Journey in Being

Toward Brevity

CONTENTS

Toward Brief Treatment

D = definition; $ = there is

B = being; P = power; M = matter, materialism; U = universe, all being; V= Void, absence of being; E = experience; RW = real world; M = metaphysics; MU = universal metaphysics

A = subjective awareness, e = example

Being

x B = x is. $x (x B). | e₁ : PB over PS.

The meaning of being is that which is there; there is being. This is a first indication of the power of being over substance.

Metaphysics is knowledge of being. Since we know there is being there is metaphysics. We will develop a powerful universal metaphysics the universe is limitless.

Experience

E = A. $A. | e₂ : PB.

The first meaning of experience is subjective awareness; there is experience—a second example of the power of being.

$x (x is E of E). $x (x is EE). $x (x is EB + Ex).

Primitive E = EB as object without EE.

It has been said that all experience is reflexive in that it is self aware. Certainly, some experience must be known in experience in order to know and talk of experience. However, while higher experience often carries reflexive awareness this reflexivity is not necessary to the nature of experience. Up to some level of primitivism, experience is not reflexive; this is seen below.

Experience grounds sentient being (there is a brief development of the metaphysics that does not require the concept of experience).

Being is not dependent on being experienced. There is a real world (alternative descriptions are merely alternate labelings or contain inherent contradiction). But being is known in experience which conditions the knowledge.

For knowledge we never get out of experience; we find further aspects and levels of experience; therefore we never need to get outside experience.

Experience is relation. The content of experience is called a concept.

The distinction between elementary and higher experience is of degree, not kind. Elementary experience has only the passive form of concept (mental content—the concept of which includes higher concept and percept). Higher experience has also an active form—concept formation or imagination. Perception is also active: experience contributes to a percept in giving wholeness to an aspect.

Experience is associated with attitude and action. Any further identification of attitude and action with ‘mind’ is unwarranted. Experience is the single characteristic of mind.

Heidegger analyzes our being in order to find the nature of being… and to provide particular understanding of our being. Here, in part due to the universal metaphysics to be developed we find that for ultimate purposes the simple analysis of experience is sufficient to both tasks. This is a first example of a lack of need for certain complex and difficult analyses (which is not to say that there is no value or need to such analyses).

On materialism, elementary experience must an elementary aspect of matter—namely, elementary relationship (known or unknown); it is higher experience, not experience as such, that emerges with complex organization (that results from variation and selection). This is sufficient to explain the essential characteristics of our form of higher experience and consciousness (variation and selection are not necessary to the explanation but provide an understanding of the origin of higher experience).

Details of the argument concerning materialism. (1) Materialism is the view that the universe is matter. Strict materialism adds the assertion that mind is not matter. (2) On strict materialism there can be behavior as if experiential (as if there is mind) but there cannot be experience (mind). (3) Therefore strict materialism is false. (4) On materialism, mind must be among the known or unknown elements of matter. This mind need not be recognizable as our experience of ‘higher’ mind. (5) Since experience (mind) is relation, the primitive experiential elements must be interaction—i.e., ‘force’. (6) Dualism is the view that mind and matter exist independently as distinct kinds. However, interaction contradicts the essence of dualism. Therefore dualism is false. (7) Materialism can be viewed another way. It is that the elements are interaction and that the interacting is an aspect of the elements. Then materialism and this particular kind of idealism or experientialism are equivalent.

Without any metaphysics the elemental character of experience is unknown. Later, from the universal metaphysics we will find the same conclusions in the following modified form. The conclusion will be that we may label being-as-being ‘matter’ or first order being, and being-in-relation as ‘mind’ or second order being; that, in contrast to the material case, first order being does not invariably have mind but when mind does emerge it is second order and that in any context where mind is absent it may always emerge; and this emergence will sometimes have the explanation that a more definite form of matter has emerged but at other times will have the only explanation that such things do happen without mechanism (as is essential to the fundamental nature of being revealed in the universal metaphysics).

Meaning

As on the written page’ this shall go to ‘experience’

A concept and its object constitute meaning. The concept is the sense, the object the reference. Although explicit reference is often absent there is almost invariably some implicit or oblique reference.

What are recognized as multiple objects may count as a single one; and an object need not be concrete or entity-like.

In linguistic meaning, meanings are further associated with symbols whose only meaning is in this association. Strengths of language are the possibilities of brevity, linearity, recorded form, common lexicon and grammar, and therefore suitability via efficiency, analyticity, and transparency to efficiency of thought, communication, preservation, and transmission.

Language is given meaning in the common context which is therefore also its origin, source of stability and change.

In common use word, concept, and object are often efficiently conflated. This may lead to occasional confusion and difficulties of meaning. It is then immensely powerful to distinguish the concept and the object and even the name of the concept and the name of the object.

There is a classic problem called the problem of the non-existent object that is exemplified in the next sentence. If unicorns do not exist, what is it that is said to not exist? It is easy to give a simple and adequate response to this ‘problem’ in terms of meaning—we can form the concept of a unicorn but recognize that there are no objects of the concept (discovered so far). It is telling to think about the case of the existent object. If I say ‘tigers exist’, my statement has no meaning without some concept of ‘tiger’.

Often a paradox may be illuminated by restatement in non-paradoxical form. Thus the sentence ‘This sentence is true.’ is true if true and false if false: it has no determinate truth value. That a sentence has meaning does not imply that it has a truth value. This sheds light on the paradoxical sentence ‘This sentence is false.’ Not every sentence with meaning has a truth value. Now when I say ‘the sun is shining’ I usually imply more than that the phrase in quotes has meaning; in having it in the form of an assertion I usually imply that it is true. That is possible because ‘The sun is shining’ is true when the sun is shining; the sentence has clear reference that enables determination of truth and falsity. On the other hand the sentence ‘this sentence is true’ does not have clear reference because although the sentence clearly refers to itself it also refers to a truth value that does not necessarily exist. The freedom of concept formation enables reference to things that do not exist (violation of fact) and cannot exist (usually a violation of logic).

The constraints on concept formation are those of meaning, fact, and logic. If a sentence has meaning, it may still violate science and or logic. This shows a unification of science and logic. Here what is comparable is deduction under science and deduction under logic. The traditional comparison of deduction under logic and induction of scientific theories is not appropriate. What is comparable? First the two deductions just stated. And, second, the induction of science and the induction of a system of logic.

In clarifying the nature of being and experience it was highly effective to analyze what we mean by the terms.

Thus the analysis of meaning is a powerful tool of understanding. Some writers have claimed that that is all that is necessary to understanding and knowledge. That, however, is not true.

It was true for our analysis of being and experience because the terms refer to explicit knowledge that we already have. However, we could not push our knowledge of being so far as to reveal that in some cosmological system (ours) quantum theory describes a phase of being. That requires a hypothetical framework to explain experiments that show deviations from classical physics.

In formulating quantum theory, analysis of prior meaning is insufficient. However, one way of looking at how we arrived at quantum physics is to think that we have synthesized meaning.

We may then say that all knowledge results from analysis and synthesis of meaning.

When we reflect that except for unexplainable, e.g. random, sources of knowledge (which even if it should occur are not to be labeled a method) the original source of truth must have been in synthesis of meaning (even in logic) we see that it is synthesis that is the original source and that once synthesis has occurred but not with explicit recognition or recollection we may then analyze explicitly what has been synthesized without explicit knowledge of it.

With a similar exception to the above we may see that all transformation of being is the result of emergence, synthesis and analysis of being.

When we develop the universal metaphysics we will find that we can eliminate the exception.

Metaphysics

This is the section The idea of metaphysics

The concept of metaphysics

Metaphysics is knowledge of being

…i.e., precise knowledge; however the meaning of ‘precision’ is open.

There is such knowledge, i.e. metaphysics (above and far more in the sequel).

Metaphysics may—and will—require action and transformation (realization) for completion.

The idea of metaphysics—criticisms and response

The great criticisms of metaphysics have concerned

Realism—metaphysics is not experiential, it is essentially speculative; system—the systematic metaphysics being speculative are imposed, not emergent; its overweening nature—the all encompassing ‘grand narrative’ that ignores the local; history—as we move on to other concerns (local narrative, metaphysics of experience, metaphysics as the study of abstract objects…) the meaning of metaphysics is in transition

Response to the criticisms

Here metaphysics and any system will be emergent from experience—tying together the universal and the local. Here, metaphysics will not be all encompassing but it will emerge where it is complete and closed; and where and in what sense ever and essentially incomplete—where there is no other way but hypothesis, action, and correction; and the complete and the incomplete-able will complement one another in a way that is perfect, not in precision, but in that no better can be done on the path of realization. And here, given the restitution of an original meaning of metaphysics, there is no conflict with alternate modern uses of the term.

Metaphysics—its range and ideal

Since knowledge and human being are part of being the most complete and possible metaphysics would seek to include what are sometimes thought the province of other divisions of thought—epistemology: knowledge, its nature, range, validity, and value (and the special topics of logic, science, and realism); and, ethics—value or significance generally. That is we might hope that metaphysics might deliver itself and in so doing, it might deliver us the universe.

The foregoing is sometimes a tacit ideal of human knowledge—we will so systematize it that it will do our work and we will not ever again have to do anything more.

Now the metaphysics of this narrative will not deliver this ideal. Intuition suggests that the ideal as stated is false as an ideal even if it were possible. But the metaphysics will show it impossible and therefore undesirable.

In a sense, however, the metaphysics will deliver more. It will deliver aspects of all that we might have asked in the first paragraph of this section. However, it will also show in what directions completeness and closedness will obtain and in what directions there must be openness. It will show the ultimate character of both the completeness and the openness—completeness in that a foundation of being is given and forever closed but openness in that the variety and extensivity of being are without limit and in which directions experience and science and form of life are without limit… ever open. And we will recognize that it is not some system, some metaphysics that has delivered this—it is human experience including thought which always sees and may also recognize the mesh of the complete and complete-able and the incomplete and incomplete-able.