“Our investigation of external reality has given birth to a mathematics that is at once a product of our own creative function, and simultaneously dares endeavor to contain it.”

You argue against the finalism that comes from application of the metaphor, but make no clear attempts to either critique or indeed extirpate the root, the metaphor itself. People dare to believe that mathmatics endeavours to contain all things only as they dare also to play Russian roulette in a haze of tungsten arc light and absinthe.

“This reentrancy of our comprehensive manifold becomes the next layer of cosmological self-reference: as physics gives rise to biology that it may model physics, biology gives rise to cognition that it may model biology.”

And, like a hall of mirrors...

“Far from it, I say, we stand in respect to ourselves in that selfsame position as the universe to itself: at an infantile crux”

That we may have great things ahead of us is to deny great things that we have been through, and I speak of things as disparate as The Odyssey and the scientific method. The greatest invention of mankind may, in a sense, be the scientific method. It did not, of course bootstrap itself: there was no chicken to lay the chicken egg of science. The first scientist was no scientist, and also therefore the best scientist.

If progress means getting stupid things done more efficiently, this is a kind of progress we may wish to opt out of. There are, no doubt, great things to come. There are, no doubt, things that we can say, and do, and accomplish which are great. When you are careful to show that there is no goal and much opportunity, you must be careful not to have that opportunity, a lump of rock by day, turn into a castle of iniquity by the same gleam of twilight that our natural philosophers made such use of.