Dear George,
Thanks for your compliments and careful reading. Contemplating Being as a tri-ality of spheres, as thinks Penrose, or a tree-ality of systems, as you express in your essay, there hides a unifying mystery. Shall we argue whether the mystery is at the center or at the top? Love or Beauty, which unifies reality? Perhaps they are aspects of the same. But then again, how could the center be also the top?
One common objection to Platonism is that relations have no meaning without the relata, that there have to be things before there can be relations between things, forms of reason being relations. So, if we defend Platonism, wouldn't we contradict ourselves if we question primacy of love on account of it being a relation? It seems Plato himself didn't see it along those lines, and to me also love seems to be of different kind.
Perhaps it is a question to you more than to us, though, since you have made a stronger claim, it seems. Your essay concludes by stating that it "provided evidence that cosmic intentionality is a reasonable, consistent and complete inference about why the universe is the way it is," and that it is such through the cosmic principle of love. But, is it really that consistent and reasonable? Mathematics, even if conceived as consisting purely of relations, is quite thinkable as a standalone world; the word "abstract" seems to mean just that. But can you really claim that love is also abstract and would exist without conscious beings, whom it connects? Where was this cosmic principle before the second conscious being was born (for there to be at least two)? Or do you imply that multiple conscious beings have existed always, that there wasn't a "second"? If always, and assuming they are temporal, then time extends back into infinity, an idea apparently fraught with contradiction. On the other hand, if temporality is an illusion, so is free will and with it our existence as individuals, in which case, there no longer is a multiplicity of subjects to relate with love, thus no love itself. It seems that either you have to take back the cosmic principle you propose or its reasonableness and consistency. Or do you have something in mind for which I haven't accounted here? Have you changed your mind about the "ineluctable paradoxes" since your previous fqxi essay, "The Hole at the Center of Creation"?
From this perspective, were we to claim, like Plato, that beauty is ultimately fully atemporal, the picture would appear to be quite consistent and reasonable. We do not. We don't say that "compelling attraction to beauty is simply a subjective reflection of the inevitability of cognitive and therefore evolutionary success." We point out an interplay between beauty that is objective and eternal and our subjective and temporal attraction and response to it. We say that "beauty breathes freedom" and "a belief that we are marionettes, even in God's hands, is incompatible with inspiration for a worthy response." In either case, however, while for evolutionary success beauty could be considered epiphenomenal, Epimenides forbids it be so for the cognitive success in mathematics.
If beauty and love are more fundamental than reason itself, can we use the terms of reason, such as the term "fundamental", to show which one is more fundamental?
I'll leave the hard questions for Alexey to answer. Thanks again and good luck to you as well!
Lev