To be or not to be, that is the question

“Quantum theory also tells us that the world is not simply objective;
somehow it’s something more subtle than that.” ~ John Polkinghorne

 

Although it is the beginning, it's not the sense in which we ordinarily - naively - think of things existing. We think of a thing existing in a measurable way; we think of it having physical properties like weight and dimension and color. This is objective existence, and it is different in important ways from subjective existence. One of these is that an objectively real entity is directly accessible to multiple observers. A mountain is, objectively, a mountain which can be observed independently by many people. Furthermore, an objectively real entity does not exist because it is observed (Berkeley is coughing pointedly, but let us ignore him for now); indeed, it exists even when it is not observed. Unlike a subjective entity, the objective entity has an independent existence of its own. It is the independence of objectivity, and the empirical evidence of our physical selves as such independent objective entities, that gives rise to the awareness of self qua self without which subjective existence were impossible.

If you accept that, you can also accept that objectivity exists a priori to subjectivity; the subjective analogue to an objective entity arises out of the process of observing that objective entity with a physical sensorium. There is a very interesting problem in empiricism, encapsulated by the philosopher David Hume when he posed the question: can we imagine a shade of blue we have never directly perceived? Hume differentiated between 'impressions' that are subjective entities triggered by or derived from the objective world around us, and 'ideas' that are subjective entities generated without reference to the objective reality in which we physically exist. Whether we can apprehend an idea of blue that is sui generis, and not merely an impression unconsciously remembered, remains a dilemma for empiricists. For our purposes right now, it is sufficient to state that all of us can readily understand both subjective and objective existence, and further that we can understand they are qualitatively different kinds of existence.

Because of the fuzzy skepticism of Descartes, it is not always possible to state definitively of any particular entity of which we are consciously aware that it is either subjective or objective; and this is another sort of problem, addressed by Borges in his Argumentum Ornithologicum. Nevertheless, we have at this point identified two ways in which a thing may be; and, at least theoretically, we have established that these ways of being are not necessarily universal - that is, some entity may 'be' only subjectively, or only objectively, although it may well exist in both ways and it can exist in both ways so homogenously as to blur the line between the two.

That is already quite some philosophical ground we've covered, but this is the point where we return to Korzybski and the metanow (which is not a Korzybskian construct, but which relates to his time-binding notion very handily). We do so by considering an entirely different kind of existence. We do so by considering words.

As through a glass, darkly

“The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until
I knew it as such without a single doubt” ~ Rene Descartes

 

We begin, then, at the unsatisfactory base camp established for us by the arch-skeptic Rene Descartes; we begin within our minds. Descartes uneasily proclaimed a link between the world-within and the world-without, with his Cogito. He was at least as aware as any of his critics, either at the time or coming after, of the problem of committing a petitio principii - but the Cogito was the best he could do within the empirical frame he had available to him. We cannot presume to place ourselves above Descartes, who is justly lionized as one of the more important thinkers of Western philosophy; but we can tentatively observe that we have more frames available to us, and the benefit of access not only to the oeuvre of Descartes but to that of many other great minds, too. Korzybski says we are time-binding, and happily he is sufficiently correct that we can rely on him to say so rather than having to appreciate it independently.

One of the more trivial bequeathals of Descartes' thought is the concept of the Cartesian theater. This is a metaphor or model for what we might poetically term the "mind's eye," and describes the milieu for those entities that occupy our minds - all the things that I have communicated to you and that you have read awoke such entities in your mind, and all of those things existed in the same subjective sense. Subjective being has the character of arising endogenously within our minds - it is real to us, but is not directly accessible to anybody but us. Indeed, it is only directly accessible to ourselves insofar as we understand ourselves to be entities within the Cartesian theater - that is to say, insofar as we are possessed of self-awareness. All subjectively real things are things of which self-aware beings have awareness.

We could assert that there are subjectively real things of which we are not, or cannot be, subjectively aware; but that would invoke entities with which nobody could interact, and Occam's Razor tells us we need not involve such entities in our models. More importantly, we understand enough about these subjective entities that we can approximately measure their impact on us, and as a result we can advance the scientific hypothesis that subjective entities arise in the process of developing awareness of them. Thus, a subjective entity is a 'made thing' in a sense analogous to the Art we discussed earlier, and we as rational beings thereby become 'Artists of the mind.' The Art, in this instance, comes into existence only when we are aware of it, and this is an aspect of the reason why I chose to define Art to necessarily involve an Observer. We are aware of subjective entities as being the manifestations of a conscious and self-aware experiencing of the world, and in this sense we-qua-Observers intuit the agency of we-qua-Artists in the construction of that experience.

The idea that we could experience the world without either consciousness or self-awareness is a very hard one for us to grasp, because it is an idea that is from first principles not appreciable as a subjective entity. It is in this sense of a subjectively real existence that Bishop Berkeley intoned: Esse est percipi. We'll not follow Bishop Berkeley all the way back up the causal chain to the original Unobserved Observer, partly because that would be too lengthy a digression and partly because the notion of subjective existence we're discussing here is only a beginning.