Cosmogony of Reason

A Philosophical Essay

Sergey Kleftzov
[email protected]

This article is affiliated to the series

Homo Sapiens as a Problem
(the text #4)

Flammarion engraving

Contents
1 Obvious and Unfathomable
2 The Unified Method
3 The Fulcrum
4 The Word of Everything
5 Is Reason real?
 1 Obvious and Unfathomable
Sometimes people have to deal with very important phenomena, to the same extent as
inexplicable as obvious. This is not only a mystery but also a challenge for the human mind
— to understand how exactly this or that fact, seemingly being unknowable, affects human
lives and the fate of society. Fortunately, if one is capable of recognizing a logical structure in
it, the task becomes feasible: not knowing for sure what causes this or that event, but by
systematizing its manifestations, the human mind becomes able to understand it and use the
power of the natural laws for its own purposes.

The changing of seasons is a trivial example of one of such phenomena. For many centuries,
people had no clue about what the Solar system actually was like; they did not know that
Earth has a spherical shape; that it revolves around a giant ball, and that trillions and trillions
of tons (real mass, simply put, is unthinkable) of its substance is in a state of permanent
thermonuclear reaction; that the planet axis tilt is the very key factor that causes the
alternation of summer, autumn, winter and spring. But no matter how mysterious this process
was, it remained unchanged, and that made it possible to predict its course. Peasants knew
how to calculate the time for sowing and harvesting, and priests — on which day of the
calendar to glorify the gods for the gift of this constancy.

Centuries had passed, and modern science emerged. Astronomy, geodesy and meteorology
replaced astrology and cults for the glory of deities. Many beliefs of bygone generations now,
in the age of quantum physics and biotechnology, look naive. But the significance of the
empirical method of research has not lost its importance, and it is unlikely that a true scientist
will question its value. Now we know what natural processes stand behind the changing of
seasons, but this knowledge has not affected this order itself. It remains unchanged from the
very beginning of observations upon it.

The list of natural phenomena, being explained by science, continues to grow. Among them
there are ones which existence is accepted by the scientific community even though their
nature is unknown so far. Perhaps, the most wide-scale example is the discovery of dark
matter (in the last quarter of the 20th century) and dark energy (at the very end of that
century). These two precedents provided the missing links in the overall picture of the
Universe; it is currently believed that they comprise more than 95% of its mass. This is the
very part of it which we knew nothing about 50 years ago. And, in fact, nowadays we also
know almost nothing for sure about this enormous fraction. But then why do we believe in
their existence? Because we can measure their effect on the visible part of the Universe as a
constant of the immutable pattern.
 2 The Unified Method

These incredible discoveries, like many others, became possible due to two powerful and
interrelated abilities of human intelligence: pattern recognition and generalization. And it is
precisely what philosophy, a jealous but beloved older sister of science, is based on. And one
of the explanations of its immense influence on human minds is precisely in its ability to see
the essence of phenomena where no other research discipline has access to; to the world
where the experimental approach is not applicable, but where the theoretical analysis can
prove all its power, as being a universal method of cognition that both philosophy and science
have in common.

This deep kinship connection between philosophical generalization and scientific research is
amazing. It may look implicit, elusive, and even incomprehensible, but it is real, although
centuries may elapse between the appearance of the philosophical hypothesis and its
scientific confirmation. So it was, for example, with the atomic model of matter, the idea of
which arose in ancient Greece in the form of the concept of Atomism. This insight came to
the minds of the ancient philosophers centuries before the coming of modern science with all
its theoretical and instrumental power. And when this happened, the philosophical
hypothesis, considering the fundamental physical structure of the world, got its scientific
confirmation.

And there is hardly anything surprising in the fact that quite often an empirical postulate,
being spawned by a great mind, afterwards gets accepted in domains where no ambiguities
are permissible by definition. The famous Plato’s Theory of Forms, which had a tremendous
impact on European philosophy and European way of thinking as a whole, was implemented,
among others, in the world of information technology. One of its key paradigms — Object-
Oriented Programming (OOP) — is based on the same principle that describes relationships
between objects of reality which had been elaborated more than two thousand years ago by a
brilliant philosophizing mind. The creators of the OOP needed to solve a problem in the field
that did not exist in Plato’s times at all; however, their approach turned out to be essentially
very alike, that once again testifies the universal nature of logic used for solving problems in
various fields of human activity.

One more evidence of the fundamental unity between philosophical and scientific cognition
is one of the so-called Cosmogonic hypotheses, proposed by the I. Kant (it has been set out in
his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, published in 1755)[1] concerning
the formation of the Solar system (we mentioned this phenomenon in Chapter One). In
accordance with Kant, stars are formed from the rarefied matter of nebulae which tiny
particles are scattered in a void. Over time they get attracted to each other and acquire a
rotational motion, turning into clumps of matter. Eventually, large celestial bodies are formed
from these clumps, such as stars and planets, orbiting them stars are formed from rarefied
matter (nebulae).

Despite the speculative origin of this idea, it turned out to be relevant to the modern view
upon the formation of planetary systems. Finally, a vivid example of the fundamental
relationship between philosophical and scientific methods is the origin of the Theory of
Relativity. As A. Einstein used to confess, it was philosophy that greatly influenced his
revolutionary discovery. On December 14, 1915, he wrote a letter to Moritz Schlick (1882–
1936), a professor of philosophy at the University of Rostock. In that remarkable message the
greatest physicist admitted that his Special Theory of Relativity was influenced by Ernst
Mach’s and David Hume’s philosophies:

… Mach, and, even more, Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature I studied
with passion and admiration shortly before discovering the [special] theory of
relativity. Very possibly, I wouldn’t have come to the solution without those
philosophical studies[2].

Einstein, of course, was not the only famous scientists who embraced philosophy. A great
mind is great precisely because of being capable of discerning true might and beauty in any
significant creative idea, regardless of what kind of world it has been spawned by. And this
universality of perception is the essence and reflection of reason as the supreme virtue of
Man.

3 The Fulcrum

Itis hardly possible to find a more improbable phenomenon among the obvious ones than the
existence of a self-reflecting human mind. The paradox of being is incomprehensible, and, at
the same time, indisputable. And therefore, the Cartesian[3] cogito, ergo sum, is perhaps the
greatest saying in the history of philosophy. This argument is ideal as the shape of a circle; it
can not be refuted since the ability to be aware of self proves the existence of a subject of
sensory experience; and even if the world is a hallucination or a dream, this does not
disprove[4] the truth of the statement, but, on the contrary, confirms it. Thus, mind obtains
the Archimedean fulcrum in understanding reality; here nothing turns into something. Here
Cosmos emerges. And since it appears to be discrete, it is knowable.
And indeed, the human mind is capable of cognition. Its results are not always reliable, yet it
brings us closer to the truth; one by one, the mind adds the bricks of the acquired knowledge
to the building of its idea of the surrounding world. Completing and supplementing it with
new architectural details, it expands its space protected from the chaos of uncertainty raging
outside.

This cognitive ability was traditionally distinguished by philosophers in the human mind and,
to one degree or another, has been oppositional to its properties, which cause fickle feelings
and deceptive sensations. This quality is known by several names, the most commonly used
of which, in the European philosophical tradition, is “reason”.

Although it appeals to the specific human capacity (to make rationally reasoned judgments),
as a philosophical concept, it is abstract. Reason can not be measured directly; we can only
judge the degree of reasonableness inherent in a particular intention by the effects it
produces. If we return to the cosmological analogy, we can draw a parallel here with dark
matter and dark energy, which intrinsic content we know nothing about, and yet we can
consider their properties because we measure the effect of these entities on other objects in
the universe.

***

The history of reason, as a concept, has ancient roots. The Age of Enlightenment approved it
as the major point on the European worldview. But it had occupied one of the central places
in philosophical discourse of the Old Continent long before the thinkers of that time
attempted to replace the dogmas of Judeo-Christianity by the belief in Ratio. And such
important role of reason is not surprising since nothing else than it determines the purpose
and main function of philosophy — the achievement of truth through understanding the
regularities of the surrounding world.

Many researchers believe that it was Plato, whose role out to be the most significant one in
the turn that the concept of reason has become the cornerstone of European philosophy. He
metaphorically presented it as one of the three components of the human soul (psyche)[5]: its
logical element (λογισμός), which has a divine and immortal nature; unlike other elements,
appetitive (epithumia) and spirited (thumos), it can be abstracted from the body that is
thought to be just its temporary refuge. According to Plato, reason is the sacred golden
cord[6] connecting Man to Truth; and this knowledge of the true nature of things allows
reason to preserve the integrity of the soul, since, having comprehended the essence of each
of its parts, their harmonious interaction can be achieved.
The provision about the existence of some true essence of things is not only the basis of
Plato’s philosophy (in particular, the aforementioned Theory of Forms) but also an essential
part of the view of the European civilization: we must not let go of the sacred golden cord
since we believe that there is no alternative to truth. When people let go of it, chaos comes.

***

Aristotle, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, a disciple and at the same time an
implacable opponent of Plato, made a decisive contribution to the transformation of the
philosophical concept of reason into an instrument of practical application: he invented
formal logic. It enabled the human mind to determine the truth of judgments on the basis of a
system of formal proofs. The process of apprehension of truth could thus be systematized; the
connection between the capacity for logical judgment and the attainment of the Good became
not only empirically recognizable, but also gave reason a perspective of limitless power: for
if we can methodologically investigate the laws governing the universe, it becomes possible
to obtain objective proof of the truth of the made assumptions. Ultimately, this opens the way
to the mastery of all the infinite energy of Space!

However, formal logic, remaining the main means of obtaining judgments from the time of
Antiquity, does not guarantee their truthfulness in the absence of clear prerequisites for
solving the problem. This is especially important in cases where the actual effect may be
delayed in time. Intuition, used as an auxiliary tool of cognition, can not supplement logic to
the necessary degree: being in many cases capable of giving an impulse to thought in a
fruitful direction, it is not suitable for confirming of the validity of ultimate judgments.

At the end of the XVIII century, the problem of cognition got in the focus of German
idealism, which resulted in an original synthesis of epistemology and metaphysics, thanks to
efforts of Kant, J. G. Fichte (1762–1814), F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854) and, finally, G. W.
F. Hegel (1770–1831).

Kant was the first to divide reason into practical (Verstand) and absolute (Vernunft) ones. He
had proposed this idea in his famous treatise the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), where
among other things, he introduced the so-called Transcendental Logic, as an instrument of
knowledge, capable, in his opinion, to overcome the limitations of Aristotelian logic. The
idea was that absolute reason (Vernunft) is able to acquire knowledge outside the individual
experience of a thinking subject, which is always constrained to one degree or another, but a
priori.
Kant’s ideas turned out to be quite demanded for that time and had gained further
development that led to another original concept by Hegel, the largest German classical
philosopher. His doctrine considered both the method and the subject of knowledge. In
accordance with it, reason as the quintessence of cognition, ultimately appears as the creative
force that guides the course of history itself, being embodied in the so-called Absolute Idea
(Die Absolute Idee). This substance, being initially impersonal, turns into a subject of the
external world, where it becomes part of nature, including Man, and is reflected in his
intellectual and spiritual activities, such as art, religion, science and philosophy. In this way,
it implements the potential of eternal development contained in it through the
complexification of matter, organic life, and the creative activities of Man, cognizing and
changing the world. The final stage of this process is the transformation of the Absolute Idea
into the Absolute Self-conscious Spirit (Geist).

Hegel turned out to be perhaps the brightest philosopher of the Modern era, who articulated
the idea of some objective laws that predetermine the development of world history (and,
accordingly, human society). Despite the fact that his teachings never lacked criticism (which
both its content and representation were subjected to), it had a significant impact on the
development of European thought. And this was hardly accidental since Hegel had proposed
the concept providing a philosophically consistent explanation regarding the phenomenon of
permanent complexification of entities of the surrounding world (and essentially the
objectivity of Progress). And although this pattern was recognized by many other thinkers yet
before Hegel, the latter made a special contribution to its understanding. He not only
formulated its philosophical definition but also proposed a dialectical method of its
justification. According to his approach, it is the internal contradictions, immanent to the
essences of the surrounding world, that is the driving force of its development (this was one
of the key differences of his philosophy from his predecessor Kant, with whom Hegel agreed
a lot, but at the same time criticized his approach as incomplete). And this is precisely the
regularity that can be found now everywhere, including such phenomena as biological and
social evolution, or scientific and technological progress: their subjects are constantly facing
the need to respond to certain challenges that are the result of contradictions that
arise/accumulate internally; overcoming them causes the very transformations that lead to
complexifications.

However, being quite original, Hegel’s ideas did not come from nowhere. The assumption of
a certain absolute phenomenon that predetermines the evolution of the Universe and is
reflected in the cognitive and creative human mind arose more than two millennia before
Hegelianism. And without this idea, the modern Western world simply would not emerge.
 4 The Word of Everything

From the very beginning of human history, many thinkers believed, that the phenomenon of
Creation is a natural part of the Universe (today, using more mundane terminology, we would
call it a force leading to the systematic complexification of matter). This appearance can be
discerned in nature and, ultimately, in the human mind since humans were seen by ancient
philosophers as an integral part of the Cosmos.

One of the first concepts devoted to this phenomenon was the ancient Greek doctrine of
Logos (λόγος), the author of which is believed to be Heraclitus[7].

The concept of Logos is quite complex, and it can be understood in several ways. In the
teachings of Heraclitus, it appears as a certain universal regularity of the unfolding of the
forms of being, which determines the unity of the entire diversity of phenomena of the
Cosmos. Plato and Aristotle, as well as the Stoics, the Neoplatonists and many others referred
to the logos in their works, although in a somewhat different context. Later, Christian
scholars had borrowed this concept and widely used it in theology (it was of particular
interest to scholastics). Particularly, it is noted in the Gospel of John, where “logos” is
utilized in the meaning of “word” (Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ
θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος)[8]. However, word, in this case, is not just an ordinary set of symbols
representing one or another object of the world. In this case, this is the entity, which the
World itself is originated from:

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God[9].

This word further becomes a message which the Creator of the Universe sends to humans,
and at the same time, it becomes Its personified messenger, who appears in Christianity in the
character of Jesus. Being one of the implementations of the Absolute, and at the same time,
the son of Man, he descends into a world full of passions and imperfections to bring the light
of truth into it (in this, it is easy to trace the analogy with the Hegelian Absolute Idea entering
the world).

Thus, Logos (God the Son appears as one of its implementations) in Christianity is the
epitome of reason and the quintessence of infinite virtue.

It is obvious that in Judeo-Christianity (and in religion in general) the source of truth and the
initiator of Creation is God. But initially, the Logos had nothing to do with any personified
being. Rather, it was a kind of abstract entity that preceded God (here, again, it is easy to see
shared features with Hegel’s Absolute in its initial state). Thus, Logos is the immanent
characteristic of the Universe itself as a philosophically finite, all-encompassing entity, and if
it was different, Cosmos would not look like it does now.

So, if we apply the allegory taken from the IT-world to this ancient Greek philosophical
concept, we can imagine the Cosmos as a kind of device, consisting of two components —
material and intellectual. The first is all objects, observable in the Universe, while the
intellectual one is what controls them, a sort of huge and complex computer program,
including a set of universal constants (gravity, speed of light, half-life, and so forth). In this
case, Logos is a set of rules for that program algorithm to be written just like mathematics is
for the real software development. This is a meta-entity that does not interact with real
objects in any way but determines the principle of program execution. And although religious
doctrine implies that there must always be One-Who-created-this-Universal-mathematics, the
philosophical concept of Logos does not refer to a specific Creator. The language of
mathematics, indeed, is simultaneously abstract, real and objective. It is a language for
describing the physical reality. And it is based on logic, which is self-sufficient and will exist
independently as long as the Universe itself exists. In this sense, mathematical logic was not
invented, but discovered.

And then it gets clear, why the word logic is originated from “logos” and reflects one of its
faculties. It is its ontological basis; it is given to us as it is forever and it explains the causality
of the world. It is immutable and all the laws of this world obey it. And at the same time, it is
a meta-language that humans understand, which allows us to describe the objective laws of
the Universe, and therefore — predictably interact with the outside world: thanks to it we can
know how to get the result of a particular chemical reaction, achieve minimal physical wear
of industrial materials or calculate the trajectory flight of a space probe to any of the planets
of the Solar System.

It is important to notice here, that philosophers considered Logos as an ontological

foundation of ethics[10], which is a universal means to distinguish Good from Evil. Thus, the
ethical principles, which a virtuous person adheres, are absolute in their essence and do not
depend on anything apart of their inner content; neither the political conjuncture nor the laws
enforced by the rulers in the name of perpetuating their power can influence it. Nothing can
be above them since they embody the rules of sapience, absolute in their essence.

Thus, human reason taking onset in the cosmic Logos fulfils two crucial functions that
determine Man’s being: first, it allows him to comprehend the objectivity of the surrounding
world; this means that Man not only gets a chance to confront the chaos but also can turn the
powerful forces of the elements in his favour. And secondly, it allows him to achieve mutual
understanding with other people, avoiding conflicts of divergent interests, and to bring into
own existence the meaning of unity of all thinking beings. Man acquires the rules of
sapience, a kind of lodestar that illuminates his path to a harmonious and virtuous life, resting
on the natural law, the law of noncontradiction, the law of causality as a means for the
adequate understanding of reality, and same logic as a generalized method to be applied to
life. And these rules are a principle, not a dogma. They do not constrain a personal choice.
On the contrary, they liberate an individual from the tyranny of uncertainty and protect from
imposing anyone’s will. Reason provides Man with the opportunity to be guided by common
sense and justifies the inconsistency between the personal and the collective good.

In essence, the concept of the institutional structure of a free society is based exactly on the
rules of sapience since the idea of the expediency of decisions rests on a reasonable (and
therefore logically justified) balance of natural human rights. The same principle applies to
the legislative system, where the analysis of the logic of acts allows us to draw conclusions
about the motives of the subjects of the process. And, of course, the same is about science
and education, where logic is seen as a fundamental tool for understanding the phenomena of
the world around us.

Reliance on the rules of sapience is the only approach that can resolve the endless
disagreements that arise around the notorious “justice”. People’s opinions on this subject
often differ so significantly that the appeal to supposedly violated justice becomes the trivial
basis for both launching the mechanism of mass violence and its subsequent justification.
And it is rules of sapience that allow solving the problem of the relativity of morality behind
this gloomy pattern by proposing a universal principle known not only in moral philosophy
but in almost every mature religion and known as the “golden rule” (of ethics) — do not do to
others what you would not want done to you. This statement designates the human being as
the end value on the basis of the logically inferred unity of human nature. Compliance with
this principle that is clear from the validity position allows avoiding collisions similar to
those found in Rousseau’s Social Contract, where the value of the personality (the human
soul according to Plato) turned out to be lower than the interests of “the whole body” whose
collective opinion (masked the so-called “will of the people”) was appointed by the criterion
for determining the good for each member of society. And this logical perversion
immediately led to the logical paradox of “compelling to be free” with all the consequences
arising from this sophisticated pseudo-argumentation. Then atrocities committed during the
First Republic became a common practice of the subsequent “great” social revolutions since
their relativistic moral and philosophical basis made it possible to justify violence under the
guise of the need for “higher” values to obtain their own political benefits.

5 Is Reason real?

But should what is commonly referred to as “reason” be regarded as merely a formal

philosophical convention, conceptualizing a process of making logically based judgments, or
as some objectively existing phenomenon? This question seems to us all the more important
because reliance on reason is a fundamental tenet of modern society. No society, in turn, can
exist without ensuring the continuity of its values; if they are preserved, then society has a
chance to evolve in line with the ever-changing realities of the world around it. Otherwise, it
becomes only an episode on humanity’s development spiral full of contradictions and
collisions.

So, is it possible to objectify reason?

Let us begin with the commonality of its ideas which, whether it is the embodiment of Logos,
or the Kantian Vernunft, or Ratio, which the thinkers of the Enlightenment praised, converge
in the main meaning: it is always something that allows the individual to achieve the
maximum Good through understanding the true nature of things. It is necessary to note,
however, all these concepts arose long before the dramatic changes that occurred with the
human civilization due to the rapid development of scientific and technological progress and
the upheavals of the first half of the 20th century. The fact that the human reason had failed
to prevent the catastrophes of two world wars gave rise to doubts about the relevance of
philosophy, based on the intellectual heritage of Antiquity and Modern Epoch. The very
existence of truth and, consequently, reason, as a means for comprehending it, has been
challenged by new intellectual doctrines that chose moral and ontological relativism as the
Absolute of theirs.

But is it possible, indeed, to overcome the never-ending influence of the forces of entropy on
the world of people while denying the existence of the objective essence of things?

Such an assumption already comes in doubt at the level of common sense and becomes
completely untenable from the scientific perspective; everything has its own ground, basis,
centre of attraction: electrons revolve around an atomic nucleus, planets around their stars,
spiral galaxies around supermassive black holes; objects fall from a height to the ground,
object that reaches a certain speed becomes a satellite of the Earth; water flows and freezes at
a certain temperature. All these are objective and explainable phenomena, no matter how
complicated they seem, and even such miracles as raining glass[11] or snowing stones[12] on
some planets obey the same laws as the events, occurring every day in the world around us.
The Universe works in a certain predictable way, and we know why — because it contains
eternal and unchanging laws, masterly conducting an ensemble of forces furious in its power,
but obedient to their ruler and being capable of not only destruction but of Creation as well. It
is this picture that unfolds from the core of the beautiful concept of Logos, and all subsequent
studies of great minds have followed this paradigm because another way to understand how
to resist chaos is unthinkable. And this truth is obvious to everyone who is capable of logical
thinking as long as logic exists, and as long as we consider it the primary tool for achieving
truth.

Thus, due to the objectivity of the universal laws, irrefutably follows the conclusion that there
is a way to comprehend them. Reason as a philosophical concept acts here as an algorithm for
translating the encoded content of reality, in all its infinite complexity, into a representation
understandable to human perception by means of reflection, fixation and decomposition of
the phenomena of the surrounding world into logical components in consciousness and the
inclusion of their meaning in the space of the individual’s life experience. By allowing the
human mind to comprehend reality, Reason becomes an imperative that prompts that mind to
accept a certain way of relating to reality. In this sense, it can be said that Reason has a
purpose. At the same time, we believe that the goals of Reason are not limited to the needs of
people, and in fact are not even determined by them. The ultimate reasonableness of one or
another decision is measured by not how it satisfies the interests of a particular person or
group of people here and now, but how much it corresponds to the true nature of things.

Considering reality at this level, we are talking about phenomena of a metaphysical order,
that is, those that we can not influence. Therefore, reason is not only a faculty of the human
mind but also an entity beyond its boundaries. This allows us to consider its nature as dual:
on the one hand, it is an instrument of cognition that individual consciousness possesses, on
the other hand, it is a transcendental phenomenon similar to Kantian space and time: their
inner essence is incomprehensible, but their place in the picture of Man’s reality is
fundamental for understanding life (further we will use a capital letter writing the word —
Reason). The human reason is then the projection onto this absolute, unchangeable as the
laws of the Universe, abstract Reason which can be attributed to the class of Platonic ideas;
the rules of sapience, therefore, are its property, embodying a universal principle, very simple
in its essence: the aspiration to reduce entropy in the space accessible to humans, potentially
— in the whole Universe; thus, Reason is the antipode of chaos.
The transcendental essence of Reason means that it can exist only in the presence of its
projection, just as the reality exists for the subject of its perception only under the condition
that this very subject exists. In other words, Reason is real as long as the subjects of thinking,
i.e., people, believe in it.

And it is more real than any other incorporeal object because it gifts Man that very Platonic
golden cord in the form of cognizing, which allows a human to achieve the truth and verify
its authenticity. And this becomes possible also in relation to intricate ethical issues; since the
goal of Reason is to reduce the entropy of the Universe, it assigns the highest value to that
what maximizes its achievement. And this is nothing other than Man as the only one of the
creatures known today, being capable of making logically proven judgments. Thus, the
projection of Reason onto the human mind adds one more basis for the ontological identity of
humans, which excludes antagonism from their relations. This can be given quite an
objectivistic justification: this principle guarantees that thinking subjects can attain the
maximum total amount of energy in their disposal expending the same efforts. This is gained
when the wasting of energy for intentionally destructive actions is excluded. And if we talk
about the tasks that people face as representatives of civilization, then this is the most rational
principle for achieving the goal that is the transition from a zero-level civilization that is not
protected from destruction due to “natural” causes to a next level civilization that has
overcome the Great Filter threshold.

And, as we noted earlier, the cognitive ability that Reason endows Man with, makes the
power of his mind potentially unlimited; now, in anticipation of the creation of AI, this
statement no longer seems like a pure abstraction. Ultimately, perhaps, the most cherished
dream of the greatest thinkers of mankind that is the liberation of the human mind from the
tyranny of matter (according to Plato, the body is the prison of the soul[13]) will become a
reality.

This is the direction Reason leads Man. And this is an objective, the achievement of which is
determined by Man’s capacity of using the projection of this Absolute in his own mind; that
leaves him with a reason to consider himself as a sapient being. Following the rules of
sapience gives hope to never stop on the path of knowledge. So, since the horizons of
knowledge are borderless and the effect of its implementation is cumulative, the probability
of permanent Progress does not seem illusory to us. In our opinion, the problem of it turning
into a Quasi-Progressive cycle should be redefined: we need not an invention of the “proper”
way” to follow Progress but an understanding of what is the obstacle on the way of the
process natural for the Universe.
However, there is one fundamental and not obvious problem: there is something inside the
human mind that organically resists this goal being achieved. And that beast would prefer to
demolish the mind itself rather than allow Reason to become its master.

Notes

[1] The prototype of the Kant hypothesis is considered to be the development of the Swedish
scientist, theologian and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), who expressed his
views on this subject in 1734. In addition, the hypotheses of the formation of celestial bodies
and planetary systems were developed by other thinkers, including Laplace (Pierre- Simon de
Laplace, 1749–1827), Roche (Édouard Albert Roche, 1820–1883), Faye (Hervé-Auguste-
Etienne-Albans Faye, 1814–1902).

[2] Albert Einstein, John J. Stachel, Martin J. Klein, Robert Schulmann, Ann M.

Hentschel, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, (Princeton, NJ Princeton Univ. Press,
1998), 220.
[3] Rene Descartes (1596–1616), one of the greatest philosophers of the Modern period.
[4] However, even it is criticized.
[5] This is so-called Tripartite Theory of Soul, that Plato coined and considered in his The
Republic (Plato, The Republic).
[6] (Plato, Laws)
[7] Note that Heraclitus was one of Hegel’s favorite philosophers.
[8] Symbolism in the Gospel of John, “Chapter 1 of the Gospel of John Original Greek text
and translation.”
[9] John 1, New English Translation — https://www.bible.com/bible/107/JHN.1.NET
[10] Note, that afterwards, Christian theologians clearly expressed this through the image of
Jesus, who sacrificed himself in the name of the salvation of the human race
[11] HD 189733b
[12] CoRoT-7b
[13] (Plato, Phaedo.)