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!

 



Connecting the dots

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our
aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
~ Alfred North Whitehead

 

What we perceive in the objective entity is only its properties. I say this as an adjunct to another important unproved result from another very lengthy examination, in this case an examination of Time - the result is intuitive and obvious, but involves some very complex analysis if we want to go about proving it, and it states simply that we can only directly perceive one objective entity at once. When we understand that a relation is necessarily the product of some comparison of more than one entity in the context of this result, we obtain the happy insight that relations necessarily concern subjective entities, while properties necessarily concern objective entities. Our understanding of discrete entities, either subjectively or objectively, requires us to understand both properties and relations: of course, the experience of observing some property creates the endogenous impression of that property, and it is strictly this rather than the property itself that informs our identification of any entity.

A subjective entity, which we have said is a created thing, a manifestation of the willed agency of the mind-artist, is therefore a deliberate arrangement of property-impressions and relation-ideas. The distinction between impression and idea can be more clearly understood in this framework if we appreciate that we can choose to arrange a given set of property-impressions and relation-ideas any way we like - we are not constrained to those arrangements which correspond to identifiable objective entities in our experience. We can invent entirely novel arrangements of property and relation that have no objective existence. We can, in fact, posit continua of relationship, along which entities of successively greater bigness or redness, say, can be intuited. The ability to intuit such relational chains, which is what cognitive scientists call pattern recognition, is an immensely powerful mechanism of rational thought. In the limit, we can consider relations as continua without specifying any entities lying anywhere along a particular continuum. This is what Plato meant by an ideal; in Platonic idealism, every thing that physically exists partakes of the ideals of its necessary properties.

Pulling this back to your understanding of my writing - you, as a self-aware conscious individual, have a reaction to this (to any subjective entity, in theory) which is essentially emotional, or sentimental to use a Humean expression. This reaction represents your critical evaluation of its conformity with your own subjective ideals, which develop organically out of an extrapolation of your historic perceptions. In hopefully plainer English, you develop your ideal of 'bigness' through having had to compare different entities along a continuum of increasing size in the process of identifying them as uniquely individual objective entities. For a fundamental physical property like 'bigness,' there might be quite significant agreement between several observers on the ideal of bigness, but it should be obvious that more abstract 'properties' can be perceived which give rise to far more heterogenous ideals.

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.