This entire blogging project has been more about archiving the development of my thinking in a semi-academic way, taking seriously thought and reasons and history. I am still very much open to it changing. However, after having some time to read and write and work on these ideas, I only have some flimsy understanding of how to apply them in the “real world” (whatever that means). It has, and will continue to be, a drafting process for something larger. Books, papers, theses, etc. so please bear with me. As the reader, I hope you feel a compulsion to not let me get away with anything. I like to consider this entire experience as a kind of directed reading with Aaron, and I’d like to develop it to be even more interesting in that regard.

In the next few days I’ll start out with a discussion of property in general, and intellectual property in particular. I hope you can find something to take away from it. In the meantime, let’s talk a bit more about Holism. For one, I’m not sure of this term, and before we even begin, I just want you to know that I don’t really understand the historical context that this term has. Any -ism’s that are attached to it might not be at all what I’m trying to get at.

A lot of my time goes in to the study of language theory, philosophy and social/political thought. I spend so much of my energy on these things for finding specific reasons and justifications for how to live better and have better ideas for how to operate on the level of public policy.

To stay holistic, I am committed to certain ideals politically such as universal health care, labour tendencies to support unions, or a personal contribution of vegetarianism. I find that all of these actions are coherent and necessary to stay consistent with the foundational claims I’m making about human beings, aligning and understanding of person-hood with a prescriptive outline of how we ought to be living.

This is admittedly a huge project, but in keeping with the epistemic commitments that I’ve begun (and will continue) to outline (please see the A Cat Named Schrödinger series, and the On Freedom of Will post) my own personal development is not just for my own person, it is from and for the socio-economic system as a whole. However grandiose that sounds, I think that our expressive narratives and interpretations about the world are what constitute it entirely (which I hope to make a case for as this new series develops). We are never really alone in our development and our communities are as much a part of us, as we are of them.

I’d like to make the case that there is no real distinction between mind and body, mind and world, or any inside and outside dichotomy. In order to show this, it requires a great deal of work in regard to foundationalism, and epistemology. Epistemology is the study of the base forms of knowledge. It is the area of philosophy that deals with the question “What can we know?” In doing so, we are opened to the foundations of knowledge, and all of those things assumed as the first premises. The issue of course, being that these premises are up for grabs themselves.

In working toward an understanding of epistemological foundations, let’s look at the grand-daddy of them all, Rene Descartes and The Meditations. The central claim in the Second Meditation is “Cogito Ergo Sum”, or “I Think Therefore I Am”. Often touted as a kind of self-help mantra whereby your willing something to be the case makes it the case, this conception is entirely missing the substance of Cartesian epistemology.
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“I Think Therefore I Am” is the central building-block of what the west views as the human consciousness. Most all social and political philosophy is built upon this notion of individual thought. If not this particular notion of individual, than one that is similar to it. Descartes articulates is well, and this is why he is so important. Descartes sets out to find the primary germ of knowledge. That which cannot be doubted or questioned, where and how far does our consciousness go? By eliminating all forms of doubt about the world, that which cannot be doubted would be the basic form of knowledge.

I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind. (Meditation 2, quote from Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Descartes’ Epistemology)

Regardless of everything that can be doubted, doubt is an action of the mind, a thought. Thinking is an action and such an action requires an actor. I am, therefore, that actor. This is the base form of what we are as conscious beings. That we think, allows us to exist. This establishes the connection of mind to the world.

However, the question is whether this is the actual foundation, or base form of knowledge. Indeed, the thought experiment works in the way it is set up. We doubt all things that are doubtable, but that we are engaging in the act of doubting must constitute something for us. (If you look back on the Schrödinger series, you might recognize this as similar to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?“) That there is something concrete is not interesting in the end, this idea of ‘Something rather than nothing’ is not telling of anything more than what we commonly come to while brushing our teeth in the morning. instead what Descartes assumes is telling of the development of his epistemology.

Is Descartes truly at the furthest stretches of the mind? Is this act of doubt ridding all assumptions of the world and scientifically viewing the foundation of truth? Is he seeing where the software of the mind is written to the metal of the world’s hardware? Consider that by doubting all empirical aspects of the world, Descartes comes to the idea that the act of doubting constitutes our being a thing in the universe. Not only does this assume an object-oriented universe, but the assumption (even in the above quote) is still certain of a self, an actor separate yet connected to the world at large.

How is it that we go from the problem of consciousness, to the idea of something rather than nothing, to a split of mind and body? There is a lack of evidence if we are to take the Cartesian model.

To step back from the problem at hand, think about a language that is restricted to present tense, and what it would mean for a society to be without a sense of time. It is possible to imagine isn’t it? How does this limit/advance the world of these speakers? How is it augmented? The answer is; in more ways than we might know. In this same way that there are more possibilities of consciousness depending on our notion of present-tense, the issue of doubt, or distinctions and assumptions of mind and world might be problems of the language that we speak.

Returning to Cogito Ergo Sum, Descartes assumes there is a world separate from him, and is merely questioning his access to it. The act of doubting all empirical senses of the world has not dissolved the idea of there being a world separate from our minds. Furthermore, ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ assumes an object oriented universe, and the thinker as an actor therein, that the world is separate from its experiencer.

The question then, in keeping with what we have been looking at so far in Mk I and Mk II is whether this notion of mind and body is a viable distinction. The case could be made that there is no such problem. For we are required to both doubt and assume to make any and all every day actions. Their solidity is a build up of habitual practises in that action-based histories. We cannot assume anything outside of what we know.

We don’t really need proof of an external world, because it’s not a problem that we actually have. There is no real reason to assume that the world is not out there and that our consciousness is connected to it. Every act is a processed act. Processed, in that it has been wrung out in the washing of assumption and speculation. Our knowledge all come from the same place, that’s why this text is understandable and why even if there is a hint of concern of the mind/body problem, we can still get up tomorrow morning, brush our teeth and go to work.

What does it mean to say that a thing is “Without Meaning”. It cannot be that the thing in question is a vessel which is empty of a kind of substance that we call meaning. As if it is a difference between there being the physical constructional attributes of a thing, and then the quality or function of it.

To talk about meaning as though it has an object and a content is to entirely miss the point about meaning. Is our language so exact and inflexible?

“Please, Mind your Step. When crossing … be careful of the footing sufficiently. Understood beforehand because the responsibility can not be assumed about the accident in case and so on.”

The meaning gets across, almost entirely to the same degree as it would in ‘proper’ English. It is the case that the linguistic structure fails, but this sentence is meaningful, is it not?

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We tend to forget that it is our practices and actions that define the terms, that how we use a thing is also how we describe it. Using a language is not like walking a tightrope. Even if there are mistakes; if my grammatical structure is incorrect, or if I miss out on particular words, spell them wrong, or mix in hand gestures, it is entirely possible to still convey meaning.

Furthermore, in reading this garbled English [above], we are not converting individual terms to proper English structures, making sense of it in its proper format and then responding. We read, do, make, say, think all together at all times, all at once. It is one motion, trial and error.

The ability of being able to utter the name of a thing suggests there is already an immense amount of meaningfulness going on about that thing. If were to be without meaning, it would not be recognizable. To be unrecognizable is to be meaningless, the things we can not talk about are the things that are without meaning. There are no examples of meaninglessness because it’s entirely superfluous to talk about the unimaginable.

What you might then further be concerned with is this notion of ‘nothing. One might turn to Leibnez’s question of “Why is there something rather than nothing?”. Even assumes that there is such a thing as a nothing, and that its competition or contrast is something. But if nothing is a something, than what are we worried about? We choose between a nothing-something and a something-something? There is no such thing as a ‘nothing’ really. To even utter that sentence gives it too much credit.

From T.H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics:

§70… The most primitive germ from which knowledge can be developed is already a perception of fact, which implies the action upon successive sensations of a consciousness which holds them in relation, and which therefore cannot itself be before or after them, or exist as a succession at all.

There is a universal bias to the viewing of any and all things. It is a bias that can be examined and discussed, but never lifted. For if you were to ‘lift the lens’ so-to-speak, you would not recognize what you were looking at. The recognition of a thing already carries a host of networked meanings. Neither before, or after the other aspects in the network, it is everything together, all at once.

‘a thing (an object in the world) is meaningless and is only invigorated with meaning by my viewing of it’

is entirely off track of how a thing has meaning, and about what meaning is entirely. there is no back and forth on meaninglessness. things that are without meaning are things that are unknowable, and really have no worth (or possibility) of explanation.

are the words on paper dead? no. entirely not. the point is that nothing is dead, if it enters in to your consciousness it is meaningful, it is something.

the recognition of an object suggests already that it has some kind of semantic weight. the spectrum of meaning is the spectrum of reality.

it depends on a kind of horizon of consciousness, not in ‘what you can see’ but in ‘what you can know’.

how does it come about that an arrow points?

with all this in mind, let us think then about perspective.

the issue at hand might only be problematic in our pre-conceptions of it. for example:

Mathematically, in space and time parallel lines will never meet. However, we assuming here in this mathematical proof that we can have such a thing as a ‘god’s eye view’ or an objective viewpoint. Although it is the case that on paper we can draw itand on the ground we can follow it, but doesn’t it say something that we can truly never see a straight line? Even from space, there is always a concave.

Perhaps the problems what we encounter in quantum physics and in theories of time and space (as they also apply to issues of morality, or social contract) is that we are looking at the world entirely in the wrong way, and assuming that we can look at it through a clean lense.