relational-dynamics-research-into-boundary-definit
"Is the water within the bell a part of the jellyfish?"
I thought she was trying to trap me in something again. Lindsay was good at that. And so, I waited before answering. I didn't only belabor her question, but the intention behind it. Where was her mind today? What was she really asking? But, of course, she'd never really ask, so I was left to carefully investigate, a sort of emotional, psychoanalytical forensics. Move too swiftly and you might miss something, or worse, tamper the site. God forbid you leave a fingerprint and become part of the crime.
"Well, what do you mean 'within the bell'? Do you mean within the epidermis and the dermis? Are you talking about the mesoglea or just consumed water? Or are you talking about the water beneath the bell?" I pulled the collar of my coat further up my body by the pockets, that way my ears would be encapsulated. Lindsay and I sighed in unison, December clouds exhausted and dissipating.
"Of course the mesoglea is a part of the jellyfish. I mean what you would call 'the water beneath the bell'," I looked back at her while she spoke, a few paces back the beach from me.
"Well, what do you think, honey?" her footsteps kept drifting. I'd look back to see she was further and further down the beach from me, her face scrunched and chapped from the wind. She wore something else in her expression, but it was opaque to me still... She turned her head to look at me and rolled her eyes.
"Answer the question, dad. I asked you first!" a smile broke with a pop of laughter.
"It's a simple question. What do you think?"
There was an old divination, 8th Century, I believe. It's unclear where exactly the practice started, but there is a satisfying parable about an elderly fellow who wandered the Roman Empire with somewhat of a song. Legend has it that he was a pauper who, whether by luck, divination or magical intervention, found a cithara and quickly set to work writing a brief song. Depending on who's research you subject yourself to, the precise words are a little different, but the general message feels the same.
Am I Tuesday?
Am I April?
Are my hands a stream if I wash them together in the water?
Am I this work?
What were the last words to become me?
Am I home?
Am I my home?
It's easy to dismiss this as some act of Dada, far before its time or perhaps just the rambling of a disheveled soul. As such, I'm not a purveyor of the mythology, so much as the meaning. When you, or certainly, when I look at the practice surrounding this poem, this memetic, it becomes more challenging to dismiss so simply. If legend is to be believed, this man would complete the song and cast a die out. Allegedly, this die would inform him of the answer. The objective, undebatable answer. There is something so strange to me and perhaps it's what stuck with the Romans that documented this behavior and the shows he would put on. It was the fact that at any time these things could be measured and at any time they could be known, without a question. You could measure your Tuesday-ness in the morning and by lunch time be considerably un-Tuesday.
I think the practice is less fascinating in preciseness. It's not exactly a tool, the way the Meyers-Briggs is or, perhaps, like the Enneagram, but it is a philosophical focal point. What troubles me, even now, is what this man was hoping to know with these questions and why so many were compelled by them. In a sense, it's as directing as the I Ching. Why is it that divination requires that we ask the Universe what we want to know indirectly? Why is it that we cannot simply ask 'What should I do today?' or 'How should I feel?' or 'What can I do to ever make myself happy?'. Instead we have to cast sticks, dice or coins, we have to pray obtusely around the thing we really want to know or to achieve. It's a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty, but provided to us about all things and all vectors.
I thought for a long time that this was the reason that Divination fell away, but for spiritual practice. I would comfort myself in the fact that we have science now. We can shoot questions out at the universe and get exactly what we want back. Not always what we expect, but answers abound. We shoot one question out after another, over and over again, keeping the conditions as stable as possible and eventually through this process, the universe unfurls it's clasped palms to relinquish to us some delicacy of truth. But what is this activity of repetition? Why is it insufficient to run an experiment once? And at what point have we truly met the standards of rigor to have a truth before us that can be appreciated as "true"? When positioned against the Acts of Praenomina, science feels little better than a Monte Carlo process.
This is not to discount the utility or veracity of science, but rather to highlight the cause for my hesitation in answering Lindsay. If science is the measurement off from an incomprehensibly large dartboard, that we have limited access to and can only measure in the collision of near arbitrary, but well directed, darts, well, then we are not measuring things, but rather the boundaries around them. If science was the act of discovering distinct things, we could simply hit them with a single dart and identify the score.
But we test and then we test again. We change the input slightly and see what happens to the system with those changes. The only raw product created out of this behavior, though, is Results. But this is not how we package this science. I suppose an Abstract is supposed to serve as a means to evaluate the methods used to arrive at a particular declaration, but why do we require a declaration at all? Why is it not enough to present the conditions and results of experimentation? Instead, we are asked to clearly define the boundaries of our research and present a premise. This saves other people time in the form of calories, but the expense is in thoughtful consideration of what the boundaries of this research truly are, what idea is truly being measured, tested and expressed through this research.
For a moment, consider a Square.
With those four lines, have you determined the shape of the square? Have you struck the "square"? Have you determined where and what the square is or rather, have you found the barrier, the momentary change between "square-ness" on the page and "non-square-ness"?If you believe that you have captured the square for what it is, that you have a drawing of a square, let me offer you this: Remove the page around the square so that none of your marks are present on the page any longer. Now remove the context of the remainder of the universe from around that square. What do you have? Is it still a square if nothing else surrounds it?
I realize that this all comes off as high-minded, newly worded Yin and Yang. It's nothing revolutionary to realize that a shape only exists within its context. A square is only a square because of the square shaped barrier it holds in space, whether that barrier is 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional, making it a cube. But then, asking if the "water within the bell" is part of the Jellyfish becomes complex. What does it mean to be a part of something? No. The water is not part of our conception of the jellyfish. It is a separate cognitive object, certainly. That barrier is indicated in our language, even the means that we use to express the idea linguistically. Words are deceptive capsules, though, as are their abstract visages in our minds.
As I invoked the example of the square, you likely wouldn't have needed a visual aide in order to conceive of the square. You have an object in your mind that seems, to your perceptions, perfectly capable of encapsulating "square". A mental signifier. But this object in your mind is not really a square in the same right as what you have experienced as a square in the past. It's really more of a synaptic miasma, a cloud of electrical signals summing into a cognitive experience like a square.
In fact, that entire previous paragraph is littered with images, evocations that have no body, no position, but they do have meaning. And it is this that is complicated about human cognition: Meaning and Reality are two separate entities, but one is experienced through the lens of the other. It was Philip K Dick that said:Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away
Meaning however is up for interpretation, an outcome of electrical impulses, an experience. Many a pioneer into psychedelics has reported "finding the meaning of everything", the compressed total of all experience, only to, in a state of renewed sobriety, find themselves incapable of articulating their discovery. I've heard numbers of them speculate that this is a failure of the sober mind, a notion that I cannot dismiss entirely, but find myself compelled away from by a greater simplicity.
What if "meaning" is a chemical experience, a tickling of some portion of the brain, delighting the nervous system with order and competence? Jurgen Schmidhuber expresses in his studies of "Low Complexity Art" that beauty is the experience of one's compression algorithm getting more efficient. I know. A romantic claim? Perhaps not. But a salient one, certainly. We seek compression, realizing that our brains are of limited mass and therefore incapable of a true copying of the vast universe around us, we seek compression. We find pattern and we glorify simplification, even when it betrays truth. We do not seek to experience truth, but rather to find echoes of our own compressions and those things which make these encodings smaller and more efficient.
Ideally, this experience of compression is provoked through patterns that are beneficial to an organism's survival, but there are many ways that this experience of meaning can be hijacked. As mentioned above, psychedelics are one such exploitation, as are many forms of mental illness. Schizophrenia comes to mind most saliently as a disease that strangles the mind in a system of false positives. Fake visions provoked by simple, possibly internal stimuli, sounds vibrating out of nothing more than electrical signals, misrouted and errant, conceptions of reality built off precepts of pattern sensitivity like that of an overeager trigger. The Schizophrenic may appear mad, but certainly, any of us that had the same experiences of meaning as the schizophrenic would experience the world in a nearly identical way.
And this is the power and deceit of words. If words are "packets of meaning", they are merely packaged experiences of astral projective power. They are phonemes, graphemes and neuremes that provoke arrayed lights in the minds of the perceiver. Small delusions. This packaging that they do is why they have been a lasting utility to humanity. I have to be self-aware enough and admit that I would not be able to express these ideas without the myriad capsules invented over the millennia. My intention is not to discredit words, but rather to identify the boundaries they enforce on our lives and the ontological effect those boundaries have.
The square exists, or at least, I beg you to presume this for me. There is something to be experienced of the square, whether visually, aurally, olfactoriaely, tactually or, if you are so bold, gustatorily. There are, of course, complications here, expressed through the metaphor of the Schizophrenic, however. I will posit an object impervious to misconception. By some vehicle of physics, this object demands its own existence in the mind of the observer, perceived without misconception regardless of the state of the observer. The Real Square. An Impossible Square.
This square exists in a fashion that the one in your mind does not. If you forget it, it persists. If you leave the room, it persists. If you deny its existence, it persists. But it is not persistence alone that justifies existence of this square. The square is justified by its mystery.
Everything about the metaphorical square is knowable, in the sense that, there is no more information about that square than the information you are able to hold in your active mind. It does not need to abide by limitations of physics and couldn't possibly embody all of those features in the way that the existent square does. The metaphorical square is pliant and inconsistent. But the existent square has location and mass and history and a library of other information that is opaque to you, a library of information that, with no regard for your knowledge, "doesn't go away".
The distance between the metaphorical square and the existent square is the full measure of the deceit of words and, beyond words, the deceit of signs. Words propose a world of simple separations, "bells" distinct from the "water beneath", purveyed on the architecture of physical membranes that only exist depending on your frame of reference. At a human-sized level, the boundary between 'water' and 'jellyfish' seems salient, but drop to an atomic or subatomic level and your concerns shift considerably. Things that once concerned you, like temperature, hunger, shelter and love now lack the synaptic space to bear meaning. At such a small frame of reference, it is hard to propose what precisely would exists and what would dissolve, but the most concerning disappearance would be 'Self'.
Selfness is one of the strangest boundaries invented. The "Self" seems to exist. "Cogito Ergo Sum" feels taut in justifying the existence of "I am". But how would one propose an "Existent Self" in a fashion as satisfactory as the Existent Square. What are the components of a Self that persist beyond the parameters of perception?
Behaviour is one proposal, since it is the tangible activity of an existent agent. My issue with this premise is that behaviour itself is not persistent. Behaviour is ephemeral and measured in events. This does not mean that behaviour does not exist, however it makes its measure notably more difficult. Events exist only in narrative. Events do not have persistent location or state the way that an Object can. They leave marks on the environment, embedding their evidence in the landscape but that is all that exists of an event after it has expired. Therefore, measuring "Self" or "Personhood" through evidence of behavior is still just a form of story-making.
Another argument, I have already presented, "Cogito Ergo Sum" posits that by the sheer experience of cognition I can build the foundation for the rest of my existence. Of "Me". But we've already comprehensively broken down the credibility of cognition as the sole measuring stick on the truthiness of anything. Much like the feeling of meaning, it does not seem impossible that "Me" is an affliction of chemical interactions and synaptic structures. It seems completely likely that "Me" could be a strange feedback loop, like a microphone too close to an amplifier. You move the input a little further from the output and the whole system untethers and stops looking so much like the same thing. Are we all just so tightly wound that we feel ourselves to be ourselves? Is it simply the fine-tuned experience of brain inputs becoming the next moments outputs in such rapid succession that we never have the opportunity to realize that we have no agency in this flow? Were we given the opportunity to unwind, would we find ourselves estranged from these things we felt were once us?
I wish I could truncate this dilemma at the Self. But quickly, wielding this uncertainty of identity, I wonder how anything can be identified. Are there, in fact, boundaries between things or is this all just what has been stirred up by an apathetic physics? If meaning is nowhere, really, but in the mind, then Pattern may befall the same mischief. Squares and Jellyfish may be convenient tools utilized by recursive polyliths who have been built too large to realize they are not monolithic. Words package together the universe in compressible, transferrable fashion that is worth noting and celebrating, but that cannot be confused as true. And the boundaries that these words create between things cannot be ignored. They become the things that we see.
While Schizophrenia is a simple look into the fallibility of certain configurations of the mind, one that perhaps is not so obvious is Depression. Depression seems to be of particular cruelty because it reshapes an agent's boundaries without such a powerful sense of delusion. Depression can come coupled with a cold sense of rationale and logic, a powerful questioning that can be hard to answer to. It creates a dissatisfaction with the usual answers that often feel like insight. It is just as delusional as Schizophrenia, but because many of those suffering have behavior that looks ordinary, unlike the schizophrenic, they are merely deemed as 'sad' or 'intense', when, in fact, they are slowly finding a world of boundaries that instantiate more boundaries and they find themselves trapped. The chemical satisfaction of "meaning" starts to slip out of the mind, things that once had color now seem blank, becoming something almost entirely antithetical to the stoner's experience, a world without meaning. It is not that reality has suddenly changed, but their synapses have.
Words and their visages become boring at best and terrifying at worst. 'Friendship', a word that comforts many of us, that is a light away from the darkness, becomes burdensome. And this becomes the source of much of the isolation the Depressed agent finds themselves bound in. They live in a world of words that all sound and look the same as the ones everyone else uses, but their internal visages are transformed. Not incorrect, just transformed. The distance the depressive feels is built in the distance between their meanings and the meanings of others.
In a sense, this is the distance we all feel from one another. A sort of cohesion or comprehension forms in culture and friendship, as visages take the form of memetic. Emotional closeness can be measured in the Vicinity of Meaning, how closely related the precepts of a Sign are between two agents. Agreement is not necessarily required for emotional closeness, but flexibility of Sign would need to stand in for true proximity. The ability to temporarily alter your interpretation of the Sign and envision what another person is expressing can lead to a similar emotional closeness. So, to speak more algorithmically, Vicinity of Meaning is measured in the Distance between two agents' best comprehension of the other's interpretation of sign.
Lindsay and I sat at the edge of the pier and I thought a great while as she tossed rocks off into the water as far as she could. I wish that I'd had some great insight about the universe in my response. That I captured an idea pure enough to match her question. But everything I could think of felt more competitive than informative. Each answer felt filled with millions of unintended consequences, conversational pathways I was not ready to approach or philosophical ramifications I felt untrained to resolve.
I never was able to answer her. Eventually I mentioned dinner and my disdain for the weather. Lindsay and I proceeded to discuss in more typical patterns as we walked back to the wharf. She never pressed me on that question again, but then again, we've never returned to that beach either.
A colleague of mine suggested compelling contest to my understanding of Divination. He suggested that Divination is not a Heisenberg Uncertainty of all vectors, but rather a certainty that merely seeks a mirror or an externalization. We ask questions to the Divine that we already know our interpretations of, but have, perhaps, merely lost some confidence in. When the Divine responds we have a meaning, not an answer.
What was Lindsay getting at? 6
Could I have answered her better? 3
Did I do enough? 1
Did I do enough? 4
Did I do enough? 2
"Is the water within the bell a part of the jellyfish?" 4
I thought she was trying to trap me in something again. Lindsay was good at that. And so, I waited before answering. I didn't only belabor her question, but the intention behind it. Where was her mind today? What was she really asking? But, of course, she'd never really ask, so I was left to carefully investigate, a sort of emotional, psychoanalytical forensics. Move too swiftly and you might miss something, or worse, tamper the site. God forbid you leave a fingerprint and become part of the crime.
"Well, what do you mean 'within the bell'? Do you mean within the epidermis and the dermis? Are you talking about the mesoglea or just consumed water? Or are you talking about the water beneath the bell?" I pulled the collar of my coat further up my body by the pockets, that way my ears would be encapsulated. Lindsay and I sighed in unison, December clouds exhausted and dissipating.
"Of course the mesoglea is a part of the jellyfish. I mean what you would call 'the water beneath the bell'," I looked back at her while she spoke, a few paces back the beach from me.
"Well, what do you think, honey?" her footsteps kept drifting. I'd look back to see she was further and further down the beach from me, her face scrunched and chapped from the wind. She wore something else in her expression, but it was opaque to me still... She turned her head to look at me and rolled her eyes.
"Answer the question, dad. I asked you first!" a smile broke with a pop of laughter.
"It's a simple question. What do you think?"
There was an old divination, 8th Century, I believe. It's unclear where exactly the practice started, but there is a satisfying parable about an elderly fellow who wandered the Roman Empire with somewhat of a song. Legend has it that he was a pauper who, whether by luck, divination or magical intervention, found a cithara and quickly set to work writing a brief song. Depending on who's research you subject yourself to, the precise words are a little different, but the general message feels the same.
Am I Tuesday?
Am I April?
Are my hands a stream if I wash them together in the water?
Am I this work?
What were the last words to become me?
Am I home?
Am I my home?
It's easy to dismiss this as some act of Dada, far before its time or perhaps just the rambling of a disheveled soul. As such, I'm not a purveyor of the mythology, so much as the meaning. When you, or certainly, when I look at the practice surrounding this poem, this memetic, it becomes more challenging to dismiss so simply. If legend is to be believed, this man would complete the song and cast a die out. Allegedly, this die would inform him of the answer. The objective, undebatable answer. There is something so strange to me and perhaps it's what stuck with the Romans that documented this behavior and the shows he would put on. It was the fact that at any time these things could be measured and at any time they could be known, without a question. You could measure your Tuesday-ness in the morning and by lunch time be considerably un-Tuesday.
I think the practice is less fascinating in preciseness. It's not exactly a tool, the way the Meyers-Briggs is or, perhaps, like the Enneagram, but it is a philosophical focal point. What troubles me, even now, is what this man was hoping to know with these questions and why so many were compelled by them. In a sense, it's as directing as the I Ching. Why is it that divination requires that we ask the Universe what we want to know indirectly? Why is it that we cannot simply ask 'What should I do today?' or 'How should I feel?' or 'What can I do to ever make myself happy?'. Instead we have to cast sticks, dice or coins, we have to pray obtusely around the thing we really want to know or to achieve. It's a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty, but provided to us about all things and all vectors.
I thought for a long time that this was the reason that Divination fell away, but for spiritual practice. I would comfort myself in the fact that we have science now. We can shoot questions out at the universe and get exactly what we want back. Not always what we expect, but answers abound. We shoot one question out after another, over and over again, keeping the conditions as stable as possible and eventually through this process, the universe unfurls it's clasped palms to relinquish to us some delicacy of truth. But what is this activity of repetition? Why is it insufficient to run an experiment once? And at what point have we truly met the standards of rigor to have a truth before us that can be appreciated as "true"? When positioned against the Acts of Praenomina, science feels little better than a Monte Carlo process.
This is not to discount the utility or veracity of science, but rather to highlight the cause for my hesitation in answering Lindsay. If science is the measurement off from an incomprehensibly large dartboard, that we have limited access to and can only measure in the collision of near arbitrary, but well directed, darts, well, then we are not measuring things, but rather the boundaries around them. If science was the act of discovering distinct things, we could simply hit them with a single dart and identify the score.
But we test and then we test again. We change the input slightly and see what happens to the system with those changes. The only raw product created out of this behavior, though, is Results. But this is not how we package this science. I suppose an Abstract is supposed to serve as a means to evaluate the methods used to arrive at a particular declaration, but why do we require a declaration at all? Why is it not enough to present the conditions and results of experimentation? Instead, we are asked to clearly define the boundaries of our research and present a premise. This saves other people time in the form of calories, but the expense is in thoughtful consideration of what the boundaries of this research truly are, what idea is truly being measured, tested and expressed through this research.
For a moment, consider a Square.
With those four lines, have you determined the shape of the square? Have you struck the "square"? Have you determined where and what the square is or rather, have you found the barrier, the momentary change between "square-ness" on the page and "non-square-ness"?If you believe that you have captured the square for what it is, that you have a drawing of a square, let me offer you this: Remove the page around the square so that none of your marks are present on the page any longer. Now remove the context of the remainder of the universe from around that square. What do you have? Is it still a square if nothing else surrounds it?
I realize that this all comes off as high-minded, newly worded Yin and Yang. It's nothing revolutionary to realize that a shape only exists within its context. A square is only a square because of the square shaped barrier it holds in space, whether that barrier is 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional, making it a cube. But then, asking if the "water within the bell" is part of the Jellyfish becomes complex. What does it mean to be a part of something? No. The water is not part of our conception of the jellyfish. It is a separate cognitive object, certainly. That barrier is indicated in our language, even the means that we use to express the idea linguistically. Words are deceptive capsules, though, as are their abstract visages in our minds.
As I invoked the example of the square, you likely wouldn't have needed a visual aide in order to conceive of the square. You have an object in your mind that seems, to your perceptions, perfectly capable of encapsulating "square". A mental signifier. But this object in your mind is not really a square in the same right as what you have experienced as a square in the past. It's really more of a synaptic miasma, a cloud of electrical signals summing into a cognitive experience like a square.
In fact, that entire previous paragraph is littered with images, evocations that have no body, no position, but they do have meaning. And it is this that is complicated about human cognition: Meaning and Reality are two separate entities, but one is experienced through the lens of the other. It was Philip K Dick that said:Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away
Meaning however is up for interpretation, an outcome of electrical impulses, an experience. Many a pioneer into psychedelics has reported "finding the meaning of everything", the compressed total of all experience, only to, in a state of renewed sobriety, find themselves incapable of articulating their discovery. I've heard numbers of them speculate that this is a failure of the sober mind, a notion that I cannot dismiss entirely, but find myself compelled away from by a greater simplicity.
What if "meaning" is a chemical experience, a tickling of some portion of the brain, delighting the nervous system with order and competence? Jurgen Schmidhuber expresses in his studies of "Low Complexity Art" that beauty is the experience of one's compression algorithm getting more efficient. I know. A romantic claim? Perhaps not. But a salient one, certainly. We seek compression, realizing that our brains are of limited mass and therefore incapable of a true copying of the vast universe around us, we seek compression. We find pattern and we glorify simplification, even when it betrays truth. We do not seek to experience truth, but rather to find echoes of our own compressions and those things which make these encodings smaller and more efficient.
Ideally, this experience of compression is provoked through patterns that are beneficial to an organism's survival, but there are many ways that this experience of meaning can be hijacked. As mentioned above, psychedelics are one such exploitation, as are many forms of mental illness. Schizophrenia comes to mind most saliently as a disease that strangles the mind in a system of false positives. Fake visions provoked by simple, possibly internal stimuli, sounds vibrating out of nothing more than electrical signals, misrouted and errant, conceptions of reality built off precepts of pattern sensitivity like that of an overeager trigger. The Schizophrenic may appear mad, but certainly, any of us that had the same experiences of meaning as the schizophrenic would experience the world in a nearly identical way.
And this is the power and deceit of words. If words are "packets of meaning", they are merely packaged experiences of astral projective power. They are phonemes, graphemes and neuremes that provoke arrayed lights in the minds of the perceiver. Small delusions. This packaging that they do is why they have been a lasting utility to humanity. I have to be self-aware enough and admit that I would not be able to express these ideas without the myriad capsules invented over the millennia. My intention is not to discredit words, but rather to identify the boundaries they enforce on our lives and the ontological effect those boundaries have.
The square exists, or at least, I beg you to presume this for me. There is something to be experienced of the square, whether visually, aurally, olfactoriaely, tactually or, if you are so bold, gustatorily. There are, of course, complications here, expressed through the metaphor of the Schizophrenic, however. I will posit an object impervious to misconception. By some vehicle of physics, this object demands its own existence in the mind of the observer, perceived without misconception regardless of the state of the observer. The Real Square. An Impossible Square.
This square exists in a fashion that the one in your mind does not. If you forget it, it persists. If you leave the room, it persists. If you deny its existence, it persists. But it is not persistence alone that justifies existence of this square. The square is justified by its mystery.
Everything about the metaphorical square is knowable, in the sense that, there is no more information about that square than the information you are able to hold in your active mind. It does not need to abide by limitations of physics and couldn't possibly embody all of those features in the way that the existent square does. The metaphorical square is pliant and inconsistent. But the existent square has location and mass and history and a library of other information that is opaque to you, a library of information that, with no regard for your knowledge, "doesn't go away".
The distance between the metaphorical square and the existent square is the full measure of the deceit of words and, beyond words, the deceit of signs. Words propose a world of simple separations, "bells" distinct from the "water beneath", purveyed on the architecture of physical membranes that only exist depending on your frame of reference. At a human-sized level, the boundary between 'water' and 'jellyfish' seems salient, but drop to an atomic or subatomic level and your concerns shift considerably. Things that once concerned you, like temperature, hunger, shelter and love now lack the synaptic space to bear meaning. At such a small frame of reference, it is hard to propose what precisely would exists and what would dissolve, but the most concerning disappearance would be 'Self'.
Selfness is one of the strangest boundaries invented. The "Self" seems to exist. "Cogito Ergo Sum" feels taut in justifying the existence of "I am". But how would one propose an "Existent Self" in a fashion as satisfactory as the Existent Square. What are the components of a Self that persist beyond the parameters of perception?
Behaviour is one proposal, since it is the tangible activity of an existent agent. My issue with this premise is that behaviour itself is not persistent. Behaviour is ephemeral and measured in events. This does not mean that behaviour does not exist, however it makes its measure notably more difficult. Events exist only in narrative. Events do not have persistent location or state the way that an Object can. They leave marks on the environment, embedding their evidence in the landscape but that is all that exists of an event after it has expired. Therefore, measuring "Self" or "Personhood" through evidence of behavior is still just a form of story-making.
Another argument, I have already presented, "Cogito Ergo Sum" posits that by the sheer experience of cognition I can build the foundation for the rest of my existence. Of "Me". But we've already comprehensively broken down the credibility of cognition as the sole measuring stick on the truthiness of anything. Much like the feeling of meaning, it does not seem impossible that "Me" is an affliction of chemical interactions and synaptic structures. It seems completely likely that "Me" could be a strange feedback loop, like a microphone too close to an amplifier. You move the input a little further from the output and the whole system untethers and stops looking so much like the same thing. Are we all just so tightly wound that we feel ourselves to be ourselves? Is it simply the fine-tuned experience of brain inputs becoming the next moments outputs in such rapid succession that we never have the opportunity to realize that we have no agency in this flow? Were we given the opportunity to unwind, would we find ourselves estranged from these things we felt were once us?
I wish I could truncate this dilemma at the Self. But quickly, wielding this uncertainty of identity, I wonder how anything can be identified. Are there, in fact, boundaries between things or is this all just what has been stirred up by an apathetic physics? If meaning is nowhere, really, but in the mind, then Pattern may befall the same mischief. Squares and Jellyfish may be convenient tools utilized by recursive polyliths who have been built too large to realize they are not monolithic. Words package together the universe in compressible, transferrable fashion that is worth noting and celebrating, but that cannot be confused as true. And the boundaries that these words create between things cannot be ignored. They become the things that we see.
While Schizophrenia is a simple look into the fallibility of certain configurations of the mind, one that perhaps is not so obvious is Depression. Depression seems to be of particular cruelty because it reshapes an agent's boundaries without such a powerful sense of delusion. Depression can come coupled with a cold sense of rationale and logic, a powerful questioning that can be hard to answer to. It creates a dissatisfaction with the usual answers that often feel like insight. It is just as delusional as Schizophrenia, but because many of those suffering have behavior that looks ordinary, unlike the schizophrenic, they are merely deemed as 'sad' or 'intense', when, in fact, they are slowly finding a world of boundaries that instantiate more boundaries and they find themselves trapped. The chemical satisfaction of "meaning" starts to slip out of the mind, things that once had color now seem blank, becoming something almost entirely antithetical to the stoner's experience, a world without meaning. It is not that reality has suddenly changed, but their synapses have.
Words and their visages become boring at best and terrifying at worst. 'Friendship', a word that comforts many of us, that is a light away from the darkness, becomes burdensome. And this becomes the source of much of the isolation the Depressed agent finds themselves bound in. They live in a world of words that all sound and look the same as the ones everyone else uses, but their internal visages are transformed. Not incorrect, just transformed. The distance the depressive feels is built in the distance between their meanings and the meanings of others.
In a sense, this is the distance we all feel from one another. A sort of cohesion or comprehension forms in culture and friendship, as visages take the form of memetic. Emotional closeness can be measured in the Vicinity of Meaning, how closely related the precepts of a Sign are between two agents. Agreement is not necessarily required for emotional closeness, but flexibility of Sign would need to stand in for true proximity. The ability to temporarily alter your interpretation of the Sign and envision what another person is expressing can lead to a similar emotional closeness. So, to speak more algorithmically, Vicinity of Meaning is measured in the Distance between two agents' best comprehension of the other's interpretation of sign.
Lindsay and I sat at the edge of the pier and I thought a great while as she tossed rocks off into the water as far as she could. I wish that I'd had some great insight about the universe in my response. That I captured an idea pure enough to match her question. But everything I could think of felt more competitive than informative. Each answer felt filled with millions of unintended consequences, conversational pathways I was not ready to approach or philosophical ramifications I felt untrained to resolve.
I never was able to answer her. Eventually I mentioned dinner and my disdain for the weather. Lindsay and I proceeded to discuss in more typical patterns as we walked back to the wharf. She never pressed me on that question again, but then again, we've never returned to that beach either.
A colleague of mine suggested compelling contest to my understanding of Divination. He suggested that Divination is not a Heisenberg Uncertainty of all vectors, but rather a certainty that merely seeks a mirror or an externalization. We ask questions to the Divine that we already know our interpretations of, but have, perhaps, merely lost some confidence in. When the Divine responds we have a meaning, not an answer.
What was Lindsay getting at? 6
Could I have answered her better? 3
Did I do enough? 1
Did I do enough? 4
Did I do enough? 2
"Is the water within the bell a part of the jellyfish?" 4