2023#
January#
What is it in being ourselves that prevents us from being other people? Why does our being require perspective and individuality?
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Do mathematical theorems have truth outside of ourselves? To what extent is existence mathematical in the absence of our being mathematical? Does our description of the appearance of reality ever penetrate to reality itself? What is reality outside of our description of it?
We are tempted to say here: reality and its description have a mapping, that the latter represents the former.
But the error of this is seen those intensely personal occurances which have no analogue in description. How does one describe anything subjective without resource to lyricism?
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The world inherently has an order, a structure that separates events through succession. Causality is manifest in time and space; things are a certain way, meaning the sequence of things that led to the current state of the world was just so and not some other way. Causality imposes a particular order on events, excluding the possibility of other orderings. Each event, by occuring, fixes the order of time as the particular circumstances that led to the current becoming of the World. It is a fact of symbolic logic that order relations must be anti-reflexive.
A reflexive relation is one that is the same forwards as backwards, i.e. \(x = y\) is equivalent to \(y = x\).
An anti-reflexive relation can be seen in the relation of “less than”, i.e. \(x < y\) is not equivalent to \(y < x\). This asymmetry in the relation is what gives rises to its ordering. Because the relation cannot be reflected, the field of its values necessarily has an order, that is to say, each integer increases in magnitude, i.e. it is greater than its precedessor.
The ordering of time and space must necessarily make us ask, what is it about being that is anti-reflexive? Where is the asymmetry in Being to be found? Why are things always one way and not some other way? Why are things perceived in a linear fashion, that is to say, as a succession of form though time? What primitve rupture in reflection causes time to move forward, making thigns have an order?
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“I am this”
“This is me”
When reflected, the “am” becomes an “is”. Is this purely linguistic, an artifact of the peculiar evolution of the word “Being”? Or is this the aforementioned rupture in the relation of being? The English “am” is one-directional. It latches to its subject and severs its reflexivity. The “am” reduces to “is” when the subject is object.
The “is” does not have this property.
“This is a person.”
“A person is this.””
“is”, in other words, is reflexive. There is no ordering in the existential relation of Being. It is, as mentioned, an equivalency relation.
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The question, as always, is: is subjective being the same as objective being? And if it is, why does our linguistic representation of it bare the logical features of ordering? Why does our language allow the relation of “am” to operate in a non-reflexive way?
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Or, in terms of ontological relations, existential being is an equivalency relation. Subjective being is an ordering relation.
February#
Everything is language.
Everything signifies something it is not.
As I get older, the thoughts are harder to string together. More and more, it is a morass of half-understood images, glimpsed with uncertain comprehension. It feels like my mind is falling apart.
I want to say something definite: that what we are is symbolic. Our nature consists of naming and relating. There is no greater power in this world than to invoke a thing’s name, to draw it into the foreground of attention and present that which is named as a singular thing, separate and isolated from the world in which it arose.
They tell me I am made of particles, incomprehensibly tiny things that are concentrated into mathematical points, but then I am told this is not quite right, because points have positions and no one has ever been able to say where exactly a particle is.
Science has a hole in its foundation. Or more precisely: an impassable bedrock that prevents the inductive advance of human knowledge beyond a prescribed depth, the limit of abstraction. Predicated on measurement, science immediately deteriorates when the truth upon which it rests is sought.
The idea that things can be measured relies on the idea that a property of a thing can be abstracted away from the thing’s being. A thing is not a unit, but it is equal, in some way, to the units which comprise its measurement. Equality, as a concept, only obtains when a thing is abstracted of its qualities and reduced to a quantitative description.
To understand everything as measureable is to understand everything as a quantity. The act of measurement is equivalent to comparison of quantities. A thing is named to be the unit. To measure a thing is to relate it to this designation. To say a thing has two units is to say it has two units of the designated unit.
Humans have somehow inverted the direction of dependence in the relation of measurement to reality. We live with an unconscious assumption, at least in aggregate within the context of the modern world, one that happens to be false: that measurement is equivalent to substantial existence. We have abstracted from measurement a definite mathematical structure the world must abide. However, this abstraction was preceded in its application by initialization of the unit. The abstraction is dependent on the designations. And so we fail to comprehend the fundamental uncertainty from which being is born.
Measurement can only exist in relation to the units which have been demarcated and designated as things which measure. Measurability cannot be the basis for being, because it must be predicated on a reference to another being, namely the unit, which only exists as a designation within an interpretation. In other words, the entire edifice of science presupposes a subject is in the world, engaged in the act of interpretation.
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There are no answers. More fundamentally, there does not even exist the possibility of an answer.
—
The problem is truth. It’s impossible to define. More precisely: it’s definition undoes its foundation. If you say: something is true if it is the case (i.e. agrees with reality), then by allowing the indeterminate sentence to be named, even with a name so innocuous as “something”, you’ve allowed the necessary and sufficient conditions for a contradiction to emerge. Let the next sentence be called P. The sentence P is not true. Then, by our definition of truth, we see we have named an undecidable sentence. More than that, we have annihilated the possibility of truth by demonstrating an example of something to which it cannot apply, that is, something neither true or false. Self reference is a paradox that cannot be exorcised; it’s impossible to give a name to something without that name referencing the thing to be named. You cannot talk about truth without giving things names and you cannot name a thing without decimating the foundations of language. We arise from a vacuum of meaning, and blindly seek what cannot be sought. All that we know and think is built on top of a void.
March#
Long moments where nothing happens. Half-formed sentences grasping at incoherent thoughts.
Did the universe feel the vice grip of anxiety, were its innards churned in vexing anticipation, as it awaited us? Did the universe agonize over every solemn moment, measure every millisecond with precise stop watches, while those who might bear witness gestated in possibility?
Did it idle in indifference? Did eternities tick by unnoticed? Was there nothing that might slow the passing of time, no passing glance of introspection, no fractal blossoming out of an instant, no reason to stop and watch in awe?
Was there time at all?
How strange, to find yourself in a moment, with only trails of breadcrumbs fading in the horizon to tell you what came before. To traverse any of these passages only extends them indefinitely, adding more long seconds, more breadcrumbs trailing backwards from your position.
How strange, to only be able to think in terms of time. Never able to ask what came before time.
The question invokes absurdity. Of course, you are a product of your parents, and them of their grandparents, and so on, one long chain extending back to some point in the past where it either breaks or begins. Is there always someone prior, some ancestor from which we derive our heritage, at every link in the chain? Is everything preceded by cause?
Is time infinite? Or finite? Does it exist outside of our perception? Is it merely a form of perception? Something revealed through the act of perception? If so, then what exists in the absence of perception? Is :being-without-us static and eternal, timeless and formless? Does it exist all?
At what point, in tracing our anthropological origins, do we encounter the point where being becomes being-without-us? Presumably there must have been a point in time when there were no conscious entities and in the next moment, there were. How far back does the chain go? Is it possible to conceive of being-without-space? Being-without-time?
Is it possible to conceive of this moment? Are we incapable of understanding what the world is if we subtracted from it?
Is the ladder of causality we extend indefinitely into the past flawed in some way? Does it measure reality? Is it an artifice?
Things only have causes insofar we perceive in them in a complex. We say A causes B because we perceive a temporal relation between A and B, a dependency that requires one precede the other. The causal link is only true insofar that we may use it to predict the occurrence of B given A.
This is, at any rate, what we mean in a scientific sense. Truth in this respect is a property of judgement, it is an emanation of judgement. But this definition of truth does not allow us to take its content and make them absolute. It is always relative to the perception that perceives the relation between A and B.
This definition of truth does not allow us to take the observations and derive from them absolute truth. We are always relegated to saying “assuming this is the case”. But we are never able to remove all assumptions from any proposition. Always there are priors that precede everything.
We cannot say with certainty what there is outside of ourselves. We cannot get to that hypothetical moment in time of being-without-us through pure understanding. We cannot even say we know there is a being-without-us.
—
To some extent, the question whether or not life is worth living is answered merely by asking it. If one truly believed in the negative, there would be no one left to ask the question.
April#
We never know from where, precisely, a feeling emanates. A feeling is not something that can be encountered in tangible form, but is rather encountered through form. This had led us to suppose all feelings are representative of the same category of “thing”
We are misled by the primacy and immediacy of experience in this matter. When we feel pain, for instance, we feel it in a location; indeed, in the modern world, we now know of the nervous system and the way external stimuli excite impulses along its circuits, leading us to suppose the stimuli is more than the cause of the pain, but in some way, is the pain. We burn our hand and say the pain is there, in my hand.
Yet, we feel in another respect, in a way that reveals the mutually excluded origins of disjoint phenomenon we refer to as “feelings”. We say we feel when something gives us joy or causes us despair, i.e. “I enjoy the music of Chopin”” or “Her death caused me great pain”. However, when we seek the origin of these propositions in material reality, we immediately collide with the impenetrability of their explanations: because we love, because we care. There is no finer increment to resolve down into; there is no map from these things to the encounterable world-substance, to observable reality. There is no nervous system for the propagation of love; love does not act on a point; love does not impinge on the senses through mechanisms of causality. Love is the possession of our being; it is only understood by being, through being; it is a way of becoming, irreducible to the beings which in the process become.
The fallacy arises when suppose pain and love are different “grades” of phenomenal experience. We assume feeling is a spectrum and that all the things we feel must necessarily have something in common. In reality, every feeling moves within its own dimensions.
September#
The first act of a fool is not the presumption preceding a judgement, but the certainty that follows it.
Certainty is a curious thing.
The things of which we are most certain, e.g. the feelings and sensations that comprise our phenomenal experience, are not properties of the external world. The certainty of our desire and intentions is due to their origination from within the deepest chambers of our selves, in the privative isolation of our consciousness. We are certain of what we feel, because what we are is, entirely and exactly, what we feel.
The things of which we are least certain, e.g. the true reality of the external world, are quantifiable properties, things which can be counted and grouped into definite amounts. There is no procedure outside of perception and judgement by which external things may enter into the internal constitution of a consciousness. Things of the external world must be represented in the perception, which in turn requires the image of the thing projected onto the sense organ must be detached from the thing itself. The sensuous thing which is perceived is only an indication of the actual thing, i.e. a representation.
Certainty, then, is only absolute in the subjective sense.
November#
Tears of nothingness. Silent agony, for the subject alone. Tell me this is a chemical reaction, tell me this is nothing but physics. That all I feel is just the result of a trillion microscopic collisions. The burden of proof is on you. It is you who must argue from outside of experience, who must make this pain disppear into computation.
—
Ultimately, we are alone. We are separate from the world, and that means we are separate from one another.
We all have a hole in our hearts. That hole is exactly equal in shape and size to the world. That hole is our reflected outline, all the things which we are not and can never be.
All we seek is this: to not be separate, to love and be loved so much the distinction loses meaning. We seek the dissolution of alienation, which is to say, we seek the annihiliation of self.
For self is fundamentallty an alienation, an alienation of the world from itself. What we are is separateness, in pure and unadulterated form. We are always beside ourselves, never in ourselves.
What we are essentially is the world, for it is through us worldhood is attained. But it is attained in such a way that its attainment severs us from the totality thus attained.
What we are fundamentally is a lacking. We lack a connection to the world that is brought into being by our inhabiting of it, the world that is severed from us as it becomes from us. We are relegated to our bodies, these containers of separateness. The world we create is forever and always outside of ourselves.