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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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