SELF-CONTAINED CAUSAL NEXUS

The Self-Contained Causal Nexus is akin to its own universe, immutable, and without outside rational and verifiable and quantifiable experience. It is wherein mysticism, the supernatural, the supranatural, and superstition reside, and it is without rational explanation. As I understand self contained causal nexus, it is a metaphysical situation where religion, truth, and such philosophical issues originate within themselves, with the help of an agent or medium. The self contained causal nexus contains its heroes, its mythologies, its religions, its narratives, its prophets, its messiahs, and it always contains its creators. The self contained causal nexus can be understood from a perspective of semantics; the self is consciousness of one's own being or identity, the ego; contained of course can be understood as to have within, or to hold; and the causal nexus has been defined as the bonding or link between a cause and its effect.

Faith is an agent for religion, in that it acts in place of external verification. Faith stands in for statistical significance, for scientific method. As science celebrates the fetishization of objectivity, religion fetishizes its own subjectivity. In regards to religion, the metaphysical is basic and inherent. As science seeks to classify and clarify, metaphysics is by definition transcendent, as is religion, and as such, science and religion (read metaphysics) are incompatible. This is what makes religion a self contained causal nexus, the fact that it is only measurable, to any degree of truth, from within itself. As to messiahs, as to prophets, as to saints, and the sacred, religion’s proof is available only to believers, and those others seeking statistical significance are left dissatisfied. As such, faith is the archetype of religion’s agency; it is the ideal example of what an agent is, within this concept of religious and metaphysical as self contained casual nexus.

Larry Shiner, in 1967 declared of the world, that a “…process (which) had been occurring in Western civilization; as a result of which one after another sphere of life had become subject to the belief that explanations for events could be found within this-worldly experience and the application of human reason.” Shiner’s perception in regards to this world’s causal nexus pinpoints the reverse proposal; that an explanation for otherworldly phenomena cannot be from another world. As we know, reality is in the eye of the beholder; only in the most specific sense does reality mean only the quantifiable; only the strictest rational definition would mean only the most objective. Phenomenology is an accepted way to view reality, stressing the suspension of judgment, relying on the instinctive grasp of knowledge, free of prejudices and intellectualizing, and is sometimes referred to as the science of experience. In these ways, reality itself can be defined as a self contained causal nexus, in that there is no universally accepted definition of what the whole of reality entails. Truth is another concept which is a self contained causal nexus, in that some define truth as only that which is verifiable and subjective, and some believe, more broadly that truth is objective and obscured. Truth is, in a sense, a matter of perspective; some truth is only true to its perspective, and as such, perspective is the agent for reality, in that it delivers external veracity.

The brain is a biological system in which the sum is greater than its parts; it is the seat of the Self. The brain is an internal map that reflects your external world; it interprets your experience and reality’s input. The brain is the center of the nervous system, and the focus of external sense organs, as well as a collection of soft tissue and electrical activity, contained within a bony helmet. As such, the brain is a self contained causal nexus in that even though it is understood, basically, that some association between the electrical impulses and the brain tissue contributes to the brain’s consequence, it is not understood, in any true sense, from where consciousness arises, other than from a geographical sense of the word. To the brain, consciousness is its agent, in that from a biological perspective, it is the only route to external verification. There is no other way to understand the brain, except from a most topical and shallow perspective, without considering the perspective of consciousness. Consciousness is awareness, responsiveness, and cognition; to quote Rene Descartes: “I think therefore, I am.” Known as the “three pound universe”, the brain is consciousness, and that consciousness is the self contained causal nexus upon which all reality turns.

Similarly, the subconscious is poorly understood. Disciples of detail and the clergy of classification are flummoxed and rendered almost incomprehensible in their attempted subjugation of the murky world of the subconscious, and is understood shallowly and topically only, from the perspective of its effect, and this is the best science can offer. Science is great for interpreting ideas; science is similarly good at rationalizing certain ideas, yet to get to the marrow of truth, science can no more than approach the truth of the subconscious, as it does not have the benefit of the incomprehensible. The dream is the agent of the subconscious, its shadowy medium, and its advocate to the conscious world. As Freud would have it, the psyche has an unconscious or subconscious component, the id, which is only approached from a standpoint of analogy. As such, the subconscious is a self contained causal nexus wherein its truth is only available from within and through the agency of the dream, and approachable only through the interpretation of the dream or through various parlor tricks.

Max Weber said in The Sociology of Religion, 1922, “Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the “world images” have been created by “ideas” have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of the interest.” This is the crux of the concept of self contained causal nexus, as I understand the term; that some ideas are capable of establishing and defining their own nexus; ideas that define themselves, that have their own meaning and importance, and the truth of them not independently verifiable. Mystery is seen not as something to be entered into but something to be conquered by human reason, ingenuity, and the products of technology; explanations referring to forces outside of this world are constantly being laid aside. Weber’s de-magification did not mean that people did not believe in the old mysteries of religion, but rather that the concept of mystery was devalued. The consequence of this worldview was that explanations referring to forces outside of this world were constantly being laid aside, in agreement with Shiner above, and weakens the bonds between this world and the next, and weakens our allegiance to a higher power. C.S. Lewis opines in The Problem of Pain, the world will be a “…uniform infinity of homogeneous matter at a low temperature…” which leads to a lack of faith in the Sacred. A heartfelt belief in the rational only, to the detriment of the supernatural, can only lead to an understanding of the rational, to the exclusion of the supernatural. This devaluation of the incomprehensible and the supernatural is schizophrenic, as mankind is not the arbiter of destiny, but only another biological organism upon this planet. Grace cannot be verified or studied by intricate mathematical formulae, and Grace is something which mankind gravely needs.

The concept of rationalism is "…any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification." Lacey, A.R., A Dictionary of Philosophy, and a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive..." Bourke, Vernon J. (1962), “Rationalism” Clearly, the above definition is derived from objectivity and classification, from scientific method and statistical significance, wholly dismissive of the metaphysical and irrational. Rationalism, then must apply to reason, and men’s intellect, and must reject the supernatural, as such, echoing Shiner’s statement above, rationalism is the process which blinds men to the sublime, and by which all explanations must come from this world. As Lewis opines, this leads to a devaluation of the supernatural, of the supranatural, and the dismissal of the mystical. Broadly, rationalism can be explained as a form of humanism, wherein the transcendental (the divine) is rejected in its many forms, and mankind is elevated to truth and primacy. Humanism seeks to supplant and replace the esoteric; it is a broad philosophy, but its major tenet is an adherence to mankind’s abilities, and rationalism is the vehicle upon which it relies. Rationalism, then, is the agent of humanism, generating humanism’s veracity to the extent that much older and more broadly accepted truths are corrupted through its insidiousness. Humanism and rationalism lend themselves freely to the western fetishization of individualism, and as such, tend to replace other, seemingly wiser views through its scorn and rejection of the transcendental, as well as their reliance on statistica and detail. Rationalism and humanism seek a plaster cast of God’s footprint, and only offer up incomprehensible mathematical models to verify, not truth, but snapshots of the verifiable. The supernatural offers truth, but through faith, and the denial of self, which run counter to western values and mankind’s urges, and thus rationalism and humanism are in opposition to the mystical.

Morality has multiple aspects, but the most common usage of the concept has to do with accepted and shared codes of conduct, and is utilized within the framework of society and social interaction. In this sense, morality is not a self contained causal nexus, in that the ability to judge and verify morality is available to anyone, and from many external perspectives. Often, however, as such things tend to be, the definition of a concept, rather than exposing a truth, defines, as this does this definition of morality, which restricts its truth. Morality then, being definable and restricted, is not a truth, but is rather the agent of ethics, which resists being easily defined. Ethics gives meaning to morality, but it is not understood whether ethics are a natural and biological phenomena, something imparted from a higher power, or a purely social construct. There are many instances of ethical conduct which are clearly social in nature, like holding a door, but considering the concept of ethics more deeply, from whence does right and wrong flow? Is there some biological imperative governing us only upon a path upon self sustenance, or is there a more universal and supernatural imperative goading mankind upon a righteous path? Obviously then, ethics falls squarely into the realm of self contained causal nexus due to the fact that its truth can only be found from within its own conception.

Death is the cessation of our existing biological function; death is the terminus of this mortal coil; death is the endgame of this existence. The statistical significance of death ends at its beginning. There is no further understanding of death, from a scientific perspective, beyond its inception. Science can only point to its causes, not its origins, and its effects, not its meaning. As noted above by Lewis, entropy (death), without considering the unverifiable, leads to a deep melancholy. Science and the “Rationalitat” have no answer, no explanation, no verifiable data as to the truth of death, beyond a topical description.

Life is easier to classify, at least portions of it, however, the truth of life, in its totality, eludes classification. Erwin Schrödinger, among others, opines that life can be understood as operating through the agency of what he called “negative entropy”, which means, loosely, that life is an open system able to decrease its internal entropy at the expense of substances taken in and subsequently rejected in a degraded form. But this does not even approach defining life, but rather is descriptive. Similarly, describing life from a purely biological perspective is again only descriptive; the biological imperative is not truth, but rather a form and a framework to describe the actions of living organisms. There is no universal definition of life, but a classification, at a cellular level is possible, but this is wholly topical, as it does nothing for a broad understanding of the truth of life.


it means something of a philosophical mobius strip, wherein an outside explanation is not viable or verifiable.
Again, as I understand it, per Weber, the process wherein religion, truth, philosophical issues are addressed from an only-within-this-world perspective is not a proper, as such things are “SCCN.”
So, the metaphysical is ignored, to the extent that a fuller truth is bypassed in favor of a more quantifiable explanation; which is, in a sense, a shortcoming of rationalization.