Good vibrations

“Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.” ~ Mae West

 

Consider the 'property' of goodness. Goodness is not actually something we can measure empirically, as we can mass or temperature, and so we could say it is not a property at all; on the other hand, 'goodness' only really has meaning in the context of describing entities which exist objectively, and we have already said that things that describe objective entities are termed 'properties.' What we mean when we say some thing is 'good' is actually something along the lines of 'this thing is closer to the ideal of itself along some continuum than things which are less good' - 'goodness' is 'conformity to the ideal,' although of course in this formulation every property is measurable in direct proportion with its conformity to the ideal - an 'ideally' red entity would be absolutely red to the exclusion of all other properties; it would exist simply as 'a redness.' We seem to be very close here to saying outright that properties and relations are both distinct from one another and interchangeable with each other, and this is a more helpful conclusion than you might think. It's also, as with so much else, unnecessary. It forms a theoretical framework within which we can attempt to explain the what and why of your emotional response to novel stimuli, which in another perspective is an analysis of how your self-concept develops and evolves (leading to the very fruitful study of how your emotional response can be selected by willed agency rather than being the largely automatic manifestation of your existing subjective framework of ideas and impressions; this field of neurolinguistics, which examines the interface between objective and subjective realities, informs our psychological understanding of schemata, or worldviews: Leary called these 'reality tunnels,' and we'll find that a useful model as well by and by). But we don't need any of this nitpicking to satisfy ourselves that we do have such responses to stimuli, and that we are aware of them separately from the stimuli themselves or the media by which those stimuli arrive. We can also propose the tentative lemma that ideals become more prone to variance within communities the more abstract the properties they idealize become.

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.

Between the lines

“Words without actions are the assassins of idealism”
~ Herbert Hoover

 

We've already stated that you understand the words to have objective existence as marks on a page - otherwise you could not read them. And you understand the words to have intersubjective existence, without which they could have no meaning for you. You also understand them to have subjective existence in that you have formed a subjective impression of the sentences you've read within your Cartesian theater. But this is not the limit of your appreciation. You have understood these words in another sense, unless you are an extraordinary person indeed. You have understood them within the context of being a self-aware conscious individual with your own history and your own prior impressions of all the things you remember from your life so far. What I am communicating to you has not arrived upon a tabula rasa within you: it has been projected onto an immensely complex and vibrant construct, which is your self-aware, self-generated, self-sustaining subjective realm. The interactions between the novel material introduced by this intersubjective process, and the established corpus of self-awareness generated subjectively over the course of your lifetime, themselves have an existence which makes your subjective world uniquely your own. Your critical faculty - your capacity for comparing the material I'm presenting to you here with the subjective material of your pre-existing subjective realm - gives rise to the ideal existence.

To see this, let's digress for a moment and return to empirical reality. We had said that, in the objective realm, things that exist do so in measurable ways. This capacity to be measured is a property of objective entities, and the things we can measure are also properties. But entities are not simply properties - we can group together 'things that are red' and 'things that are big,' to give two simple examples, but we do not thereby perceive discrete entities in the way we understand them: certainly, we do not in that fashion perceive entities we can relate to word-symbols and communicate intersubjectively with other people. Entities, in fact, exist as unique relations between properties. Every entity is theoretically describable as a specific set of relations among properties that exactly describe it, and within the empirical physical universe the whole immensity of Creation is similarly susceptible to representation as an exhaustive and exhausting catalogue of relations and properties.