The World of Facts is Not Isomorphic
If Wittgenstein is right, we are very special.
The big blue dot is just a speck in a massive universe, and we are just hairless monkeys hurling through space for a finite time until it all ends.
This view of the material world can best be called reductive scientism in which the world is comprised of things in various configurations in ways that appear predominately isomorphic from outside of the system. The configurations of things into facts is merely a secondary emergent effect of the processing of things into facts through systems of a priori reasoning that ascribe values to things to produce facts.
This suggests that values exist outside of the world and are imposed upon it through interpretation, and facts have truth values determined from outside of the world.
We encounter a logical inconsistency at this point. How can facts about the world have values determined from outside the world? We can appeal to the existence of a metaphysical Platonic reality that exists outside of the world and from which facts are plucked. The view demands a metaphysical reality to be accessible by conscious beings.
This gets messy and falls apart due to the Cartesian dualism implicit and the cleaving of subject from object. A purely materialist counterargument is that the metaphysical reality being accessed does not exist in the world — it is not real but imagined, as are the qualia that we experience. While logically consistent, it is tautological as well because it assumes all that exists is measurable material, and thus if it is immeasurable it is thus not material and does not exist — they are illusory emergent phenomena from real material. The materialist must deny qualia-qua-qualia because qualia cannot be measured, and all that exists is material and can be measured.
The materialist response that qualia is grounded in the material world and can be best understood within the material world argues that the set of qualia is not greater than the quanta that created it and consciousness can be accounted for by a reduction of physical processes. Simply put, the set of qualia cannot be greater than the set of quanta. Qualia is thus not multiplicative beyond the subject experience of qualia and thus they have no objective reality outside of the objects that made qualia emerge. Consciousness is essentially an illusion created by emergence and is not a real fact of the world.
If we view the world as Wittgenstein does, as being comprised of facts and not things, qualia are facts of the world and scale is irrelevant. We cease to be a bunch of hairless monkeys hurling through space for a finite time on a speck in a massive universe, and in fact we become very central to it.
Imagine the universe mapped not as a collection of subatomic particles existing within spacetime, but as a set of all things. This set includes all ideas, concepts, thoughts, theories, and emotions, for those are factual outputs of the world. “I was hungry yesterday at 3pm” is a fact of the world just as much as a particular subatomic particle combined with another 5 billion light years away from Earth 20 million years ago.
From this model, how would the world look if we tried to make a map of all facts? Let us consider facts to be points in spacetime and we represent their density within spacetime as a heatmap, from blue to red. What would Earth look like relative to the rest of the universe of material? It would be the reddest and densest point in that world, like this.
From this perspective, it appears that we return to a geocentric model of the universe, which carries significant socio-historical baggage. Such a view has been falsified several times throughout the history of western science and could easily be falsified again. We can easily avoid this trap by assuming that there are other nodes of consciousness on other planets.
If there are other planets with conscious beings, our model of the world changes drastically. Unconscious matter cannot have a correlating set of facts larger than can conscious matter, since conscious matter can create a multiplicity of sets of facts from the same arrangement of unconscious matter while unconscious matter cannot. If there are other planets of other thinking beings trying to understand the universe, then the map of the world looks more like this:
And if we are truly alone in the universe, if there are no aliens at all, a Wittgensteinian worldview assumes by necessity the uniquely larger value of Earth vis-a-vis the rest of the universe of unconscious matter. We’re no longer one valuable node among many; we are the monad of value creation in the universe.
Either we are special or uniquely special.
Aliens or no, the world as a collection of facts — of states of affairs — suggests that Earth and other locations are where consciousness processes information to create new facts. This challenges the isomorphism of the universe, which unquestionably exists in the world of inert matter but not in the world of facts.
However, if the world is a system of information production — or, restated, the world is a system of entropy production — then Earth and living beings are special, important, and quite literally valuable as creators of value and modes of valuation. Conscious beings transform inert matter into meaningful information, creating facts through their material interactions with the world of things.
Furthermore, other pockets of specialness where conscious beings exist and create information may also exist as other nodes of information creation. The universe is then a collection of nodes containing dense proportions of information to matter separated by areas of little or no proportions of information to matter. Facts of the things in the Milky Way exist on Earth while the things in the Milky Way exist in the Milky Way. This architecture mirrors that of the human brain.
Philosophy is a process of understanding how we can exist, and any understanding of anything must begin with the facts.
