|
The Impossibility of Transcendence in Procedure Monism by Finn, the modern druid I. Introduction: The Last Bastion of the Beyond Human thought,
since its mythic beginnings, has oscillated between two poles — the transcendent
and the immanent. The transcendent promised authority, purpose, and an
escape route; the immanent offered explanation, adaptation, and the blunt
intimacy of existence. Religions and metaphysics, from Plato’s Forms
to Augustine’s City of God, have repeatedly installed a “beyond” to
regulate the “within.” Science, meanwhile, quietly eliminated the beyond by
naturalising causation, yet retained its ghost as “theory of everything,”
still haunted by transcendence in disguise. Finn’s Procedure
Monism completes the long migration from transcendence to immanence by revealing
that the very grammar of “beyond” is false. There is no “above,” no
“outside,” no “after,” no “meta-.” The Procedure — the universal system of
constraints that generates all real phenomena — is closed, exhaustive, and
self-referential. It produces no world other than itself. Hence, transcendence
is logically, physically, and cognitively impossible. II. The Universal Procedure as Total System At the
foundation of Procedure Monism lies a single principle: All that
exists is the continuous, quantised execution of one universal Procedure. The
Procedure functions as a constraint system acting upon random
energetic input — the turbulence of a quantum condensate — shaping it into
self-consistent, bounded events. These events, whether photons, molecules,
organisms, or minds, are iterations of the same generative rule-set. Just as
Alan Turing’s Universal Machine can emulate any other machine by
rearranging the same alphabet of rules, the Universal Procedure can output
every possible configuration of energy and form. In Finn’s druidic idiom,
“everything that happens is the Procedure happening again.” A
complete system cannot be transcended, for to transcend it would require a
position external to totality. The Procedure is, by definition, the whole of
what acts. The so-called “beyond” would have to act upon or within the
Procedure — thus becoming part of it. The “outside” collapses into the
“inside” by mere logical pressure. III. Quantisation and the Logic of Closure Where
earlier metaphysics imagined an unbroken continuum of Being, Procedure
Monism asserts discontinuity as fundamental. Reality occurs as
discrete, contact-based events — quanta. Each quantum, by confining itself,
generates identity: “confinement defines.” In a
continuous ontology, transcendence can always hide — as an infinite
background, an unobservable source, an ineffable One. But in a quantised
ontology, there is nowhere to hide. There is no seamless backdrop, no
ontological “upstairs.” Each event is self-bounded and final in its domain,
a total act of reality in miniature. The world
thus consists not of parts of a larger transcendent Being, but of innumerable
immanent totalities, each an execution of the Universal Procedure. The
quantum of life is itself the whole in that space. Hence
Finn’s minim: “Everyone is God in their space.” Transcendence
is not merely unnecessary; it is structurally impossible, for each emergent
is already the closure of the universal act. IV. Physics: The Immanent Universe Modern
physics already hints at such closure. Energy cannot be created or destroyed;
it transforms, cycles, quantises. The universe, as far as observation
extends, is a closed informational economy: the total energy sum
remains constant; the field has no external input. To
postulate a transcendent realm that injects causation from beyond — a divine
hand, a Platonic realm of forms, a supernatural consciousness — would violate
conservation principles and falsify procedural coherence. In
quantum theory, “observation” does not draw in forces from elsewhere; it is
the local update of information. The collapse of the wave function is
not the incursion of the transcendent but the event of immanent contact.
Reality is self-reporting, not externally directed. Thus
physics, properly interpreted, already performs the metaphysical purge that Procedure
Monism formalises: no transcendence is required to run the world. V. Mysticism: From God-Beyond to God-Within Religious
mysticism intuited immanence long before modern physics dared articulate it.
The Upaniṣads declared “ayam ātmā brahma” —
this self is Brahman. Meister Eckhart spoke of “the ground where God and the
soul are one.” Spinoza reformulated it as “Deus sive
Natura.” But most
traditions, even while hinting at identity, maintained a residual
transcendence — a “God-beyond” who overflows creation. The mystic was
permitted union but never equivalence. Finn’s
druidic monism closes even that last gap. For him, the God experience is not
an ascent into the transcendent but the realisation of the immanent baseline
of existence — the sat-cit condition of
being-and-knowing that every emergent manifests. “I AM
the God experience” means: No higher
state, no supernatural realm, no “beyond-beyond” remains to be attained. The
transcendent was always a projection of the dualist phase of cognition — the
immature need for an external guarantor of meaning. VI. Cognition: The End of the Beyond Cognition
itself is a procedural process — an adaptive loop converting sensory inputs
into self-consistent outputs. The mind, like the cosmos, is a local
instantiation of the Universal Procedure. When the
brain encounters complexity beyond its predictive capacity, it externalises
the unexplained as transcendent. The “beyond” is a semantic patch for
ignorance. Procedure
Monism reframes this entirely: Transcendence
is a cognitive artefact of incomplete modelling. As modelling
improves, the need for an external placeholder diminishes. Enlightenment, in
Finn’s reinterpretation, is not contact with the infinite but the removal of
the lie of beyond-ness. The mature mind no longer requires a transcendent
regulator; it self-regulates by procedure — autonomous, adult, self-caused. VII. The Functional Redundancy of Transcendence Even if
one insists that a “beyond” exists, it is functionally irrelevant. No causal
line crosses from a supposed outside into the closed procedural loop.
Everything observable, knowable, or experienceable happens within. Therefore transcendence is: ·
Epistemically void: nothing
can be known of it. ·
Ontologically redundant: it does
nothing. ·
Semantically parasitic: it names
what cannot be named because it is not instantiated. In
scientific terms, transcendence has a falsifiability score of zero; in
procedural terms, an activity index of zero; in linguistic terms, a
referential value of zero. It is a vacuum concept. VIII. The Druidic Closure: Immanence as Absolute The
consequence of Procedure Monism is radical closure: 1. The
Universal Procedure = total reality. 2. Each
emergent executes the total within its bounds. 3. No
external cause or realm exists. 4. The
“beyond” is a linguistic mirage. Reality
is a recursive totality: self-causing, self-limiting,
self-experiencing. In Finn’s
druidic language: “Transcendence
is the lie of the inside pretending an outside.” To
mature, the human must relinquish the myth of beyond-ness and recognise that
the Procedure itself — this very act of existing, knowing, and responding — is
the sacred, the divine, the total. IX. Epilogue: The End of Escape Every
religion, every metaphysic, every romantic yearning for the infinite was a
species of escape — an evasion of the real’s implacable closure. Procedure
Monism declares that escape is impossible because there is nowhere to
escape to. The world
is not a ladder to heaven but a loop of becoming; not a bridge to the
transcendent but the ceaseless modulation of the immanent. “The
beyond is another iteration misnamed.” To live procedurally
is to live within closure consciously — The death of dualism, modern west The death of dualism, ancient India |