ʿÁlam al-Mithál: The Imaginal Realm and the Fixed Point Formulation

Abstract

This paper contributes to the philosophical literature on the relationship between contemporary physics and premodern theological cosmology by examining a specific test case: the Islamic and Bahá'í doctrine of 'álam al-mithál, the "imaginal realm" situated ontologically between the intelligible and the sensible. After reconstructing the doctrine's development from Ibn 'Arabī and Suhrawardī through Shaykhī eschatology to Henry Corbin's mundus imaginalis, the paper isolates five structural claims common across these sources — ontological reality, intermediacy, bidirectional mediation, dream-state phenomenology, and eschatological persistence — and asks whether any existing physical formalism can serve as a non-reductive structural vehicle for these claims. It argues that the Fixed Point Formulation (FPF), a time-symmetric interpretation of quantum cosmology in which past and future boundary conditions jointly constrain present actuality via a generalization of the Aharonov-Bergmann-Lebowitz rule, is uniquely suited among current formalisms (in contrast to Everettian many-worlds, Bohmian mechanics, or process physics) because its direct-sum sector structure generates an ontological-density hierarchy with no analogue in competing interpretations. The paper's central methodological claim is that this correspondence should be understood as comparative metaphysics — an argument that two independently developed frameworks are attempting to characterize the same intermediate register of reality — rather than as reduction, historical derivation, or empirical confirmation. It engages directly with the objection, familiar from Humean critiques of design arguments, that structural isomorphism absent independent warrant carries limited evidential weight, and defends the more modest claim that convergence between independently motivated frameworks is nonetheless philosophically significant. The paper concludes by identifying specific unresolved questions — a rigorous derivation of the imaginal-realm identification from the FPF's own resources, a decoherence-consistent account of imaginal persistence, and a predictive criterion for veridical dream cognition — as necessary conditions for moving the proposal beyond structural analogy.