The temporal past has no ontological significance, though it is probably the most naturalized false metaphysical postulate (an epi-ontology, if you will) that is given great investitures by the pillars of human culture like religion, fate, and determinism. It is the pastulate—if you won’t—that receives a great deal of traction from many non-classical and colloquial areas of human endeavor. Such disparate areas where the past is taken for granted range from the academy, where most scientists subscribe wholesale to Einstein’s spacetime, on over to the informal references to activities of yesterdays and yesteryears—references which take on a seemingly active existence in the imaginations of those who dwell on events past. Some, such as archaeologists and particle accelerating physicists, would even go so far as to forcefully plow and dig up modern habitations, or put our solar system at risk of a black hole, than lack any knowledge of the past. Whatever the particular method, it seems that devotion to something that isn’t in the here and now is certainly a trend in human behavior. The past, for its part, is a well papered over falsity that has cropped up and will continue to crop up when our vigilance sleeps, which is when our brains succumb to platitudes. An ontological explanation as to why a determinant past, though ontologically false, has staying power in our institutions and imaginations, is called for. The past is an enduring falsehood that is the logical mirror to something that does have real ontological significance: the metaphysical entity that is a determinizing future, i.e. the logical uinverse.
The past is not an ontological reality: it does not endure, reverberate, or have any effect on the present. A tenseless past does not accumulate with the passing of time (and no tensed past can be reaccessed out of our present, i.e. time travel into the past is precluded). Yet because of the nature of the uinverse—with its incessant logic impending upon the present with the potential future metaphysic—it is able to project itself (through negation) back in to “the past” transhistorically, seeding itself “there” so that an idea grows in the we of the present that there maybe is some sort of ossified past that seamlessly is moving us in to its logically contrived future. Contrarily to this supposed commonsense worldview, the reality of the metaphysical uinverse is that it is as an overturned fully branched out tree; it is such a tree that has come from no seed (for it has no birth), it only has a death that is intimately intertwined with the death of the Universe. When we of the present are a totally passive and captive audience, unable to deny scientific logic, the uinverse presents to us a full trailmap that displays our roots going back to a beginning. However, this trailmap that we unwarily misinterpret as a genealogical record is in reality a roadmap that projects the route to its end; it is a postdestination that when we chose to believe, we fate to be so (analogous to the “self-fulfilling prophecy”). The uinverse, then, is completely associated with a future and could not be locatable into a past for both the reason that 1) I am positing that there is no extension to time, i.e. time does not exist, and 2) the uinverse is in a purely reactive relationship with the physical present, rather than a “preactive” state that would allow it the causal agency to continuously create the present. Thus the logic driven uinverse, from the observations being made earlier (in part 1), is clearly a mere reactive metaphysic that is always making prescriptions a posteriori in relation to the evolving present.
The uinverse does have temporal sequence, which might be called duration (as opposed to the fully present-ed real Universe). This is not physical duration, but rather a metaphysical extension that is temporal, a perfectly sparing amount that has just enough calculus to drive the present Universe back to its original and constant end goal of the purely logical singularity. It is important to note that this uinversal duration tensely disintegrates when the choice is made to fall in to this logical path, this for the reason that our present treats a logical determined choice no different than it would an un-logical free movement previous state—both quickly leave ontological existence as they are tensed. The uinverse is a pure opportunist, and has no care, no pride to ontologically store previous routes to Universal destruction; all that it cares for is to move the pieces towards the end logical singularity. Premeditation is the defining difference between a determined, logical choice for new motion and that of a free, illogical choice for new motion.
The logically singular end goal aspect of the uinverse is what Parmenides inherently realized when he devised his philosophy impossibilizing motion: he was speaking with the voice of the pure logic that diatribed of a necessity for a singularity. He denied the real world of motion all around him in favor of submitting to the whining of a metaphysic that ultimately wanted to destroy that world. The past’s non-existence is, not coincidentally, something Parmenides would agree with, but for a very different reason or end than he had hoped to investigate, that of freedom and determinism. In contrast to what Parmenides would say—that there is no freedom because there is no change, and that there is no need for determinism because everything (i.e. the only thing) is already determined—the real moving Universe has the option of freedom built in to it, and as being truly free, it has the optional choice for determinism (via the uinverse) available to it. The freedom of our living Universe, of our ontological reality, is a freedom that has the option of death (and the Universal freedom should not be confused with a individualized and separately locatable “free willing” entity). Without assuming a past as is tacitly done in so much of the causal determinism/freedom dialogue, there is now the space afforded to the Universe to include the existence of both freedom/determinism without the temporal restrictions that make them mutually exclusive. Determinism is an option, a future direction, that the energies/energy of the present can avail themselves to. There is no necessity that this deterministic path is elected, and there is no force greater than collective conformity that keeps the ontological present committed to such a straight and narrow path.
Heading off the role of cause and effect: the breaking of the cause and effect chains
The most basic of inversions that logic binarily has put on our minds is that of the concept of cause and effect. Logic, in crude form, says that causes out of the past conglomerate to create our present, as a mere effect, which in turn becomes a future cause of future effects, and so on chaining up the future in-definition. However, this logical presumption becomes highly problematic when there isn’t a past out of which the present can causally spring, and the questions that then emerge are where is the place of cause and effect, and is it just a false belief (leaving the Universe to be ontologically free, or somehow determined by another force)? Cause and effect is indeed a creation of the uinverse—which explains why it has independently emerged repeatedly in different cultures—and it cannot hope with this tactic to be causal, it can only hope to be “effective”.
There are many intuitive problems that arise when one seeks to use cause and effect as an explanatory device for all that is empirically witnessed in our world. It would be peculiar, but not necessarily falsifiable, if we lived in a causally determined universe that caused, deep back in its origins, among other things the exact necessary causal chains that would allow the correctly mental-structured (for human consumption) concept of cause and effect to appear now and then cause variable written refutations of such a concept. Another observation that doesn’t sit well with cause and effect is that of oneness somehow causally erupting from within itself, or later on being caused to erupt from an outside force, in to a multitudinous mixture of matter and forces of varying speeds and distances. A universe with increasing levels of depth/subtlety/difference seems to be ill-explained or formulated when it is understood as causally causable; this may be restating the age-old paradox that something needs to be caused and yet needs to be self-causing, albeit by a different route. However, from my view self-causation only seems paradoxical if we assume cause and effect to be the only (or primary) ontologically real method of motion (i.e. mutually exclusive, or “incompatible”). Many contemporary cause and effect enthusiasts defer the issue by appealing to the determined randomness from the quantum mechanical scale to explain how cause and effect could appear so subtle and unknowable. To be fair to the physicists, physics is currently a lot more open-minded than philosophers and logicians who would use their trade to push crude causal determinism; in this regard, perhaps I am just one such person, though in reverse, crudely unpushing a crude cause and effect model.
The metaphysical uinverse is a plethora of sequential cause-effect chains that all lead off with an effect, which they use to bate the Universe to provide the cause to. The long but finite “fuse” of effect, cause, effect, cause, …, logical-singularity is inertly constructed in the metaphysical potential state of the uinverse. It is always dangling the effect tip of its fuse into our present as the logical option we might embark on. The sorrow of embarking upon this path with all our energy consistently devoted towards it is that the voyage has at its end a final disembarkment at Universal death; it would be better to embark on an endless voyage. Causal chains, though linked to death and ultimate death via logical necessity, are an option afforded to the free Universe; they are led by the effects that seek to recruit their own causes to bring themselves in to concrete realization.
Next: The Uinverse Part 3
Subverses 