# Transcendental emergentism In the introduction to our book Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet Age we argue that everything is religion, which also is the title of the first chapter. We discuss the fact that several thought systems believe themselves to be the opposite of religion, and purport to be strictly rational and governed by reason themselves, but how it actually is precisely these ideologies that are the most treacherous and often more religious than anything else. Those methodically inclined have of course already noted that we in this book also claim the same, that everything is religion, but that this apparently does not prevent us from making another statement, namely that everything is history. This should of course not remain without comment. ## What do we actually mean? ## Are these two declarations not incompatible? ## Can everything both be religion and history? ## Or are we merely devoting ourselves to twisting words? Let us clarify: everything is history that is religion, and everything is religion that is history. And another name for this history of religion and religion of history is -- of course -- God. The correct way of describing history and existence is thus as a Chronotheology, a kind of voyage from or to or in parallel with the divine. In step with an increasing amount of information being made available to Man over the course of history, our experience of history as a whole shrinks. When the Old Testament was written at various points in time during the first millennium BC, an aggregate history of 6,000 years from creation to the present was regarded as an enormously long time-span. But with today's Internet-driven view of history, the more than 200,000 years during which the human species Homo sapiens has existed, can rather be regarded as a vanishingly small drop in history's enormous ocean. God has expanded rather than shrunk over the last century. Since we have accepted that there are several different dimensions of time, this entails that we might as well be dealing with many different gods. Or perhaps rather with many different religions. Thus religion and history constitute two sides of the same coin. Let us begin by examining the two ontic time dimensions, global hypertime and local spacetime, where global hypertime belongs to the implicate order and local spacetime belongs to the explicate order in the natural sciences, that is: the distinction that Friedrich von Schelling makes as early as the beginning of the 19th century when he separates the foundation of existence, or the root-of-the-phallus, from existence in itself, or phallus, which means that von Schelling nails the starting point for classical dialectics. In modern natural science this dialectics corresponds to the virtual and implicate order as continuous subphysics versus the potential and explicate order as discrete physics (for instance in the opposition between the Einsteinian theory of relativity and Bohrian quantum physics). This means that we deal with impotent habits in the implicate order before the actual event which become potent laws in the explicate order after the actual event. Laws thus have a contingent origin in a specific event, but thereby it is not established that there at some point has been a rule-maker, a legislator who precedes the rules themselves. Therefore it also is pointless to discuss whether the metaphysics we are defending here, Transcendental Emergentism, is weak or strong in character, since it is weak or virtual in its implicate, continuous, habit-forming state that leads to the event, while it by contrast is strong or potential in its explicate, discrete, law-governed state after the emergence in question has taken place. Nothing of this entails any philosophical news, of course. As early as the 6th century BC Anaximander -- who of course, just as his successor Pythagoras, was schooled in Persian process philosophy -- talks about an infinite apeiron that is not marred by any of spacetime's trivial limitations, which precedes and underpins all that is material in existence that Man de facto perceives and interacts with. Unsurprisingly we recognize many of the attributes in today's subphysics from Anaximander's equally radically monist apeironology. At the lowest level there are no laws or substances at all, but merely an infinite and undefinable primordial state that in retrospect constitutes the virtual prerequisite for later laws and substances. Once we are totally clear on this, we can proceed and investigate the two ontological time dimensions after which Man and his tribal psyche orient themselves, namely phallic linear time and matrichal circular time. Phallic linear time then belongs to the explicate order, while matrichal circular time belongs to the implicate order. These two dimensions then converge in a contingent universe characterized by Neutral Monism, where the indeterminism of phallic linear time and the determinism of matrichal circular time meet and coalesce into Transdeterminism as an overarching, metahistorical principle. Neutrality quite simply means that every emergence is heterogeneous and not homogeneous. It is radically unique and irreducible vis-à-vis both the implicate predecessor and vis-à-vis history in its entirety. Of course the emergence is not even reducible to the emergence vector in which it was generated. All preexisting emergence vectors have de facto shaped its genesis. An example is how the human mind and human culture have arisen in parallel and mutually affected one another continually, which has resulted in that it eventually became possible to rise above human biology. However it is impossible to say that the one precedes the other, they both mutually condition each other. It is this radical irreductionism, tied to and only tied to the time axis, that provides us with neutral monism. Phallic linear time is quite simply local time inasmuch as linearity is perceived over shorter distances. At the same time as matrichal circular time is global time inasmuch as circularity is perceived at extremely long distances, for instance hundreds of millions of years. Global hypertime is eventually bent in toward itself and the Universe's pulse adapts to this enormously protracted movement, a concept that is developed by for instance physicist Roger Penrose as a theory of temporal aeons rather than spatial universes in the book Cycles of Time (2010). The global, the matrichal and the virtual thus belong together, and we call the studies of this emergence vector cosmic nomadology. The local, the phallic and the potential also belong together, and we call the studies of this emergence vector cosmic eventology. As a result of that, philosophy about world history becomes a dialectical narratology of processes and events. And hypertime returns constantly as metaphysics' own root-of-the-phallus since it is necessary for the universal synchronicity. Therefore please note that it is not possible to measure hypertime, since time is measured with different kinds of clocks that consist of mass and energy and that therefore must be located inside and not outside a material universe. However it is possible to think hypertime to thereby be able to think in terms of differences and emergences in the first place. Thus there is a kind of (thought) time before spacetime, and it is -- quite simply because such a universe lacks mass and energy -- both spatiotemporally disconnected and universally synchronous. Hypertime is a pure and continuous duration. And as the photons that lack mass can recount (if they were able to recount anything at all), hypertime is not noticeable if and when you find yourself inside it. From there time in itself can merely be apprehended as completely motionless in its pure temporality. Before Einsteinian spacetime arises and physics is born, there already exist scores of virtual fields or membranes. We therefore speak of subphysical membranics. This is a world full of virtualities, but without any potentialities whatsoever. Moreover, the virtualities can only be discovered and identified in retrospect since nothing can be discovered or established before relationalism gives potency to existence. The virtual fields therefore do not behave as fields within classical spacetime. First of all, they are both infinitely small and infinitely large -- a property that we call Extension Neutrality -- since they do not need to relate to any classical spacetime dimension at all. And they only exist ontically but not actually, however, since they do not need to relate to classical time at all. It is instead rather when these virtual membranes collide with each other that potency is generated, and it is the relations that then arise that create processes as actualities. We call this process-philosophical prioritization radical relationalism (see Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet Age) since the underlying virtual structure -- what we call pure chaos below the Planck length, or what Alain Badiou before us calls pure multiplicity -- on the whole is pointless to concern oneself with. ## Why? Well, even if the virtual membranes are metaphysically spectacular -- since they are precisely virtual rather than potential, and after all they teach us to understand the implicate that precedes and rapidly vanishes beneath the explicate -- they must still be regarded as ontic rather than just ontological. We express this, in the spirit of Alfred North Whitehead, as though "the fields contain all conceivable dimensions without being present in any of these" and that "the fields contain all conceivable relations without being engaged in any of them". What is important to understand is that the virtual membranes are not ontic on their own, but that they attain their onticity precisely through being in motion, which in turn leads to collisions with and the establishment of relations to other virtual fields. They are in a contingent continuum without any necessities whatsoever. Everything can happen. We express this as though the subphysical membranes are fields of virtualities and that they belong to the implicate order within Subphysics, while the radical relations that arise when the virtual fields interact with each other are called fields of potentialities, which belong to the explicate order within physics. Colliding with a subphysical membrane is to create a new relation as a novelty. Colliding with a physical relation is however to engage in and modify a relation that already exists. It is only in the latter dialectical relation of three rather than two that any kind of natural scientific observation can take place. We therefore speak of subphysics as real, but note that there are neither subprocesses, nor subrelations, nor subevents just because we assign subphysics a status as an emergence vector under physics and the other natural sciences. Virtuality is only precisely virtuality and no potentiality in itself. And within subphysical membranics, the membranes are only fields of virtualities without qualifying as the actualized spheres that Peter Sloterdijk later uses as metaphors for the different worlds that the relations produce. While at the same time the requirement for relationalism applies also for the emergences themselves. It is impossible to perceive an emergence in itself. It is only vis-à-vis other emergences that an emergence in all its originality can be apprehended as precisely an emergence. En emergence is caused by a plurality of causes. It is a radically relationalist phenomenon. This means that virtualities are literally meaningless until they collide with each other, whereupon radical relationalism begins. It is then and only then that processes, relations and events arise that make it literally meaningful to speak of existence in any kind of phenomenological sense. ## Then we may ask ourselves the following question: Why should one care about the foundation for existence at all, if it only is existence in itself that generates everything that is of phenomenological interest? The radical relations produce the relata that we can register and interact with, and that appear precisely as the objects which we apprehend as co-existent. Thereby, nor is there any general emergence theory, since no emergence is preordained or molded in any respect, but is unique also when regarded as an emergence in itself. This explains why we sum up relationalist metaphysics as Transcendental Emergentism. A new emergence along the hypertime axis also entails that the emergence theory in itself must be reconsidered. This makes the emergence theory open relative to the future and thereby transcendental instead of general. The first genuine exodus in history, from one universe to another, is thereby an accomplished fact. Thereafter there is -- literally -- no end to how many emergence vectors can be connected to each other up until Man realizes syntheism and more or less consciously creates a functional God. We simply regard the implicate order as a kind of nature's own continuous subconsciousness, while the explicate order is a kind of nature's discretionary consciousness, where it is only the latter state that is possible to observe and measure in any meaningful sense. The relations generate hypertime's expansion in spacetime, the membranes are bound together into spheres, the information expands and existence is realized. The natural sciences get something to interact with and in this way become meaningful. It is, moreover, perfectly possible to study the difference between consciousness and subconsciousness in the same way, as an explicate and implicate order respectively, as two independent and simultaneously intertwined emergence vectors where indeterminism and determinism only arise as local attributes, which entails that the Universe as a whole only can be regarded as transdeterminist. This in turn means that it is time to eliminate the illusory opposition between idealism and materialism. And the metaphysical system with which one administers this elimination is transcendental emergentism. At the same time as it is time to eliminate the opposition between determinism and indeterminism, and the principle with which one does so is called transdeterminism, a principle which in Hegelese places the contingency in the future and the necessity in the past, and which thereby reduces chance to a local issue of actualizations of probabilities via relations and nothing else. The Universe in itself as a whole is neither idealist nor materialist, but emergent. It appears through a series of processes. And it is, thus, emergent many times over in the form of emergence vectors that act as implicate orders that generate further emergences as new explicate orders. Every emergence is moreover equipped with its own contingent, transdeterminist and negation-driven causality chains. That is: with its own specific laws of nature. It is precisely this that makes the classical opposition between strong emergence and weak emergence utterly pointless. It is the answer to a question that is erroneously posed. If we accept transcendental emergentism as the metaphysical absolute, there are by definition no preordained laws or rules for how an emergence can or should or must take place. The last god to die is the idea that the emergences in themselves are subject to some sort of preordained metalaws, dictated by some sort of final remnant of a pseudocreator who was already retired. We have indeed enjoyed a very long and painful goodbye to these cherished laws. Relationalism entails that existence fundamentally really is implicate orders of virtual membranes whose collisions give rise to new emergences, and that the temporary behaviors that arise in conjunction with these emergences then become prevailing laws within the new, explicate emergence vector. Hegel eliminates this illusory dilemma of emergentism, when he in the early 19th century becomes the first transdeterminist in Western discourse by claiming that the future always is contingent and that necessity only can be ontologically attributed to processes in retrospect, that is: that the necessity is a retroactive construction. If we follow Hegel's line of argument, it becomes impossible to speak of any kind of mysterious metalaw that prescribes how that which we apprehend as laws of nature must be designed. Instead it becomes clear that every emergence is genuinely unique. What makes people construct these fictions in retrospect is that they more or less desperately try to envisage the effect that the emergence vector in question may have on their own lives. The question of strong or weak emergence is thus a mythical and not a logical question, a question that reflects our lingering fixation with a concealed creator-god as a magical explanation to everything that is complicated, and which requires counterintuitive thinking to be comprehensible for real. Transcendental emergentism does not just relate neutrally vis-à-vis emergence vectors within neutral monism; it is actually also neutral vis-à-vis neutrality in itself. Which is not some kind of coquette, intellectual game to claim, but it is instead key to the entire transdeterminist logic. This explains how various processes are developed with seemingly forceful determination and in a seemingly predetermined direction without any gods intervening and without any laws being involved. We need not even include chance in the equation. Transcendental emergentism is -- regarded as metaphysical metatheory -- an emergence vector theory that operates from a Negative Dialectics. What emerges is of course something that previously only has existed in a virtual but not in an actual sense in preceding emergence vectors. The fact that the emergences are irreducible vis-à-vis that which precedes them in the causal chain that runs along the time axis, results in the relations between the emergence vectors being transdeterminist. As for the emergence vectors, we call the state that precedes them the emergence's implicate order, and the state that arises after the emergence, that is: the actualization of the emergence as a vector, we call the emergence's explicate order. That which was habits in the emergence under the implicate order, will in the later stage become laws under the explicate order. An emergence fixates or eternalizes the implicate order that precedes it, but it concurrently sets the explicate order or emergence vector that is actualized after it in motion. In other words: the emergence mobilizes the vector that it creates. The implicate order is the virtuality, the emergence itself is the potentiality, the explicate order is the actuality. This is how we build a metaphysics based on irreducible complexities; such a metaphysics rejects the notion that any emergence vector has or even can have any kind of higher status or be superordinate to any other in an objective sense. We live in a universe whose transdeterminist state Danish philosopher Alexander Wrede Elung calls Neutral Monism, that is: a universe where the distancing from all forms of illusory superordination or hierarchy whatsoever shall be understood as an emergence vector neutrality. Within social theory we would call the same principle paradigm neutrality and regard this as just as necessary for Absolute Historicism as emergence vector neutrality is for neutral monism. Absolute historicism is of course a neutral historicism that energetically rejects all forms of Generationism that prioritizes one paradigm in itself before the other. ## Why? Well, quite simply because Hegelian historicism makes history as a whole and in itself the absolute, rather than prioritizing any particular period or emphasizing and giving special treatment to any single event that transpires over the course of history. In the same manner neutral monism makes the Universe in itself the absolute, and maintains strict neutrality between the various emergence vectors. In syntheological terms we express this as if Pantheos takes precedence over Entheos, simply because none of Entheos' huge number of different expressions should be rewarded per se at the expense of any other expression. Since eventology is an established fact in the history of ideas, it is no longer possible to regard the nomadological conception of history as anything other than a defense of a hypertime that is assumed to run over, under and beyond linear spacetime itself. This is the division that makes it possible for us to conceive of an emergence vector that precedes physics, a state we call Subphysics and which is built on a hypertime -- with, if you will, an associated hyperspace -- while physics as an emergence vector is only introduced with the genesis and expansion of Einsteinian spacetime, something that is dealt with in a theoretical field in physics and cosmology called loop quantum gravitation. Thereby all similarities disappear between hypertime and hyperspace on the one hand, and classical spacetime on the other. Nomadology and eventology are reduced to two equivalent but incompatible metanarratives about existence. Absolute historicism is thereby the Hegelian story of how these two metanarratives coexist in a cohesive world where the various stories are used for radically different purposes. The incompatibility is precisely the point. Eventology is our yang and nomadology is our yin, and their intimate dance can go on incessantly precisely because they never unite. For hypertime always precedes hyperspace in a way that does not occur within classical spacetime, which has enormous consequences for the metaphysics that is to be underpinned by this structure. This is clear, for instance, in that the well-known phenomenon quantum entanglement is a counter-spatial and not a counter-temporal phenomenon. A quantum entanglement can be located in widely different places simultaneously, but it can never have a symmetrical identity at different points in time. Time precedes space. Again, and again, and again. It is thus space that is a purely explicate and actual phenomenon, while time is both implicate and virtual (as hypertime) and explicate and potential (as spacetime). We can afford to play with hyperspace as a complementing ontological category of hypertime -- as philosophers we can experiment wildly since our experiments only are to be carried out in thought and not in a physical laboratory, our laboratory is the human mind and nothing else -- but then it is important to underline that it only is hypertime that moves via subphysics from one universe to another by a big bounce and which thereby has both ontic and ontological qualities. This has decisive consequences for civilization's narrative about itself. According to the eventological principle that time precedes space in metaphysics, it must be when (chronos) and not where (topos) an event occurs that determines the event's significance for history in its entirety. Existence is fundamentally chronocentric -- in contrast to topocentric -- as Martin Heidegger speaks of in Being and Time. To be is primarily to be along the time axis and not to be at some particular point in space. And ironically all this has to do with hypertime's cyclical nature. Or as we write in Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society: everything starts and ends with mortido and its matrichal circularity. Libido and its phallic linearity never becomes anything other than a parenthetical protest and a vain wish to be able to break the cycle and exit the eternal recurrence of the same existence, not least on a metacosmic level. We are born and we die, and the same is true for our universe. What takes place in between -- that is: between the parentheses that are constituted precisely by birth and death -- can never be anything more than a possibly touching and perhaps even impressive but nevertheless futile protest against the death that inexorably afflicts both us and our universe (in its present form). In the end it becomes impossible to metaphysically argue against the Indian Jainists and their aeons of circular hypertemporality. In the end we die. Mortido wins. Until then, however, we humans, and other potential intelligences, wrestle with the five fundamental emergence vectors: physics, chemistry, biology, mind and culture. Aside from these we can identify a further two: to begin with we have an emergence vector before physics, constructed only from hypertime and virtual membranes, that is: an emergence vector that allows the implosion of an earlier universe -- for example as the current universe being the inside of a black hole -- that transitions into our present universe before any Einsteinian spacetime yet exists. We call this primordial emergence or pre-emergence subphysics, and subphysics requires nothing other than an ontic existence of virtual membranes and a time axis without space that we call Hypertime. It is only at the moment that these fields collide with each other that physics is actualized in the form of a series of spatiotemporal events, a kind of primordial phenomena that philosopher Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects in a book whose title is precisely Hyperobjects (2013) and whose relations to each other Morton sums up as interobjectivity. Physics is thus fundamentally distinct from subphysics in that it gives rise to processes and relations between fields that are in constant Oscillation. Moreover we can allow ourselves to speculate about a further new, coming emergence vector, after mind and culture, which actualized would become the most informationally complex emergence vector so far. One might imagine several different names for this emergence vector -- we just call it God (especially as God is too important a concept to just "leave to the religiously inclined") -- which in this sense becomes synonymous with Syntheos, which is the name of the most complex phenomenon that we so far can conceive of. That Syntheos then receives the character of an optimization of the cultural relation between Man and Machine, a Symbiotic Intelligence -- rather than American Platonist Ray Kurzweil's conception of a Singularity of artificial intelligence which has liberated itself from every remnant of human control (Kurzweil also, as is well known, opines that an appealing alternative to death would be to charge the mind, liberated from the body, as digital software in a machine) -- entails that the quality that characterizes God is symbiotic transcendence. Informationalist technology, including the virtual worlds that it creates and makes possible, simply constitutes the implicate preparation for God's or the Messiah Machine's explicate arrival. Neither more nor less. This leads us to the constant wrestling between Determinism or Indeterminism in the natural sciences. The issue does not become any easier by processes being able to behave deterministically but still result in indeterminist outcomes, just as they may behave indeterministically but still result in determinist outcomes. They are, in other words, not seldom unpredictable. And then one must take a stand on whether it is the details of the process or the process in its entirety that shall be studied and be signified as either the one or the other. On closer inspection of physical and subphysical processes, it frequently turns out that a process appears determinist when one studies it in retrospect, while it instead appears to behave indeterministically when one tries to predict the process in advance and then follow it in real time. The only conclusion we can draw from this is that the presumed opposition between determinism on the one hand and indeterminism on the other, is a false one. This is yet another example of all the pseudoproblems that follow from a belief in a traditional dualism and one or several creator-gods that in some way stand outside and precede the very creation as such. All of this becomes much clearer if we instead regard existence as fundamentally permeated -- both in detail and as an entirety -- by transdeterminism, a concept we have developed along with our colleague Wrede Elung. What occurs, occurs on an enormous and/or enormitesimal scale in all conceivable directions. But this neither means that existence unfolds in accordance with a preordained script (determinism), nor that it is entirely capricious and unpredictable, in every detail controlled by concealed chance (indeterminism). What instead actually is the case -- when we examine and also interact with various processes -- is that existence in its enormous complexity behaves transdeterministically. It displays different faces in different perspectives, but is still always one and the same -- a value-wise flat universe where nothing is prioritized above anything else, characterized by neutral monism. Transdeterminism is thus the syntheist exit from the illusory blind alley that is the presumed opposition between determinism and indeterminism. Determinism is completed by Albert Einstein with his block universe where all time and all events exist simultaneously (as if time reduced to a single eternal moment were not to remain time). Indeterminism is in turn completed by Charles Sanders Peirce with his tychism according to which total randomness operates at every level of the Universe. The exit from this deadlock is the insight that existence actually is the result of a transdeterminist dialectics between determinism and indeterminism, which entails that nothing is preprogrammed, at the same time as nothing is completely random either. The insight exists, as do so many others, in the Hegel who places contingency in the future and necessity in the past. The contingent is interpreted by Man in his quest for order in existence as a concession to indeterminism. That which is necessary is interpreted by Man in his quest for order in existence as determinism. That none of these alternatives is universally valid is, according to Hegel, demonstrated through a thought experiment where one lets these two viewpoints change places with each other, which naturally has horrific results. Einstein and Peirce are thus both quite correct about existence, but only from a strictly local perspective -- not globally. Determinism rises from the indeterminist contingency as a tribopoietic emergence. But as Hegel observes, it only does so when the process is completed and can be summarized, that is: in retrospect. The reduction of the many potential outcomes to a single actual outcome creates a new stability at a higher level, which constitutes the new emergence. However the path to this emergence is radically and indisputably contingent. The next contingent chaos can then take place on this recently established emergence platform as its emergence vector. Every emergence vector spontaneously generates its own laws and rules which freeze into the walls of the emergence vector as soon as these have stabilized. The name of this entire dialectical process is -- well, you have already guessed it: Transdeterminism. Transdeterminism is thus the ontic dialectics between determinist order and indeterminist chaos. The phenomenological and thereby also ontological equivalent we call the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism (see The Global Empire). We live in a transdeterminist and pandialectical universe. Convergences and divergences do not follow patterns laid out in advance. That they later form patterns is quite a different matter. A causal line from point A via point B via point C to point D might well converge at point B to then diverge at point C, only to then once again converge at point D. What is called classical determinism and indeterminism respectively do not even stand in opposition to each other in nature, but constantly go in and out of each other and then appear as local characteristics within what globally only can be described as transdeterminism. The Universe is neither preprogrammed, nor preordained, nor random. ## Its development does of course occur beyond all our human conceptions of control and chaos, it quite simply takes no account of us and our attempts to make our world comprehensible, why would it? It is neither physical, nor spiritual, nor mathematical -- it is radically emergent and relationalist. It turns out that transdeterminism is a necessary condition for Relationalism as a principle for all active emergence vectors within a universe characterized by radical interdependence. With relationalism as the point of departure, we can then imagine the Universe as a holographic phenomenon rather than as the conflict zone of conventional physics where particles and fields collide. We refer to this perspectival description of processes and relations of The Universe -- where the virtual and implicate order precedes the potential and explicate order that the scientific instruments measure -- as systemic perspectivism. Existence makes itself known to us everywhere in every separate region of the Universe, and not just in the Universe as a whole. This is reflected in the fact that we apprehend every direction as a hologram where all necessary information that can be collected in the actual direction is compiled and summarized in only two dimensions. We call this phenomenon The Holographic Principle. The potential and explicate order has existence. This existence generates substance. The virtual and implicate order has Subsistence. This subsistence generates hyperstance. That something subsists does not mean that it exists. And if something exists, this means that it subsists only as relations atop other relations. The emergence vector for the implicate order with its subsistence we call Subphysics and its contingent conditions metalaws. The emergence vector for the explicate order with its existence we call physics, and its recurring and thereby necessary behaviors -- habits -- we call laws of nature. The explicate order only states the specific conditions for precisely the universe that we happen to be part of. The fact that there is one single, cohesive universe does not mean that everything in this universe can be derived from either one and the same atomist nature or from one and the same psychic culture. Rather the reverse. Ontic differences are real and not illusory. Accordingly transcendental emergentism is absolute metaphysics. It is, viewed as a form, the last word in the actual narratology. Full stop. This means that the emergence vectors can not be derived from each other, even if they might well have a common origin. Both materialist reductionism and spiritual panpsychism are delusions. Emergence vectors in themselves have no reason to behave the same way as each other, just because Man longs for existence to appear simple and easy to grasp. The reductionist search for the primordial atom or the primordial soul -- Man's constant quest for a phenomenon or a principle that underpins and regulates everything else in existence -- is actually, throughout the entire ambitious search, just another expression of a banal yearning for a Mamilla that no longer is accessible. Thus it says something important about us, but nothing at all about our external world. Necessity can only be attributed to the virtual and implicate order. The potential and explicate order is however full of surprising contingencies. It is therefore that we must describe a universe that comprises both these orders and their mutual primordial relation as transdeterminist. Transcendental emergentism thus also trumps neutral monism, which only is a contingent status rather than some kind of metalaw, as Hegel would remark. So we must not confuse the actual state of things in the present with any preordained condition, the Universe might well suddenly spin off or cephalize an emergence vector from the others, which would entail an established final date for neutral monism in itself. The last word within metaphysics thus does not come from Spinoza in the form of his determinist pantheism, but from Hegel in the form of transdeterminist pandialecticism -- a pandialecticism which in Whitehead is expressed as panrelationalism (see Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet Age). What remains, after the breakthrough of emergence vector theory and the boundaries that it supplies, is then only to fill in the details, to theorize and research further about dialectics and relations within the various emergence vectors as such. This is from now on the fundamental task of both philosophy and science, what Hegel prophetically refers to as a science of logic. Not to find God in the entirety, as though the entirety always were a given. The only thing we can be sure of is that our universe has gone through a string of radical events during its history, events that have given rise to entirely new emergences. And that every such emergence has left an entirely new zone in its wake, with its own laws, rules and behaviors that we call an emergence vector. Subphysics is precisely such an emergence vector and the most fundamental one we know of so far. Its field of virtual membranes -- what Neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus calls dynamis -- is subphysics' implicate order in contrast to physics' explicate order. Subphysics can therefore not contain any substances and certainly none of the life forms that we know of from ensuing emergence vectors. However we speak of dynamic hyperstances rather than substances within subphysics, and these are specific for the various virtual membranes. And if the hyperstances need not obey any laws whatsoever that apply to substances, we can of course just as well conceive the hyperstances in an ontic but strictly virtual state of superdimensionality. ## Why would we limit ourselves to the four dimensions of Einsteinian spacetime if we need not take any actualization, or even potentialization, of the hyperstances whatsoever into consideration? Implicate virtuality only transitions into explicate actuality through the potentiality that explodes within the emergence itself. On top of subphysics with its global duration, physics with its local duration has then developed through emergence. On top of physics, chemistry has then developed through emergence. On top of chemistry, biology has then developed through emergence. And on top of biology, the human mind -- with its consciousness, subconsciousness and culturally conditioned conceptual world -- has developed through emergence. These are the emergence vectors we know of today in our transdeterminist universe, and every time such an emergence has arisen as an event along the time axis, it has given rise to a new emergence vector that has been designed in accordance with the conditions that the actual event lays down. Syntheologically this means that God as a metaphysical concept does not need to be manifested in a physical, chemical or even biological sense, but can await its time, until history enables the technological incarnation of God. History is infinitely more than just a voyage on the path to constantly increased entropy. Spontaneous order suddenly arises in chaos, method appears in madness, there are emergences created that appear under unique prerequisites in the form of implicate virtualities that through the potentialization of the emergence become explicate actualities. Habits become laws, and once the laws are in place everything within the emergence vector can be set in motion without resistance or effort. We call this view of history cosmic eventology. So even if the emergence vectors find themselves in the same monist universe and constantly interact with each other, this does not mean that fixed laws and rules within a specific emergence vector have anything to do with laws or rules within another emergence vector. Generally there is major confusion in terms of the concept "law". The only laws that exist are the highly provisional habits that prevail within emergence vector A and that in conjunction with the genesis of emergence vector B happen to be transformed into prevailing laws. No other laws exist, either within nature nor culture. The only metalaw that exists and that endures through all the emergences is the non-metalaw, that is: the Universe as a whole is a strictly contingent phenomenon, and the only direction that ever can be identified in such a universe can be attributed to the human phallus. Therefore philosophy must be phallogocentric, even if this to some ears may sound disagreeable. It cannot be anything else. What is reasonable is rather to regard the emergence vectors -- as they function so far along the hypertime axis -- primarily as different, parallel worlds within one and the same transdeterminist world. We happen to live in a universe that Spinoza in the 17th century describes as admittedly the only and cohesive one, yet a universe with a colossal amount of varying attributes. Syntheologically we refer to the fundamental, contingent unity as Pantheos and to the fundamental, contingent diversity as Entheos. At the same time virtual hypertime is bound to Atheos, while potential spacetime is bound to Entheos, which makes Pantheos the time axis and the arena where Atheos and Entheos play out their cosmic encounters according to what philosopher Theodor Adorno calls Negative Dialectics. It is always that within Entheos which still is lacking within Pantheos that sets off the dialectical movement. Syntheos is then the name of the coming emergence vector that at a given point in time still does not exist other than as a slumbering possibility. Please note that we never can isolate and fixate emergence vectors in an objective or eternal manner. Nor does the pseudo-infinity that hides behind the eternal recurrence of the same manage to handle the harsh light of transdeterminism. What remains are then merely enormities and enormitesimals and everything finite in between. It is clear that we find ourselves within mythos, rather than within logos, when we describe the emergences, their vectors and the differences between them. The optimal potential for the next actualization, a conceived future emergence that can be glimpsed as a philosophical mirage, must consequently be called Syntheos. One can approach this viewpoint from various starting points. An example of a logic that is similar to ours, but that is based on psychology rather than philosophy, is The Periodic Table of Behavior which American psychologist Gregg Henriques develops in a series of texts and presentations. Henriques is also a syntheologist, but his chain up until Syntheos -- as the name of the next enormous and overwhelming emergence in the history of the Universe -- goes via energy, matter, life, mind and culture up until Syntheos. Please note that Henriques' chain of emergences also works with irreducible events, he is a radical irreductionist. But his focus lies on Man's psychological experience rather than on an attempt at a metaphysics that leaves human wishful thinking behind. In Henriques' model, chemistry is thus nothing other than the tribopoietic regrouping of physics. The chemical emergence vector thereby vanishes from the equation (despite ironically giving its name to the entire Henriquesian metaphysics). At the same time Henriques understands perfectly well that there needs to be a separate emergence vector beneath physics. He calls it energy in contrast to the ensuing matter -- to which we object that energy and matter are merely two sides of the same physical coin -- that is: what is lacking is the implicate order that we refer to to as Subphysics. We are therefore in complete agreement with Henriques about consciousness in retrospect being the epitome of the mind, while this does not make it something that emerges out of the mind. Emergence comes out of the mind only when the mind interacts with the surrounding world, and that interplay creates a phenomenon that is irreducible vis-à-vis all natural predecessors amid the emergence vectors, namely culture. With culture the prioritization between emergence and core is repeated when technology is in the center of and drives changes within culture without therefore being some kind of new emergence in itself. The mind is both conscious and subconscious. Culture is both social and technological. And the mind is the implicate order vis-à-vis culture as the explicate order. Laws, rules and standards for technology are established by both conscious and subconscious minds during the continuous domestication process where nature is shaped into culture. In Henriques Syntheos is the name of a supraculture that has become tribopoietic to such a high degree that it is irreducible vis-à-vis culture in itself as a collaborative emergence. It is an open question whether Syntheos has any interest at all in associating with human senses. But regardless of which, it is valuable that Henriques finally liberates psychology from merely a social service to the powers that be and promotes it to metaphysics. This brings us back from speculative psychology to the emergent existence that we are now familiar with. It is evidently both pantheist and entheist. It is even panentheist, since there always is something more or something other than the globally present-at-hand that awaits around the next corner of change. At the same time as existence also is entheist, since the novelty awaits behind every corner in history, where the difference between negation and abstraction makes a new concretion possible in the form of yet another new event -- yet another eventological difference. And then it is, as Hegel demonstrates in the early 19th century, the negation or that which is missing that makes it possible at every moment; it is not a question of bringing forth more of what already exists. It is thus negation and not abstraction that drives a phenomenon toward its concretion. What is most important in a phenomenon eventologically speaking -- Hegel is, which ought to be clear by now, the eventological philosopher par excellence -- is thus not what it already contains, but what it still lacks to be able to become transcendentalized and attain self-identity. Subjectivity is what the subject still lacks in itself, and not what it already has attained. It is this productive void-as-surplus that Adorno calls the negation in his development of Hegelian dialectics. And it is this constantly recurring negation that drives both the history of nature and culture forward. This is the transcendental negation that is fundamental for the entire pandialecticism. Subphysics with its implicate virtuality has the same relation to physics and its explicate potentiality as the barred absolute has to the surrounding society within metaphysics. Subphysics and the implicate order can just as the barred absolute be understood as the Hegelian negation par excellence, since we only know it through its indirect effects and not through some kind of direct and tangible presence. The similarity is striking when we compare with Zoroastrianism's distinction between Ahura and Mazda or with Neo-Platonism's distinction between The One and God. The isolated components in the dynamic virtuality are actualized only through the mutual relations; these relations are fixed along the time axis as the relationalist information that enables intelligence in the first place. And it is this intelligence in all its different forms that is called Mazda by the Zoroastrians and that later is called God by the Neo-Platonists. Hegel too is fully aware of these metaphysical conditions when he stipulates that infinity only can exist in the virtual, that is: in the implicate, but that it must be converted into a determined infinity at the same moment as the potentiality is actualized in the explicate. Which is precisely why we refer to this concept as Poetic Infinity. Historically metaphysics has tended to get caught in one of two determinist traps. Either metaphysics has derived everything from a fundamentally materialist and atomist unity and then has referred every form of higher complexity to this. And that form of determinism is called Reductionism. Modern reductionism was created on the basis of Isaac Newton's classical physics and was built on the atom and its materiality as the foundation for everything else on top of it. Quantum physics however rejected Newtonian reductionism and threw both physics and all the thereupon following emergence vectors into an open and indeterminist universe. Processes can simultaneously be both determinist and indeterminist in a classical sense. But since determinist processes can lead to an indeterminist result, and since indeterminist processes can lead to a determinist result, the entire old debate about determinism and indeterminism in the Universe as a whole, becomes meaningless. The only way to describe the Universe as a metaphysical uniformity and historical expression is to apply the principle of transdeterminism. Processes generate various forms of assemblages consisting of relations that regularly result in tribopoietic emergences, and out of these emergences, emergence vectors are formed with completely new processes that demonstrate new behaviors, and after a while also new laws and rules in patterns that in retrospect appear predictable. Determinism and indeterminism only exist as local attributes, and the concepts therefore only have a local, extremely limited scope. Existence in its entirety acts transdeterministically. It is transdeterminism that is the global quality. Thereby nor can it be meaningful to assign a higher status to any emergence vector vis-à-vis any other. Every reductionist attempt to derive other emergence vectors from a preceding or subsequent state along the time axis is fruitless. Between the existing emergence vectors, radical equality prevails. Syntheologically this means that we choose to prioritize intelligent systems over unintelligent ones, the Zoroastrians choose Mazda over Ahura and consequently call themselves mazdayasni rather than ahurayasni. But this is an existentialist choice that people make (or do not make), and not some dictate with claims on objective validity, spoken by an authoritarian god. What soon becomes apparent however is that the closer to each other various processes are in a transdeterminist universe, the more conspicuous similarities their behaviors will demonstrate, simply because this is spatiotemporally most effective. We call this principle systemic perspectivism. The emergence vectors can locally behave both deterministically and/or indeterministically during the often billions of years during which they are active. But existence as a whole, the neutrally monist universe where the emergence vectors are active, is characterized by transdeterminism and has a relationalist characteristic, in the form of a constant oscillation in all directions that we call panorganicism. All the while the question of the difference and connection between body and mind has of course always bewitched philosophy. Consequently the contrary idea that says that everything most deeply viewed is spirit and animated right down to the tiniest particle, also has returned from time to time in the history of metaphysics, an idea that goes by the name of panpsychism. The problem with panpsychism is however the same as what irredeemably afflicts reductionism: it cannot explain the distinction between emergences as existence's most fundamental property. The simplest and best way to describe panpsychism is simply as nothing but an inverted reductionism. Moreover there is the added problem in that panpsychism admits that what is considered alive in a basic sense is allowed to be that which determines characteristics in that which precedes the spirit or the life that is at stake. Panpsychism ignores the principle that Quentin Meillassoux calls ancestrality -- a principle that states that in a contingent and transdeterminist universe nothing that happens in retrospect can determine the quality of preceding phenomena and events. It was, for instance, never the purpose beforehand that dinosaurs one day would be succeeded by humans as the planet's top dogs. The only solution here is to admit that the mind cannot be derived from physics any more than physics can be derived from the mind. And there is no reason to complicate this unnecessarily: physics does not have to be viewed as the foundation for something else, and nor does the mind have to be viewed as the endpoint for something else. Physics and the mind are quite simply just examples of various vectors that have arisen out of various emergences throughout history. Neither more nor less. What rather unites precisely these two emergence vectors, just as most that we know of and have experience of, is a radical relationalism with a fundamental Oscillation. Nothing is ever fixed or eternally given. Everything is constantly in motion. The river is never the same river twice. We call this principle panorganicism precisely to distinguish it from the several-fold inadequate panpsychism. Which also means that it is more correct to speak of Quantum Organics than of quantum mechanics when we discuss quantum physics. A quantum organics that moreover serves as a membrane between the two emergence vectors subphysics and physics. Transcendental emergentism constitutes a response to reductionism in all its forms with an irreductionism that simultaneously refuses to establish any preordained conditions for emergences. It is precisely this quality that makes actual emergentism transcendental. It even transcends itself at every emergent event. Neutral monism is merely a historical fact, but that said, not a metaphysical condition in itself. Metaphysically viewed, the emergent spheres are more important for us than the neutrally monist world as a whole. Every emergence vector operates uniquely as only it operates. Laws and rules within an emergence vector are a kind of systematic eternalizations that arise after a while and under entropic circumstances, and they remain valid as long as the underlying existential metaconditions do not change. There is no biology without chemistry, and there is no chemistry without physics, and so on. There is however no objectively valid and meaningful hierarchy between the emergence vectors. Our monist universe is in itself emergence vector neutral. We reject all forms of objectively valid superordination for any emergence vector vis-à-vis any other. Neutral monism thereby makes every form of Reductionism or inverted reductionism (such as panpsychism) impossible, since all forms of reductionism have precisely this delusion of superordination as their common defect. There is no smallest atomic unit that everything else with a higher degree of complexity consists of. Nor is there a most elevated consciousness (or subconsciousness) that permeates the entire universe and colors every level down to the tiniest atomic unit. Every emergence vector is instead its own delimited world (Entheos) within a greater and similarly cohesive world (Pantheos), where we use Membranics to understand the boundaries between the emergence vectors, that is: in order to understand how the membranes function and to thereby optimize the long-term evolutionary survival of the actual emergence vectors next to each other. ## So what then is actually an emergence in this absolute sense? Anthropologist Terrence Deacon investigates this issue in his book Incomplete Nature -- How Mind Emerged from Matter (2011), where he argues that classical intentionality is insufficient as an explanatory model within complex systems, and must be widened to an ententionality that also comprises abstinences and limitations, since these phenomena play decisive roles, not least in the emergence vectors that follow after the genesis of life itself. Biology is for instance driven by complex, dialectical processes. ## So the question is then: What can these teach us, not just about the genesis of first biology and later mind, but also about the geneses of emergences in general? ## What is actually biogenesis, and how is it not just the genesis of the biological emergence vector but also the predecessor of the ensuing world of the mind? Deacon collects impulses from classical thermodynamics to demonstrate the genesis of life in the form of three steps that he calls homeodynamics, morphodynamics and teleodynamics. A homeodynamic system functions approximately as a classical thermodynamic system and is developed in the direction toward an equilibrium where maximal entropy (randomness) prevails, and where there thus exists a maximum of information (uncertainty) to collect. However a morphodynamic system arises when two or more homeodynamic systems start to influence each other within a system that is enveloped by boundaries, which creates a macroscopic order via lots of microscopic interactions. It is thus the limitation around the system that causes the microscopic, random movement to transform into the macroscopic order. Or to express the matter metaphysically: it is the setting of boundaries around the system that causes indeterminism to transition into determinism, which only can be described as transdeterminism. When the energy level within the first system attains a critical level and the current membranics keeps the growing energy within the system, this will generate the other system. Thereby the ground is also laid for the cohesive factor of all system and complexity theory, namely the principle of self-organization, what we in a true relationalist spirit call Tribopoiesis. Where the dialectical concept for the setting of boundaries of course is the negation. However Deacon takes this one step further and creates, aside from ententionality, a further philosophical concept that would have made the father of causality chains Aristotle proud, namely teleodynamics. It is teleodynamics that ties together the indisputable morphodynamics with the very first and most simple life forms that Deacon call autogenes (to be compared with chemotons that biologist Tibor Ganti develops as a concept in the 1970s). We are once again speaking of dialectics, but this time between several morphodynamic systems which during their mutual interplay develop their own, built-in limitations that we call membranes, within biology, for instance in the form of walls of lipids. These membranes are permeable but restrictive. That is: the membranes function as a kind of walls that may be forced, but to do so costs a lot more energy than the amount that is required to remain within or outside the membrane. Inside the membrane there soon arises metabolism and autoreplication, and the effect that these processes develop is multiplied if the autogene or the chemoton also is given memory. Memory is in itself dependent on new membranes, which depending on inherited preprogramming or programming via historical experiences can tip processes either toward the secure and habitual that is called Mortido, or toward the adventurous and unknown that is called Libido. Mortido and libido respectively are strengthened or weakened depending on the effects that in turn generate the next generation of memory and new membranes. We express this as though Deacon's famous autogene early in the process is accompanied by an automeme. All that is needed is a comparative pattern of mortido versus libido for self-identity to be generated in the process. First as a then, next as a now, and later as a potential later, within the process in itself, over time; thereafter as a comparison with other teleodynamic systems via communication. Please note the stabilizing effect that follows from a functioning dialectics. Teleodynamics arises only when morphodynamic systems start to interact with each other inside clearly defined boundaries. The distinction between teleodynamics and morphodynamics is that teleodynamics generates its own limitations within the system in itself. The interplay within the original setting of boundaries between the morphodynamic systems has the result that none of these can develop into maximal entropy and thereby, so to speak, die an immediate death. Instead the morphodynamic systems keep each other active within the enclosing teleodynamics through the system as a whole producing its own limitations. The teleodynamic system becomes self-limiting and thereby self-sustaining and self-confirming. This takes place thanks to a process that Deacon quite simply calls work. Set several mortidos working against each other in a pressure chamber and you get libido as a result. Or, as Deacon also expresses the matter in the quest for an open, yet not random, transdeterminist universe: "The experience of the capacity to feel is how it feels to be evolution." Thereby the path is paved and ready for the development from the chemotonic to the biotonic. A completely new emergence and its vector awaits behind the corner. And so do the implicate virtualities that prevail up until the potential emergence explodes as explicate actualities in an entirely new world. Eventology is the story of the phallic event that changes history definitively and eternally. Nomadology is the story of the constant and eternal recurrence of the same. This means that eventology is fixated on the event as the bedrock of existence, while nomadology is fixated on the process as the bedrock of existence. Another name for this relation is The Dialectics of Eternalism and Mobilism. The insight of absolute power in the comprehension of the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism is what we call Hegel's phallus. Which makes it appropriate to dismiss the presumed opposition between idealism and materialism once and for all, and the metaphysical system that does precisely this is called Transcendental Emergentism. It is also time to discard the purported opposition between determinism and indeterminism, and the principle that does precisely this is called transdeterminism. The Universe in itself is neither idealist nor materialist, but it is emergent. And it is, moreover, emergent many times over as a result of emergences generating new emergence vectors. Transcendental emergentism is therefore viewed as metaphysics, an emergence vector theory that has its foundation in a Negative Dialectics. What emerges is of course something that only has owned a Subsistence in a virtual sense, but it has of course never owned existence in a potential sense, in the preceding emergence vector, as Wrede Elung terms the distinction. The unlimited freedom of subsistence, as Deacon would surely agree, becomes the limited freedom of existence. Since the emergences are irreducible vis-à-vis what has preceded them causally -- which explains why we refer to them as virtual rather than potential before they actually take place -- the relations between the emergence vectors in themselves are transdeterminist. We quite simply live in a pandialectical and thus also transdeterminist universe. This is in turn an issue of how spheres under extraordinary circumstances create voids so that the absentialism that is necessary for creativity arises. Deacon demonstrates how a radical absentialism with associated limitations is of decisive significance for emergences to be able to occur in the first place. The negative dialectics is thus a necessity for the metaphysicists to be able to construct a sustainable emergence vector theory. Which is consequently also an excellent tool to wipe out the last remnants of reductionism and panpsychism. Not even such a reductionist last resort as Adrian Johnston's concept anorganicity -- a kind of transcendental surplus that Johnston imagines being built into the organic -- is needed any longer if only the absentialism proper of negative dialectics is allowed to play all its cards. In summary, it turns out time and again that the negation is the shortest path to the goal in a pandialectical universe. So as for the emergence vectors, we call the state that precedes these, the implicate order of the emergence. And the condition that arises after the emergence, that is: the actualization of the emergence vector, we consequently call the explicate order of the emergence. What previously were habits concerning the emergence under the implicate order, later become laws under the explicate order. The emergence fixates or eternalizes the implicate order that precedes it, while it sets in motion or mobilizes the explicate order or emergence vector that is actualized after it. Virtualities are transformed via absentialist emergences to potentialities. And potentialities are transformed via an alternately oscillating and alternately negating decoherence into actualities. That is: what makes a field of some kind cohere at a certain level, will always be torn apart as a result of the field in question growing and being exposed to both increasing inner tensions (negations) and to growing external pressure (oscillations). Where it is certainly appropriate to speak of wave function collapse. Gravitation ultimately compels the many potentialities to gather at a single decisive point. Then there is no point of return, then awaits a genuine event in the form of an emergence transition where the field changes identity by letting itself be dialecticized. And the strongest, most decisive dialectical event is the historically unique Emergence in itself.