Mechanism and Levels of
Being
David Banach
Department of Philosophy
St. Anselm College
A Great Irony
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Mechanism has made it difficult to take seriously
the ideas of the Good or of metaphysical levels of
being beyond the particular.
Yet mechanism arose during the scientific
revolution from a set of neo-platonic and neopythagorean attempts to resurrect the use of
mathematical form to understand reality.
In the Pythagoreans and Plato the idea of
mathematical form was intimately tied to the idea
that the reality and goodness of things in this
world were jointly tied to their source in other
levels of reality.
Pythagoras and the joint discovery of the formal origin of
both truth and beauty
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There is a hidden formal
source of the order in
our perceptual world
This is also the source of
the values we feel in
things.
Being  Goodness
form is the ultimate
source of order and the
ultimate object of desire
The Scientific Revolution and
Mechanism
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The scientific revolution was a set of technical
innovations in purifying the appearances for
study that allowed, for the first time, the
methods of the Pythagoreans to be applied to the
study of natural phenomena with great success.
Galileo is able to say in The Assayer
“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the
Universe, which stands continually open to our
gaze. . . . It is written in the language of
mathematics, and its characters are triangles,
circles, and other geometric figures without which
it is humanely impossible to understand a single
word of it.”
Platonism turns on itself
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Plato and Pythagoras
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Reality is Number and
Mathematical Form
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Mechanism
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Form as ultimate reality
and ultimate good
Form as ultimate reality
and ultimate good
Plato’s Timaeus
(48e-56c )
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1. Way of Reason:
A. Internal principle of Change.
B. Orders things for the best. Works by persuasion, the
presentation of attractive modes of being.
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2. The Way of Necessity. Blind Matter constrained by its
form.
A. Must have a medium: the Receptacle
B. Must have a external cause of its being and initial
conditions: The Demiurge or nursemaid.
C. Must have external rule that govern the relationships
between its elements.
D. Action is necessitated by the formal relations of the
elements and their medium.
Plato’s Primal Triangles
Platonic Solids
A Mechanical Theory of the Elements
II. The Power of Mechanism:
Lessons from the Game of Life
1. A clear Model of what Mechanism
entails show that Mechanism cannot
be true.
 2. It also shows that the typical
arguments for the necessity of form
are inadequate.
 3. It suggests a new way of arguing
for form that a mechanist could (and
would have to) accept.

The Rules Of Life
(1) An unoccupied cell surrounded by
exactly three filled cells will become full or
alive
 (2) A full or live cell surrounded by either
two or three live cells remains alive
 (3) A live cell surrounded by more than
three live cells dies, or becomes empty.
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More Life Resources
dbanach.com/life
1-5 Pixel Patterns
Random Pixels
Stable Life Patterns
Oscillating Patterns
Gliders
Acorn
Breeder
A Turing Machine in the Life World
Self-Organization
.5
.48
From Ron Knott, University of Surrey,
http://www.mcs.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibInArt.html
Self-Organization
.6
1.2
Self-Organization
Various Ratios near .6
III
The Limits of Mechanism
A thoroughgoing Mechanism reveals its
own limitations.
 Getting clear about the nature of
mechanism reveals that reality can’t be
mechanistic all the way down.
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It can’t be mechanical all the way down.
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1. The pixels that constitute this world must have a medium, in
this case the screen.
2. There must be a more fundamental reality which implements
the program that governs the Life world, in this case the computer
itself.
3. Finally, there must be some agency that is responsible for the
actual operation of the program, in this case the factory that
made the computer, the programmer who put it into the
computer, and the user who pushes the button to run the
program.
The essence of mechanism is external compulsion by some
substrate neutral rules or algorithms. Considering the Life World
as a model shows that such a mechanism is not self-sufficient.
Everything cannot be pixels; there has to be a screen on which
the pixels exist and a computer to run the program.
The Life World as Model
of the Physical World
Element of the Life world
Element of Physical Reality it represents
Pixels (Functional Representations in CPU) Fundamental Particles
The Physical World
Program
Fundamental Laws of Nature
Computer (and the rest of the world)
Primal Reality that underlies our physical
reality
Large sustainable patterns of pixels
Physical objects
Meta-regularities or side effects of the
Observable regularities of macroscopic
program.
objects.
Screen/Keyboard/Agent
Mind
Input/Output module
What can we know about Primal Reality?
1. Substrate neutrality seems to
guarantee that we cannot now the nature
of the Primal Reality.
 2. There need not be unities or entities
that correspond to those we find on the
screen.
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A Virtual Pixel
IV
Reanimating Form
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Getting clear about how mechanism works
reveals a new notion of how form works.
What lies beyond the screen?
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The patterns in the Life world do not correspond
to entities in the primal reality that gives rise to
them, nor do the laws and regularities we can
detect correspond to the laws that govern the
program that gives rise to them.
But
1. It is clear that their properties arise from
formal aspects of the configuration of the pixels
2. We cannot know anything of the actual forms
of causality that operate in the primal reality, or
between it and our world.
Two Levels of Being
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(1) A Formal Reality, however conceived,
that describes the regularities and
patterns that are instantiated in, but are
not caused by, the rules of the program;
and (2) An unintelligible Primal Reality
that somehow gives rise to the
implementation of the rules that generates
this world.
The Reality of Pattern
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The most salient
features of the objects
in the Life world arise
from the formal
constraints of the
patters that its laws
produce, not directly
from those laws.
Balls of Bats and the inverse square law
Can we pose no hypotheses?
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Newton recognized the same relationship in deducing the
inverse square law of gravitation, that mysterious force
about which we are to pose no hypotheses. Even if we pose
no hypotheses about what the source of gravity in the
primal reality might be, we do know that something about
it is spherical, or at least has the same formal constraints
as the distribution of a uniform density onto the surface of
a sphere.
If in both cases if we assume that the distribution of bats,
or whatever is causing/carrying gravity, is uniform, then
the same number of bats will be distributed over a surface
area that increases in proportion to the square of the
distance, making the density on the surface of the sphere
decrease in inverse proportion to the square of the
distance.
A new view of form
1. The forms we are capable of knowing
are structural constraints on primal reality.
They are patterns of being that constrain
the very nature of the primal laws and
pass down those constraints to the world
they generate.
 2. These constraints are implemented
non-mechanically through the very
structure of the medium and the way in
which the program is implemented into it.
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What requires form?
All physical objects composed of particles,
like all patterns composed of multiple
pixels, and all meta-regularities
observable in these patterns, will require
something like substantial form.
 The vast majority of the physical
properties and laws that we can observe
are not mechanical.
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What is an object?
In the Grip of Form
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Energy Conservation Laws: The stable forms of
matter that persist in our world are all
equilibrium points or points of lowest energy for
some physical system
In mechanistic worlds whose laws have a certain
type of symmetry or set of conservation stable
patterns will arise who activities are governed
more by the formal constraints of those patterns,
than by the rules governing the particles.
Objects are patterns of particles in the grip of
a form.
Form and Soul
Physical Reality (Pixels and the three laws.)
Fundamental particles and the
laws that govern them.
Primal Reality
Soul
Active principle
Formal Reality
Form
(The Computer CPU and program)
The physical system that
Instantiates the Form in physical
reality. Allows form to be relevant
to physical reality.
Pattern, the formal constraints
imposed upon Being by form.
Three things to notice
Formal causation is not incompatible with
mechanical causation or determination.
 Formal regularities are not mere
epiphenomena or artifacts of our
description: They constrain primal reality
as well.
 Without infinite regress, these formal
constraints cannot be implemented
mechanically, by external compulsion.
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Form Persuades Necessity:
The Good Returns
If form cannot be externally imposed, one
must describe it as arising from its
attractiveness within the internal
constitution of primal reality.
 Patterns are attractive modes of being in
the primal reality that passes these
patterns onto the physical reality it
necessitates.
 Soul feels form and enforms objects with
pattern.
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The Powers and Limits of Mechanism
1. Mechanism can explain the origin of,
but not the nature of, most of the unities
we find in experience.
 2. A thoroughgoing Mechanism implies its
own limits and reveals that the vast
majority of the patterns we see, though
they originate mechanically, are nonmechanical.
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Mechanism is your friend
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The proponent of form in the modern
world should not oppose mechanism, but
should insist upon it. If a thoroughgoing
mechanism is true, it implies its own limits
and requires the resurrection of a type of
form that even a mechanist could love.