If the 'monism' of matter is global rather than linear, and involves a simultaneous multiplicity of principles or 'causes', and if, as we have suggested in our previous post, this global monism of matter embodies a 'pre-awareness' or 'proto-awareness', then the boundaries of the field of awareness in fact constitute the evolutionary horizon. Matter and consciousness are necessarily intimate at a level that allows for the intimacy of function and interpretation. That is, the analytical activity of consciousness – the 'interpretation' – necessarily mirrors the process of matter – the 'function'. This is not to say that the mirroring is equality in any sense. In other words, I am not proposing an equivalent of the 'nature philosophy' of the later Idealists, in which 'nature is mind made manifest' – that is, not unless we are willing to define 'mind' as the reflective function of consciousness, rather than narrowly linking it to 'idea'. But, even within this frame, we must still objectify the functions in terms of the structures that are the necessary prior condition for reflection, particularly the correlation of whole and part.
            I have discussed reflective awareness in early posts in this blog, and defined, however briefly, the structure implicit in the nature of awareness and how it functions to produce reflection. This, of course, stands between human consciousness and animal consciousness in general. But, obviously, the evolutionary process also involves the transition between the tacit 'pre-awareness' in matter and the production, first, of organic entity and then of the self-moving creature or zoological branch of evolution. In other words, from an evolutionary standpoint, we have qualitative shifts between 'matter' as such, and the stages of life and 'consciousness'. So we cannot presume an absolute correlation between interpretation and function.
            At the same time, if the range of awareness is also the 'evolutionary horizon', then we can presuppose correlation. I am not using the phrase 'evolutionary horizon' as a deflection. Obviously, I am speaking of the range of awareness – perhaps 'mind' in the largest or eastern sense : the Great Body of Upanishadic tradition. But, by the phrase, I am pointing to its evolutionary origin. Since both consciousness and its functions arise from evolution, the extent of the array is a legitimate expression of 'matter', since, as the materialists insist, evolution is a material function. The wholeness of the field is an expression of the wholeness of matter.

           Now the reflective process points to the necessary correlation between the whole and the point of focus. Unity cannot arise without reference to the whole. And the equivalent in terms of 'pure' consciousness is the nature of focus. Reflection shows us that the act of focus that produces unity is 'absorption', the moment when the whole ofconsciousness comes to rest in the point of attention or point of value. The value, then, is the corollary of the whole as the instrument of focus. Thus, the evolutionary horizon is intimate both with wholeness and with value as a generic possibility.
            To some extent, we can make the same assumption about evolution itself. If consciousness and the activity of self-awareness – with all its implications – is a function of evolution, then we can equally say that evolution is a function of the possibilities of consciousness and its unique actualities.
            But, again, we must not fall into the assumption of an ironclad equality between the structure of 'thought' and the structure of 'nature' or 'the world'.

           Modern physics begins to find the empirical equivalent that we would necessarily suppose or infer from this peculiar structure of 'the world' as we experience it. That is, both relativity and quantum phenomena can be 'explained' to some extent in terms of this peculiar relationship between part and whole. If we assume that the smallest particles in fact reflect the whole of the universe, some of the paradoxical behavior starts to make sense. That the speed of light is simultaneously finite and infinite, in the sense that a finite speed – the speed of light – behaves as if it were an infinite speed, suggests the peculiarly 'dualistic' intimacy of whole and part as it comes to rest in the photon. Here, the dimension of course is time : infinite speed is the simultaneity of the whole of which the finite is the subsidiary or partial function. Not only are both present in the photon, but the photon to some extent is defined by the simultaneity of both.
            Quantum phenomena express the same ambivalence. When we send a single photon through a splitter with the alternative of two tracks, one having a sensor, the photon will 'choose' the track with the sensor and, when brought back to the 'combined' track, will exit the apparatus without producing interference. When sensors are placed on both tracks, both sensors will register the photon, and when the tracks are rejoined, an interference pattern will appear, the sign of converging photons with synchronized waves. We can say that the photon somehow 'responds' to the context of observation. But I think it would be more accurate to consider the context as a whole, with the nature of the whole and the specific event forming a necessary corollary. That is, there is no 'causality' except wholeness.
            Thepossibility that a particle can appear in two places simultaneously, or the radical proposal, at one point in the history, that there might be only a single electron in the universe, also can find their native element in this correlation between part and whole. And when we recognize that part and whole applies to time as well as space, we may find more or less direct solutions to some of the most puzzling cosmological problems.
            In other words, we are already accessing keys to this corollary definition in terms of the 'objective' nature of the world as 'matter'. Granted that these keys still tend to pivot, to some extent, on the question of 'observation' and the moment of observation, this is inevitable in science as well as philosophy. But insofar as we are able to objectify our experience of the 'inner nature' of 'the external', we are moving away from the rigid formalism of self-subsistent 'eternal' and 'objective' principles, and redefining 'matter' as a relational 'form' defined by the reciprocity of part and whole.

           Matter starts to look like a corresponding parity with the functions of reflective awareness, as if the evolutionary horizon, as a strictly evolutionary function, were the direct equivalent or corollary of the functions of consciousness in self-awareness. But what still stands between the two 'pictures' is the nature of entity itself. When we get close enough to the subatomic particles, their existence as 'particles' becomes problematic. 'Particle' may be a convenience for us. And we cannot envision consciousness without body – at least 'empirically' – even if we can envision a 'pure consciousness' that is theoretically other than body. Body is a necessary condition for both experience and reflection. So, in both cases, we have the intervening condition of 'entity', but we cannot automatically assume that the two natures of  'entity' are in any sense correlated, much less parallel or the same. And between matter and consciousness we have precisely the evolutionary process, with its emergent entity form – a form we presume to be 'body', but which obviously we do not experience in the same way.
            At the same time, the observable or 'objective' nature of the emergence of entity as 'body' in terms of evolution suggests equally that 'entity' is integral in nature, that it is not accidental or adventitious that our consciousness develops in terms of entity. It is just that we cannot automatically equate the functions of 'entity' throughout the range of its observable manifestations.

           In particular, we cannot automatically place the emergence of 'entity' during the evolutionary process in a framework that necessarily corresponds with our model of part and whole. From a strictly formal chronology, the appearance of the entity is spontaneous if incremental, and does in fact seem to simply arise from a material sequence. It is only in terms of our present view of matter, on the one hand, and our view of view, so to speak, on the other – our self-awareness ofself-awareness – that it would appear that entity as living organism is also a function of part and whole.
            But the nature of the entity also points to it. As I discussed in the last post, the peculiarity of the amoeba is its self-protective behavior.While it lacks a nervous system, it responds to its environment as if it were a self-identifying whole. That the particular reactions can be described more or less categorically in terms of chemical processes still does not justify the reaction as a whole. This is part of the problem with the linear causal game : it allows us to pretend that piecemeal explanations of lesser functions actually 'explain' larger functions. And the reactive nature of the whole in terms of the whole means that nature itself comes to focus in entity, that entity is an indigenous potency in 'matter'. But how or whether we can define this in terms of part and whole is moot.
            At the same time, this version of 'entity' is obviously 'body', and thus forms the grounding condition for the emergence of consciousness as the active expression of the whole, something that becomes clear through the emergence of self-awareness in terms of the 'conscious' unity which is the immediate 'noetic' equivalent of the body.

           But the unity nature of entity is the functional expression of part and whole. That is, unity itself expresses the equivalency of part and whole in the productive moment of their relationship. While we cannot say what grounding corollary of whole and part finds expression in the appearance of body or entity, body or entity, in itself, as an expression of unity, necessarily epitomizes a whole / part relationship.
            This equivalency throughout the experiential range, from the subjectivity of self-awareness through the frame of evolution and into the region of the strictly 'material' suggests very strongly that if we make a generic pattern for 'cause' on the basis of entity or unity, it will have universal application. And, of course, as I have already outlined, we have a productive framework for the One or organic unity in the nature and structure of self-awareness.
            Presumably, then, this framework can be 'turned around' to supply an 'objective' generic structure for 'cause'.