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The Emergent as Analogue The
Cosmos as Play of Maya The Druid’s Ontological
Perspective In the search for the foundations of the experience of
identifiable reality, a recurring motif arises: that
what is perceived and cognized is not the world itself, but an expedient
projection as localised analogue. This intuition, found in both modern
quantum ontology and ancient philosophical traditions, suggests that the
cosmos, as the totality of emergent phenomena, is a ceaseless dance (and which the ancient
Indians called The Dance of Shiva) of conditional, transient
‘as if’ appearances—fit illusions shaped by necessity, not truth. At the most fundamental level of description,
contemporary physics points to a ground of emergence that is neither
continuous in the classical sense nor directly knowable. Instead, the
underlying substrate is an excited quantum space—an all-pervasive, non-local
field whose fluctuations yield the discrete, quantized events-become-objects
observed, hence decided in measurement. Whether framed as the vacuum state of
quantum field theory, the superfluid order of a Bose-Einstein condensate, or
the probabilistic wavefunction, this domain is structurally incommensurable
with everyday experience. What we encounter phenomenally—the realness or
solidity of objects, the flow of time, the persistence of self-as-unit—is
absent from this foundational description. The initiating ground is a
ubiquitous matrix of potentiality manifesting as discrete, massless energy
packets whose combinatorial interactions give rise to all emergent forms. Yet no observer, as emergent, whether an elementary
organism or a reflective human intelligence, perceives this ground as it is.
Contact with the underlying flux occurs only through streams of discrete
“instructions”—photons striking photoreceptors, quantized chemical gradients,
quanta of energy exchanging momentum. From these fragmentary,
pre-experiential events, the emergent generates an identifiable and real
analogue: a continuous, stabilised analogue projection. This analogue
encompasses its own time-space, its felt realness
and solidity, and a bounded identity that experiences itself as the point of
view within which the world appears. Crucially, this analogue is not a veridical mapping. It
is a localised, momentary fiction (an ‘as if’): an
evolved or emergent construction that enables action, prediction, and
survival. The organism must navigate a domain of threats and affordances. A
fragmented digital instruction stream (of a billion bits per second) would be
unmanageable; the smoothing, stabilising fiction of a continuous world is
evolution’s solution. What the emergent experiences is therefore a “useful
lie”—a cognitive interface selected for functional adequacy rather than
truth. This argument extends to all emergent systems, from simple life forms
to complex observers: each arises as a localized analogue projection, bounded
by the constraints of its perceptual and cognitive apparatus. When the scope of this argument is widened to the
cosmic scale, the implications are profound. The totality of the cognizable
cosmos—what we call “reality”—is nothing other than the collective ensemble
of such localised, provisional analogues. Each is a response to the same
ubiquitous, initiating quantum ground, but none can disclose it as it is. The
emergent cosmos is thus a ceaseless process of localised appearances (or projections, like in a
cinema) arising
within and from a non-local, thus unlimited, thus unknowable domain. Each
emergent moment is a provisional stabilisation, dissolving and reforming as
discrete events continue to fluctuate. Ontologically, the cosmos is not a
static object but a dynamic flux of individuated perspectives. This perspective resonates strikingly with ancient
Indian philosophical insight, especially the doctrine of Maya. In
Vedantic thought, Maya is the principle by which the Absolute (Brahman),
itself formless, ubiquitous, and unmanifest, appears as the differentiated,
cognizable realistic cosmos. Maya is not mere illusion in the sense of
arbitrary unreality; rather, it is the power of projection, by which
provisional forms, names, and real experiences arise. The “world” is thus
real as appearance, but ultimately false as a representation of what truly
is. The Play of Maya is precisely this dance of localised,
individuated appearances emerging within a single unbounded ground whose
nature remains forever beyond the reach of perception and definition. From the vantage of quantum ontology, we see an echo of
this insight. The ultimate substrate is a ubiquitous, indeterminate
potentiality—continuous yet quantized, everywhere present yet never disclosed
in its fullness to any observer. All emergents—organisms,
minds, stars—are provisional stabilisations within this flux, each generating
an analogue reality suited to its survival and cognition. The cosmos,
therefore, is the Play of Maya reframed in the language of quantum
discontinuity: a ceaseless arising of momentary projections whose function is
not to reveal the ground but to render it identifiable and real. This view invites a sober humility. The realness of
experience, the solidity of objects, the continuity of time, and the
persistence of identity are not mirrors of the initiating domain but
artifacts of the emergent’s own analogue
construction. What we call “knowledge” is thus an interface, not an
unveiling. And what we call “the world” is a tapestry of such interfaces,
each a useful fiction arising in the unknown quantum ground that remains, as
the Upanishads put it, “neti neti”—not this, not that. But then again, the
projected analogue is nothing other than the ground shaped from actual
communication, hence “eti eti.” |