The whole world in His hands

"In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe;
therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe." ~ David Bohm

 

 

 

 

So yesterday we talked, not especially transparently, about how one goes about deconstructing oneself in order to mirror the world around one. We didn't really get into the why of it - curiosity about the transcendental seems both an incongruously casual aim for such an all-encompassing task, and to some extent a mismatch of concepts (how can one be curious about a subject one cannot intellectually grasp?) - and we aren't going to today, either. Why is a very important question; in fact, it may be the only question, but it's off-topic (is it?).

 

We're going to dodge 'why' for the moment because the transcendent doesn't truck with why. The question denotes purpose - which can have meaning only in the context of an outcome state different from the present state (that's actually too simple; conservatism is a legitimate purpose if its viewed as opposing an organic trend in the current metastate towards transformation, although the subtle difference between the two may only be apparent to a sufficiently Zenoic examination). The transcendental, which is always everywhere equally immanent upon the subjective, has no purpose - all possibilities are equally within and beyond the transcendental.

 

We're instead going to look at what, which is to say we're going to consider identity again. Specifically, we're going to consider identity from the perspective of the transcendental, which means we're going to indulge again in vague analogies. We'd mentioned the Aleph, the point that contains the whole universe; that represents one extreme of the possibility space (if we suspend for a moment our bourgeois notions about particles sharing space and time coordinates - think of it as a Paulian conversion). But for a probability space to exist, it has to contain all the possibilities. The mirrors we talked about yesterday clearly lie some way along a continuum from the universally accessible max-local Aleph to the locally accessible universal mirror (the parasimplex). There should, indeed, be a far limit to that continuum: the point which doesn't partake of the universe at all, the transcendent immanent upon the void. We call this singularity, and it's another terrifically useful and important concept that we'll hit up in another metanow.

 

We could advance the hypothesis that every entity in the apparently objective universe around us lies somewhere upon this continuum - but then the transcendental would be immanent upon the objective as well as the subjective, which would mean that objective and subjective map perfectly across the transcendental (it has to be across the transcendental, because objective and subjective are necessarily estranged). It is certainly possible that such a perfect mapping exists, but there is no reason why it must; accordingly, the transcendental may indeed be immanent upon such perfectly-mapped objectives and subjectives, but should also be immanent upon the conceivable subjective which maps to nothing objectively real - to rephrase, the transcendent immanesces upon impression and idea alike.

 

And this means that there can conceivably exist in the world objects which are merely objective; objects which are merely subjective; and objects which partake of the character of the Aleph, and in some fashion bridge the divide between the two. And that means that what we talked about before, about making ourselves a mirror, might really be overcomplicating things. It might be simpler to find a thing, or a system of things, that offer us a different sort of mirror. And the reason it might be simpler is that the transcendental is right there in all of us, in the process by which we interrogate the world.

 

But we'll get to that, in the next cycle. 23, skidoo!

 



Reflections

"The whole purpose of education is
to turn mirrors into windows." ~ Sidney J. Harris

 

 

 

 

I tapped myself on the shoulder before I wrote this, the better to remind myself that I need to talk about Shannon sometime and why information and entropy are linked; but this is not the time for that discussion.

 

This is the time to talk about mirrors. Mirrors are a form of parasimplex: you can look into any mirror in the world, and see the same face you would see in any other mirror (although that face would not be your own, exactly - not least because of its lateral inversion) - and yet any other person could look into that same mirror and see a different same face in each one. There is an echo of both the paradox of identity and the paradox of persistency here, if you're listening for it (remember Lord Ravenhurst's warning on that, though).

 

The transcendental mirror, though - what would that show you when you looked into it? One way of answering this question is by considering the transcendental mirror to be simultaneously immanent upon all subjective mirrors. The transcendent is not bound by limitations of time or space; it is omnipresent (if only in a surreal fashion) and eternal (if only because it is untouched by Time, which after all dates from a mere Planck second after the Big Bang - and is destined to be extinguished along with everything else in the maximum-entropy state). Thus, this transcendental mirror would show you, not only your face when you looked in it, but also your face when you looked into any other mirror, and also any other face when it looked into this mirror, and also any other face when it looked into any other mirror. It would show you the perfectibilized relation of mirror and observer; it would show you the observed universe of mirrors in a single mirror. It would show you the All-in-One: the Aleph. Both Borges and Leibniz have worthy reflections upon the Aleph, which in turn naturally reflects upon them in their full manifestations; within the Aleph, as all things must be, we are already discussing these aspects.

 

Insofar as parasimplicity makes a virtue of anything, it is this ethical principle: speculum ego; I am a mirror. According to the parasimplicity principle, we should strive to be all that we can be - everything exists in order to exist more. More than this (remember: the Parasimplicity Principle is itself a parasimplex, so there is always more), we should strive to be all that we have been - the parasimplex does not abandon past instars, because it is no more itself at one time than at another. Neither does it recoil from contradictions: indeed, these are the spoor of paradox, within which we glimpse the transcendental in the unresolved processes of Reason. Thus we should accept all that we have been, and all that we might be, as equally essential reflections of what we truly are. To be a parasimplex is to embrace identity in the abandonment of identity - to become a Gateless Gate.

 

This seemingly impossible task, as with all tasks, begins with a self-similar task - for all action is self-similar to the transcendental action of wei wuwei. In this case, we seek to become mirrors of mirrors by first becoming mirrors of our world: this is why the enlightened man goes to eat rice when the bell sounds, and goes to his bedchamber when the bell sounds again, and rises from his slumber when the bell sounds the third time. The enlightened man recognizes himself in every stranger, and he accepts the stranger as he accepts himself. We say of those renowned for conviviality - "he never meets a stranger." Verily I say unto you: the enlightened man never meets anybody but strangers.

 

Borges, again, that invaluable vademecum, describes this process in a lovely fable entitled "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." In it, the fictional Menard embarks upon an appropriately Quixotic quest: to rewrite Cervantes' classic. Not satisfied with merely translating it, and abhorring the notion that he might improve upon it, Menard sets about experiencing the Quixote as Cervantes himself did - after an abortive attempt which he himself bitterly rejects before completion, he immerses himself in the lifestyle of the 17th century Spaniard and eventually succeeds in reproducing a Quixote that is line for line identical with the original - but, as Borges' abstracted fictitious reviewer of Menard's Quixote notes, so much richer than the original for having been written by a 20th century Parisian. This should not be understood as presenting Menard as a parasimplex; however, in the illustrated shortcomings of Menard from that perspective, it provides a template for the initiate to follow.

 

 



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.

Creatio ex nihilo

“Abstraction is everybody’s zero but nobody’s nought.”
~ Robert Smithson

 

Zero is believed to have been invented as a number like other numbers by the Indians, somewhere between the fifth and ninth centuries. The idea of ‘null space’ or the ‘void’ was known and used by earlier cultures, but the Indians were the first to produce a symbol that could be utilized in mathematical calculations to represent the void. When we consider numbers today, it is appropriate for us to begin with zero as the unique numerical symbol for nothingness – indeed, when we derive mathematical operations from set theory this is exactly how we do start, with zero as the symbol for the empty set.

If the first number is zero, denoting nothingness, then the second number – one – denotes identity. In set-theoretic terms, it is the set which can have only one possible element (the set of the empty set, in fact). This set-theoretic interrelation between nothingness and oneness is mirrored in the symbolism of the taijitu, and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo – something out of nothing.

The existence of zero and of one as numbers generates the concept of category; a unitary entity having more than one component subentities. The simplest structure of category is duality – the category that has exactly two elements, as ‘one and zero.’ The numerical symbol for duality is two.

Three elaborates this concept of category further into the more general plurality. Where twoness denotes a paradigm of either/or, a binary system within which ‘one’ may acceptably and completely be defined as ‘not-zero,’ threeness opens a doorway – a Gateless Gate, indeed – onto countable infinities of paradigm in which each element is uniquely itself and cannot be defined in terms of any other element (although it can be defined in terms of all other elements, with reference to the established concepts of nothingness, identity, and duality).

Four, being both the sum and the product and the power of two twos, embodies divisibility. This is a further elaboration upon plurality – with the addition of fourness, we now find that there exist some plural entities which are both entities in themselves and unions of lesser entities. We can, of course, derive numbers along the real number line by defining mathematical operators that utilize this principle more generally – indeed, we could do that when we had only zeros and ones to play with – but fourness is the philosophical symbol that uniquely develops this concept.

These, then, are the numbers which symbolize the essential concepts of being: nothingness, identity, duality, plurality, and divisibility. You probably already realized this, but we have just derived another expression for the Law of Fives.