The Science of Applied Metaphysics: Marginalia

A few more odd bits and bobs that didn't make it into these essays.

If I had more of that editorial discipline I’m always trying to develop, I could probably write more succinctly and make my points more effectively.

Unfortunately—I’m an autodidact with a bad habit of finding a single term that suits my purposes, and then running off with it like a dog with a tennis ball. (Sorry about that.)

Here are some additional explanations that probably would have made the preceding essays much more intelligible for everyone who doesn’t live inside my head:

Ontological flooding and The X-Files

• Another good pop-culture example of ontological flooding is The X-Files. The reality that Agent Mulder lives in cuts right across any ontological model you can think of. Extraterrestrial intelligence, psy abilities, past lives, ghosts, cryptids, that guy who turns into jelly—Mulder correctly perceives it all as fair game for interpreting the clues he finds.

• Meanwhile, the show’s narrative unfolds from the perspective of a material-reductionist ontology, personified in Agent Scully: always claiming to look for concrete, verifiable proof and never finding it, while flatly refusing to acknowledge the metaphysical reality that she (and, by extension, the audience) is very obviously experiencing.

• The treatment of applied metaphysics in The X-Files is wildly inconsistent. Despite being surrounded by metaphysical weirdness, both of the main protagonists are satisfied to observe and report—rather than earnestly engaging with, say, magic, or divination, or prayer, or any of the other modalities developed by other cultures to interface with the outer expanses of non-material reality. It’s an ontologically flooded world imagined by materialists. You’re telling me Mulder has seen all this crazy stuff, and never once gotten wild with the Lesser Key of Solomon¹?

• Scully’s Catholicism is one of the purest examples of “religious but not spiritual” in our cultural imagination: it’s coded as a pro forma, remote, are-you-there-God-it’s-me-Dana expression of pure faith—the belief in an omniscient, all-powerful, personal deity—while stalwartly ignoring all the minor manifestations of that same metaphysical reality. The show heightens the contrast between Scully’s “Monster of the Week” experiences and the inscrutable God of her faith for dramatic effect. At the same time, out here in the real world, there are millions of contemporary Christians who will tell you with a perfectly straight face that they believe in a cosmos-spanning intelligence who created the universe for the benefit of humans—but the Witch of Endor in the Old Testament is a bridge too far, pure folklore, because it’s impossible for people to actually summon spirits of the dead.

Applied metaphysics and meaning

• Another dimension for looking at applied metaphysics is in how meaning is created. I’m sure there are whole college philosophy courses taught on the meaning of meaning—which I haven’t taken. (Again: autodidact, tennis ball, etc., sorry.) Just for fun: is meaning a fundamental part of reality? Or is it just a human construct?

• Carl Jung suggests that it’s both: there are archetypes that somehow precede (or prefigure) the development of human imagination, which are recognized but not necessarily created. These packets of meaning are indigenous to the collective unconscious. While humans can further develop these archetypes through the evolutionary process of shared imagination, they originate from somewhere deeper in the imaginal space. The Tower is one such archetype. We could say The Tower is an idea so fundamentally ingrained in the human imagination that it practically has its own independent existence, and is perpetually trying to realize itself in our reality.

• Applied metaphysics takes this process and makes it more intentional, which requires a kind of intersubjectivity: treating the more-than-human world as capable of recognizing and responding to meaning in the same way as humans. Once that initial leap is made² , it allows for the cybernetic “observer effect”: we notice an entity (a god, or a djinn, or a spirit, or Sasquatch, or extraterrestrials), which notices us noticing it, which changes its behavior toward us, which changes our behavior toward it, and so on. From this perspective, all the symbol sets created by magic, religion, divination, etc. (i.e. applied metaphysics) are a formalization of this feedback loop.

Applied metaphysics always works

• Applied metaphysics is a self-justifying ontological exercise: it’s always effective, insofar as it always changes reality on some level.

• For example, if you say a prayer for the first time, you will have irrevocably changed yourself from a person who doesn’t pray to one who does. Even if you never do it again—you’ve made a subtle change to your own personal narrative, which will indirectly change how you think about the world for the rest of your life, in unexpected ways.

• Every time you say a prayer, you’re reinforcing its ontological status in the world: prayer is real, because it’s a thing that people do, regardless of whether or not it “works” by having a metaphysical effect on reality. While the significance of prayer could be interpreted in different ways, it continues to be a form of applied metaphysics that exists in the world, because you chose (along with billions of other people) to behave as if it’s effective.

• If you say a prayer and it does seem to have some sort of metaphysical effect on the world, a non-local resonance in “objective” reality as a result of your “subjective” symbolic behavior… well, pull up a chair, because things are gonna get weird.

1. What would the ontologically flooded reality of The X-Files look like with applied metaphysics in play? Well… it would look like Hellier, which I’ve described elsewhere as “a team of four Mulders without a Scully.”

2. Which, again, should be an easy lift for all of the estimated 5.8 billion humans who identify as “religious” (unless they’re all just playing along because they like the snacks and the company.)