Renormalization of Ontology

Some time around the middle of the 20^th century the field of philosophy called ontology began to experience a change. Ontology is the study of being in the largest sense. More than a scientific analysis such as Aristotle got started, ontology is a way of considering the entire phenomenon of existing and being aware of existing.

For millennia a philosophy of existence-an ontology-was necessarily phenomenal. The 20^th century philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote an epic tome named 'Being and Nothingness' during the Second World War that epitomizes a conscious phenomenal epistemology inclusive of ontology. Descartes' cogito ergo sum-I think therefore I am- is simultaneously an ontological and epistemological phenomenality.

In ancient Sumer atop the Ziggurats there were great dressed up dolls portraying Babylonian gods (ref. Rosenberg's Abraham-The First Biography) that were moved around by a priesthood for the benefit of the masses below who could look up and observe a great play explaining the mechanics of ontology. That mechanics differed from that of ontological phenomenalism. A mechanics for being is today named physics rather than philosophy. Cosmology around the time of Sartre's composition of 'Being and Nothingness' was moving towards its modern phase though not quite there yet. From Lemaitre's interpretation of Einstein's General theory of Relativity the concept of the Big Bang or inflation of a Universe from a singularity arose. Late in the 20^th century physical cosmology surpassed ontological phenomenalism as the fundamental theory of being.

Not that Sartre's subjectivist approach to ontology is wrong, it is simply limited to a place within cosmological ontology. People and science regard the mind and its place in nature as fitting within a steady state field (not one like Fred Hoyle's) wherein exists everything in the Universe. That field is often thought to be the Higgs field named for Peter Higgs-a field that provides every particle-wave with mass. Where the perturbations flowing through the field arose from to start with is challenging to say. The field itself is, I think, though to be expansionist itself from a singularity. With all the great physical theory based on and often confirmed by observation a phenomenalist epistemology is severely challenged to get attention. Some physicists believe philosophy and ontology hasn't kept up with cosmology and science. Of course some neurologists and psychiatrist also believe their study of the brain and human behavior have transcended a phenomenal epistemology like that of Sartre. Reductionism explaining away the holistic experience of mind and being within a Universal Higgs field.

For some time in history spanning a few thousand years theological approaches to ontology were preeminent over physical and cosmological approaches. With evolution theory and later Big Bang cosmology and even later the Hubble Space telescope and microwave telescopes able to observe the pattern of the background radiation of the Universe left over from the era less than 400,000 years after the Big bang when the Universe cooled down enough to let electrons escape, there were two great theories that seem to oppose, at least initially, theological paradigms about the Universe. So at the end of the 20th century theology and ontology were to some prima facie obsolete. While work had gone into science, less so did modernization after reflection arise in theology and philosophical ontology based on phenomenal approaches.

Obviously some ontologies like that of Bishop Berkeley's Ideaism were not able to be refuted technically. Berkeley's arguments remained valid as did Sartre's even as reductionists challenged each part simply because of the recursive nature of arguments and responses. In fact entire scientific cosmologies arose that took up a phenomenal approach to mechanics with the innovation of cosmological holography theory and higher dimensional spaces.

The Bible book of Genesis itself may be taken in more than one way and is amenable to modern interpretations permissive of relativistic time paradigms even as theologians may interpret God's omnipotent and omniscient potential as encompassing a level 4 Multiverse (re: M. Tegmark) wherein everything is actually static and pre-existing while human minds journey through and infinite number of them branching and switching to different Universes with each individual new thought though unaware. Assumptions about the Bible and the nature of God tend to restrict the possible ways of interpreting the book of Genesis though theologians readily stipulate the absolute, omnipotent power of God. Jesus Christ's reference to God having many mansions could refer as well to an infinite Multiverse as well as apartments or buildings in one metaphysical realm.

As philosophy and science were apparently briefly surpassed by modern scientific cosmology in the field of ontology at least, remarkably within a generation science itself provided the tools to renormalize each as fields of study consistent with the Bible and or ontological phenomenalism (with all due respect to Edmund Husserl though I am not above referring preponderantly to his works such as 'Logical Investigations').