The World is Relative, custom/thoughts are Absolute

 In the modern world we are spoilt with the number of analogies to the human cognitive framework. We have a plethora of machines all based upon humans with which to think about this. But the camera is a great starting point for vision.

The pin-hole camera (camera obscura) has been known for centuries. Anything the camera is pointed at will appear as a relatively focused image on the screen behind. Relatively upside down.

Upside down is an unusual side effect that throws the casual observer.

So it looks like we see the world upside down. And yet it looks the "right way" around?

Well that is simply about Relativity. What we see is that everything has the "same" orientation. We have no Absolute point of reference like the stop sign. There is a subtle logical problem in the diagram above. If the "stop sign" on the retina (Retina-Stop) here represents what we actually experience, then the "stop sign" outside the eye (World-Stop) cannot then be what we experience. The stop signs although linked by light are different stop signs. The question for the viewer of this image is that if we now conclude that everything we see is upside down then actually the World-Stop here is upside down, and the Retina-Stop here is the right way around. But World-Stop was our initial reference to decide we see things upside down. Turns out we see them the right way around, and the world is what is upside down.

Its the same as the World Map. There is no reason to have the North Pole at the top. Its just the people who drew the map were from the North and with the Pole Star above them they thought in terms of North as going up, and South as going down. But it could just as easily be the other way around.

All we know in both situations is that the World-Stop and the Retina-Stop are opposite orientations, and the North Pole opposed the South Pole, that is the relative structure. But you cannot apply an Absolute to this and declare either the World Upside Down or the North the top of the globe. You may "adopt" an absolute to remove ambiguity but this is just convention ands custom. But it makes no difference what you chose.

Now its interesting that in everyday life we literally never run into any ambiguity about what is "up" in the world. The only time would be in opticians and people working in optics where images get inverted.

The reason is that everyone has the same world inversion going on. And because it is constant it almost never shows up in the human world. we are all looking at the world the same way and that is all that matters. The actual orientation has NO MEANING.

It looks like orientation should matter. We can clearly see an "up" and a "down". I mean people say lets go upstairs, and we dive or jump we know all about where is up and down. But it is relative. We deduce the down from what we see, not from some absolute reference. It is "immanent" to use a fancy word. The "up/down" we use in daily life is deduced from within the world. It not deduced from an absolute.

So in actual fact the Retina-Stop and the World-Stop are both pointing up, just in different worlds!

The paradox arises cos we are comparing them in a novel way that we never normally do. The idea of "getting outside your head to see the world as it is" is a contradiction. It is like getting outside the plane to see what flying is really like. You get outside the plane you stop flying! You get outside the head you stop seeing! There is SRH in here, because we are always looking for an absolute, but forget that what we have is built upon a scaffold of conditions. You step off the scaffold you change a lot more than you assumed.

Someone I know once said, "do you realise you've never had a break from life." Thing is "realising" is built upon the scaffold of life. You get a break, you stop realising.

Now unfortunately recent musing show that f(g, h) where f is a function that can deduce whether the function h() is a component of function g() leads to contradiction. So at the logic level the idea of working out the scaffolding upon which we stand is impossible.

It is like we are flying in a plane, that we can't deduce we are flying upon, wondering what flying is really like.

Now this all starts to gets very ungrounded and destabilising for the psyche. With no firm place to stand, and no way of even knowing exactly what we are standing on, the world seems very insubstantial and uncertain.

But STOP. What a load of nonsense. And here is the problem of "thinking." Famously Wittgenstein infuriated Russel by arguing in such a way that Russel could not disprove that there was an elephant in the room. "Thinking" can do strange things when we get absorbed into it.

There is a stanza in epistemology, that I realise I have forgotten, about all the doubt of even the university quadrangle existing but it ends with the searing pain of stepping on a pin and the lack of doubt in that.

Its a rather brutal illustration of the heart of Buddhist meditation. Thoughts are just thoughts, and the mind is so wide and great that it can observe thoughts crossing it like clouds across the sky. Yet humans have a tendency to get absorbed into these phenomena and ride those clouds as though they were real. Soon we can end up even doubting the ground on which we stand. But we don't stand, do we?, cos we are just riding clouds!

However the above analysis is an immanent analysis of thought. That deep within thought we like to think we have grasped some solid absolute and we "know" for sure the way things are. This leads to all the bigotry and confusion of the world. It is good for the searcher of truth, and the bigot to feel groundlessness at times cos it reminds us that we are just in the realm of thoughts.

To feel grounded again we simply put the thoughts down and return to the world "as it is." We observe that we are thinking, we observe that we are not thinking. We observe that we are seeing. We observe that we are not seeing (perhaps we close our eyes). Obviously observing that we are not thinking is a very special moment indeed! It means the mind has finally broken from the chains of thoughts. RIP Descartes. I believe some psychologists say that ALL mental illness begins with not being able to master our thoughts. It begins small, but gradually takes over and changes our brain chemistry and becomes a full blown psychiatric condition. True all people are different and some more susceptible than others, so it may appear that some people are string and can survive very unhealthy mental worlds, but that doesn't make attachment to solid thoughts good.

And so when we feel that things are grounded and we really know what is "up" we need take a break and reflect on the fact it is relative to some other things we are holding on to, and that we can't ever know how much foundation we have stood upon to get there. We just stop and look at the world again with fresh eyes.