What is a Teleological Object?
How to Constellate: 1
Envision if you can, a spaceless, timeless ganglion hovering just beyond the reach of thought and sensation.
It has no shape, no volume, no mass and no substance. It does not look like anything, but things can occasionally look “like” it. It is incomprehensibly intelligent, but having no physical needs, is utterly, exotically dispassionate.
To ask what it is is the wrong question, because it has no ‘what,’ and yet it is.
I am describing to you what I call a “teleological object” or TO for short. Here, I use the term “object” in the most loose and abstract sense, akin to its use in mathematics.
It’s a kind of cosmic gene that governs the manner in which reality is allowed to unfold across time. It might be an aspect of consciousness which imposes a dimension of coherence and intelligibility upon potentiality.
A flipped coin can land on heads or tails. It cannot land on heads and tails. This is an apparently trivial fact, but it is really a rudimentary illustration of a cosmic principle with far-reaching connotations.
The binary potential of the coin imposes a hard and natural limit upon the set of possible futures. But there are some such hard limits which may not be so obvious.
It is impossible for me to be in Paris in an hour. Even though the explicit laws of physics technically allow this, the current pieces in play are moving along trajectories, which conspire together as a diffuse, invisible wall forbidding that outcome.
The collapse of the wave function is mediated by the laws of logic which are imposed by observation upon reality. From these laws of logic proceed those of mathematics. From these, those of physics. But whence do those laws of logic proceed?
Position is negation. If heads is up, tails must be down. This is the point: there is an intelligibility to the manner in which “this” is posited and “that” is negated. That intelligibility is described by the structure of the teleological object, the underlying or overarching principle which unites all possible states and excludes all impossible states of a given set. It is not a logical principle, but a principle transcending logic, anterior to logic, which gives logic its being. Something further upstream which makes logic logical, and which logic inevitably serves and recapitulates.
The only term our culture has ever formulated for this metalogical thing is “the logos.” A teleological object is an aspect thereof — a refracted hue of that white light.
The larger point is that that which is physically possible is only thus insofar as it is logically possible. Logic in like manner conforms to archetypal intelligibility; the logos.
This is why systems of representation that are incompatible at the logical level can be reconciled analogically (e.g. Christianity and Gnosticism in the cosmogram).
By extension, this would imply that the physical is subordinate to the archetypal. An event must be symbolically coherent “before” it can be physically possible, because the wave functions which we observers collapse into realized logic (e.g. “if x, then not y”), get their probabilistic structure from archetypal schemas which describe the set of all possible measurements. In other words: the laws of physics do not describe any symbolically incoherent timelines except hypothetically.
Sounds like a word game. Relativity also looks banal until you start splitting atoms.
I struggled to find a good thinking tool with which to analogize the concept of the TO until I started fidgeting with a Rubik’s cube. Ernő Rubik, the inventor of the cube was a Hungarian professor of architecture, and he must have also been divinely inspired.
I don’t care what anybody says, these things are not from here:
The Rubik’s Cube has 43 252 003 274 489 856 000 possible configurations, most of which have never been physically made by humans — but there is a kind of syntactical metastructure that binds them all together. For example, the relative positions of the centers are conserved in all arrangements. Likewise, twisting a single corner piece will create a state outside of the original ~43 quintillion from which there is no path to the solution.
There are likewise rules about how you can and can’t move from one configuration to another. It was proven by a team of researchers using a supercomputer that every possible configuration can be solved in 26 moves or less (if a 90° turn = 1 move).
Thus 26 was (correctly) declared “God’s number” in the quarter-turn metric.
Imagine a vast graph with ~43 quintillion nodes, each corresponding to one unique configuration. Imagine each node connects to 12 others (all the adjacent permutations). It would look a bit like a network of neurons but one in which all possible connections are realized.
This would represent the “maze” of the Rubik’s Cube which you are navigating while solving, traversing from node to node with each move.
Hopefully my esoteric ‘word salad’ is now beginning to touch ground.