becoming more human by becoming more godlike 389truth that the former corrupts the latter. Th e element of truth is that
what we ordinarily take to be the eternal and general condition of na-
ture turns out, on our best contemporary understanding of the uni-
verse and its history, to be only one of its variations: the one prevail-
ing in the mature, cooled- down universe. In this variation, nature
exists as a diff erentiated structure as described at both more funda-
mental levels (as by particle physics) and less fundamental levels (as
by chemistry).
Th e laws of nature can then be represented, in the language of math-
ematics, separately from the phenomena that they govern, a fact that
misleads us into supposing that causal relations are derivative from
laws of nature as their instances. In fact, it is the opposite: causal rela-
tions are primitive features of natural reality and acquire law- like regu-
larity only when, as in the cooled- down universe in which we fi nd our-
selves, nature takes the form of an enduring diff erentiated structure.
Th ere are here only few degrees of freedom and a limited range of adja-
cent possibles— of what can happen next— surrounding any state of
aff airs.
However, nature wears other disguises. It also exists in forms with
none of these characteristics. In the very early history of our universe
(or, on some cosmological models, at the end of its history, or repeat-
edly in the succession or “bounce” of universes, if indeed there is such
succession), everything was diff erent. Th e phenomena were excited to
very high (albeit fi nite) temperatures and energy densities, with many
degrees of freedom, and gave access to a broad range of proximate pos-
sibilities. Nature was not yet, or had ceased to be, or ga nized as a typol-
ogy of natural kinds, in the form of distinct building blocks. States of
aff airs could not be distinguished from the laws of nature governing
them; indeed, they may not yet have acquired, or may have lost, the re-
peatability that gives causality a law- like shape. Th e truth in the doc-
trines of universal mind or being is the recognition that nature as we
know it is not for keeps and that all distinctions, including the distinc-
tions among selves or minds, travel from annihilation to annihilation
on the sea of time.
Th e falsehood in those doctrines is the dismissal or the demotion of
the reality of the distinctions among minds, among selves, and among
living and lifeless things in that long- lasting variant of nature in which