While Tillich's detailed analysis of Love, Power, and Justice was essential to my own understanding (especially how to work through the confusions without panicking!) it is only a small piece of the overall picture captured in ONT. Fig. 2 captures a few of the dynamic principles used to develop meaning in ONT.
To address the questions posed earlier, I use
ontology in its metaphysical sense, that is, what exists and how to fully characterize what it is.
Ontological states refer to structural meanings that bear relation to other structural meanings and to being itself. Further, I suggest there are numerous though limited (I derive 176) states that capture the structural elements, to borrow Tillich's phrase, essential to being. The number is not infinite (such as the notion of a collective unconscious or possible worlds might suggest) though the expressions possible within it appear infinite due to the roles of abstraction and, paradoxically, tautological self-awareness. Tautologies are the "because I said so" of philosophy. As such they are the all-powerful parent who seems to know little and require everything!
Remember the states of confusion referenced in the Tillich quote ("jungle of ambiguities... conceptual control... emotional drive")? Rather than rely on semantics -- and thus extended dialogue -- to surface the most useful existential meanings, the instrinsic structure within ONT accomplishes much the same thing. And when our own inner dialogue flows in a way that cuts through confused abstractions, hidden even from ourselves, clarity of being-ness in both self and other arises.
Let me make explicit a perhaps strange-seeming aspect to what I am saying so far. There are formative dynamics to existence. There are words I am associating to key (ontological state) conditions within it. THE WORDS ARE SECONDARY TO THE CONDITIONS, such that existence is not beholden to the particular words. Language origin, spelling, word choice (use of synonyms), and even language type (species specificity), do not necessarily affect key conditions. When one resonates in feeling, thought, or action purely with an ontological state, the experience (and utility) is comprehension of the situation that, while not suspending the use of languages to tell stories, is evocative of a special sort of absoluteness that its conditions carry. It is "right with the world."
* * * [ invitation to breathe :) ]
Back to Fig. 1 and the funny funnel diagram. Within it, I make the following statement:
- What appears and disappears, what perpetuates pressure, and what awaits readiness, blended algorithmically, result in scaling, auto-catalytic processes that exhibit both iteration and embedding.
The
three "
whats" summarize a triumvirate categorization of complex phenomena from which being-ness emerges at the cosmological level. I ask you to take them at face value, as it will be more helpful to discuss them later. My intended focus now is formative terminology. The term I use to group them is "behavior" (4th row in the table in Fig.1).
I refer to groupings such as "behavior" as algorithmic features, as well as to algorithmic blending.
Algorithm is perhaps a surprising word choice in relation to ontology, though not so in relation to complex systems. Algorithm refers generally to a procedure with a finite number of steps that requires repetition of an operation. While math and computing are obvious places where such procedures are of use, they are also reflected within complex natural phenomena. For instance in Bernard Chazelle's analysis in "Natural Algorithms," he derives an algorithm for the convergence of bird flocks.
I find the term algorithm useful because it suggests a route to unification or oneness of existence, a way of tying all things together, yet is not married to the concept of forces like modern theoretical physics is. (Yes, there are forces, as in things that act on each other, but it is quite another thing to insist that forces are what are responsible for something-ness at the unseeable level.)
Scaling, the suggested result of algorthmic blending, should bring to mind fractals, or the multitude of natural phenomena observed to repeat some feature over multiple levels. Then, evoke fractals where the patterning over multiple scales is there but not visually detectible (exceeds the limits of our ability to discern through the senses or logically follow). In Fig. 1, read the paragraph under the table to get a sense of how non-linear phenomena might affect our ability to figure out meanings that persist at multiple scales.
Finally,
auto-catalysis is on the other end of the science-y spectrum to algorithms, being used almost exclusively in association with biological, organic phenomena. It means a materially and energtically complex relationship in which at least one reaction product is also a reactant. A dynamic positive feedback system results. Order is increased within the system despite the thermodyamic tendancy toward disorder (2nd law). I am not the first to suggest that such a dynamic might be central to the emergent nature of existence itself, though the case remains speculative and therefore fringe within the "empirical" sciences.
OPTIONAL: Listen below to a short piece that builds on the above description of auto-catalysis using the metaphor of cosmic engines and delves in some detail into the cosmological principles behind ONT.