While on holiday on Snowdon to celebrate my 40th Birthday I was taking a rest on Y Lliwedd when this development of a thought from a few weeks before struck me. Originally I had mused that “ownership” is a thought, but who owns that thought? In one sense there is the ownership of the original thought many millennia ago when language was first constructed. Before that territories would have simply been fought over without any recourse to reasons or labels. The other sense is this actual thought that I am having when I think of “ownership”. That thought is “my” thought so surely I own it. However what about the thought “there is no ownership”, do I own that? This raises deep questions about the nature of ownership but is subject from a previous blog.
On Y Lliwedd on 8th April I switched the idea to the think about something existing. The idea may be about the existence of something e.g. the existence of the mountain, but the idea itself exists when I am thinking it. So we have the Quine’s use/mention distinction in action. In one sense we are using the idea of existence to say that the mountain exists, in the other sense it exists itself. This is what I have referred to before, and now call, the “right angle of Zen”, which is the way in which the “present moment” presents an orthogonal dimension to the space of worldly events; no matter what is happening the “present moment” is at right angles to this. Now naturally I asked does the idea of existence (when I am thinking it) refer to its own existence. That is in the moments when I am thinking about existence itself, do I contemplate the quality of the thoughts themselves as existing in that moment. To answer this I considered whether an idea could ever be about its own non-existence. Can an idea ever consider the occasion when we are not thinking it? Well it can but only in the sense of use above, the idea of non-existence can never be congruent with its own nature because by definition we aren’t thinking it when it becomes itself! The idea of non-existence is true to itself only when we don’t think it, and the moment we start to contemplate it it becomes only a reference to an already lost entity. Like using a torch to search the darkness our very investigation destroys what we were looking for. We cannot think non-existence. But since existence and non-existence are only opposites of one another if we can’t authentically think of non-existence we have problems with existence. From notes: “If an idea cannot be about its non-existence then it cannot be about its existence either.”
After returning from holiday it dawned on me that meant that the SRH was really to do with existence.
I use the logical syntax:
(x) : for all x it is true that
(Ex) : there exists x such that
¬ : not/negation
<statement>
Thus the proof of God is this:
The simple sentence “this sentence exists” seems unproblematic:
- <(Ex) x is this sentence>
But consider:
- <¬(Ex) x is this sentence>, or equivalently
- <(x) x is not this sentence>
These sentences are equivalent and are false because the sentence itself serves as an entity which contradicts them.
Now we can’t say that the sentences are “not sentences” because that would eliminate the entity we need to make them false. So it is not that self-reference is impossible as was naively proposed by the SRH. However there is something odd.
The sentences are necessarily false. Once we have read the sentence we cannot then deny that the sentence exists, for what did we just read? So by the time we have understood the sentence we are already committed to its existence; we are already committed to its falsity. It is an analytic statement false by virtue of the definition of its own words. However it is a posteriori to the extent that we must have experienced it to have proof that it exists. (This is in contrast to Kant’s synthetic a priori.) It is thus a necessary contradiction.
It follows that its negation (statement 1) is not just true but necessarily true. It is a tautology, an analytic a posteriori.
So all the sentences above carry no information that the reader isn’t already familiar with by virtue of reading them. While they seem to make profound statements they are actually meaningless just as “Black swans are black” doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know: if we can find a black swans we already know it is black. More generally then for any predicate:
clearly doesn’t tell us anything i.e. anything which is S and has property B has property B… i.e. all swans(S) which are black(B) are black(P).
What this means is that no entity can carry information about its existence or any feature which is required to identify it.
This means, and this is the SRH, that entities can only be meaningful about the existence of other entities apart from themselves.
To put it another way: we are very unlikely to hear that we have died and if we did we would know it was false. Thus the statement that we are alive is meaningless to us. It is this meaninglessness which means that we must be silent when it comes to issues of our self-existence and non-existence. Death, or indeed any word, doesn’t make sense here.
In contrast however other people can die and so we can make meaningful statements about their being alive or dead. When someone else makes a statement that we are alive then it is meaningful, but only from their point of view. This is social consciousness. If we attribute meaning to “I am alive” it is because we have adopted a social consciousness. This is not a good thing because why would we do this when we can see with our own eyes the truth? I suspect that the search for fame and social status derives from this weakness of our own eyes. The need to make noise and words (as I do here) is also such a weakness. For such a consciousness Death is a very real thing.
From this stems all the rest of the SRH. Most importantly that no system can exist independent of another because if it was an Ultimate theory of Everything it would need another system to state meaningfully that it did indeed existed as the ultimate system.
Likewise for every entity that seeks knowledge of its existence there is always an Other outside it that it must acknowledge first. This is the God Proof. Not the proof of a particular entity amongst all the others (the naive view of God) but the principle that there is always and necessarily an entity outside.
This also explodes the narcissistic, solipsistic world view. No self can know its existence before it knows the existence of another, and worse for the self it is the view point of the other that it adopts as its own proof of its existence! If it really looked at itself with its own eyes it would be speechless because what can its eyes “see” that his “seeing” hasn’t already told it?
