Consciousness and Cosmology have always been intimately tied together in my mind. This assessment is fairly easy to come by for me when I ponder the nature of consciousness. It may not seem so easy to someone who is inclined to see physical reality as unaware matter obeying strict laws. I generally consider there to be two camps of people who see the world this way, those that think of consciousness as inhabiting a spiritual realm distinct from the physical realm, and those that consider consciousness to be a phenomenon emergent from the fine patterns of biological clockwork. The former group has owned philosophical thinking for as long as it has existed up until only very recently. The latter group currently holds the full attention of the Academy, though I do not think it will hold complete sway for long. The reason for my hope that the worldview of the Realists and Positivists won’t last is because the philosophical foundations for their assertions and implications have not been properly tended to and when these are inspected they are found to be inadequate to support the girders of the deterministic program. At the same time, it would be foolish to toss the findings of Science, so I believe it is incumbent upon the toppler to explain how Science can be true by virtue of its success and yet false by virtue of its perhaps improper claim to global scope. Any postulated cosmology must necessarily demonstrate that it can be reduced to a form that comports with Science. This is true even if we are considering the resurrection of an antique cosmology for it must be compatible with modern sensibilities. This is because we have acquired in the last few hundred years a core capacity for understanding the world through the scientific method and its findings, a core capacity that won’t simply go away just because we are uncomfortable with its statements about a lack of free will in General Relativity or the neuropsychological reduction of a spiritual experience to certain patterns of brain function. To deny our hard won capacity for critical inquiry and experimental verification would be tantamount to plucking out our eyes in hoping to learn that all that we see is an illusion of maya. Even more ridiculous would be to suggest that someone we are trying to convince or bring to a similar experience as ours should first blind themselves. Clearly this is an impotent philosophical tactic, not merely pedagogically, but more importantly, epistemologically. We must incorporate all of our capacities in the search for greater understanding of the cosmos.
For that system of thought that holds consciousness to be a purely emergent phenomenon it is fairly easy to see that Cosmology and Consciousness are unified in reality. After all, that is pretty much what is asserted. But one thing that becomes difficult for this paradigm is to execute a reductive program that explains what it is to be conscious.  This is the Hard Problem of David Chalmers. How can meaningless, non-experiential matter give rise to the experience of being? I don’t wish to categorically consign the effort to find that explanation to the pile of futility, but I do suspect that the process is one of peeling an onion. As it stands, we now understand a lot more about personal and social psychology than ever. We know a lot about how neurotransmitters and hormones affect our mood and cognitive states, how some common modes of social interactions and compensation show up as personality traits, and how epigenetic influences can shape our growth as a person. Where these gleanings fall short is in claiming that something fundamental has been uncovered, something with universal applicability. It is a fallacy to claim that statistically measured tendencies have anything to say about an individual example. A close corollary is that there is no average person.
This mistake is often made because it is a natural tendency for humans to categorize our experiences and appraisals of others. We say that one person is loving and another is stentorian, or that this person is neurotic while another is peaceful. Our brains have only a limited capacity for capturing our whole experience of another and so we keep only a Cliff’s Notes version. This necessarily is a reductive process from the fullness of being to a set of categories. Even at a bare minimum we can only appraise that which we have experienced of another, an accurate recording. But that’s not how our minds work. We operate in a semantic world of meaningful labels and snippets. When we call up an avatar of another in our personal mindscape, we call up a quite limited set of scripts and labels, notes that can relate our conception of an individual to myriad other conceptions we might have such as personality traits.
Our necessary tendency to reduce and categorize is thoroughly infused into how we have constructed the scientific method. Our goal in the prosecution of critical experimentation and conjecture is to uncover universalities that we can understand the world by. We should recognize that this is by necessity a reductive process and can really only answer reductive questions. Alfred N. Whitehead refers to this as the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. In reducing a set of measurements to a statistical model we are not able to logically extend that model to all measurements simply because any new measurement is not measuring the same thing - different moment in time, different environmental context, different influx of noise. In taking a statistically inferred model and applying it generally we are committing Whitehead’s fallacy.
Now this is a brash claim in the face of the overwhelming evidence that Science has very strong, verifiable statements to make about how the world works. And it flys in the face of our everyday experience of things like the reliability of the sun rising or lobbing a ball to a catcher. Of course these macro events behave in a statistically consistent manner. This ground should be staked by Science and we should grant its claim. Where the territorial rights of Science must end however is in the exact specification of the individual occurrence. Science, in its pursuit of the reductive analysis of consciousness, steps out of its philosophical shoes when it claims a universal theory of being. Science will not make the claim that it can demonstrate in practice adherence by a being to universal laws, for the individual is too complex a system to capture. The claim Science makes instead is that it is possible in theory to demonstrate adherence.
When such a claim is made, the immediate implication is that a being has no other source of variance from the set of universal laws that would grant capabilities such as free will or creativity. If all that is being is constituted by the material stuff of Reality, and this stuff is entirely subject to universal laws as uncovered by Science, then it would seem that in order to rescue our sense of independence we must either relegate that sense to a fantasy within our emergent consciousness or Science must be somehow cast down. In my estimation, it is only necessary to slap the wrist of Science when it reaches beyond its ordained country. And to be true to the self-conception of Science, we must cuff it with its own self imposed limitations, limitations that seem to have been forgotten in its campaigns.
Before I expound upon these self imposed limitations and posit a replacement theory, I want to investigate the claims of the other grand school that posits a spiritual realm that is not of the world of reality. A general theme that can be found among the intense variety of spiritual cosmologies is that there are two essenceses at work in the totality of the cosmos, the stuff of matter and energy, and the stuff of mind and consciousness. This dualism can take many forms. Idealism is one form of dualism that asserts a realm of forms and motivational influences that has agency within the world of reality. Some forms of Idealism claim that reality doesn’t actually exist but is rather a projection of the ideal realm. Plato and Hinduism come to mind.  In other schools reality and ideal are ontological but connected by some means which affords agency, typically hierarchically with ideal acting upon reality.  This is the Christian model of a divine, spiritual realm that operates within the playground of a real creation. Chalmers posits a dual aspect monism where each particle of reality also has a foot in the realm of mind.
The perennial problem that arises for dualistic schemes is how agency is to operate. What is the ontological structure that allows for a mental influence to alter the otherwise deterministic flow of reality? As an example, I am contemplating what I am writing as I write it. If left to determinism, nothing would flow from my mental world onto the page. But if I am to mentally influence my brain to execute the letters necessary to convey to the page that my eyeglasses are a bit loose, then I must have in my mental realm a dramatically intricate model of the reality in which my body exists. The concept of “loose eyeglasses” presupposes an enormous hierarchy of concepts bound to a very fine set of perceptions. We must ask where this structure resides. Is it manifest in reality as the makeup of my body, my brain, and the functions of memory, sensation, and perceptual interpretation? Does it exist in parallel forms, both in reality and a copy in the mental plane? I think that if my mental life is to operate with any coherence to reality then I must have a copy of my body at hand in the mental realm. It may be argued that the mental holds an idealized version and so does not really require an atomic resolution for its model. But then we must ask where the boundary lies between what is necessarily part of the mental and what is contained within some ideal well enough to remain in reality. I think this is not something that can be fixed upon an axis of complexity or semantic content, or even given a hard boundary. At best I can imagine the mental realm occupied by ideal forms with a gradual transition into the real but imperfect forms of reality.  But again, how is a partial transition implemented? Is there some substrate for forms that can exist in both realms?  Seems unnecessarily complicated. This leads me to conclude that disjoint dualism is not a viable model for consciousness and reality.
Chalmers’ notion of a dual aspect monism doesn’t really help us. It was conjectured to solve the problem of how consciousness arises out of non-conscious matter. If we allow that an atom is not conscious, then, as we aggregate more and more atoms into a system, at some point we suddenly have something that is conscious. But it is not reasonable that the addition of a single atom to the system would suddenly impart consciousness. Chalmers seeks to circumvent this problem by having a modicum of mentality as part of every atomic particle. But this doesn’t really solve the problem because if it is the case that aggregations of mental aspects of particles eventually leads to greater and more intricate expressions of consciousness, then why bother to have a dual aspect particle at all?  Wouldn’t the aggregation of non-dual particles achieve the same? They would have the same structure and relationships, so where is the distinction that makes a difference? Chalmers is working from the assumption that there is indeed a mental and a physical pole to the cosmos and these are somehow distinct yet intimately tied at all levels. But there is no ontological extra mentality that grants free will in this model, and if there was, all Chalmers has done is give us a surface on which to glue the purely mental to the physical. The system does not solve the basic hierarchical structure or where one blends into the other.
In my personal view, the concept of reality as a projection from an ideal realm is closer to a workable model. Agency is captured nicely since anything that is postulated in the mental realm would show up in reality as a projection of that postulate. Just think a thing with the free will afforded to the mental realm and it will show up as real. Fortunately for us and unfortunately for the concept, that is not how the world works. We can’t just reorder our shared reality to suit our whimsy. We are bound by the coherent requirements of reality, the laws of physics in our modern language. So while the concept of ideal projection may be a good starting point, it will need some serious overhaul.
The most thorough system of thought that I know of that posits reality as a projection is found in Yoga philosophy. There are many distinctions among the various schools and these have evolved over time, but generally the cosmos is organized in a hierarchy of tattvas. In the following description of what these are I’m going to do violence to the exquisite handiwork of the practitioners of Yoga who constructed these models. But I am not here so concerned with being accurate as attempting to capture the essential approach to organizing the cosmos. In any case there are a number of variants and interpretations.  At the apex of the tattva system is the deity, an undifferentiated, pure potential, the unthinking source of all existence. As the deity expresses itself, we find at the highest levels of the tattvas the most fundamental differentiations of Divinity, such as those of Shiva-Shakti, roughly corresponding to male and female essences, although that simple description does not do justice to the fullness of their expressions. As one descends the structure these further divide into various aspects of consciousness differentiated somewhat according to how reality is experienced. For example, the world may be experienced as separate from self, as a system of concepts, or as a creative process. These are primal modes of condensation of undifferentiated, pure essence into identifiable, separated entities and aspects. Below these principles are the realms of human and animal consciousness. And as one descends further down the hierarchy, the differentiations become so severe that consciousness is ground too fine to hold anything like a mental model of the world. Here we are at the level of elemental physicality.
This is quite a different schema than other forms of Idealism, one that locates the source of the cosmos in Divinity, not merely as creator of an independent reality, but as the substrate of the cosmos itself. It places our experience of being and consciousness in somewhat of a midpoint of the process by which the hardness of reality is formed. That is not to say that the creative juices necessarily flow through us on the way to reality. That notion is not held by all schools. Rather, we exist in our normal lives on a plane that can experience both reality and consciousness in a unified whole of being. From our vantage we have access to both mundane and divine. The earthly elements do not have access to the divine except via the expression of medial levels of consciousness in the patterns taken by these elements in forms that are, for example, human. In other words, matter experiences the divine to the extent that it loses its differentiated atomicity through aggregation in biological entities. Likewise, divinity does not experience the world of matter except as it differentiates itself into the forms of conscious awareness that can take in the plenitude of the material world. Thus the cosmos exists as a continuum between unknowing bliss and potential in divinity and unknowing calcification and determinism in matter.
Again, I want to express that this is my own interpretation of the system of the tattvas, one with which I try to extract the essential model of a progressive, structural process of being and becoming, not only in the human aspect, but as the fundamental process of the cosmos in general. Even so, this is an incomplete system. This personal model, and as far as I’ve understood, any of the tattva systems, do not explain anything that we might call physics except at the most rudimentary level of the elements of earth, wind, fire, water, and in some schools, prana. These are not systems of mechanics, let alone atomistic depictions of reality. The Eastern philosophy of the Yogis turned their attention away from this end of the spectrum and focused on the attainment and experience of “higher” levels of consciousness. A more detailed understanding of physical mechanics would involve focusing on what, to them, was the phantasmal realm of maya, the veil that hides the true nature of the cosmos. To the Yogi, the easy part is to sit in “reality” and just take it as-is. To enhance one’s experience, one has to practice the path of enlightenment, reject the solidity of the world, and experience the wonders of the hard to obtain realms of higher conscious awareness. Here in the West we have taken the opposite path, to meditate on what is solid, true, and provable without recourse to the untransferable experiences of individual knowledge. There is no guarantee that meditative states of awareness are generally reproducible, unlike the logic and empiricism of the Western methods for knowledge.
At this juncture I have covered the field of Idealism and settled on a neo-Eastern system that explains the world in terms of the differentiation of the divine into conscious forms and ultimately into the stuff of reality. I have noted that the Eastern program has elided the intimate details of the workings of the material world. The reason for this prejudice lies in the conviction that the material world is a false portrayal of the truth of reality. I have also asserted the competence of the Western program at teasing out those intimate details while at the same time it has eschewed research into any possibilities for a mental cosmos. The prejudice displayed by the West lies in the conviction that the truth can only be known as general laws, demonstrable in the repetition of experimental procedures, not through individual experience as practiced by Eastern philosophers. Accordingly, the “truth” that is known by either camp is peculiar to their respective modes of inquiry and what each is willing to accept as evidence. I want to turn back now to the philosophical underpinnings of the Western approach, the assumptions that I have called into question.
Western Scientific pursuit concerns itself with finding truth in the form of laws which can be demonstrated to be repeatable. Buried in this attitude is the assumption that Truth is something that is repeatable, that has the character of a universal law, applicable across translations in time and space. Such laws necessarily take the form of a causal narrative. The narrative is a prescription for determining an outcome given a set of initial conditions. It might be said that the laws themselves are not intrinsically causal, but that they describe causal predictions. The search for such laws therefore looks for repetitions of apparently casual occurrences to bolster a proposed law. Individual, uncorrelated events are considered noise that might mask an underlying causal pattern and so great lengths are taken to eliminate or calibrate for the removal of such data from the supporting evidence. Conversely, if an isolated, unexplained event is noted, the assumption is made that it has occurred according to the same causal laws, but because not all of the input state is known we cannot therefore make a corroborative prediction that explains the anomaly. It should be obvious that the questions asked are concerned with causal processes and therefore only causal answers are acceptable.
This is a highly fruitful approach to understand reality as we experience it. Apparently, the physical world does indeed follow something like universal, causal laws, though it is premature to claim absolute universality or precision. It is the claim of absolute universality that militates the implication of a fully deterministic cosmos devoid of free will or anything that could be roughly characterized as a transcendental mentality. However, from what Science itself has ascertained about the nature of reality, it cannot make that ultimate claim. Physicists have learned that the processes of quantum mechanics involve an indeterminism in the prediction of the outcomes of individual events. The wave equation used to describe the causal outcomes cannot make precision determinations. There are a number of interpretations for why this is so, but time and again, with ever more sophisticated setups, the evidence supports the Copenhagen Interpretation which states that the wave function determines a probabilistic proscription for the possible outcomes of some process. What this means is that the physical laws, which, at the fundamental level are grounded on the equations of quantum mechanics, do not predict a causal chain for the cosmic process. What they do describe are probabilistic guide rails, but not a uniquely determined outcome. It is in principle possible, wholly within the confines of our known physical laws, for any manner of miraculous things to occur - telekinetic manipulation, flying, and time reversal. This is the philosophical truth of the laws of Science, not the unsupported extension of probabilistic determinism to the lack of free will. That said, we obviously don’t live in a world of blatant violations of physical laws and so we must inquire further to understand why this is so. Further on I will introduce a tendency towards coherence that can fulfill this observation.
The second element of quantum mechanics, demonstrated many times over under increasingly sophisticated experiments, is that of entanglement. This is something that occurs when two or more particles interact with each other to the point that their states, the set of qualities that uniquely identify a particle, are no longer independent. This amounts to a decrease in the degrees of freedom the particles enjoy. Whereas without entanglement they can independently follow their own wave functions, once they are entangled their outcomes are locked together. What were two degrees of freedom are now one. The essential philosophical feature of entanglement is that the two particles must always act in the future according to that entanglement. And if a third particle should become entangled with one of the two, then it too will be entangled with the other. For example, if Alice entangles with Bob, and then Bob entangles with Charlie, then Alice must act as if it is entangled with Charlie even though they have never encountered each other. This is quite a lot of bookkeeping for the particles to keep track of.
However, as it turns out, entanglement occurs in the interstitial realm between events that make up the causal chain of reality. When an event occurs, all of the entanglements are forced into a singular state - the outcome of the event. When all of the entangled particles have marked their state in an event, a cross check of those states will show that the particles had been entangled at some point before the measurement events.  Mathematically, the degrees of freedom are analogous to the location around a circle, what is known as the phase. For particles that are not entangled, they can have independent angles. But when entangled, they will have a fixed angle with respect to each other even though the pair can still take on an arbitrary phase. The wheels of a bicycle can serve as an example. At any point along a road, you can take a snapshot and see the valve stem of each wheel has an arbitrary angle, but the relative angle between the two valve stems will always be the same degrees apart. The tires became entangled when they were set on the road with that particular relative angle. A bicycle whose tires are not entangled would be floating in air, the tires free to rotate independently. Each time a new entanglement is made, the tires are essentially locked into a new phase arrangement. When this happens for three tires, it is the sum of all three angles that must remain constant. But this means that if I take a snapshot of only two tires it will no longer appear that they have the same original angle between them.  All three angles must be taken into account.
Here is where the argument is made in the scientific community that entanglement is degenerated by continuing interactions between particles. The effect is only noticeable when entangled particles are kept undisturbed until they are measured. The claim is that there is no need for extensive bookkeeping on the part of the particles, and so there is no crisis of complexity for fundamental particles. But this is not a proper philosophical argument. In the case of just two particles, there is extraneous bookkeeping involved. Experiments have shown that the same is true for three particles. Quantum computers currently entangle more than fifty particles. All of these systems show that the complexity of entanglement does indeed grow exactly with the number of  particles. Indeed quantum computing relies on this massive bookkeeping to achieve the tremendous level of computing power with such a small number of states. The argument that there is no need for an extended state doesn’t hold up to current experimental results. And in principle, the entangled state history of any particle must include every interaction the particle has ever had!
The entire concept of a particle has been developed around just a handful of parameters to define its state: its location, momentum, and spin vectors, along with its mass and charge. Now we are contemplating a cosmic scale of notes regarding how particular particles should behave with respect to other individual particles. Note that there are two demands made here by the metaphysics of quantum mechanics. Not only must a particle somehow represent its complex history, it must also do so on an individual, particle by particle basis! Gone is the notion of every electron being indistinguishable from any other electron that might have the same location, momentum and spin vectors. These electrons each have a unique history of their encounters in the cosmos. This is at odds with a foundational premise of the Scientific Method that a theory must be testable by the corroboration of repeated experiments. There simply is no way to repeat an experiment because it will involve particles that do not have the same historical context.
To be clear, I am talking about aspects of particle behavior that are very difficult to even bring to a measurable effect. But philosophically, the implication of the effects we have measured profoundly upend the extrapolated assertions of Science regarding deterministic laws based on statistical verification. But there is an even deeper lack of support lurking at the edge of what is measurable. I’m talking about the Planck Interval which derives from the same Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that drives the wave function’s probabilistic character. The Planck Interval is a measure of spacetime within which absolutely anything can happen as long as it is as short and fast enough to not violate the conservation of momentum. In this extremely tight hunk of spacetime, a virtual particle may pop into existence, interact with a real particle, then pop back out before any alarm bells go off. In one of the greatest predictions in all of science it was found that in order to most precisely account for the masses of particles, these virtual interactions have to be accounted for. And that means every possible interaction! As it turns out, the simplest possible interactions have the greatest effect and so when calculating the expected mass of a particle in a particular circumstance one only needs to include a limited number of possible interactions that are of minimal complexity. But in principle, every possible interaction affects the particle’s mass.
Here again, Science makes statistical measurements of multiple particles and finds that the predicted statistical distribution matches reality to whatever precision is needed. But these are aggregates of a great many events, not individual outcomes. So Science is only answering questions that have a likelihood for answers, not a truly causal, deterministic scheme. We have seen this several times now where Science asks certain kinds of questions, those that support a general tendency for the way things should unfold, applies the technique of repeated measurement, and gets statistical answers in support for those tendencies. But what Science does not ask nor answer is how a particular chain of events will unfold for a particular, individualized system. In verifying its general laws and discovering that they are only of a statistical nature, Science has self-limited its applicability to what only appears to be a causal reality, but is really novel and diverse under the appearances. Science, by its own findings, cannot extrapolate a predetermined universe.
But what Science has uncovered for us is a possible mechanism for the condensation of a causal reality from a realm of potential. Consider again the interstitial realm between the events that mark out the causal network of reality. The picture is one of an unlimited number of virtual realities playing out in a context that is neither in the space nor time of reality. In the time between one event and the next, whatever can happen does happen, and there is a kind of accounting that takes place before any subsequent event takes stock. This is an atemporal and  non-spatial process at work. Moreover it is infinitely more complex and dense than the two events that mark its boundaries. This goes on between every event-knot in the network-fabric of reality. I would go so far as to say that an event in reality is a degenerate projection of an infinitely complex process in a field of potential.
At this point the nature of the cosmos is beginning to look like the process ontology of Alfred North Whitehead. In his conception, Reality is composed of events, what he calls actual occasions. Actual, meaning that which really happens, and occasion, meaning an event or instance within that reality - its atomic dollop of existence. Events are created through the process of concrescence whereby a number of prior events come together to form a new event. In addition to actual occasions as input, ideal occasions also form part of the recipe for the new occasion. The ideal occasions are akin to the Platonic forms or similar objects of Idealism. As near as I can tell, Whitehead’s conception is an extension of Idealism executed at the quantum level. He replaces a particle ontology with an event ontology, but he adds an Ideal realm, which he calls the Mental Pole to the Physical Pole of quantum mechanics. I have been unable to find in his writing a worked out mechanism whereby the laws of physics as we know them are emergent from the process of concrescence. What I have found is the assertion that they are emergent as what he calls habits. These habits are passed on through the process of concrescence to each occasion in turn. Those laws that are the most fundamental were worked out at the earliest stages of the cosmos and subsequent occasions have served to solidify those laws. It is interesting to note that this description of the habits of occasions looks remarkably as if the cosmos itself is running experiments in order to determine the exact nature of its own physical laws and constants.
Another aspect of Whitehead’s theory is the notion of societies of occasions. These are aggregates of occasions that are mutually self-defining and perpetuating. These societies are the bases of individual organisms. In other words, where in a particle ontology we have aggregates of particles forming a recognizable organic individual, a process ontology has societies of events that perform the same aggregation function.
But one thing I want to call attention to is that Whitehead’s organizing principle is a set of occasions that presses forward from what and where it has been. It is a universal organism, the entire cosmos in aggregate transforming itself through process. It exists in the Physical Pole, but draws from a Mental Pole for where it will become. I find this to be another expression of simple Idealism without an in depth inquiry into the Mental Pole itself. As we have seen, it is fairly easy to inquire into the nature of the Physical Pole. We have a reality close at hand to test our theories against. But the Mental Pole is more elusive. We might posit an Ideal form towards which reality attempts to perfect itself. But as far as I can make out, this is not that well developed in Western thinking, even in Whitehead. It is almost time to cue the return of Eastern thought, but first I must reorient our perspective to take in the kind of cosmos I am growing more and more comfortable with. I pointed out earlier that the realm of the virtual particle field within the Planck Interval is of a vastly greater order of infinity than reality. I also pointed out the need for a cosmically complex particle to support the requirements of entanglement. I’d like to introduce now a concept for the cosmos that is akin to Whitehead’s concept, but is more amenable to answering some of the gaps. Or at least I find it easier to do so.
Instead of an ontology of particles aggregating an ever increasing complexity due to their ongoing encounters, I will, like Whitehead, posit an ontology of events. Events in the particle ontology are what occurs when particles encounter each other. When this happens, the entire histories of the engaging particles must be reconciled according to the entanglements each has undergone since its inception. Once this is done, the particles continue on their way having acquired the new interactions at the event. But I see no reason to consider the particles life between events (notwithstanding the virtual particle field which I will return to). Instead I will take the events as the real thing and the particles as useful interpretations of how events are connected to each other. What makes this move so useful is that an event represents a unique perspective on the cosmos. It never needs to change because it is an atomic, eternal snapshot of the histories of the putative particles which, by the intricate cross linking and engagements they have been through, amounts to a view of the entire cosmos. I will go so far as to call this an experience of the cosmos.  Whitehead uses this language as well, which is comforting. An event ontology represents a static network of unique experiences of the cosmos. Each event is an experience of other event-experiences and nothing more. This allows me to define Reality as the set of all unique, singular experiences of the cosmos. This set is entirely self-contained and self-referential. Reality does not specify how any new experiences are created, just that it consists solely of those experiences of itself. This is a nice arrangement when we consider what happens in a scientific experiment because it is concerned with a subset of observed events and make inferences about the processes that determine what events exist and how they came to be.
Whitehead does not develop much of a theory as to how his actual occasions are selected for inclusion in a novel occasion. He refers to physical laws as habits of occasions, but he doesn’t speak to how these habits inform a mechanism whereby actual occasions are combined in ways that fulfill those habits. How do habits buried within a set of occasions direct those occasions to each other? In what space are these occasions tied together except via long recursive histories? If they are connected in the Mental Pole, how are they supposed to be organized therein? What are the binding glues and scaffolding that they can come to connect with each other in habitual ways? What common substrate might they have in the Mental Pole that is not reflected in the substrate of their own concrescence?
I have my own answer for these questions in a realm I call the Potential. The substrate of Potential are degrees of freedom, those same degrees that show up in quantum entanglement. The Potential realm starts out with a vast set of such freedoms. As the cosmos plays out, those freedoms become aligned in various ways to form ephemeral structures, patterns of ideals that are not completely defined, yet provide guiding influences to yet further binding, folding, and knotting of the freedoms. This occurs in an atemporal process, an eternal becoming that creates temporality as part of its patterning. Eventually, the creasing and binding produces a potential well that collapses into an event. This event has a spatial and temporal relationship to other such events. The spacetime between them all was created in their concrescence from the collapsing degrees of freedom. Within each event are vast connections to every other event, because the degrees of freedom that have become bound up with each of them are present in every other event as well. However, each event is a unique collapse, a unique pattern of fold of those degrees - a unique perspective on the entirety of the cosmos, a unique experience.
This is different from Whitehead’s process model which has events as the aggregate of some number of other events, not all other events. The substrate are the events themselves. Whitehead posits different types of occasions, those that are actual and have been concresced, and those that are not themselves actual but do participate in the concrescence of actual occasions. Whitehead also seems to require some sort of space in which occasions can meet and greet as it were. In contrast, my conception has a substrate that is common to all elements of the ontology, a substrate of dimension or degrees of freedom. Any recognizable element in the ontology is a pattern of combination and folding of that substrate. Like Whitehead I posit two poles, a Potential Pole where there exist only pure, unfolded and unknotted potential degrees of freedom, and a Reality Pole where the substrate has the highest degrees of binding and degenerate collapse. This is a continuum of complexity, all existing on a common substrate of possibility. What we experience as spacetime reality is emergent from the fundamental patterns of the folded events.
Earlier I identified the problem of complex entanglement. It should be readily apparent that because the events of my cosmology are composed of every degree of freedom folded in a unique origami, there is sufficient complexity in the event entity to support any degree of entanglement. I also pointed out the problem of indeterminate outcomes of the wave equation and its implications for the limits of applicability of causal laws. The events I have described do not necessarily represent the complete, utter folding of every possibility into a unitary event. Rather, an event represents sufficient collapse to form a stable, coherent base state. This state is sufficient to support the expression of causal laws as statistical approximations, but leaves a vast space of potentials undefined. I have an image in my mind of a macrame that contains local knotting of some strands with many more strands passing through the knot unbound to any others. Each local knot has a unique set of actual bindings with the remainder unbound. I also mentioned earlier that there is a tendency towards coherence that is the driving force behind the creation of events. I see coherence as a potential well into which dimensions become knotted and reinforce each others’ attractive power for other dimensions to fall into alignment with. There is something akin to a higher energy potential for dimensions to remain aloof and so they fall into alignment from an attractive affinity for one another.
I am long overdue to bring back the subject of Eastern cosmology in the form of the tattvas. To me there is a beautiful correspondence between my cosmological model and that of the Yogis. The Potential realm as I have described it as a field of protean origami forms handily supports a model of consciousness such as the Yogic one. I don’t think it too irreverent when I use language more appropriate for Western mathematical explanation to interpret the tattvas because I am proposing a substrate of possibility and a progressive expression of complexity upon it. Wherever there is something of folding in the Potential field there is the possibility for experiencing that fold.  That is really the same thing as what is described in Yoga as far as I can tell. I consider my conception to be a reworking of Whitehead into a more uniform model that is informed by the general structure of Yoga philosophy.