4 Theories of Final Causation

Much of the technology featured in Striker, particularly around strikers themselves, owe their existence to what are called the Four Theories of Final Causation. These theories examine the most fundamental building blocks of reality itself and therefore the final cause (in Aristotlean terms) of reality.

In Guild Space, the first known formulation of these theories began in the early 24th Century from within the Arcananite Fraternity and some sections of the then Technocratium. It came from long-asked questions around the so-called cosmic coincidences, the Assertion of Purpose, the existence of psychokinesis and its relationship to the role of the observer in the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation, and the still largely unanswered, Theory of Everything.

Observations of the Cosmic Coincidences had been continuously made since the early 20th Century:

the astounding flatness of the universe, offering great stability over long periods of time, the extraordinary properties of water, without which most of life would not exist, and many, many others.

While attempts to answer these had adherents, getting any broad support, required them to be more satisfying: the anthropic principle seen as a sort of logical sleight-of-hand, and the appeal to multiple universes in a kind of evolutionary process was seen as implying a purpose, which ran counter to the academic ideology of the day.

Indeed, while the existence of biological evolution was universally accepted, the Problem of Purpose remained. This is to say: we accept natural selection drives evolution, but why is there natural selection? Efficiently, we see that it has led to more and more complex and capable organisms, but to what end? Surely, a frugal universe would not accommodate any of this: there’s no need for it.

Many observations like the above, challenged the notion of accidental creation and evolution, because of the astounding coincidences, required to even bring the universe into a sufficiently stable state, and then maintain itself and the many evolutionary processes for billions of years. Some equated this to attempting to balance a pencil on its tip for a similar length of time.

The extraordinary complexity, subtlety and length of treatment prevents a detailed examination of Four Theories of Final Causation. What follows is a popularised summary.

Basic Premise

• The Theory (particularly its second the third iterations) establishes that the universe is idiomatic, not material. The means that it is derived from thought, not matter-energy.
• The physical universe (referred to as the Corporeal Realm in the Theory) is considered a realisation from a series of nascent realms. The nearest two nascent realms are structured as the Ethereal (sometimes also called Subspace, or Scersic Space) and the Hypereal. Of the nascent realms, these are the most realised.
• The Theory predicts the existence of parallel Corporeal universes owing to the probabilistic nature of realisation. The process of realisation is what informs the laws of quantum mechanics. This means that there is one Ethereal to the many Corporeal realisations.

Striking as an Outcome of Derealisation

The Theory provides a means of derealisation or reverse realisation, through stress-energy negation. When this was employed through technology, it became known as striking.

The Idiomatic Nature of the Universe

The universe began first as thought and is forever the product of it. This is not to say that physical processes cannot happen without it, but that its structure and laws were stamped out from it, and without it, the universe will run down.

While the concept of thought being the anticedent to the world has been well understood by Buddhists and other monasts for millenia, Western Science only popularised the idea beginning in 2024 with the Theory of Final Causation (Bodart 2019 - 2102). Since then, much progress into the properties of pure thought and the resulting shape of reality has been made.

Thought as process is consciousness, which shapes reality at three levels. The corporeal is the most familiar to us, and is the most rigid and obvious to living beings. The ethereal is a far more fluidic representation, and is generally understood to be the world of spirits. The hypereal is the least fixed of all, and is considered to be the world of pure imagination. Thought itself forms a substrate to which reality is fixed. This substrate acts a little like a scaffold that continually moves and shapes the world after its image.

Human and other consciousness is able to move and change the scaffold, and hence shape reality along with it. This is now formally studied and goes under many names and variations, but a collectively useful term, psionics, is often retained. It is also true that human and other consciousness is synonymous with the scaffold, and so any part may communicate with any other part at any time and in any way. Practices involving such observation and superlogical reasoning often went under technical terms like remote viewing, clairvoyance, or ESP. In all, these studies are branches of Subjective Science (sometimes also referred to as Concise Science), which is opposed to the so-called Precise Sciences (or natural Sciences), which concern themselves with patterns and processes entirely within the Corporeal Realm.

The studies of Psionics and Psychics are joined by a range of other disciplines that specialise in the ethereal (like Scersic or Subspace Physics), the hypereal (Quantum Mechanics, or at least the latter extensions of the same), Psionic Engineering (such as that used in Striker construction), and Cosmology. It is important to also note that traditional disciplines such as history have been aided greatly by these new persuits.

Practitioners and theorists must train their minds through focussed meditation in order to join the discourse and peer review. This is simply because observation is virtually impossible without having a fair degree of the so-called sight. With the sight, the ethereal and to at least a small extent, hypereal realms come into view as does elements of the substrate itself. The need for this additional superlogical toolbox makes Final Cause more exclusive than other sciences (and certainly given to priesthoods). This sort of focus is difficult to obtain and many make use of genetic or cyborg augmentations that are based in psionic engineering.

Before Final Cause: The Assumption of Materialism

By the late 20th Century, science, as it was known, had overturned god, successfully described, in rough terms, the mechanisms of life, and concluded that all purpose is subjective, arising from the physical. It is useful to briefly describe this view for the reader to appreciate the dramatic shifts that occurred over the 24th Century in particular.

Our consciousness was conceived as being an emergent property of (result of the nonlinear combination of) electrochemical processes in the brain. These processes were (and are) a development of basic sense algorithms that control muscle action and process sensory input. A typical sense algorithm would be: "if I have to bend my eyestalks up to see the creature, then scram fast". This sort of simple process could have, they contended, developed right up to, and beyond "I think therefore I am". The sense of self apparently having arisen from a roving controller circuitry that marshals various parallel processes, casts a vote and distributes the outcome. This ringleader, as the metaphor commonly went, was responsible for our feeling of self. This could change "I think, therefore I am" to "I think I am". The evolution of this capability, was seen as an efficient unspecialised way of adding sense to the biological entity that possessed it, thus improving the chances of its survival to maturity, and therefore improving the chances of the DNA replicating itself. The selfish gene was the essential paradigm, where animals, for example were just the means by which the DNA ensured its replication. The DNA itself was a chemical accident probably stamped out by replicating clay molecules. While it was conceded as being astoundingly complex chemistry, it was in essence, just chemistry.

In the Early 20th Century, observations leading to the development of quantum mechanics, in turn, led to the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation. The essential controversial features of which are (1) the Uncertainty Principle (also called the Indeterminacy Principle) of Heisenberg and (2) the Principle of Complementarity of Bohr. With the passage of time the Copenhagen Interpretation has been more specifically identified with a concept known as "the collapse of the wave function" (also called "the reduction of the wave packet") as formulated by John von Neumann.

For the purposes of the Theoroes of Final Causation, and the consideration of the idiomatic basis of reality was consideration of the role of the conscious observer. Although at the time, this role was relegated to any phyical process that collapsed the probability distribution of, say, an electron's position to a precise position after the act of measurement, it left an important clue to be picked up centuries later.

Beginning in the late 20th Century, similalarly unnoticed or sidelined results from many researchers were showed the capacity for consciousness to skew random data toward certain objectives, thus reduce entropy, and reduce it in a manner not constrained by, or even distorted by, space and time. These capacities were manifest not in the strange worlds of Quantum Mechanics or Relativity, but in everyday macroscopic life. This repeatable capacity was shown to be characteristic in pattern to a particular person or group of people. These studies relied on vast datasets and strong statistical analysis to show a small signal. Although they could contend that the likelihood of an errant conclusion was astronomically small, it remained largely unconvincing, particularly as science was under the pall of the dominant, materialist paradigm at the time.

Researchers at the time attempted to present models for the characteristics of consciousness, but remained largely unsuccessful in this endeavour.

The Corporeal

The Corporeal is expressed through the geometric framework referred to as the coherence constant. This constant is called a pseudo tensor because it has never been directly measured with physical instruments, rather measurements are inferred from the physical properties of the universe. It was this inference that led to the formulation of the original theory.

The fact that this constant shaped the physical universe in both form and content was of limited utility in and of itself. What gained the attention of the scientific community was its explanatory power for both general relativity and quantum mechanics, by offering a single mathematical framework. Most scientists disregarded the non-material cause part of the theory, preferring to use the theory as is, in a similar tradition to that adopted around Copenhagen Interpretion.

Of corse, the main claim to fame for this theory is its utility in faster than light travel. The basis of the theory was that the material universe could be used to reverse the causation over short periods of time. When configured correctly electromagnetic fields can shape the coherence constant causing a quantum degeneracy in the stress-energy tensor, and thus causing a dimensional collapse in one particular direction over large distances. A faster-than-light ship could then fall into that hole and arrive at some distant location is a much shorter time frame than otherwise.