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  1.5 Freedom's Causality

Last modified 05/26/2008

The discovery of the eonic effect has stumbled on something that Kantian philosophy of history predicts or assumes must exist, without actually showing an example. 

As Elizabeth Ellis notes in Kant’s Politics,

What would “bridging nature and freedom” mean outside of politics? For Kant the big questions are nearly always epistemological: thus, bridging freedom and nature might mean specifying the conditions under which investigators of the empirical world (scientists) are able to find evidence of spontaneity in the physical world (that is, of freedom’s causality). Either freedom and nature are strictly alternative perspectives on the same set of empirical occurrences, or there are some things in the world that can only be explained according to freedom (in other words, the second alternative posits empirical evidence that some thing has no antecedent cause). I am not the first person to point out that it is not an easy thing empirical evidence of a lack of a cause. Kant himself assumes that a good scientist will operate under the presumption that absent natural causes may eventually be discovered. Elizabeth Ellis, Kant’s Politics

We have actually discovered such a phenomenon. It is implicit in the very way we address the question of, first, the Axial Age, thence of the eonic sequence. A finite interval formally satisfies the rubric of a spontaneous, hence 'uncaused' or without an antecedent cause. Of course, our language was deliberately designed to show a different, not antecedent 'cause' on another level. But this cannot be truly causality in the standard sense, and in fact we have seen its association with, among other things, the discrete freedom sequence. It is as if a 'freedom effect' appeared spontaneously in the midst of a causal stream. This is not an abstraction. We can measure the phenomenon down to the century level to see a precisely timed effect satisfying the category of 'absent natural causes'!

 

 

  

 


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