Updating Existence, Identity, Consciousness

News on updating the ‘essay’ Existence, Identity, Consciousness   

Last year’s ‘essay’ had been drafted as a personal exercise to sort out and integrate a number of intriguing metaphysical, physical and psychological contentions that I had tumbling around my mind. On review I think its overall thrust is valid, managing to integrate some rather radical ideas that I’ve not seen integrated elsewhere, however there are some aspects that could certainly do with updating or overhauling. 

Here are seven areas that I’m currently seeking to refashion: 

1. Achieving a more holistic integration… 

As I have looked into refining these ideas further they seem to be even more integrated than I first supposed. That is to say that the ideas are fundamentally integrated, inter-related, each mutually defining. I don’t think the original PDF managed to do justice to that natural holism of mutually defining parts.  

2. The dichotomies… 

The structuring of the essay around various dichotomies made each of those dichotomies seem like fundamental metaphysical lynchpins rather that ways of considering the mechanics of reality through various optics of contrast. 

Also, choosing the final 24 dichotomies from a number of alternatives seems way too arbitrary (as was the number 24). Furthermore, whether or not there is some sort of hierarchy amongst these dichotomies is left open, as is the degree each dichotomy might be true or false and why. 

So for these reasons I want to get away from structuring the essay by way of an assortment of dichotomies, yet without completely abandoning the role dichotomy plays in both meaning and physical ontology. Besides, there is something more fundamental through which such an essay ought to be structured…

3. Holism and ‘the fourth law’…

I think this is the most radical idea presented, and the one that conceptually sets the stage for the others. It is my proposed ‘fourth law’, appended to the other three classical laws of logical thought (please ignore the hubris): 

A is A because of not-A.

In other words, the identity of any physical or mental entity is what it is entirely because of difference — it’s differences all the way down. Because of its radical shifting of the metaphysical paradigm, it ought to become the essay’s core around which all else is structured. 

That idea builds a bridge between what logic must be and what physical existence must be. 
Epistemologically, ‘A is A because of not-A’ is not a novel idea (it is found in Saussure’s structuralism, through Quine’s semantic holism to Tononi’s integrated information). The leap that I make here is to argue that it's effectively physically true too — the notion that the very existence of, say, the full-stop at the end of this sentence is because of everything else in the universe that forms it, forms it by ‘making way’ for it right here and now. 
Likewise, by being a constituent, that full-stop intrinsically forms the rest of the universe, along with all other mutually forming constituents, great and small. Crucially, this notion depends on fully grasping universal holism (and the universe as potentially infinite rather than actually infinite as well as a continuous, rather than discrete particle-based, physics).

In conclusion, existence is relational — a figure requires a ground and visa-versa, absolutes require relations in order to have identity through difference — in order to actually be. 

4. The not-quite-reification of space and time… 

I think that I established that “in terms of dimensions for ‘foregrounded things’, they are not things in themselves” (on the original Space/Time page). However, on the following page I suggest how they effectively become real, realised through localised difference which then splits into the two dimensions. But I should clarify that the conceptual terms of space and time still ought to be thought of as dimensions, abstracts rather than concretes, indeed they are defined by not being things but on being ‘the ground’ through which differences are able to occur. 

5. Anti-matter rather than void… 

Avoid ‘void’. 

Aristotle was right that the idea of literal nothingness that void implies is nonsensical. 
By suggesting a Matter/Void dichotomy I may have given the false impression that void is ontologically valid, that void somehow exists. My intention was to use the term as the absolute contrast to matter, to entity, rather than award it the status of entity.

Anti-matter might be a better term as it suggests an active contrast rather than passive emptiness. 

NB, antimatter is fairly well defined in modern physics, yet comes with its own baggage. The hyphen in anti-matter is intended to liberated it from such impedimenta. 

6. What philosophic persuasions do these ideas resonate with…  

I think the ideas most resonate with, and owe themselves to, the metaphysical foundations of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. This does not itself preclude them from reaching into more general ideas found in Scientific Naturalism and allied progress in naturalised metaphysics as well as developments in cognitive neuroscience, information theory, etc.  

However, students of Objectivism might notice that I seem to sail dangerously close to a couple of tricky and turbulent stretches of water. One is the seeming fuzziness of entities in my ‘analogue’ physics rather than the clear and non-contradictory “A is A” of entities and concepts according to Objectivism. The other is the almost subjectivist conclusion suggested by the wholly inductive nature of consciousness leading to a ‘radically individualist epistemology’. 

But in both cases I think I can throw out a lifeline back to solid Objectivist principles. In ‘analogue physics’ the concrete objectivity of any entity is dependent on objective thresholds. For example, under certain threshold conditions, local spacetime will contract into matter, differentiate-out anti-matter, form-up into definite elements and galaxies, etc. Similarly, in each individually hewn ‘internal’ consciousness there is an intrinsic connection via neuronal thresholds to the detection and definition of any ‘external’ change. These changes are real, objective. What our information processes make of them is thus not merely a subjectively invented interpretation but something much more all-embracing, indeed at this level of analysis the objective/subjective dichotomy dissolves. Consciousness is part of existence, not the other way around. 

The overall spirit is to recognise and focus on seeming contradictions in reality — those basic niggling childlike concerns about the universe, infinity, consciousness, causation — and attempt to resolve them through integration with all other areas of knowledge, in a way a marrying-up of loose ends. 

7. The medium… 

Initial forays have shown that the time-based medium of animation is quite useful at getting across some of these tricky ideas (often time-based ideas after all). For this reason the next updated ‘essay’ will probably be more along the lines of a webpage containing a few simple metaphysical animations in order to more fully explain the text, rather than just a standard PDF. 

More news on this, perhaps even a preview of sorts, next month…