I tend to repeat certain topics—for emphasis, because I forget what I’ve written. But it’s also natural for some topics that there should be some repetition. For each topic decide a main place; eliminate repetition except where essential; in the essential repetitions minimize discussion and refer to the main occurrence.

Some topics

About topics I repeat

Continue to build the list.

The nature of and fact the journey—no limit to extension, duration, variety, peaks… ever freshness… while in limited form…

Possibility, significance and fact of metaphysics

The beginning of foundation

Intimacy of being and experience (and existence)

Experience, concept, object, meaning, world, difference, identity, extensivity, early

THE NARRATIVE

General review for narrative

Title? ‘Journey in Being’?

Review for concepts to retain, concepts and sub-concepts to add, and concepts to combine.

PREFACE

Review: preface

Selection, order and titles of topics? New topics?

INTRODUCTION

Review: introduction

Selection, order and titles of topics? New topics?

FOUNDATION

Review: foundation

Selection, order and titles of topics? New topics?

Where should the following go? Where here? Perhaps in the longer version.

A definition specifies a concept.

This definition is in the standard form of definitions in this narrative. Given a definition it does not follow that there is an object. In this narrative we study the world directly and so do not resort an approach, e.g. as in mathematics, in which a concept defines an abstract object (which entails two problems—the existence of the abstract object and its relevance to the world). Here, abstraction will be focus on aspects of the world so simple that there is a corresponding concept that is faithful to the object (it will be a goal to find aspects that are both significant and sufficiently simple). Other aspects of the world may be studied in practical (not known to be better than rough) terms. The dual approach will be shown adequate to significant purposes or values. It will be found perfect in terms of ultimate purposes to be identified.

Being

Being is that which ‘is’.

In its first occurrence just above, the word is marks definition. The second occurrence is constitutive of the definition. It does not follow from the definition that there are entities with being. However, definitions and concepts are examples of being (whether or not they have objects).

In English when the word is marks tense it is usually used as a present tense form of the verb to be. In the definition of being above, the word is in quotes refers—in what will be a frequent practice in this narrative—to some region, connected or otherwise, of extensivity—i.e. of difference that is, for example, space andor time like.

The concept of being will be found simple enough to found significant understanding of the world where materialism and other over-specific approaches flounder. However being is not primally simple.

Experience

Experience is awareness.

This is the first definition or sense of ‘experience’. Experience is a case—perhaps the most immediate case—of being.

That there is experience may be questioned but this involves experience. Therefore there is experience (as we will see there is much more). That is—

There is experience.

There is being.

Experience and world

Experience seems to be a relation—it seems to be of a real world.

It is conceivable that there is no world but ‘my experience’. This position is called solipsism. I find my experience an essentially incomplete map of the world. Therefore solipsism is a contradictory conflation of ‘my experience’ with ‘all experience’ and is therefore impossible. Thus there is a real world which contains experience and of which we have knowledge in experience. Solipsism denies the reality of the world other than experience and its value is in showing us that there is a real world outside experience.

There is a real or ‘external’ world that contains and is known in experience.

Experience and being

Experience and being have an intimate connection.

Experience is the place of our significant relations with self and world.

A position that is similar to but related to solipsism would be to say ‘the world is experience’. This is a form of ‘idealism’. This would be a mere relabeling of the world (which we might find to require an extended meaning of ‘experience’). We later find such an extended meaning an alternate labeling. It is not a true idealism in that it truly asserts nothing except that with a sufficiently liberal interpretation of idea (or other substance), idealism (monism) is a tautology.

For an entity to have being it is not necessary for it to be experienced. We can conceive of an entity that never has an at least indirect in experience. However, to then assert existence of the conceived entity is contradictory. This sort of conflation is at the root of many paradoxes and conceptual confusions.

Meaning

A concept is mental content.

This sense of concept includes the entire range of psychological phenomena which in western psychology include experience or awareness, percepts, the higher concept—e.g. the unit of meaning, feeling, emotion, cognition, attitude and action; and personality which includes identity and memory and their arcs.

The unconscious refers to experience that is not experienced as such or to something in the body—e.g. something that can be remembered—that may enter or affect experience.

Therefore concepts are essentially experiential.

A referential concept is one purports to have at least oblique reference in the world. An object is the reference of concept.

In this narrative the main concepts will be referential and so ‘concept’ will mean ‘referential concept’ unless stated otherwise.

A concept meaning is a concept and its object (or, equivalently, objects). In linguistic meaning a symbol is associated with concept meaning. The association is often tacit for this is efficient; however to abstract symbols have meaning when unmoored from concept meaning is to risk confusion and paradox.

Symbolic and linguistic meaning make for efficient and powerful representation, communication, and transmission of ideas. At the root of this efficiency is the symbol itself—something simple that stands for something complex. The efficiency is enhanced by (a) common or defined contexts and (b) formal representation of patterns—especially repeated or generic patterns—by symbols and arrangements of symbols.

A symbol may have intrinsic meaning by having resemblance to an object—the resemblance may be simply iconic or iconic via an arrangement of sub-symbols as in a sentence. An abstract symbol—one that has no evident or conventional or otherwise associated iconic content—has and can have no object. The phrase ‘There is a tiger’ is a contraction for ‘There is an object that corresponds iconically to the concept of a tiger’. Common speech and writing use the contracted version for its simplicity and efficiency. However, if the context does not provide meaning for the contracted form it may be without meaning and may lead to confusion and paradox.

The other sense of ‘meaning’ in this narrative is that of significant meaning. To distinguish the two senses, when meaning is not prefixed by the term ‘significant’ it will refer to concept or linguistic meaning.

Existence

Make the point that being-existence is dual to the pure-practical; both are interwoven; and there are senses in which there is no distinction.

Universe

The universe is all being.

In so far as creation and destruction are causation and causation is external to what is created, the universe has no creation or destruction. The universe has—can have—no creator. However, one part of the universe may create-destroy or be involved in the creation-destruction of another.

A natural law is our reading of a pattern. The manifest pattern may also be referred to as the law.

All laws have being. Since they have being, all laws are in the universe.

Possibility

Raise heading level for this section?

The concept of possibility

A possible state (or event or process) of a system or context is one that satisfies its constitution or definition.

Some contexts are defined by more than one state. One example is a single role of a dice in which there are six possible outcome states (but one actual outcome). With two dice the number of outcomes depends on how we count; we ‘normally’ count thirty six but can still count six—a one occurred, a two occurred, and so on; and in a given outcome at most two possibilities will be actual. With six or more dice all (six) possibilities may be actual and he setup may be designed so that all possibilities will occur with certainty or with probability one which is effective certainty.

The concept of logical possibility is satisfaction of the laws of logic.

Note that a law of logic is not a law of nature but a constraint on the freedom of concept formation. Thus is appears that logical possibility must be expressed in terms of concepts. However we may express it in apparently objective terms—logical possibility is the absence of limits. A simple concept of physical possibility is satisfaction of the laws of physics. Physical possibility might then come in two kinds according to whether non-physical entities are admitted (if the laws of physics are regarded as pertaining only to physical entities non-physical entities do not violate the laws).

Logical possibility is the most liberal meaning of possibility for if a concept violates logic it is unrealizable by definition (one notion of logic is that it is the system of truths that obtain in all possible worlds). In the following section, possibility is logical possibility.

A limitless universe

A limitless universe is one in which all possibility obtains.

In pre-relativistic physics the universe was thought to have a present state that determined all future states. However, it is conceivable that the future would include all possible states. One way that could happen is if the laws of physics were different so that the future evolved sequentially—linearly or in some sort of repetition—through all possible states. But now, since we have relaxed the laws of physics, the context is not defined. What does or could ‘all possible states’ mean?

We could ask of the universe, what it would mean for it to realize all possibilities of any kind. We saw above that this kind of possibility would be logical possibility. This poses a number of problems. In the fist place logic applies to concepts. We could therefore draw some simple consequences. However, what are the consequences for the universe as a whole. Would our logics under or over specify the nature of a ‘limitless universe’. In the second place it is most probable that our modern logics have not exhausted logic itself. This suggests that the idea of a limitless universe requires re-conceptualization of logic and a computational ability whose surface we barely scratch. This is further complicated by the fact that while our categories—e.g. the physical ones of space, time, and cause and aesthetic ones of value and beauty—must apply to parts of the limitless universe they cannot (in all probability) obtain of that universe at large and the question then arises as to what does obtain. We can imagine a void in transaction with near formlessness in transaction with creation and destruction of form and structure. It is hard, however, to imagine the nature of that creation (except adaptation) and hard to imagine the categories but the ones we know (space, time, cause…) in varying degrees of definiteness.

A final concern is that while we do have some knowledge of the universe, this ‘empirical universe’ must be immensely limited if the universe is limitless. What part of our knowledge should be best regarded as determining the rest of the universe? We may call that part of our knowledge the determining basis or base that determines the entire universe (above we saw that in classical physics the present state of ‘a universe’ is an appropriate base). The question pertains to a deterministic ‘universe’ where the examples of base are initial or boundary conditions. If the classical concepts of time obtained a good candidate would be the present. However, in a limitless universe as we consider greater and greater removes from such a base, what the base determines diminishes into utter insignificance.

The actual universe

Some modifications

Clarify the idea of ‘base’, improve the terminology, and the argument that all bases are equivalent (in their insignificance).

Separate main from non main material in the chapter universe. Indent non main material.

Given the ‘empirical universe’—currently the roughly 13.8 billion year old and 92 billion light years across cosmos of big-bang origin—what can we say of the entire universe?

Points I tend to repeat

Repeated point—variety of being:

Repeated point—consistency with science and experience:

We can say that the universe may be the limitless universe except that the above has truth—the empirical cosmos is a partially determining basis for the universe. This is clearly consistent with logic because here limitlessness is defined as occurrence of what is logically possible. Further it is consistent with—does not contradict—science or experience since science and experiences show some parts of what is there but what is not there (there is a contradiction with any positivist view of science that asserts that what is not seen in science does not exist which very few hold explicitly but many hold tacitly). The following would not contradict neither science or logic. There is an unlimited array of formed structures (‘cosmoses’), some passing through ours at present. These occur against a background universe of void to barely formed structure; the universe has identity and being in acute, diffuse, and absent phases; the universe confers these powers on all individuals (within possibility).

Where in this vast realm of possibility does the universe lie? If we consider imaginable possibilities as constituting a probability space (it is not clear that this is valid), then the vastness of the space suggests that the universe must be near limitless. What limits this conclusion to a ‘suggestion’? First, that there is a base—the empirical universe. However, ‘far’ from this base its significance tends to zero. Secondly, if we count ‘all states’ once it is probable that almost all of the states be realized. However, to retrieve probability from possibility every state must be counted according to the number or measure of its occurrences—which under possibility has no limit. That the probability that every state occurs is certainty has been given a robust argument.

If each state occurs with certainty what is different is the density of distribution of the states. This is affected not only by frequency of occurrence but ‘lifetime’ of the states; we expect that both factors will be greater for those self-adapted states that originate by increment (variation and selection) through a sequence of self-adapted states. If we then recognize that the constraint of the given is not in fact a limit, the universe must be near limitless. But even if possibility imagined does not constitute probability space it is reasonable to think that the probability space is immense.

Simply, a robust ‘possibilist’ argument has been given that the universe is limitless (a proof will be given in the universal metaphysics). And if the universe is limitless, chosen empirical base has almost no effect on the entire universe. Alternatively, any part of the universe is equally a base for the entire universe.

The assertion that the universe is limitless can be developed into a worldview that is clearly ultimate in the sense of possibility. It would be interesting to do so here but the development is deferred till the universal metaphysics following a preliminary introduction to metaphysics. The main reason for this deferment is that the argument given in the universal metaphysics includes a proof of limitlessness and that the proof introduces the confidence of necessity and analytic tools for the development.

Science and logic

A fairly pervasive view of science is that its theories explain so much that they seem universal until shown inadequate by new information—theories and data—when a newer theory may replace the old. The old theory remains valid (accurate) in some domain while the new theory is valid in the old as well as newly revealed domains. The conceptual structure of the new theory and its predictions in new domains are vastly different from those of the old. However, if the universe is immensely different than the part that we know this view of science may be limited. An alternative and perhaps more prosaic view is that every good scientific theory is a fact in a limited domain. This view holds up regardless of what is revealed by new information and is therefore more robust. Further, if—as argued above and proved later—the universe is limitless then of the two views of science it is the second that will survive and obtain. Therefore in the following I take the second view.

If we consider all our truths, logic is the system of truths for all possible worlds while the sciences are true only of some worlds. This synthesis is now reinforced.

In the first place science has been regarded as inductive but logic deductive. However this contrast is inappropriate for consequences of the logics and the sciences are both deductive while arriving at sciences and logics is inductive in both cases. And both inductions are ‘empirical’—science over facts of the world and logic over facts of symbolic expression. These reinforcements does not depend on limitlessness.

The distinction that science is concerned with facts and logic with concepts (propositions) but this distinction not as sharp as it may seem. For a fact is a percept—a kind of concept and logic is concerned if only at the extreme points of its deductive process: premises and conclusions. Further, science is concerned not only with facts it gains its power from patterns expressed in conceptual terms called ‘laws’ and ‘theories’. What we call facts seem atomic and what we call laws seem to have structure. Perhaps, however, facts are complex entities that we (usually) see or interact with as atomic; and perhaps laws and theories are elements of even more compound structures relative to which the theories are elementary.

Another reinforcement is as follows. In the previous paragraph science and logic are seen to share in their experimental and conceptual character. It is likely that the complexities of possibility will shape the logic of the future in such ways that the truths of logic and science become indistinguishable. They will merge in a single entity that may be called logical realism, realism, or Logic. The distinction between science and logic will not become void a gradation—if not a continuum—rather than a sharp distinction. This may well be made necessary by limitlessness. The relative character of fact and compound will be seen necessary by limitlessness.

The void

The void is the absence of being.

When (if) the universe goes from non manifest to manifest the term ‘creation’ is inapplicable we may say that the manifest form emerges.

The void contains no laws. A void may be said to be associated with every ‘particle’ of being.

Under limitlessness a void is equivalent to every state and the number of voids has no significance. This argument depends on limitlessness. Later we will not take limitlessness for granted but argue from elementary properties of the void to limitlessness.

Knowledge

Knowledge is important because it enables negotiation of the world. It is important to destiny. Therefore the nature of knowledge—what it is—and criteria for validity are important.

A conception of knowledge as ‘justified true belief’ occurs in the writings of Plato and has dominated western philosophical thought on knowledge. This idea has recently been shown problematic via counterexamples due to Bertrand Russell and Edmund Gettier. These counterexamples are open to criticism and therefore not definitive. However, it should be noted that ‘justified true belief’ is at least as much criterion for as it is the nature or concept of knowledge.

What is knowledge? On a simple account knowledge is a map or picture of the thing known. The problem with this notion is that the concept is not the object and the idea begs the question of veracity or validity—how do we know that the alleged map is true or even that the idea of map is more than a metaphor? Consequently there are other notions of knowledge—it is relationship, an aspect of our being in the world; this notion was emphasized by certain existentialists and it has in its favor that it appears natural and non instrumental. Another notion of knowledge comes from its function—knowledge is that which purports (and proves) to being useful in negotiating the world and its criterion is success in negotiation.

We have seen above that there are cases of knowledge as perfect map! That it is perfect means that (a) the idea of mapping is not just metaphorical and (b) the ‘map’ is perfect. It is important that we have not shown this to be universal. But it is also important that we have given more than trivial examples of it. The examples are of course more than mere examples which include that there is being, regarding experience—there is experience and the experience that there is a real world that contains experience is true, there is a universe, that—trivially—the universe that contains all laws, and that the void contains no law. Some simple assertions regarding identity, space and time, and that ‘it is possible that the universe is limitless’ are also true. The assertion that knowledge breaks down into the perfect and the practical (and that some knowledge claims are simply wrong or illusory) is also true.

In the development so far—except some discussions in the section on—we established cases of perfect knowledge in that the concept perfectly matches the object (and that the matching has meaning). Clearly not all claims to knowledge are perfect. Remaining knowledge claims are practical in that (though they are not known to be better rough and in that metaphor of representation in such cases is not known to be better than rough) they may be useful (instrumental) and they may be perfect from the being-in-the-world point of view (in which of course ‘frustration’ is also perfect).

Later, especially in interaction with the perfect, some aspects of the what is known as practical will be revealed or improved to the perfect while some will remain obviously or not known to be better than practical. A divide between the perfect and the practical will remain even as understanding improves.

Since the perfect knowledge so far concerns being and the universe it may constitute a boundary or container for all knowledge and the interaction between the perfect and the practical. This will turn out to be the case. The perfect will be seen to bound and illuminate the practical and the practical will ground and show the way to the perfect. From the point of view of perfect faithfulness, the distinction will remain. However, it will vanish according to instrumental criteria (especially there will be no limit to cosmoses where local knowledge cannot become perfect but need not do so because it functions positively as an instrument on the way). Finally all knowing is and remains perfect in the sense of being-in-the-world.

METAPHYSICS

Review: metaphysics

Selection, order and titles of topics? New topics?

Introduction to metaphysics

The universal metaphysics

The universe has no limit to being and identity. If power is a measure of what is realized, there is no limit to the power of being—of the universe.

That is, the single constraint on realization of concepts is realism—over all extensivity (e.g. duration and spatial extension) the actual and the possible are identical. Our best and approximate direct knowledge of realism is in logic and the science (data and laws) of our cosmos.

I.e., the universe has identity and manifestation in acute, diffuse, and absent phases; there is no limit on the variety, peaks and their magnitudes and dissolution (e.g., of cosmological systems), and extensivity of being. Peaks are transient but peaking and self are eternal (more generally limitless in kind, quality and extensivity).

This power is conferred on individuals—the contrary would be a limit on being. Realization of the ultimate is given; individuals participate in self as universal identity. While in limited form realization is an endless journey in being.

Objects

Realism

Cosmology

Normal world

Review: normal world

Add substance. Normal worlds are characterized by substance (as approximation).

Order of the following topics in this division.

That individuals in our world experience limits, that our world has limits (laws) is not a contradiction of the limitlessness of the universe. A limitless universe—there can be only one—necessarily has parts that have temporary limits. Our cosmos is ‘necessary’.

It is the problem of a normal world to find a way into the universal. This is not an avoidance; it is ‘the problem’ in that our worlds and the universal are necessary to one another. See the discussion on realization below.