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.

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.