The Great I AM

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

~ Albert Einstein

 

 

 

I had said earlier that all paradoxes are either paradoxes of the All-in-One, or of the One-in-All. I will restate that here: Identity and Persistency are the twin illusions that shape our world. It may not be clear how that is a restatement; today's discussion will begin an attempt to build that bridge.

 

We talked at some length a while back about what being means. We had said that something is in several senses, potentially several senses at once. The implication of this is that identity can mean several things simultaneously, as well.

 

Let's consider something with a fairly stable identity, as we'd naively consider it: Mount Rushmore. Chances are pretty good that you recognize that name, and that as you read it, your Cartesian Theater obligingly summoned up an image of it. You probably thought about the Presidents' heads carved into it. You probably feel pretty confident that you know how many Presidents there are up there... which ones... how they're arranged... what the rest of the mountain looks like...

 

Getting less confident, right? In fact, even people who've seen Mount Rushmore with their own eyes would probably be less than certain about those details. Even though most of the people who read this understand what 'Mount Rushmore' is, I'd venture a guess that every one of you has a subtly distinct, individual, subjective impression of 'Mount Rushmore.' So, while we can maybe agree that there exists an objective Mount Rushmore, it isn't as real to us as our subjective version. And the intersubjective Mount Rushmore is a strange beast indeed - it encompasses all these subjective versions, and the objective Mount Rushmore, under an umbrella that lets all of us recognize the same mountain (even though it's not the same mountain). What's more, without summoning that shorthand, I could offer you a vague description that nevertheless incorporated the necessary details for you to recognize the idealized Mount Rushmore. And that's before we get into Mount Rushmore as a symbol or an association for each of you personally.

 

The point is that, even with something that all of us think we know as an objectively real entity, it exists in many different ways, as many different things. Everything is both itself, and other than itself: this is the Parasimplicity Principle. The self-similarity Mandelbrot described in Nature's curves is another aspect of this: identity as a pattern of infinite recursion, Self as both self and self-concept and concepts of Self beyond the self, as many unique iterations as there are possible perspectives. Paradoxes of self-reference arise because of the essential dichotomy between the Self we are being and the Self of which we are aware in the process of Being. Russell's famous paradox - "this sentence is false" - arises because we erroneously view it as equivalent to "the sentence 'this sentence is false' is true." Truth, in this context, denotes positive Being - Being in a state of awareness. The truth that Self alters itself in the course of becoming aware of itself qua self makes it paradoxically impossible for Self ever to be truly self-aware; despite the inescapable truth that self-awareness is the hallmark, the necessary condition, of Self-being or Sein-in-der-Welt.

 

Persistency, it turns out, is just Identity viewed from another dimension - the dimension of Time - and that will be the subject of our next discussion.