If we believe in a soul this gives us an under-pinning to our understanding of Life that lies outside life. We understand life as things that happen to us in a period of time that began with birth and will end with death; we however existed before this time and will exist after this time. Thus, our understanding of life gets built upon a more fundamental belief than life itself, that of an immortal soul which doesn't "live" in the same sense. Of course this doesn't really solve much theoretically because we still don't understand souls and that world, but practically it gives us a step of removal from what is pertinent namely life.
If however we don't believe in any metaphysics we run into the SRH because we will try to define life in terms of itself. This impredicativity of life it occurred to me at 4am as I watched the snow falling is why Life is such an enigma, and why I have this blog.
It is to do with boundaries. We wish to put a line around Life so that we might know what it is like, where it is placed, how far it extends, what shape it is. We use terminology every day that implies that we have a fix on life: most humourously the Americanism "get a life", but all manner of decisions regarding what is the Good Life and the Bad Life. Our choices are very often governed by a sense of what life is, or should be, especially how our life will look to others or against the established norms and fashions.
But logically there is a problem with the above. Life includes "us" ourselves. We are the product of our life. Our beliefs, our attitudes, our expectations are all products of our upbringing and the environment and context we find ourself. To put a limit around life from within is the SRH problem of using ourselves as the standard from which to measure and construct ourselves. The result is vapid and banal. This is the source of the intractability of life.
A belief in something "Outside" this sphere offers us the foundation we crave to construct a hegemony of life, but without that outside foundation we can say nothing fixed.
On the positive side this impossibility of definition of ourselves and Life means that "we" find ourselves infinite and without boundaries; there is nothing from which to construct boundaries from! But this level of freedom is very hard to accept because it means on the other hand having to let go of the idea of a solid foundation of ourself (the "soul" so to speak).
Not accepting the infinite we find ourselves imprisoned within the walls of beliefs. Sometimes this offers us security and protection, other times these walls are fears that constrict our life. Why do people have phobias, fears and anxieties? It is not something they don't want! Rather they actually relish having fears because these fears provide solid foundations for their life and thereby ironically proof that they exist. There is security and solidity in the absoluteness of impenetratable fears. Don't go in there that is a place of great fear says the map, and thereby we have fixed signpost that we will never explore and so remains invulnerable to disproof. We have certainty from fear where actually there is none... but that fear of Nothing is simply another fear that blocks us from discovering the truth about ourself that logically we can never provide an account of ourself based upon ourself.
SO the SRH ought lead to the fundamental insight into Life that this blog seeks and thereby liberation. Yet the problem remains of constructing a proof (undoubtedly reductio-ad-absurdum) that a contradiction lies in constructing something with itself, for example the simplest such construction:
T = {T}
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