My Weltanschauung –offered as a New Paradigm candidate- cannot be put in a nutshell –any more than can the Toccata and Fugue in D-minor. Part of the problem is the vastness of its scope –it truly ‘covers the waterfront- for the way in which it addresses all of the ‘Great Questions’ of traditional ‘Systems Philosophy’. It tackles all of the categories and modalities of the larger Reality –as are customarily treated under such headings as ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, eschatology and axiology. Finally, it does so within a novel formal framework of Logic and mathematics –an important matter that I shall return to further below. This latter is of quintessential importance to an understanding of my Worldview, but is the most difficult to present to readers not ‘literate’ in such matters. .

          A central difficulty is its radical novelty –on so many fronts. This is aggravated by the way in which so many of these run counter to the political rectitude imposed by the spokesmen of the culture within which we are currently mired. As has so often been the case, I found myself in sore need of some kind of formalism –couched in logical and mathematical terms- to provide a scaffolding within which to erect my edifice. I take it to be no accident that so many of the philosophers of the golden era were also mathematicians –or had strong leanings in that direction –one need but mention the names of Descartes, Leibniz, Pascal and many others. But here again, what I have come up with bears little resemblance to the classical and modern canon. My ‘metamathematics’ –as I have dubbed it- is its inverse, for the way in which its structure hangs from a unitary apex, in the form of a master invariant, that is its source. Rather than being based upon a parsimonious set of axioms, postulates and other primitives, from which complexity may be elaborated and built up. One might say that metamathematics is top-down ‘ceilinged’ rather than bottom-up ‘grounded’. What I found to be required has been hinted at by philosophers , mathematicians –and also, theologians- of monistic persuasion, such as Plotinus and Cusanus. Hegel did a great deal more than hint –in his elaborate dialectical ‘Logic’. I am much beholden to him for many of his ideas and concepts, but my dialectics departs radically from what he had in mind. Though also borrowed freely from others, such as, Eckhart, Bruno, Böhme and others, its elaborations are peculiarly my own. Bringing it into existence turned out to be the most challenging part of the whole exercise –to the point where, at times, the tail threatened to wag the dog. The dominance of its formal underpinnings does nothing to improve the immediacy of its accessibility.

         Faced with all of these problems, what I have done is to offer glimpses of the edifice as a whole from a variety of vantage points; no attempt has been made to provide even a brief systematic coverage or to justify and of the novel ideas that are mentioned. The presentation leans heavily upon diagrammatic devices, many of which assault the viewer with the impact of a Buddhist ‘koan’. (e.g. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?") Those among my readers who may wish to dig deeper will find what they need in a companion website http://ontodynamics.com. They may find the many hyperlinks distributed throughout the text to be useful to this end.

           What are ‘Paradigms’?

           Within the present discussion, a ‘paradigm’ may de defined as a system of beliefs entertained by the culture at hand about the nature of the larger Reality and of the significance of our own presence within it. The ambient paradigm seeks to provide answers to the so-called ‘Great Questions’ that have disturbed the sleep of mankind ever since the genus Homo broke out into explicit self-consciousness. Just what are these? As George Wald has so pithily put it:

            Here is a representative sampling:

          Throughout the history of philosophical speculation, answers have come to be formulated which satisfied for a while but which failed, in the passing of time, to stand their ground. Thus defined, paradigms have been few in number within the reach of history and anthropology since the genus Homo --and more particularly the species Homo sapiens- broke out into explicit self-consciousness making articulate introspection and abstract reasoning increasingly coherent and informative. This spectacular breakout from the time-locked animal domain was evidently the consequence of the organization the cortex surpassing some analogue of ‘critical mass’ In historical sequence one might mention the Age of myths, legends and allegories; the early formulation of the great Religions –particularly in the East; The birth of coherent reasoned argumentation –the great Athenian age; the Roman adventure that was its sequel; the scholastic movement of the middle ages (together with the broader speculative rationalism (and alchemistry) of Moslem Spain); the coming of the renaissance, and finally the era of scientific secular empiricism within which we are currently mired.

          The need for a New Paradigm is particularly urgent at the present juncture. Not only is the incumbent weltbild of secular physicalism/positivism lacking in the resources needed to tackle the more bothersome of the ‘Great Questions’; much worse are the alienating consequences of its attempts to fill the void given only the modes and categories vouchsafed by the lex naturalis upon which it is grounded. This being said, one would hope that one’s ambitions extend beyond those of providing an adequate replacement –just one more in a line of paradigms to –hopefully- carry us one step further in our attempts to come face to face with the nature of Reality. What we need is a final step that shall bring this sequence of hopeful and tentative standpoints to an end –where we finally know who we are and where we are heading. Let’s take a closer look at the kind of huge leap forwards (or lateral switch into an orthogonal heading that is actually called for

           What we need, then, is neither growth nor elaboration of the status quo but regeneration -which goes beyond an equivalent of Ecdysis in ontogeny or Paedomorphosis in phylogeny. Although it is certainly true that we are currently languishing at an ontological ebb-tide, what is needed is not the recovery of some supposed earlier -and happier- status quo, but something much more radical and far more exciting -to find out truly who we are and the direction in which we are supposed to be heading, and to discover, for the first time, what our meaning and destiny really is. The needed paradigm is not to be reached by any extrapolation from the present, nor by returning to some past high water-mark from which to execute a recule pour mieux sauter:

            Obviously, ideas and concepts evolved over thousands of years of philosophical speculation will be found to be transportable from their origins –thence to be adapted to our needs. To insist that we are in need of a new paradigm is not to say that we should start from a tabula rasa. But we need to be circumspect, casting no more than a glance or two back over our shoulder, lest we suffer the fate of Lot's wife; for the most part, the past must be rediscovered from the future. Never mind that this may lead to a reinvention of the wheel; you can be quite sure that it won’t be the same wheel.

          Once more, the magnitude of the needed shift must be emphasized. I’m not talking here about just another paradigm where the present is replaced by one more in the sequence that has bought us to where we stand today. What we are in need of will head off orthogonally from this entire sequence. This termination has been spoken of as ‘the end of history’. Thus stated, the entire saga of philosophical speculation and rumination to date is to be regarded as a huge transition exercise bringing us to the point where, at last, we know who we are and what we should be doing with our lives. It should mark the point at which Homo verus has staked its claim and is ready to be brought into existence. How remote from what passes today as open-ended, broad minded re-examination of the relationship between faith and reason. To be prepared to settle, in advance, for a coexistence between two domains seemingly mutually disjunctive is so small minded and pusillanimous.

         Unfortunately, as ever, those able to render the greatest services within a given paradigm are the least able to envisage a different order of things

          This is one of the many reasons why the future will not come from the spokesmen of the present paradigm of secular positivism. What is so discouraging are the depths of their ignorance. They have gaily discarded so many ideas and concepts needed to make a meaningful discussion possible at all. Not only is he unwilling, but also unable to tackle the issues at hand. One might say that he had thrown out the baby with the bathwater, were it not for the way in which this otherwise worthy metaphor miscarries in the present context. Better, perhaps, to say that he has discarded the wine with the leas. The impoverishment of his data base prohibits him from asking the right questions –let along of providing plausible answers. Ask the wrong question, and the answers you get won’t even be wrong. This is quintessentially true of the ‘God’ question. They will die as they has lived, never glimpsing the vision of a new future lying ahead.

          At risk of seeming to ‘jumping the gun’, I can proceed no further without saying something about my speculations over ‘Germinal Mind’. The reason that this cannot be avoided is that the conclusions reached very much affect how we should approach the New Paradigm’ problem –i.e. what is really afoot. Unless the problem itself is properly defined and understood, there is little hope of the enquiry heading off in the right direction.

          Evolution has presented us with a most dazzling cornucopia of beings –terminating at the explicitly self-conscious beings that we find ourselves to be. The questions crying out for some kind of answer are these. First, how is the incredible, organized complexity that we find in ourselves and everywhere around us ever contrive to come into existence –in the face of an ever-present second law of thermodynamics? The official doctrine of Neo-Darwinism says that what we observe in the gorgeous outpourings of phylogeny can be explained by a natural selection acting upon an indefinite number of mostly circumscribed mutations arising in according with the laws of probability theory. That this theory could ever have been taken seriously cries out for explanation. How could it be that distributed largely independent quasi-random mutations should produce organisms in which there is such an effect cooperation across these fringe areas; how does such a mechanism lead to beings who are typically top-down rather than bottom-up in their constitution; in almost all cases, we see one or more agents at the apex, seeming to take the major guiding hand in deciding what goes on. Finally, how is the ‘Second Law’ held at bay? Given its forbidding depredations it is unlikely –to some huge degree- that meaningful, seemingly purposeful organization can move progressively upwards –as it often does? One would expect that in situations where a significant advance has been blundered, it is far more likely that what shall happen next is its loss –rather than an augmentation to a yet higher level of negative entropy. The problem is at its most acute where life’s origin is concerned. It takes no more than an elementary knowledge of thermodynamics, biochemistry and probability theory that limited to the resources that mainstream science allows, there is no way in which this can be accounted for. In summary, Neo-Darwinism as a sufficient explanation of evolution is just about as disconfirmed as it is possible for a conjecture to be. How it has come to be that it is accepted without question by men who take themselves to be paragons of rationality? Their celebration of gullibility is a wonder to observe. This is part and parcel of the currently entrenched ‘Cult of Science’ –to be examined briefly below.

         There have been protests from those who point to the seeming manifestation of ‘Intelligent Design’. Most of those backing this movement attribute its manifestations to the intrusions of a theistic Being, but the problem stands apart from this particular resolution initiative. My own contribution has been my introduction of a theory of germinal mind. Why it has been necessary for me to raise it at this juncture is the light that it throws upon how we ever came into existence and what our next steps should be. In other words, it has a substantial impact upon what form the ‘overdue ‘new paradigm’ should take. I’m far from satisfied with my ideas, but some of the possible alternatives that come to mind are even less promising. For those theists who would urge that evolution is under the control of a divine orthogenesis, one immediately finds ourselves obliged to ask: Why should a perfect God bent on evolution find it necessary to introduce parasitism –especially in those of its most revolting forms. Pantheist theories –e.g. Spinoza in progressive motion encounter the same problem.

           The main problem for me, then, is to consider how germinal mind might be so constituted as to deliver the goods.

          Table 1 presents compares and contrasts the properties of somatic and germinal mind; as is seen, two closely related somatic minds have been featured. By way of further comment, it should be noted, first, that although germinal mind has no explicit self=consciousness, it has a depth of interpenetration that to a degree confers an equivalent advantage. Second, and more to the point, although most of our thought is in the form of a guided, articulate stream of consciousness, there is a second mode of mentation much closer to what I’m assuming to be the case within the germplasm. Whenever we find ourselves confronted by challenges of creativity where we are trying to bring order to a complex configuration of ideas, images or symbols, we become absent minded –our minds are ‘elsewhere’. Over an extended period of time, things start to happen in which a previously untidy configuration converges –perhaps through a series of jumps, to reach the solution striven after. It maybe as though a colloid had collapsed into a more crystalline or a fuzzy image came into progressively better focus. I’m assuming that this is roughly what is going on in germinal mind, though to a greater depth and over a vastly extended interval of time. ,

            There is a second side to the ledger, however –and that is over the matter of longevity. The history of our germplasm –and hence of its concomitant mind- stretches back over reaches of time to be reckoned in terms of a few billion years –so this comes near to offsetting the size advantage of our brains over that of the germinal cell; thus the cortex alone has been said to be comprised of some 1.5 x 10¹⁰ neurones. It may well be that its private mental time has a proportional outreach. Thus consider the look-ahead evolved in the emergence of the genus Homo; over a period of time to be reckoned in millions of years, we witness these ordered emergences:

            Notice particularly its astonishing foresight in realizing that we needed some way of holding the older limbic mind in abeyance –as called for- if the newly-found cortical persona is to have any hope of taking charge of the mental realm. Long reaches of time are needed, first to evolve the plans and second to bring them into progressive implementation. After all, the organism must be continuingly viable throughout the transformation. A handy support is provided here in the Jeffroyic process –or analogue transformation- in which an organized module no longer needed is transformed to provide an unrelated function as when there bones within the gill arches migrated to form the mechanical acoustic b ridge f the inner ear.

            In purely formal terms, I can but assume that germinal speculations take their highest origin from the very apex of Logos from the master invariant itself from which everything else ‘hangs’. Nothing less will account for the astonishing breath of operations needed to do all of the things manifested by germinal mind as it goes about its business. This is the exact reverse of what one might expect from the scientific mindset, namely that things started with a non-blind beginning in which the substratum was possessed and through a series of speculative manipulations was brought into an increasingly propitious form. I now doubt that this occurs, or if it does, that it plays no more than a supporting, subsidiary role. One gasps at the potential depth and breadth of the information that is conserved and directly known. This would be spread over from tens of thousands of generations (for recent macrosomatic and neural aspects) to millions for metabolic and cellular incrementations.

            In a desperate tempt to put anything to use that might be available, a number of possibilities were explored and rejected. First in order was the possibility of some form of Lamarkian feedback. Unfortunately, there’s scant evidence that any such could occur, but more important, it simply would not provide the kind of information of which we are in such sore need.

            In comparison with our own minds, the germinal agent is doubly blind. First, it has no perceptual access to the outside world beyond the immediacy of its own material substratum, yet it seems to have little difficulty in designing successful organisms operating on scales stretching many orders of magnitude beyond. Second, it is lacking in any machinery by means of which plans could be put together under a watchful eye. Evidently, it must operate in a top-down, parallel, analogue way in which ideas are brought into progressively finer focus –finally to be launched into the world through the ontogenetic process. We have to think of ourselves as mentally hybrid. Each of us takes origin as a germinal speculation or gamble; in its conception of each of us, it is saying ‘why don’t you try this out and see how well it works. I was certainly not born as a tabula rasa but endowed with a philosophical cast of mind leaning in one direction rather than another. To this extend the germinal mind which conceived me is a part of the somatic mind that I have come to possess. We’re two aspects of one being engaged in a joint venture

          Although seemingly ‘double blind’ in the ways described, yet I suspect that there is a feedback guidance of a unique sort that is available. This is the ongoing history provided by the process of sexual recombination. I suspect that the entire history of what entered, and what cross-over changes were made over the entire history of the evolution from which the species arose. This means that there will be a most elaborate configuration of audit trails giving information about rates of change and the frequency patterns of repeated encounters of the same germinal instantiations. i.e., there will be a clear record of the distribution of different levels of inbreeding. How frequently previously encountered incoming sperm haploids the extent to which successful modifications were distanced from each other

          I take it to be the prime purpose of the recombination process of consolidating the gene pool, i.e. to hold the species together as a larger organic unit. But it seems clear to me that an important service rendered by the convergence of haploids from different places in the gene pool in to diploid zygote. This gives the conjoint germinal mind to view the situation from a new vantage point. The cross-over phenomenon occurring just before the first meiotic cell division contributes to this viewpoint shift. Obviously, what the sexual process cannot do is to disseminate the living experiences of the individual organism –for this would call for some form of Lamarkian retention that seems to be ruled out of order.

          It has often been observed that mutation rates are slow and that little novelty enters within historical stretches of time. But of course, these speculations assume all information storage is lodged within DNA sequencing, whereas actually this is but the thin terminal crust whose purpose is to create an interface for RNA expression. This immediately leads me to suggest that innovations within the exotic substratum of germinal mind are going on all the time, and probably occur following every haploid recombination.

          It is time to say something more about germinal aims and motives. As previously mentioned, the ethical quality of its motivation would seem to be hauntingly similar to our own –and not at all one would expect if divine management of evolution were afoot. This being granted, there seems to a tangled spectrum of aim and goals in need of clarification. I take it to be the case that the leading concern is simply that of species-survival, i.e. that the purpose of life is not individual centered but to reach forward to some future goal. This being said, however, I presume that the somatic individual is valued in its own right, and something into which germinal mind wishes to express itself. I suspect that things go deeper, and that sometimes furthering evolution as a whole may be being taken into account. Does plant life persist partly in order to make advanced animal life possible? Was oxygen-producing photosynthesis motivated partly as a means of making the intense metabolism of animal life possible? Finally, I would like to suggest that the notion of a convergent termination in a single individual of cosmic proportions exists somewhere in the back of its mind. But most astonishing of all is the situation at the present –anthropological- moment. It is as though we have been given a clear signal; germinal mind has taken things as far as it is able. The baton has been passed to us. Does this mean that germinal mind is willing itself out of existence? I think not; I shall return to this point later.

          Obviously germinal mind is a most complex configuration existing at many levels. The machinery of embryogenesis must be at hand for when it is needed. The substratum of germinal mind exists at both of the levels of physical and of exotic matter. Mechanisms are required to transfer information across the exotic/classical interface –as when base sequences are changed or extended. Obviously elaborate machinery is for ever being called upon to manage cellular division and the production of gametes. Finally, there are problems of internal dissention to be contended with. We are multicellular organisms composed of a huge population of cells most of whom are there solely to serve rather than to enjoy any modicum of a life of their own. This, I fancy, is what the malignancy of cancer is all about –a rebellious insurrection in which an unconstrained metastasis consumes the larger host. That the apex of germinal mind is aware of this danger is evidenced by strata within the immune system aimed at countering rebellion.

          In summarizing all that has been said about germinal mind above, I will now conclude b bring its role within the past present and future of evolution into a proper perspective. First of all, without any hesitation whatsoever, I insist that the possibility of our reaching the present junction was always vaguely in the back of his mind; it is an essential portal through which evolution had to pass if ever we are proceed with further evolutionary process. There are two reasons why we have taken so long to get here, and why there seems so have been so much meandering in the process. First of all is the nature of germinal mind itself. Despite its extraordinary imagination, creative powers, and the ability to bring extraordinary complex formal configurations into existence, it has had to labour under a number of severely limiting constraints. First is its own ‘double blindness’ under which it is obliged to operate. Second, there is no way in which the germplasm can go about creativity in the way that we do. Consider the way in which we put an advanced robot together. First is the assembly of the needed blue prints and organization of the material of fabrication. Assembly can then begin, in the process of which various unforeseen problems will turn up. But finally at the end of the road, we might end up without quite credible which is able to do roughly what was expected of it. But germinal mind cannot work this way. Any organism that it wishes to bring into existence –e.g. us- has to be continuously viable through its very long evolutionary process. This is a most forbidding constraint, and the fact that we could ever have arrived seems to call for something close to a miracle. And finally is the huge dimensional offset between its own cramped quarters of a single cell, and the huge macrostructures ‘out there’ that it is going to need. And finally, it must content with the slings and arrows of outrageous problem –e.g. with the impact of comets or meteors that threaten to wipe its slate clean. This is the reason why the astonishing spectacle phylogeny doesn’t seem to run as though there were some ultimate goal at which evolution is heading, or that we ourselves do not seem to be anything more than a lucky accident or serendipitous outcome of an unforeseen sequence of events. It is pounced upon by the nihilistic intellectual who withes to see our appearance as a fluke that it simply one more way in which the species has gained a ‘competitive advantage’.

          Actually, things could hardly be more different. When all is said and done, what germinal mind is really trying to tell us –as its reason for bringing us forth- is that ‘he’ has taken things as far as it is able. It is passing the baton to us. Henceforth it is our job to take over the reigns in guiding evolution towards its intended terminus. In do doing it is seemingly also signaling its own demise –though just exactly how post-germinal evolution is to proceed is far from clear. We arrive finally at the reason why its bequest to us –of a brain capable of explicit possession and self consciousness comes without the necessary ‘software’ to put it into operation. This is the very reason we have been provided with this new-fangled apparatus –to do what the germinal mind could not do for itself. It has reached the end of the road of what is possible to an instinct-driven mentation –no matter how otherwise ‘intelligent’ it may be- can achieve. This automatically makes of us Homo sapiens caducus. We are indeed fallen, but not from a previous state of grace, as the Garden of Eden portrays. It is our job to work our way through this limitation to achieve our intended destiny of Homo sapiens verus. To do this calls for the ‘inside job’ of auto-regeneration –a basically ontological and painful process in which we confront and come to terms with the Nonbeing be component of nonbeing we discover in ourselves.

          To bring these issues into better focus, we need to step back to view the matter from the broad perspective of anthropology. For the purpose at hand we need to recognize three successive phases in the emergence of Homo sapiens. First came Homo sapiens aurora –dawn man who had just come into possession of explicit self-consciousness. What finally separates man from all other beasts is not his upright posture, nor his emancipated hand and tongue, nor his opposable thumb. Even the possession of true language does not, in itself, make the difference. What is crucial is his acquisition of explicit self-knowledge and self-consciousness. It might be argued that this is only a matter of degree, but if so, the disparity is so huge as to constitute a discontinuity:

          Homo sapiens aurora entered the scene with no more –metaphorically speaking- than the shirt on his back He lacked any kind of language that we would recognize as such, and hence, in consequence, in the complete absence of any framework of ideas with which to make sense of his new surroundings. He must no more than vaguely sensed that he had left the animal shelter –that realm of ‘animal grace’ in which the meaningfulness of the teleological drives of instinct is self-proclaiming.

          It is no accident that we have been thus turned lose into a new world in a state of destitution; the whole transaction can only be understood in terms of the machinations of germinal mind and the mode of entrance of ‘intelligent design'.

         What role remains for germinal mind? Seemingly, there are two choices. First that we restart and embark on a very long journey starting with the discovery and elaboration of the nature of exotic matter and the fields, lattice space and configurations of which it is capable; the long term aim here would be to invent a substratum more robust than protoplasm than protoplasm upon which much larger life forms –ultimate of gigantic proportions- could be built. The other –and I now see, much more attractive option is to somehow capture germinal mind and make it a part of our own; henceforth there would be a partnership of quite another kind. When germinal mind singled ‘finished with engines’ he had no intentions of a making a grand sacrifice in bowing out to make room for a fresh start. He has released us with the full intuitive knowledge that he’ll be brought back into the picture in a way that will be highly satisfying to both parties. Eventually, we shall be in need of surpassing the limitations of the present organic substrate, but it will be the conjoint mind that shall make it possible.

          Loud protests about the limitations of a Neo-Darwinism have recently come to be heard by those marching under the banner of "Intelligent Design’. Though no longer under danger of capture by the Creationists, its major advocates are of theistic religious persuasion –in one form or another. Stretching things a little, this notion might be extended into the kind of ontology of Neutral Monism that I’m proposing. But this leaves us with the same limitation of accounting for the obscenities of parasitism. It also runs directly counter to the thoroughgoing ‘bottom-up’ burden that the overcoming of Nonbeing imposes upon us; that is to say, any such proposal would be something of a ‘short circuit’’ –the very thing that needs to be avoided.. Somewhat in the same category –yet a big step down- would be the acceptance of some kind of global group mind participated in by all individual germ cells.. One might think that the lateral outreach of each germinal entity increases in ascending towards its apex. This is upon to the same kind of approach that it essentially jumps the gun –if less precipitously. Though such set-up might offer some hope of coming to terms with the uncanny insight that parasites seem able to gain into the anatomy and physiology of some of the hosts that are to be preyed upon. But it wouldn’t solve any o the other problems. One might invoke a still lesser version o the idea in the service of a Neo-Lamarckism. One might [postulate that there is some modicum o sequestered communion between our minds –immediately sousing the cortex- and the germinal minds still latent ion each one o the neurones from which the cortex is put together. However, this leaves us with the problem of how the information so gained is made available where it is needed –in the gonads. As we have seen, The rather dubious agency of ESP might be invoked in meeting some o the problems –e.g. insight into the crass physical nature of the unseen world ‘out there’ but again as elsewhere, this would do nothing to explain how the necessary knowledge might be gained in setting up celestial navigation.

          This is certainly the greatest of the unsolved ‘natural’ problems (I’m saying nothing here about more metaphysical and eschatological domains). As such, it is essentially within the purview of science –once this had its compass of natural law extended to contents with the organic domain of life and mind. .

          It is ironic that despite all of the features that I have been prepared to grant germinal mentation, I’m far from certain as to whether I have actually pulled it off. Yet Neo-Darwinist assert –without hesitation or proof that classical mindless matter is sufficient