We all know what the word ‘spontaneity’ means, but at the same time we don’t really know. No one really knows, not even the most learned professor in the land! It’s simply not possible to know this – if we could know what gives rise to a spontaneous event then that event wouldn’t be spontaneous. It would be ‘happening to order’, it would be ‘happening as a result of rules’. It would be a ‘programmed event’.
The thing about spontaneity is that there is no mechanism to it, and if there’s no mechanism then there’s nothing there for us to understand. ‘Stuff happens’, and that’s all there is to it. If we say that there’s more to it than this then we’re talking nonsense, we’re ‘talking out of our hat’. We’re trying to make out that we know something, when the plain fact of the matter is that we don’t.
We think we ought to know, of course. We absolutely think we ought to know. In our super-rational culture, we think we ought to know everything; we take the position that – sooner or later – we will know all there is to know. We have this sort of unexamined intellectual arrogance to us and having this outlook is our ‘insulation’ from the core element of the universe – the core element in question being its Enigmatic Character. Existence is ‘quintessentially incomprehensible’ and this represents an insight that we are determined to shut the door on. Such an awareness is – after all – deeply unsettling, to say the least…
Spontaneity means that something happens, but we have absolutely no way of understanding how it happened, or why it should have happened. This is – needless to say – in complete contradiction of what we might call the ‘Rational Ethos’. The Rational Ethos – we might say – holds that our situation absolutely can be explained, that it is eminently susceptible to being explained, if we apply ourselves to the task of investigating it in the correct scientific manner. If something is ‘as of yet still unknown’ – we say – then it’s only a matter of time before we will work out what’s going on. As the phrase goes, we intend to ‘wrest nature’s secrets from her’; we wish to ‘rip aside the veil’…
This is not something that we can gloss over if the rational ethos is to stand up at all, it has to work across the board, it can’t work in just some instances. If we’re going to be able to place all our trust in the authority of logic (which is what we want to do) then there can’t be any ‘chinks in the armour’, so to speak. If any one thing is to be explained, then everything must be explained. There can be ‘no free miracle’, as Terence McKenna puts it. If logic is boss, as it has to be if it is to do the job that we want it to do (which is to give us 100% wall-to-wall ontological security) then they can’t be anything that escapes this tyranny. If there were to be something that escapes the tyranny of our rational explanations then that would be the end of our ontological security right there. As we know, denial has to be ‘100%’ if it is to exist at all…
The point we’re coming to – therefore – is that the phenomenon of spontaneity breaks all the rules as regards ‘cause and effect’, as regards ‘explaining one thing in terms of another’. The key aspect of spontaneous activity is precisely that there is no cause – if there was a cause then it wouldn’t be spontaneous, if there was a cause then it would be explicable in terms of this cause. We could of course try to say that there is a causal factor but that we don’t as yet know what it is; we could try to say that the ‘relevant mechanism’ is as yet undiscovered. This doesn’t work however because there is zero predictability to spontaneous activity and there is no mechanism that can result in zero predictability (just as there is in mathematics no mechanism that can result in the production of random numbers). It’s the very same principle in both cases – there can be no such thing as ‘a rule which produces an unpredictable result’, just as there can be no such thing as ‘a random number whose origin is explicable to us’.
Non-random behaviour comes out of rules whilst randomness comes out of ‘no rules’ (which we can also refer to in terms of symmetry) – rules are quintessentially asymmetrical whilst ‘rulelessness’ (or ‘chaos’) is a manifestation of symmetry (symmetry being that situation where all possibilities are given equal weighting). The thing about this of course is that if whatever is happening isn’t the result of rules (known or unknown) then we can’t understand it. Even the biggest and most powerful brain in the universe can’t understand what’s going on if there are no rules (which is to say, if there are no regularities, no constants, no fixed relationships between whatever variables). If there is nothing ‘regular’ about what’s going on then ‘understanding’ doesn’t work (since ‘understanding means ‘spotting the regularities’ or ‘spotting the patterns’). To talk of ‘understanding symmetry’ or ‘explaining where it came from’ is frankly absurd, therefore – how can we try to explain or account for spontaneity in terms of rules when the former precedes the latter, when ‘space’ (by its very nature) precedes ‘form’. We might as well try to explain a tree in terms of its twigs.
Spontaneity (or ‘symmetry’) is – we might say – the natural state of affairs – it is the way things are when there has been no ‘interference’, no ‘meddling’. It is the Dao. When we interfere (by impose our own arbitrarily chosen patterns on the world) then this is ‘non-random’ stuff. The only thing here being that the order we see around us, which we put so much stock in, was put there by us in the first place (which means of course that it doesn’t count). Rational interference always detracts from the natural situation, even though we think that we’re ‘making an improvement’. If we take a bunch of perfectly spherical ball bearings and then shake them all over a perfectly flat steel surface then there’s no telling where they will go, but – on the other hand – if we score grooves in that surface then this is going to be a very different story. Instead of ‘random activity’ we’re going to have activity of the ordered variety. Everything’s going to be pinned down, everything’s going to be ‘organized’.
When we put it like this then it’s easy to see that spontaneity comes out of the unmanipulated situation and that it is the unmanipulated situation which is the natural one, the one that ‘no one needs to make’, the one that ‘comes before everything else’. It’s easy to see why we don’t have to wreck our heads worrying about how things could happen without first being caused – the question of causation never arises in the symmetrical situation. A symmetrical situation is a situation with no rules in it and since ‘rules’ and ‘causes’ are essentially equivalent there is going to be no ‘causing’ going on; cause and effect are absent in a symmetrical situation. As Immanuel Kant says,
There is no freedom, but everything in the world takes place entirely according to nature…. Transcendental freedom is therefore opposed to the law of causality, and represents such a connection of successive states of effective causes, that no unity of experience is possible with it. It is therefore an empty fiction of the mind, and not to be met with in any experience.
When we talk about ‘effects that have been caused’ then what we’re saying is that ‘some bias, having been previously introduced into the situation, then goes on to give rise to some further manifestation of that very same bias’. This process continues indefinitely with the bias that we started out with continually replicating itself, for all the world as if this act of replication constitutes an actual ‘event’ in itself. This is what ‘cause-and-effect’ comes down to. As we said earlier, we ascribe great significance to the existence of activity that arises out of rules (and which is therefore non-random in nature) and this is rather peculiar – to say the least. It’s peculiar because all we’re looking at here is straightforward ‘redundancy’ – which is to say, one particular thing (or ‘signal’) carrying on being that same particular thing (or ‘signal’) on an indefinite basis. So biased are we against the spontaneous (or the ‘non-random’) that we customarily regard it as being little more than a curious oddity which doesn’t have very much real significance. We dismiss the random as being ‘merely random’; we say that it doesn’t mean anything (when actually it means everything).
There is no explaining the random, no explaining the spontaneous, and whilst the phenomenon of spontaneity may therefore be regarded as ‘strange’ or ‘uncanny’ it is no more strange or uncanny than the universe itself. We may say that it’s strange that the universe should have come into existence (or that there should ever have been the possibility of it coming or not coming into existence) and that would be fair enough, if something of an understatement. We don’t generally see things like this however – rather we take the position that the existence of the universe is ‘normal’ (or ‘only to be expected’), thereby saving ourselves from the trauma of having our minds blown. Everything in the mind’s picture of ‘how things are’ is inevitably going to be ‘regular’, ‘normal’, ‘run of the mill’, ‘only to be expected’, etc., because that’s how the rational mind works. The RM runs in ‘well-worn grooves’; it operates on the basis of precedence and so of course our attitude to be things is going to be blase. Basically – not to put too fine a point on it – when we are in Rational Mode then we’re functioning as machines. Thought follows rules and anything that works by following rules is a machine, is a construct, is a mechanical device…
This doesn’t mean that when we’re in Rational Mode we don’t like to pretend (when the need arises) that we are experiencing feelings of appreciation or amazement, and so on, we like to do this sometimes because we know – on some level – that this is the appropriate response. We don’t want to come across as being robots. When we’re in Rational (or Machine) Mode we don’t feel amazement or awe, however; we just have to imagine that we’re feeling it. Machines (naturally enough) can’t be amazed, they can’t feel appreciation or wonder at contemplating the universe. A concretely religious person gets to avoid ontological insecurity by telling themselves that ‘God made the world’. Invoking causality automatically takes all that uncomfortable ontological insecurity away. The rational materialist – on the other hand – invokes causality by talking about ‘scientific laws’ and this works just as well. It makes total sense for us to say that ‘the universe came into existence as the inevitable result of natural laws,’ and we would laugh long and loud at anyone who tried to argue otherwise. This isn’t science however but mere ‘degenerate scientism’ – what came first is the state of Original Symmetry, not the rules or biases which it gives rise to when it ‘collapses’, quantum-mechanics style. The state of Original Symmetry can’t therefore be reduced to the level of ‘a phenomenon that is explicable on the basis of ‘this, that or the other’, on the basis of ‘a bunch of arbitrary rules’. To claim otherwise would be ‘putting the cart before the horse’. This is why the Alchemical Tree is represented growing downwards with ‘its roots in the air’ – it doesn’t grow ‘up from the ground’ in the familiar manner that we usually associate with trees. The universe doesn’t come into being as a result of the logical operation of ‘rules’ or ‘laws’, it comes into being freely – which is to say, it comes into being as a result of pure, undiluted spontaneity, which we absolutely can’t explain…
Image credit – reddit.com
