No Limits, 3rd man falacy, Just Do It, self-reference

Edges are interesting things. Do they exist? Take the edge of a chair. Does it exist? If so then where is it? Is it the last row of atoms on the chair or the first row of atoms in the air - or is it between these? If it's between these and between the electrons clouds that compose the atoms, infact we are saying it is an invisible line drawn in empty space... hmmm sounds like an illusion to me. And of course given an arbitrary photo of an atomic boundary between gas and solid phased substances like a chair and the air one would need to zoom out an awful lot before seeing the chair and then zooming in to declare the nature of the boundary. Yup it does exist! Same conclusion that Buddha came to 2600 years ago. Agregate forms do not exist in reality, only in the mind.

We know this from painting. Naive painters draw the lines around things before filling in the colours and covering up the lines again. The lines don't exist they are artefacts of human vision and human understanding of the world - a map so to speak of the mental processes involved in worldliness.

On holiday I realised that this is all a version of the 3rd man falacy - which lies behind a lot of the illusions and mysteries of this blog. This is the classic critique of Plato's theory of forms. In that theory Plato decides that things are alike in type because they share resemblance to an archetype. What makes a table a "table"? For Plato it bears enough resemblance to the exemplary Table in the realm of forms. In creationalism all members of a species are members of that species because they have resemblance (with variation) to a hypothetical exemplary example of that species envisaged by God. (In Neo-Darwinism there is no exemplary example and it is interesting why species are discontinuous. The familar zoo forms are just temporary islands in the soup of Life. 2 oppositing theories... hmmm something interesting gonna happen here). Anyway Plato's criticism of Forms is that if two real tables are tables because they bear resemblance to an ideal Table, then do not all three tables bear resemblance to a Fourth ideal and so on ad infinitum.

And, so walking around the coast and into river esturies I wondered at what point the sea became the river? There are obvious answers to this but they aren't very realistic because there is no discontinuity to see, just arbitrary definitions. In reality we are definitely walking along the coast and then there is a transition and then we are definitely walking along a river bank. Now the problem with putting a limit to the river and the sea is that we wonder as above what the boundary belongs to. Is it river or is it sea? And if this boundary really exists then doesn't it have to have a boundary between itself and the sea on one side and the river on the other... and so on ad infinitum. The hypothesis that there are boundaries between things is like Plato's theory of Forms ... just as he projected a phantasmogorical entity to support our belief in forms, so we project phantoms to support our belief in boundaries and edges.

Now seeing that boundaries don't really exist the foundations of property as a natural law get shaken. But if it is no a natural law then what is it? Just an illusion? Interesting however that just as people with psychosis can make awful misjudgements and do great harm, so people under the misconception of property can do the same thing. In a world which over produces food people can go hungry... and I assume it's not just the logistics of transport which makes them go hungry, its because it doesn't "belong" to them: a non-existent barrier makes them die!

A similar example has confused me for years also: that of thought and action. Especially if you have OCD you can contemplate the origin of Action and Will quite obsessively and be like a dog chasing its tail. How do I know what I am going to do? If I don't know then how do I know I will agree with what I do? If I don't know then how is it me that is doing it? Especially so if i don't agree with what I am about to do? If I do know that I am about to do then what decides when I am going to do it? We can contemplate doing something without actually doing it, so where does that impulse for action come from? If I don't know etc etc is that impulse me... and if I do know then is thinking the impulse enough to make you do something? Can you think yourself into action? If so then can you decide what you think, which will make you do something? If you don't know what your thoughts are going to be then are they yours... etc etc

I don't know if you followed that (maybe it's just as OCD thing). But behind it all one realises that actually like Nike says "Just Do It". That is the bottom line. As a writer once said when questioned on his new play, "you either talk about it or you write it". I've noticed that people often discuss the opposite of what they end up doing. A girl will discuss leaving a guy, only to find later that she got engaged. This is immediacy, spontaneity and freedom - acting in the moment. It is not that we don't think, but we only think about what is present at hand, we don't enter the reflective pre-planning of events because I realise its Third Man Falacy. I explain...

Searching for a material existing object to support our belief in ourselves and our choices and our plans requires Us to make choices and plans and then don't we need to search for another self to have found the first self .. ad infinitum. This is the core of the self-reference criticism. Self is fleeting and temporary, it doesn't actually exist, it can't be an entity which it can then relate to in a fixed way. Now quite whether that can be formalised I still don't know, but it applies to more than just philosophy like here.