable of making comparative discernments between what he terms comparative magnum and absolute magnum, the former being capable of being discerned through a sensible experience, but the latter being capable of being discerned through a concept of pure reason, which conducts the notion of nature to “a supersensible substrate (which lies at its basis and also at the basis of our faculty of thought). As this, however, is great beyond all standards of sense, it makes us judge as sublime not so much the object, as our own state of mind in the estimation of it.” (Kant, § 26)
At one point, Kant warns his followers to beware of supposing that the absolute and even the comparative better is nothing more than an idea which might more effectively direct and regulate our purely rational search for empirical knowledge. However, at another point in the Preface of the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant asserts that he succeeded in showing that the reality of an unconditioned cause—hence a source of human freedom—could be proved by means of an apodictic law of practical reason, thereby constituting the keystone of an entire edifice of a system of pure (though speculative) reason.[2]
While subject to objection—even rejection—by adherents to other worldviews, this postulate categorically distinguishes the cosmology of adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview from the cosmology of adherents to the First and Second Paradigm Worldviews.
The Teleological Question:
Is there a specific direction in which our physical universe is unfolding? If there is, what is the role of our human species, if any, in this unfolding?
The unique cosmological belief of adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview generates an equally unique teleological belief. Looking out upon the otherwise chaotic or purely random universe of the First Paradigm and the physically predetermined universe of the Second Paradigm, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview look over these two different concepts and tell themselves that, while we as human beings possess no biological means of which we can, to an absolute degree of certainty[3], sense what reality is absolutely true, we are capable of choosing (by an exercise of our unique mind[4]) which reality we can mathematically project as being potentially real. In addition, we are then capable of existentially choosing to comport our human conduct in accordance with the projected reality rather than remaining a mere unwilling object, subject to the purely mechanical, predetermined mandates of the physical universe (either in the form of the chaotic mandates of the universe of the First Paradigm or in the form of the mechanically, predetermined dialectical mandate of the the Second Paradigm.)
Through such an act of the assertion of our existential mind, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview believe that we can assert a certain degree of existential human freedom—although, since it is impossible to escape from our preconditioned state of physical experience, we must make these choices existentially—knowing that we cannot ever get outside of our physical conditioning to know, to an absolute certainty, what is actually the truth.
The insertion of this added factor of human freedom and choice on the part of adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview adds a new dimension of direction to the physical universe, thus, changing its otherwise chaotic or dialectical and predetermined teleology.
The teleological belief of the Third Paradigm Worldview—our ability to choose a consistent, rationally-projected reality enables us to live as though our projected (chosen) reality were true—is distinguished from the teleological beliefs the First and Second Worldviews.
The Ontological Question:
How did sentient consciousness come into being (especially human consciousness)?
Adherents to the First Paradigm Worldview believe that consciousness is a randomly-occurring, material epiphenomenon of the entirely chaotic interplay between mass and energy in a chaotic material universe.
Adherents to the Second Paradigm Worldview believe that consciousness is an entirely predetermined mechanical function of the mechanically-determined physical expansion and physical contraction of the universe, like physical sparks thrown up by the mechanical grinding together of two metal balls.
Adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview, on the other hand, believe that because they are capable of accessing a dimension of realty through pure reason, which was not created by the physical universe, but was instead, created by the mind that there exists a dimension of reality which has no material existence, but does exist although we have no access while in our material incarnation, except through mind and then, only as a non-material concept. Since the human mind appears to have been generated by the physical interaction between purely physical mass and purely physical energy, it is reasonable to conclude, as a function of pure reason, that this field of mind (to which we have access purely as a concept through pure reason) was also generated by the purely physical interaction of all of the mass and energy in the entire physical universe which has no physical location but is generated by the physical universe—like our mind is generated by our brain.
However, this phenomenon is not physical. It is not part of the cosmology of adherents of the Third Paradigm. It is, instead, a concept of the mind of our human family, which we know to be true through pure reason alone, but to which we have no intellectual or physical access in our material (conditioned) state as human beings. Thus, this super mind is an ontological not a cosmological phenomenon.
The Epistemological Question:
What are the means by which we as human beings are capable of discerning the “facts” that constitute the answer to ultimate cosmic questions such as these?
Believing in the power of mind as the foundation of some degree of free will, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview believe that human beings have developed the ability to determine facts beyond the reach of five physical senses—not through access to some as of yet scientifically unidentified sixth biological human physical sense, nor through some direct access to a spiritual being beyond the boundaries of the physical universe to which we have no access in our conditioned material state—but instead through the power of our rational mind or intellect.
One such exercise of our human intellectual mind is mathematics, by means of which human beings are capable of, first, discerning patterns, which exist within the material plane we have direct physical access to through our five physical senses. Secondly, in identifying the mathematical formula, which exists within this observed physical pattern. Lastly, arithmetically extrapolating the formula that is mentally beyond our material physical senses so we can, thereby, determine, through an exercise of mind, additional dimensions of reality, which exists beyond the capability of our direct physical senses, which, in fact, need no material existence.
Adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview believe that human beings can do this same thing in the area of human ideas, specifically, intellectually discerning the pattern within a given human idea, and then, by intellectually projecting or extrapolating that idea beyond the realm in which we can presently directly experience it. Again, through the exercise of mind, we can access realms of knowledge that we could not otherwise access were we to remain bound to the physical three-dimensional world through our five physical senses.
Drawing upon data obtained from within such a realm of mind, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview hold the epistemological belief that human beings are capable of making intellectual choices, which would not be otherwise available through the materially-determined physical world of our five physical senses.
The ability of our species to impose choices upon the otherwise physically predetermined world, choices made based upon data discerned from within an intellectually-accessed realm, which exists beyond the three-dimensional world, constitutes an additional epistemological source of data which is available to adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview on the basis of which they can make their choices in the physical world.
This is, therefore, a distinctive epistemological belief of adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview.
Mode of Ethical Reasoning
Because of this unique epistemological belief on the part of the Third Paradigm Worldview, adherents employ an equally unique mode of ethical reasoning. The mode of ethical reasoning of the Second Paradigm Worldview is rigidly dialectical, and the mode of ethical reasoning of the First Paradigm Worldview, employing a consistent mode of ethical reasoning, which, when faced with a number of alternative action choices to respond to a given problem, will always choose the action which merely maximizes the personal degree of short-term physical pleasure and/or minimizes the personal degree of immediate physical pain.
The unique mode of ethical reasoning of the Third Paradigm (Right Middle-Marginalist) Worldview is that, when confronted with a number of optional actions to respond to a given problem will, first, choose which reality they can rationally project into the future to be potentially (arithmetically) true, and they then choose to engage in, or endorse as better, that particular action which will maximize that reality as though that reality were real.
This is an existential mode of ethical reasoning or mode of ethical reasoning that is directed toward making the world into one in which the adherent to the Third Paradigm Worldview can rationally project as being potentially existent.
Adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview hold the cosmological belief that our universe has always existed. However, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview believe that the specific physical form that our physical universe will take on, in any given cycle of its physical manifestation, is the result of the three-way interplay among energy, mass, and mind. Adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview therefore believe that consciousness, energy, and mass are eternal.
Like adherents to the First and Second Paradigm Worldviews, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview recognize that all matter that becomes physically manifested at the beginning of time (within each cycle of the universe) is expanding out and away from every other piece of matter. Adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview (along with the First and Second Paradigm Worldviews) also believe that every complex combination of matter that is more complex than the smallest, and, therefore, ultimately indivisible unit of matter, is also disintegrating into their smaller constituent, ultimately-indivisible units of matter.
Furthermore, as with adherents to the First and Second Paradigm Worldviews, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview believe that each and every ultimately-irreducible integer of matter in our physical universe is, at the same time, repelling itself out and away from every other such ultimately-irreducible integer of matter. However, while adherents to the First Paradigm Worldview believe that this expansion and disintegration of all matter in our physical universe will inevitably continue to go on forever until our universe disintegrates into nothingness; and adherents to the Second Paradigm Worldview believe that, at the moment in time at which every single ultimately-irreducible integer of matter in the entire physical universe stands separate and apart from every other such integer of matter in our entire physical universe, the expansion of our physical universe will inevitably stop expanding out and away from the original manifestation of matter, stopping our physical universe from ultimately disintegrating into nothingness and that, after stopping its expansion and disintegration, our physical universe will stand in a state of equipoise and inevitably begin to collapse back in upon itself, thereupon reconstituting itself back into singularities, waves of energy, particles of mass, etc., all the way back into planets, stars, solar systems, star clusters, galaxies, nebulae, etc.; very crucially, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview believe that neither of these two alternatively-proposed realities are inevitable or predetermined facts.
Instead, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview believe that whether our physical universe will expand forever out into nothingness or ultimately stop and collapse back in upon itself, creating a new cycle of physical existence is strictly the function of an existential choice that must be made every day by each human being by either lending the power of our minds directly to holding our physical universe together through an exercise of our existential hope followed by our existential actions taken in accordance with that existential hope, or by lending the power of our minds directly to the ultimate disintegration of our physical universe through embracing despair and engaging in individual and collective human conduct every day, giving effect to such despair.
Adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview adhere to the ontological belief that human consciousness is an absolute preexisting partner in the eternal interplay between mass and energy in our physical universe. However, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview do not attribute any metaphysical or psychic power to this activity on the part of our human mind. Rather, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview believe that human actions, taken as a result of existential, intellectual decisions made within our mind in the aggregate, can affect the material universe, but only through strictly rational and physical actions to physically effect our existential choices.
Martin Heidegger has clearly articulated this ontological belief on the part of adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview in such works as Being and Time (1930) and the Introduction to Metaphysics (1953).
The epistemology and theory of human psychology generated by the Third Paradigm Worldview is strictly sensory and intellectual. That is, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview hold the epistemological belief that human beings have access to a greater truth than that which we can experientially obtain from the total composite of raw materialist data directly physically experienced through our own five senses because they believe that human beings have an additional ability, through the exercise of our human mind (intellect), to discern patterns within the data that we can then physically discern through the exercise of our five senses, and which we can then project to intellectually determine a range of possible alternative realities that constitute real data pertaining to the real world that lies beyond the direct reach of our five physical senses.
Indeed, adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview hold the belief that the function of the human mind, while, indeed, an entirely material activity, is more than a random function of the interplay of physical forces in a random universe. They believe, instead, that human beings are capable, through the exercise of our mind, to make existential choices governing our moment-to-moment conduct, and that our existential conduct can constructively alter the otherwise strictly predetermined dialectical or chaotic pattern. Our physical universe would then radiate from each juncture of individual human decision, thereby providing to us an existential psychology—a much more satisfying psychological state of mind than being either mere flotsam of random consciousness in an entirely chaotic physical universe, as adherents to the First Paradigm Worldview believe us to be, or as mere slaves to an entirely physically predetermined, eternally-repeating, dialectical existence, as adherents to the Second Paradigm Worldview believe us to be. This existential psychology is most clearly explained by Swiss psychologist Ludwig Binswanger in a school of psychology known as Daseinsanalyse, described in The Foundations and Cognition of Human Existence (1942).
In its lower manifestation, the Third Paradigm Worldview generates the existential mode of ethical reasoning of John-Paul Sartre. Pursuant to this mode of ethical reasoning, a human being, faced with the otherwise entirely meaningless world of chaos of the First Worldview or with the only slightly less meaningless world of a rigid, materialistic, pre-determined, perpetually recycling, dialectical reality, one basically makes a heroic choice of choosing to engage in the form of human conduct that one would choose if human life were of supreme value. This philosophy of existentialism dictates that human beings, invested with intellect (intellectus—the ability to distinguish the difference between), are capable of choosing to act as if they possessed free will (the ability to act differently from a form of action that is imposed upon us by the otherwise predetermined physical laws of the universe).
This philosophy is, at the same time, both heroic and foolish because existentialism is rooted in an absolute conviction that human beings have no ability to know what absolute reality is. We are therefore necessarily without any absolute referent in accordance with which to make absolutely certain normative (norm-driven) choices or judgments. Thus, according to this philosophy, all judgments made by inherently ignorant human beings must be ultimately arbitrary. However, rather than have such choices be meaningless as well as arbitrary, adherents to the lower manifestation of the Third Paradigm Worldview make choices as if each individual human life were of absolute value and possessing free will (see, e.g. Being and Nothingness (1956) and Existentialism and Humanism (1948).
The mode of spiritual expression of adherents to the lower manifestation of the Third Paradigm is Judaism, projecting Yahweh God onto reality as an existential function of the mind.
In its social form, the Third Paradigm Worldview manifests itself, in its lower manifestation, in the form of the nation state, such as the nation state of Israel, the nation state of The United States, or the nation state of Sweden.
In its higher manifestation, the Third Paradigm Worldview generates the mode of ethical reasoning of Immanuel Kant. Pursuant to Kant’s higher Third Paradigm mode of ethical reasoning, one will be able to:
- Discern, through an exercise of one’s mind, the arithmetic, geometric, exponential, or algorithmic pattern that exists within the physical data that one experientially perceives directly through the exercise of one’s five physical senses.
- Project this pattern out into a realm of intellectually-perceived potential realities, beyond the reach of one’s five physical senses. By this means, one ascertains the structure of several potential, alternative, existential realities, each of which could logically flow directly from this pattern discerned through the mind.
- Make an existential choice to comport one’s personal conduct in accordance with one (among several) of the projected realities, which action comports with one of the intellectually-possible realities.
- Existentially engage in that chosen form of conduct so as to impose upon an otherwise chaotic or materially predetermined recycling world, one’s mindful, meaningful order and direction (see e.g., Kant’s Phenomenology of Mind: The Science of The Experience of Consciousness, 1807, and Naturrecht und Staatswissenshaft im Grundrisse, 1821).
Furthermore, the higher manifestation of the Third Paradigm Worldview is characterized by:
- A denial of the ability of an individual to be able to obtain access to ultimate reality through any combination of his or her five physical senses or through any act of sensuous intuition
- The rejection of any sharp division between faith and knowledge or between imagination and understanding
- The championing of the exercise of mind as the means by which one is able to discern patterns within the physical data obtained from the universe through an exercise of one’s five physical senses, and by means of which one is able to project these patterns out into a realm not directly accessible to our five physical senses so as to be able to intellectually intuit reality beyond that which could be directly experientially accessed through our five senses
- The belief that human beings can, through our actions, guided by mind, impose a direct effect upon an otherwise chaotic or dialectically predetermined physical universe
The mode of spiritual expression of adherents to the higher manifestation of the Third Paradigm is Hebrew Cabalism.
In its higher manifestation, the Third Paradigm Worldview has expressed itself in the social form of Zion, the mythical nation state governed by the wise King Solomon and a Council of Cabalists.
[1] That is research conducted by undertaking an analysis of the disparate data gathered in the field, and then discerning a developing pattern which that raw data generates.
[2] See below a discussion of how this pure speculative reason functions as an additional epistemological source of human knowledge acquired from a source beyond the physical sense experience at pp. 149-150.
[3] We will discuss this epistemological assumption of the adherents to the Third Paradigm Worldview under the topic of epistemology.
[4] See the above discussion of cosmology for Immanuel Kant’s description of this unique faculty of mind.