Where does the light come from?

At the moment this is the core issue. And have been through this a lot but just running through again.

The simplest level is we look at a light bulb and we see light coming from it. Great in Humphrey Davy style we have light!

But what this question is looking at is how does the "vision" of light occur. We close our eyes and the light stops. The light bulb is still shining but something else has changed. The "vision" has stopped.

We can dream of a light bulb. There is light, but there is no light bulb. Where is this light? 

In the West we conclude roughly "the brain" is where the vision is, or the brain is like a light bulb and it switches on and creates the vision with in itself. We have a schematic like below and roughly assign the "vision" to this object:

But this is a rabbit hole. It hasn't got us any closer to what we actual experience. We have just slapped a big label over our experience saying that bit over there is the physical light bulb from shops and when we switch it on it produces light which we then see and that switches on the "vision" from my brain that I was born with.

It makes sense that you cannot see the brain when you look, because the brain is how we look. That would be like a camera taking a photo of its own film plate. That is nonsense. This is why we see a light bulb and not a brain when we see. This is SRH you can't see your brain and what you see at the same time because brain is how we see. So you could argue the "identity theory" that what we see is the same as the brain. You can't have Hesperus (Evening Star) and Phosphorus (Morning Star) in the sky at the same time, because they are the same thing (Venus). Phosphorus can never see Hesperus. The Brain can never See itself.

So we are saying that the brain is the source of the vision. But we would say that the brain is part of the objective world. It is a thing that after we die a surgeon can remove and put in a jar. If we are saying that the "vision" of light that we have via our eyes is made by the brain then we are saying that the vision comes from the same objective world that the light bulb belongs! The vision of light does not come from us. In fact where is there anything that is "from me" and is "mine"?

This is the core issue. When we separate the light into the light coming from the bulb and light coming from our brain or consciousness we are trying to separate things into "mine" and "not mine." And that is the issue.

Really nothing that we see comes from "me"!!!!!! Yet we persist in believing that this is "my" experience and "I" am somehow intimately involved in experience. Worse we persist in believing that I somehow contribute something to the world.

This spills out into thinking this is "my" brain. But if you actually are the brain then whose brain is it? It can't belong to itself! Suppose we break a couple of cups and their handles fall off. When we reassemble them we decide which handle belongs to which cup. We say this handle belongs to that cup. But we don't say the handle belongs to itself. Why then do we say that my brain is mine?

And that raises the whole issue of subjectivity and personhood.

So a lot comes from this core issue of trying to separate things into "world" and "me."

In Upanishad Hinduism "Tat Tvam Asis" concludes that seen correctly the Self and the World are the same. But this is also to say that there is no self separate from the world. What is world is self, and what is self is world.

Buddha says that "all things are non-self." We have a clear statement from someone who got as far as seeing this correctly that nothing we experience has any links to a "me". There is no clue of our self in the world. The vision of light that appears when we see a light belongs to the world not to us. It belongs to the same world as the lamp itself.

But wait a second isn't this Naïve Realism? This is the opening belief we probably had as a child that what we experience is exactly what is there. We have no split into objective and subjective. It happens pretty fast that we realise that people see different things, or at least different sides of the world. But to get there we have developed this problem idea of "separate people." We have installed in the world of experience these "people" who are centres of experience. It is this move that distorts the world into a billion separate bubbles.

Yet we cannot maintain that there is just one uniform world of experience. There are parts. The light bulb is one layer. The arising of consciousness is another layer. Light "exists" physically and also mentally if we wish to examine it and start to split it up. And there is the layer of "self" as well.

What is difficult is to unpeel the layer of self and get beyond it. The problem, as said in previous-but-one post, is "who" is getting beyond this layer? Well by definition we can take no one with us. To experience more fully we need be able have nothing in any part of it. We are not the light-bulb is pretty simple. We are not the consciousness is a bit harder. We are not the belief that experience is happening to someone is very hard. Yet it is easy to see this is true, but very hard to actually step beyond, because we habitually want to take our self with whatever move we make. The issue here is to take no one with us when we step beyond having a receiver of experience!

The light comes from no one, and it goes to no one!

I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member

There is a lot of truth to this.

I think Groucho meant that if someone invites you to join their club it feels like they are the one to gain from the relationship and so you end up being used. You want to get into a club that doesn't want you so you can wear it as a badge and gain, while they take the loss.

But being Jewish, and given my suspicion of Jewish thinking*, I wonder if Groucho looked at it the other way.

If you have doubts about yourself then if you were the club you would not want yourself? So you only identify with clubs who do not want you. You feel kinship when you are not wanted, cos that is your view of yourself. And that is the irony you want to belong where you are not wanted and vice versa.

So I didn't have a contract renewed recently owing to a falling out with the company. Quite whether it started with me losing interest, and they responding to that, or they responding to some feature of me and me losing interest I cannot calibrate or know. Or perhaps they are one and the same, and we only divide it into sides afterwards. These things are always two sided. Anyway it ceased to work. But what has occupied my thinking since is how the individuals in the "organisation" closed ranks and behaved as an entity in quite a complex way to secure my removal. I am mostly unconscious to this kind of thing and only realised as I analysed afterwards. I have seen this happen to other people. It is actually quite extraordinary how groups self-organise to "include" and "exclude" people. This is a really fundamental part of human make up.

Contrary to this view however we spend a lot of our time in the Liberal Democratic West being told we are individuals free to chose etc. But little is said of the collective identities that we also have. And this is not just individuals buying their season tickets and taking their seats to watch their football team, it is a genuine "organism" that exists that takes over our behaviour. In Europe we are aware and even celebrate this in ideas of Solidarity and State. But in the US it is itself a rejected entity. So ironic (and Ayn Rand was vaguely aware of this) that as a collective the Libertarians organise to exclude the collective. You can't out-think the "collective." As an individual you are already beaten before you even pick up the collective language of your thoughts to think about it.

I think Monty Python intended this to be mockery of religious followers who do not think for themselves and just recite mindlessly whatever their guru teaches them. Obviously Monty Python skipped the passages in all religions that warn people of this and encourage them to embody the laws and become a living example of the law not a dead reciter of laws. In fact is this not one of Jesus' main points to the establishment of his age that they do not embody the laws they protect:

 "The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them." [Matthew 23:2-4]

And in Buddhism there is a whole word Ehipassiko which means come and see and test for yourself.

So the irony really is on Monty Python and the fact that it is them who are the collective reciting "individuals" like robots and not really understanding what it is to be free. Those people in the clip reciting "we are all individuals" are actually all the liberals of the Western Democracies who have been told they are free but actually have no idea what this means other than get a job, do some shopping and go and vote, or dig deep into "oneself" and be creative and create new products. Strangely all things the establishments tells them to do. And why? Well I suspect we are told to do this because it makes the economy grow and all those rich people invested in the system then get richer. So the ruling class are actually plugged in to the system in a way that makes them encourage the working class to seek employment and work. Not sure there is a conspiracy here, it is just that this self reinforcing loop has become socially stable and no one has got wise to it yet (Marxism for one tried to but not taken shape yet, or the "collective" has excluded it for now).

Being an "individual" then in fact turns out to be a collective action. And our whole life is really made up of joining collectives that influence our behaviour which we confuse with "my choice" because we belong to Western Liberal Democracies that tell its collective this. Without a strong sense of irony none of this makes any sense ;-)

But what really came home to me in being "excluded" was how this sets up a division between people. I presume people who join a club want to be there. And so when someone enters the club who does not fit or who threatens the club they work to exclude them and protect the club and themselves.

Yet in the grander scheme of things, especially in our modern world of inclusivity, we are all humans and the idea of someone being outcast is something we don't like. We think of the Jews being persecuted by the Nazis as the epitome of what happens when a whole group gets excluded. I prefer to remember the American Indians who were excluded by the Western Imperialist Capitalist economy that got imported unknowingly on the backs of the colonists. In both cases millions of people were hunted down and killed. We definitely think this is not good. These days we prefer at least some level of inclusivity for all people.

And so we arrive at the irony. Unlike Groucho we wonder whether we want to join a club that excluded us? You see if it excluded us then it would exclude other people and this is not a good thing. If being excluded was of any consequence to us, then if we joined we would be weighed down by the knowledge of all those people who our club was excluding.

And so I came to think about the company that excluded me. Wow! would I really want to become part of the ranks of a club that closed out other people?

Suppose I don't care and am easy whether I get included or excluded so that I don't care about other people being included or excluded? In which case then joining in club means nothing to me. This is close to my own position where I don't even realise I am a member even when I am. I guess that is confusing for women who are always trying to form a club of 2 and I don't even realise. Perhaps this is the result of my experiences with "My Muse" early in the blog?

But then there are people who really want to join, and feel hurt if they are excluded. They also should not join knowing that the organisation they join is excluding other people.

Whichever way you look joining a club is not something of interest.

Which gave me a slightly different view on my previous work colleagues. While I was casually doing my job, I think they really got hooked on being part of the club. At least their behaviour at the end was certainly very protective of the club and they were certainly very willing to embody the interests of the club.

Despite all this talk of  Liberalism and Democratic Individualism we are all very susceptible to embracing the collective. Friedrich Hayek acknowledges this when in 1940 he wrote that while Capitalist businesses are collectives, you stand a much greater chance against something of the scale of a business compared to a state. Surely in his lifetime he saw business grow far beyond the wealth and power of states? We have almost all countries indebted to organisations, and a growing number of countries unable to free themselves. The other thing he doesn't seem to have noticed is that states are ideally democratic and the collective undergoes constant evolution and revolution (revolving) as its stake holders jostle for a voice. Meanwhile Capitalist institutions are Totalitarian under a CEO who reports to the Capitalist investors. How does Hayek think this is anything to celebrate? Ridiculous.     

Anyway quite opposite to Groucho who would join an organisation that rejected him, I settle myself in the irony that I could not be happy in (and so refuse) any organisation that would not have me (or someone) as a member.

But before ending a final irony. That is too neat an ending. How comfortable for me! At the start I acknowledged that everything is two sided. All organisation have some right to exclude people. People who are incompetent or criminals for instance. So being excluded from an organisation should never be "comfortable." But at the same time being included in an organisation should not be too "comfortable" either. The "ego" is highly activated in matters of inclusion and exclusion and we will twist narratives and gain fuel for narratives from every aspect of "organisation". "I got a promotion" encourages "I am awesome" or "I lost my job" encourages "I am worthless" etc. trying to narrativise to protect oneself is red alarm bells always.

Quite a rich terrain to explore here, just wanted to jot down some of the twists and turns.

* And this is hugely ironic given that there is an ironic undercurrent of Jewish thinking in the likes of Freud et al. - yet I would say the ultimate irony is that Jewish thinking is not ironic about its own irony - and Jews will laugh at that cos they think they are hugely self-deprecating and ironic - but at root are they really ironic? Jewish thinking is conservatives at root as it will never compromise the Jewish Identity and this leads at root to Dualism and separate sides and not irony.

There is One Truth

Applying a bit of Kantian logic we can get this:

If there is a truth it must be universal.

This means it must be true in all places and all times and for all things.

This means the truth cannot itself have a place or a time or be a thing.

So we are left with this puzzle how do we approach something that has no place or time or even being?

A common form of the Universal is God. There is much debate over the nature of God and whether "He" exists.

It is a feature of most branches of Hinduism that God has a personality. Indeed that is the main difference from Buddhism which says the Universal has no form at all not even personality.

The common debate over whether God exists is probably better for what comes next.

Given we are talking about the universal how ridiculous to even be thinking about whether God exist. To ask this question of whether God exists means the questioner has limited their scope of questioning into whether things exist or not.

This is kind of Humian thinking (after David Hume) whose pronouncement that became knows as Hume's Fork was the inspiration that legendarily awoke Kant "from his slumbers":

 “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

But ironically this limits its scope below the level of itself. Does Hume's Fork pass its own test:

(1) contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No.
(2) Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No

Himes Fork is itself nothing about "quantity or number" and itself presents no "fact and existence." So it should be cast into the flames. This is classic SRH (see chunk so this blog)

But the point of interest here is how we become blinkered to the scope of the truth's we pronounce.

When Richard Dawkins is challenging the existence of God why does he think like Hume that existence is everything? Simple SRH: existence itself cannot exist! It is simply a limitation of scope chosen by the interrogator.

Instead of "scope" perhaps "context" is just as good. When performing some investigation or thinking we set a context, a playing field, in which to play out our thoughts. SRH is when our game goes outside the bounds and we are forced to re-evaluate context as Hume should have done immediately after establishing his Fork.

So when we speak of the Universal the classic mistake is to impose some context or bounds to our investigation. But we should realise immediately that to speak of the Universal we must include everything and so any bound we should establish is immediately subsumed by the object we are trying to contain and think about. God is boundless so all attempts to delimit and put a perimeter around the Universal are immediately futile.

So what drives people to still try and establish qualities and knowledge of God?

Well this I believe is called "Ego" and ironically this is exactly what God stands against. When the Devil tempts he calls upon our Ego to put up limits and barriers to exclude God. Ultimately under the commands of the Devil we may even think we know God and can put boundaries around Him. Again ironically we should perhaps try and do this to the Devil and the Ego itself before trying the Universal. That is SRH.

As noted in later blog about SRH here lies the great problem of SRH. It looks like a law we can apply to everything. But it's very nature is to say that boundaries are there to be broken. So any attempt to fix SRH into a well defined theorem is doomed to failure. It was noted that this "doomed to failure" nature of it however might be the key to a theorem that defines its doomed to failure nature and so fails itself thus at least remaining consistent even if incomplete. This was illustrated in this failed statement:  

"Every rule has an exception"

So if this is true then it must be incomplete and have an exception. But it is not inconsistent for that exception to be itself! Thus a self-contradictory statement can remain consistent ! It was speculated that SRH may have a definition of this form, where it states that all bounds are broken, and then breaks its own.

Anyway God breaks all bounds. And rather it is the way that we approach God that reveals our self. For Dawkins its was a preoccupation with material existence. For Hindus it is a preoccupation with personality.

The reason why God seems so baffling is because we find it so hard to give up our boundaries. If we live in a world of physical things how hard to give this up. Instead, like an oyster, we try and cover the annoying grain of sand in pearl and make it try and go away. So we rile against God and argue that he doesn't exist so that is the end of it. Or we try to coat him in Personality so he is more approachable.

Buddhism is very radical in this. Buddhism makes no pretences. The Universal is not graspable and is beyond all form and phenomena and thought or mental objects. There is nothing in all the universe called God so give up looking like this.

Buddha says in the Diamond Sutra:

"Someone who looks for me in form or seeks me in sound is on a mistaken path and cannot see the Tathagata."

So we are truly baffled what to do, where to look, this is hopeless we think.

But this is progress!

As Hui Neng says to Sin Hae:

 "Keep this 'don't know' mind at all times, and you will understand your Master.''

To truly grasp the Universal we need to start dropping everything. We are like a groundman who has covered the field in all sorts of chalk marks for the games. Some for football, some for rugby, some for hockey. Or perhaps like kids who have chalked the pavement to play a game of hop-scotch.

The whole world is like this to us. Everywhere the safe boundaries and signs we have set up to make sense and give us orientation in our world. And there is nothing wrong with that: but know that we don't need them. In the night the rain washes the hop-scotch game away and we are distraught that we can't play the game any more. Perhaps we push this away and draw a new one. But stop, look at the empty street as it is, don't redraw the game (yet) and gain something greater a freedom from needing the confines of the game. Just get used to the street again. It's frightening or depressing at first and the mind throws up a million emotions to drive us back into hop-scotch but have faith in the Universal. The Universal after all made the whole universe including yourself why are you suddenly so worried about not playing the game?

So universal is not like this. The universal is true in the hop scotch game. The universal is true when it is washed away. All things come from the universal, it is not itself one of them.

So really we grasp the universal not in things but in having a free attitude to things.

But how big is the scope? We don't redraw the hop-scotch game and go for a walk outside it boundaries instead. Wow this feels liberating we think, I never realised I had grown to need hop-scotch so much. Am I enlightened now?

Well you have a taste but hop-scotch is a small boundary indeed and the walk was a couple of steps to get outside.

If we take Dawkins' hop-scotch game it covers all of existence! So what exists?

Okay now we get to the real sticking point. What about myself? Am I a boundary that I need to get outside of?

Uh ho we have a problem now. Suppose we think we need go for a walk to get our self outside the boundary of this limitation. We go for a massive walk, perhaps get on a plane and fly across the planet. Climb a mountain and stand at the top staring across new worlds we have never seen. Are we outside the game of self?

Of course not we just took it with us!

"you" cannot put "you" outside "yourself"

Again completely bamboozled. It's hopeless how on Earth do you win this one. We are a long way from stepping outside hop-scotch game we loved. This is a vastly different challenge. But is it?

We loved that hop-scotch game so much we didn't want to let it go. But after we had it was liberating and we looked back and wondered how the confines of that chalk pattern could have been so enthralling. Its not that we never played hop-scotch again but we were not contained by it anymore.

But that was hop-scotch, this is me. What am I without myself, this is craziness you are asking me to die.

Not the first to struggle with this.

Okay this can get crazy. A person struggling with escaping the limits of them self finds a cliff and jumps off. Unfortunately that achieves nothing, because like flying across the world we just take our self with us. This is why the Hindus say you get reborn, and why suicide is a sin. If you take yourself to the grave then unfortunately you will live again because you failed to get outside the hop-scotch game of life. Okay that probably sounds crazy doesn't matter let it go.

Getting outside the game of self is nothing something we can do. That "ego", that conception of ourselves as "being" with boundaries and which does things and has a name etc all that is just a hop-scotch game drawn on the pavement of the world.

Now you are talking rubbish. "I AM" and I exist as a real thing separate from the world with a beating heart and real feelings and a real life and you can "f*ck off " with your rubbish philosophy and just leave alone.

So exactly like previous post we've got the protagonist angry at the suggestion they are not a single real thing in the world.

But we were at Dawkins stage and challenging the boundary of existence and it can be seen clearly that our protagonist needs that existence to secure their self: "I AM"

But what if you were greater than existence? What if it was just a hop-scotch game and like the kid it is possible to step outside of this? And that does not mean die, or live or do anything it just means step outside the game right now.

To do this is exactly the same process as with hop-scotch. Buddha makes it very simple he says:

"all things are non-self"

So full disclosure I have not done this myself. It is not obvious how to do this. But we can see that is must be possible. Take our protagonist: what did they list as reasons to believe they existed.

"Beating heart." Well we know under surgery that beating heart can be removed and another one put in. And for a while with machines processing our blood we have no beating heart. Would we say those machines are "me"?
"Real feelings." Is there a particular feeling that we have always had that could be me? We have no idea what we will feel in 5 mins let alone a life long feeling. So none of these feelings is me.
"Real life." Think "life" here means the amalgam of people I know and things I do and what makes up my life. But this is hardly a constant. That person we liked the company of so much we end up not wanting to spend do much time with. It is all subject to change. Sometime for the better sometimes for the worse. Nothing constant in all of this "life" you could call me.

Instead of actual existences and things we can hold up and say "this is me" really what we are saying is that I can feel my heart beating and I can feel my feelings and I relish the world around me and the people and things that go on around me. So we are not identifying with any of these existences at all! We are kind of the camera at the centre seeing it all and living our life.

We are kind of a long way from existent things now. But one remains that camera at the centre seeing it all. We tend to think of that as a thing.

But if we examine it it is just thoughts and feelings and memories and wishes and lots of "things" but it has no thing of itself. This is why Buddha says "all things are not self." List everything and none of it is you. "you "is the thing doing the listing... except we are not a thing!

We are all stuck in Dawkins world at the moment more of less. Even faced with overwhelming evidence like Hume asked for, where nothing in all the world is actually "myself" we still hold on to the hop-scotch game drawn on the pavement that draws out the boundaries of a "me" or an "I."

It takes along time, perhaps many lifetimes, but we are free to step beyond that game at any time.

And when we do we are one step closer to true God. But unlike the common belief in Hindus and most religions we are free from the idea of an existing personality or entity to confine God.

This is not to say that all Hindus and Christians and Muslims don't understand God. We are all confined in different games and chalk boundaries and many people have done great work to step beyond these boundaries. We should not measure people by the side of their boundaries. That kid wiping away the tears as they realising their is gone and stepping beyond hop-scotch is gaining freedom as Buddha when he made the final step beyond all chalk boundaries. 

So returning to to the top. Yes there is a universal, there must be a universal, because that is the pavement on which all the chalk games have been drawn and what remains were all the chalk to wash away*.

* caveat we don't need to wash it away! People go and live in caves and throw their lives away. It is enough to know deeply the true nature of these things, although it is such a precious gift to know this that the games of our life are not important in comparison. "Come follow me" Jesus said. 

 

I'm Here vs God's Here

So here's the absolute root issue:

When we step on thorn only I feel the pain. There is a 4 line British philosophical verse I mean to find that captures this fact that pain is irrefutable and mine and prior to thought and analysis.

There is empathetic pain and other people will flinch but we are not pretending that by standers are the subject of the injury and pain. They only share in some one else's experience.

So this leads to the crude Western philosophy of Self which is a low point for humanity and probably the most ignorant thing this planet has ever seen.

The Sphere
The argument is that the "sphere" that contain this experience of pain is closed off from other people who cannot experience it. The very proof of this schism in the world is literally that they cannot feel what I feel. There is no argument about this it is true and no one has ever challenged that. I feel what I feel and you feel what you feel. We then deduce an "I" inhabiting this sphere who is the recipient of the pain, the "feeler". In Daniel Dennett philosophy the homunculus sitting in the Cartesian Theatre watching the film of experience and observing the pain turn up. With all this established you get pugnacious teenagers exclaiming "you don't get me", "no one understand me", "just leave me alone." Which extends into adulthood but we have coping strategies. Ultimately we end up proclaiming like Orson Welles, "We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone."

In this paragraph we started off well but somehow ended up all wrong.

How can we be alone? There are 8 billion people crammed onto a small planet here. It is a great struggle to be alone especially in the cities. Indeed I would suggest that Orson Welles was never alone in his whole life. To be crude he spent the first 9 months in his mothers tummy and he was born in the company of his mother and at least a midwife. What is this "alone" he is talking about? It is none other than the "sphere" of experience in which feelings and thoughts happen that only we know about.

I know this way of thinking. In 1991 I wrote a short piece where the sphere was called "O-Space" the observer space in which private experiences unfold. What more proof do we need that it is private than only we know about it. Should be an alarm bell here that this model of experince is suspiciously like private ownership of a house in a Capitalist economy.

So we create this sphere, but where is it? We know there is only one universe. Here is a map of the microwave radiation across the known universe:

 

Note it is a sphere. Sphere's turn up in measurement of radiation because the lines of detection radiate out in all directions. A point with rays going out in all directions intersects a sphere one point on the sphere for every ray and so we can map this experience perfectly onto a sphere. We could use any convex shape but sphere is the simplest with rays being of equal length. How odd that Orson Well's lonely space should map so well onto physical measurement?

So we each have a sphere of measurement around us? Or perhaps a sphere of consciousness? Are humans really like foam bubbles all neatly fitting together sphere?

Not very realistic is it. We definitely interact and for the most part experience the same world. It's only when we get down to the really nitty gritty that we find differences that if we focus on them can seem like chasms. We feel we have a friend until we find they have screwed us and taken something for themselves leaving us with nothing. Perhaps we put money together for some plan and then find they have spent it all on themselves and done a runner. Now we feel the vast chasm between our self and other people bigger than ever. Not only are we stuck in a foam bubble but it has become separated from the mass of foam. We are all alone and worthless.

Note here that Richard Rohr discusses bubbles and uses them to picture the rigid concepts that we use to think about the world. Missing out feeling the real nature of what we are dealing with in favour of skipping over the surface. Interesting when applied to the self. That we have a bubble view of our self, when if we access the bubble we get something quite different. That is another take on what lies below.   

So how do we stick these two completely different ways of thinking together?

(A) On one hand we know there is only one world. Only One Sun, only One Earth, only One Moon*, only one United State of America, only one China, only one Pacific Ocean, only one Everest.

*On an aside saw a video of a tribal woman watching the 1969 Moon landing footage and she thought that the Americans only landed on the American moon not her one. This is a very broad schism between the "universal" and the "self."

(B) On the other no one in the whole world knows what I am thinking right now but me. Well perhaps a bad example there are only so many thoughts to go round and most of what we think we got from somewhere else. As demonstrated I believe my "mind readers" using "suggestion" or advertisers, these thoughts are very easily implanted and the feeling they are "mine" is an illusion. But while I am thinking them, in that moment they are mind. Pain is a better example. When I feel pain I know that is mine right now, no one else has that pain. There are types of pain that are hallucinatory and do not even come from the body, only I know about them and when I have them they must be mine and mine alone.

Now we note that B is a subset of A. There is only One Me. So B actually depends upon A. The problem though is that B then grows to conflict with A.

When I see The Moon, despite there being only One Moon right now it is My Moon because I am seeing it, and I am seeing this vision of the moon.

When I see the reflection of the Moon that is definitely My Moon. No one else is standing here at this lake, this scene is purely Mine, for me alone. A moment in time that will be gone, seen and remembered only by me. In this way we carve out pure, perfect, private experiences that are very beautiful. But we need be careful, these are dangerous cos without wisdom these can sour very quickly into Orson Welles isolation from the world.

In this example we have a good marriage of the One Moon and My Private Experience. Somehow they fit together perfectly.

Or perhaps we should ask where in this is the problem. They fit together perfectly in the Moon reflection, why don't they fit together more broadly.

Now the crux.

Where did The Sphere paragraph go wrong?

We start quite correctly observing pain that only I can experience, that is indeed private as no one else can feel it. And we end up locked away in an "Orson Wells chamber" all alone separated in an eternal solitude from the world. Worth noting here that this is actually the definition of Hell. Hmm interesting right? What Sin did Orson Welles commit to get to Hell?

So the problem lies in the previous post on "I'm Here." The Moon is quite happy riding on its reflection and the wind gently gliding across the smooth lake to tickle it and make it shudder. Each moment is unique and special. And have been doing this type of thing for billions of years ever since water first collected on the fledgling planet. But this moment, this Now is not like them because it is actually appearing Now and Here. It fills the Present Moment and is Alive.

So far so good. Where does it go wrong?

But then we think someone is here, and they are seeing it. The Moon is not alone I am here.

Oops straight from top to bottom of the class.

 

But wait we protest if I was not here then the moon would not be seen. I mean if I close my eyes it is gone immediately. If I left and got in my car and never came here then it would not be there. I AM the one who made this and I need to be here for the Moon to be rippling on the lake. Note "I AM" translates as Yahweh in Hebrew which is the full name of God in the West.

We have the AB problem again (A is One Moon, B is My Moon). We are not saying that the Moon is not reflected on the Lake! We do not have control over existence only "God" can do that. If the Moon really did go missing when we closed our eyes the NEWS would definitely cover it pretty soon. Ah we start to argue perhaps I make the NEWS as well. Well in a way you do, but really do we have to do this now? That for later. You are wearing the Dunce Hat cos you said something else stupid.

The thing is yes it is true you need eyes to see the Moon and you need a brain to see the Moon. But this is true for everyone. You can call your friend and say hey come and see the Moon reflected on the water and he turns up and he says "wow mate that is cool." And you go "can you see it " and he says yeah of course I have eyes and brain too. So just being a body with senses does not make it "My Moon."

When we say "I am here" we are not just saying "someone is here" cos anyone will do, we need to explain how this Now and this Here is uniquely occurring right now that no one else can see.

So its not the eyes and the brain that matters, it is "these eyes and this brain" that matters to get these experiences.

But that is not what we said to get the Dunce Hat. We said "I am here."

The point is that these eyes and this brain are quite capable of making these experiences all by themselves. Nothing else is needed.

The feeling that there is something unique here in addition that makes it "mine" is a creation of ours that is not necessary.

Woooahh we protest but this is MY EXPERINCE do not try and wizard it away from me. I AM HERE and this is MINE. When I see that Moon rippling on the water I get a deep experience that validates my life and makes me happy to be alive. I am so happy to be here and to be experiencing such beautiful things. F**k off if you think you can separate that from ME. In fact just F**k off and leave me alone to watch the Moon in silence dick head.

Okay I got our protagonists really angry, was that realistic? But it was to illustrate how the Moon rippling on the water is one peaceful thing, and the person watching it is a potential bag of noisy nonsense.

This is like the The Sphere paragraph it starts off with a peaceful accurate portrayal of a very potent image of the experience of pain and ends up with noisy nonsense about "being alone". Who is alone to start with? The same person who started out experiencing pain? I'm not sure there is time for philosophical reflection about "whose pain it is" when we experience pain, it just happens. I mean when it happens it always happens to the same person right? In fact were the brain to tag "oh btw this pain is your btw in case you wanted to know" we would put it in the bin. The pain is all we care about. Perhaps in that we can see the subtle step that comes later to package that experience up into "my pain." Its a useless thing to think really. Obviously its your pain, your experiences are always yours why even think this?

This thought happens when we step into A type World Thinking. When we phone the medical services to report pain and the receptionist goes is this call about yourself. Yes you go: it is my pain. That could well be the first time you bothered to think it is Mine.

So why watching the Moon do we tag on I AM HERE? We don't need to do this, it adds nothing!!!!!!!! Moon is there regardless.

Wooahhh bomb shell.

Okay but if we think about that we still have no way to package it up. How can the hospital have hundreds of patients with pain and the doctor still be so acutely aware of his just own. Doesn't this sit us back at the start in the Orson Welles Chamber? This incidentally is the Sin. If the doctor ignores his patients to treat his own pain then he is fuelling belief in the Orson Welles Chamber and eventually he will end up with the illusion of isolation. The Orson Welles Chamber is a mistake. We wear the Dunce's Hat when we think this.

In its place then we need a way of marrying the private nature of actual experience with the public sphere of collective events. Personal pain in a crowd of hundreds in pain.

Might be worth noting that personal pain is far less when experienced in a crowd. Its an awful thing to say but the suffering is Gaza right now will seem less for people because it is a collective suffering. There is no pain like the person suffering alone because this pain leads to thoughts of the Orson Welles Chamber which is Hell.

A woman once begged Buddha to resurrect her recently deceased husband. He said he would on one condition. He gave her a bowl and said I want you to collect a grain of rice from every house not visited by death. If the bowl is not empty I will bring your husband back. She eagerly she set off with dreams of meeting her husband again. But returned reflective. Her bowl was empty and she started to realise that the loss was not hers but rather something shared by all beings. She departed the Buddha with something better than her wish, bearing a deeper understanding that it was quite natural to let her husband depart.

So how do we do this? Bring our private experience into the world?

Let us not pretend in universal consciousnesses and experiences that will bring us into the company of the universal truth. Experiences are experiences whatever form they take. I don't believe there is a level of experience that transcends the individual. These eyes see these things. This brain thinks these things. For sure there are deeper experiences. This Third Eye can give us visions and knowledge of these things. But in every case we are not escaping the problem here of this being this. Even if I could feel your pain it would just become my pain. In the future scientists will find a way to add more eyes or link our brains to cams so we can experience directly over the internet rather than first render it on a screen and see it. In such a world we would feel our consciousness pop up somewhere else. I like AfricaCam at the moment. In a real Matrix like world we could open the website and have a direct vision of what was being seen in South Africa. Like a dream of a distant place. Up till now this was only possible with Third Eye mystical experience but its well within the bounds of technology. But none of this is the solution to the issue in hand. In all these cases the experience remains "My Experience" no matter how complex the brain/sense set up.

Altho one thing would be interesting. What if multiple people had the same stream sent to them. I wonder if there is a case of a Siamese Twins sharing an eye? That is two brains but with their optic nerves growing together in one eye. It is possible. Then you would have two people with separate experiences which when they discussed it would be the exact same. Well that would depend on their language centres being being separate. It starts to get weird because "a person" is not one thing. As Daniel Dennett discusses a lot the idea of a "unity" of experience is a myth. It is a chaotic asynchronous mess. We see one thing, think another and say another. What we "think" is happening is another layer of modelling that the brain does to try and make sense of all this. Lets not get into that, altho it does help this discussion because this "problem" we are discussing, namely of "My Experience" does depend upon this mess all being unified, so we can see from this angle that it is a genuine problematic way to think.  But this does not replace it with anything else.

This blog entry is getting long I will cut to the end.

So how can many different selves belong to the same world?

Well hopefully enough has been said to pick the first problem part. The Experience of the world and the  need for a "self" to experience it are separate. Experience, like the pain of standing on a sharp stone, just happens. It is later that we think that happened to "me" and that is "my pain." Described this in the previous post.

But we still appear to have the problem of experiences still being separate. While this pain is not mine, it is still pain that you do not experience.

This is the A B problem. (A) is the One World we know exists and when we stand on a sharp stone medical science is in a position to study that for me and I don't need to worry. (B) and yet when the pain gets too much it is me that is suffering and no one else.

So in a way this problem has no solution, as there is no problem. How else did we expect it to be? When you stand on a sharp stone it will hurt how else could it be? No one else feels it cos no one else stood on the sharp stone. Once we are no longer adding "self " into the picture to hold this experience then it is just the experience.

Yet it is still mind blowing to try and think how all these separate experience fit together into the One World.

Borrowing from the Hindus we can have this thought.

Instead of thinking there is a "Me" experiencing these experiences, why not have God experience them?

We already decided that "Me" was just an add on we perform later, and is not inherently there. So why not replace "Me" with "God."

What is the difference? Well while "Me" is private thought stuck in its "Orson Welles Chamber", God is Universal. To get started think that God can see and experience everything that everyone can. So he can feel all the pain of the world as his own. Wooahh one second is this not the story of Jesus Christ? Anyway doesn't matter.

The point is to find a way of thinking about all the experiences of the world in a way that marries (A) the One World and (B) My World.

Now obviously we can never see things from God's perspective. What I see is what my eyes see and I cannot see what your eyes see by definition.

But just to start we can imagine that God can see both what my eyes see and what your eyes see.

We now have a higher way to have a "watcher" which escapes the Orson Welles Chamber of private loneliness.

Going back to the Moon Reflection. This means that at the immediate level the moon is in the reflection right here and right now. But who is seeing it? Well if someone needs to see it then its God who is the recipient of all experiences for all people. (This is not yet correct but it is closer than Orson Welles.) 

We can picture the world of experience like this polygon shape below. God is the polygon, but our particular experience is like a face that is just a part of this One Body. We are not irrelevant though because if our face was not there then the polygon would not be complete. But we are not everything either as we only experience a part of the whole. 

source
https://robertlovespi.net/page/181/

Now this is close to the truth but not there yet. For this to be true we need to create a God Sphere. Which is much much better than The Sphere above but still mentally clunky and probably ends up in its own problems like the Orson Welles Chamber if we think about it too much.

The bottom line to get to the point is that eventually we have to let go of thinking about this.

Thoughts have their own sphere. Experiences are quite happy just being experiences without ever getting near thoughts.

All these issues discussed of "whose experience" are secondary issues. Oh yes they are issues, but the key here is to not let them invade experience. And this takes practice. You can't think your way into freeing experiences from thought!

If you want to think about things then think. But do not think you can get into experience and start to make sense of "whose pain is this." That is thinking and is different.

Knowing the difference and mastering it is what is missing. A true experience belongs to no-ones and no-one is there nor needs to be there, not even ultimately God. But that last bit is dangerous.

The main problem in the West is Orson Wells Chamber and we 99.999% of the time slip down this way of thinking. God is such an enormously imporatant antidote to the Sin of holding onto Self that it is best to keep God in our thoughts all the time. Who is feeling this pain? Only answer we need is "not Me but God". 

"Here" as opposed to "I'm Here"

Been seeking this one for a while.

SO there is that experience of Present Moment where we feel like we really exist and right now is really happening. It is solid and tangible, we wouldn't want to be anywhere else, indeed we couldn't be anywhere else, because all there is is Here.

This experience has two very similar but different flavours. The common one is the sense of me experiencing this. How lucky I am we might think, or life is great or perhaps we have the darker non-luminous version which goes something like why is it always me, I'm so unlucky, this is not what I want.

But actually both the luminous and darker version are the same no matter how real this moment is, it is being had by "me." I am here to experience it. I am the one in the forest to see the tree fall. I can leave the forest now and tell everyone what the sound of a tree falling in the forest is. There is wisdom here in that a sound does need a ear to hear it. But stop there.

The other more quiet version of this experience is hiding from usual sight. It is the Present as just being there. I am looking at a sun set now from my study. I could be imagining a person sitting in a room looking out of the window and I could be thinking that all this is there for me so that I can see it. Certainly no one else is seeing this. Not only is it an enjoyable sight but it is my sight. A double bonus of a pleasant experience and affirmation that I am here to enjoy these things.

At least that is the one view. The other is just that there is the pleasant sunset. Seeing that is exactly the same as the bombastic version above. Exactly the same! There is the sun and it is being seen. Awesome let's watch...

 The difference is just that this moment is revealing itself all by itself. There is no need for someone to muscle in and take the front seats. Just let it be. You are already seeing it to even think about taking a front row seat so just forget about the seats. Just have that Now wash over you. There is nothing to do; no one to be affirmed, and no one to take anything away.

Of course the best bit is you never run out of Now. Ironically the only way to run out of Now is to try an take this one for yourself. Just put it down and let the next one come along. Okay there are thoughts of death that can mess that up, we feel limited and short of Nows. But actually we're already tainted to think that. Who is short of Nows? That guy a minute ago, the one in the future or the one Now? Well clearly this one has nothing to worry about, indeed never has anything to worry about, so just forget about it.

Grasping

We often find ourselves holding onto something we didn't even acknowledge we grasped.

Something happens and we find the thing we grasp being dislodged. Automatically we try and restore the grip. This can lead to all sorts of automatic behaviour.

Perhaps something happens or someone suggests we are not good at our job. If we hold onto "being good at our job" then we start to grasp to re-establish our hold on "being good at our job."

It can be quite a panic 

So we behave quite instinctively and without much thought. We need to regain that grasp, and we probably didn't even realise we had it before.

But actually there are 2 ways to go here:

The left way is to fight to restore our grip again. But we often over look the right way which is to acknowledge the grip we had and re-evaluate it.

Life throws exactly the right stuff at us to reveal what we are gripping.

It is quite spooky how right life is. This is why it is often said that "Life is a Test" which if we pass we get to Heaven.

But how and why is this? It seems too metaphysical and hocus-pocus to be true.

Well for something to exist you need the thing and you need someone to see it. The famous question "What sound did this tree make when it fell?"

We "know" it made a sound, but if no one was there to hear it then there was no actual "sound". We need be a bit careful. I'm sure fine analysis of the soil or something could prove there were sound waves being generated and the evidence is there for a sound. But what is the sound of sound waves if no one is there to hear them. The point is not that a tree fell, or sound waves were made or any other "thing" what we are referring to specifically in "hearing" is the consciousness of a sound. Someone with hearing needs to be there for there to be a "sound." Not sound waves, not any material thing but "sound" as we experience it.

The point of that exposition is to bring our attention not to the facts of the world but the experience of the world. If two people walk through a museum and then speak afterwards we know there experience will be different. One will say "wow did you see the display of dinosaur bones" and the other will go no but did you see the display of "musical instruments." Museum is the same, but how we interact and the experience we get is different. Life is like that!

We are not actually interested in the facts of life; we are interested in the experience, that is how it presents itself. It is the ability of certain things to present themselves to us that makes up our life. And why do somethings present themselves and others do not present themselves? Well that is to do with who we are. More precisely this is called in the East: Karma. Karma is best explained in terms of brain state. Someone who like football will automatically select football related things from their environment. If a person holds onto a football team then when that team loses they get reflective, when it wins they celebrate. Its not the team that matters its that we hold on to it. These responses are down to the grasping that they have nurtured in themselves. If they find football a good influence in their life then they hold onto good things, but suppose they start betting and find themselves losing money then they their grasping is no longer of use.

It is this ability to nurture a holding on to things or propensities in our self, that then select aspects of the world which is what makes our life experience.

The reason that life throws at us exactly what we need is because we automatically select those things for our self! We automatically pick out of the world the things we are holding and so they become apparent.

The naïve confusion is that people think the world is solid and thrown at them, they don't realise that to actually become apparent they still need to pick things up and hold them. If we just let the world fall then nothing would stick and nothing would happen.

So when faced with a sudden panic to grab hold of something that has slipped we have this choice of whether to really pick it up again or perhaps let it go.

As said the reason for the sudden panic is that we probably did not know we were grasping it. This is how life is constantly ready to surprise and shock us. It is constantly revealing what we are holding on to.

The wise person has perfected this picking up, holding and letting go of. But to master this requires firmly opening up this fork in the road.

And this raises an interesting feature of freedom. For the naïve person freedom is the ability to pick up what they are grasping for. They see an advert for a car and start to grasp and if they have the money they can buy it and hold it. That feels like freedom. But they are really only ever going Left and so don't have true choice. This way of living will eventually throw up a problem because life will shake their hold on the car at some point and with only the Left route to explore they don't have any option but to fight to grasp it again.

Meditation is the method that is often used to open up this Right option. Imagine being in a state where we have the genuine choice of whether to pick up or put down something.

Thoughts enter our mind here.

(1) I will just get lazy and put everything down like a drop out hippie. Well perhaps what is wrong with that? The problem of course is picking up anything after this. You are only a master of this when picking thing up and putting them down are equally easy.
(2) What about the things I cherish and love. If I put them down easily then what proof is there I love them. Would my wife appreciate me "just putting down" our anniversary and saying "hey don't get so attached, chill out and let it go." I know of a similar example to this of someone in a casual relationship who said to his partner when she raised the issue of something more serious "don't get attached and don't hold onto this." Again this is like (1). The master can pick up and put down, not randomly, and not inappropriately, but with equal ease. Why would you put down your anniversary?

(2) Now there is the naïve beginner approach here. We challenge ourselves to sit under the tree meditating until we enlighten like Buddha did on the final road to enlightenment. Or we punish ourselves by denying ourselves things. And we can dream up a lot of things to do to ourselves. BUT in here lies the BIG grasping. Every single ones of these revolves around a SELF that we want to move into enlightenment, or bring enlightenment towards, and we pick up this self and we move it around like a chess piece looking for where to put it. One naïve view is that one day we will pick it up and put it in Heaven so we do lots of good things and make lots of donations in the hope that God will pick us up and move us. It's been pointed out a few times by people that no self respecting God will have anything to do with people who try to buy their way into Heaven with good deeds. What is the difference between this and handing the priest a £5 back hander to forgive our sins. But its a starting point at least so not inherently wrong.

In all these cases we have not noticed that we are grasping a self. So life will throw stuff at us again and again that shakes our hold on this self, and we panic to re-establish that hold because it never occurred to us that there is a choice of whether to pick it up or let it down. We need a self right?

Do we need a self? What was this about?

Okay this is super advanced. We may run at this and go if that is what it takes to be free then "great I can let go of myself" and we do something dramatic and sacrifice our self in some way. Perhaps we give everything we have away to the poor.

Well maybe it will work, but chances are we are just doing this because "I" want to be free. we are still doing it to liberate a "thing" that we are grasping.

The whole goal here is just to have that choice to grasp at a self or not.

Ego is the famous example of self. Ego thinks it is permanent and never changes and never dies. But life will eventually throw that utter humiliation and failure at us which will bring us to realise that this particular "ego" is wrong and inferior and we need to grow. Who thinks we are still that person who tripped up when we were 1 and still new to walking and started crying. We have grown and can now run. But there is still that over arching Ego that we hold onto that we think is more important than life potentially. Its the "holding" that we need get aware of so that we have at least that option to put down.

This blog post is actually an example of what it is talking about. I recently discovered that my services were not needed in this company. I thought they were needed and valued. So I found that it was not a completely simple operation to just put it down. I found some latency and holding going on. But rather than struggle with it, I realised the Right turn and saw much more valuable that regaining a grip on the company was to notice this grasping and in so doing be free from it. Sure I can get a new contract with the company perhaps, or perhaps a new company who knows. But right now being free to pick up and put down is the real win. And then I wrote this blog entry which unfortunately is still a grasping of sorts as I seek to cement some "gain" for a "self. One day I hope to be free enough to even let go this freedom to chose and not own it, or even celebrate it or even hold it.

===

So that final point is that we can grasp at "grasping." If we walk away thinking ok this is easy there are 2 paths we can walk: (1) the path to re-establish our grasp on something, and (2) the path to step back and observe our need to grasp and use this space to review. Of course we are now grasping at this "2 path method." That is okay at this moment probably, but if we walk away with a doctrine the way life is it will shake that doctrine from our grasp as some point and we will feel like we are back at square one. This is the "loss of faith" that everyone feels occasionally, the "dark night of the soul" as it is called in Christianity. But we can see here that all this is happening is stale habitual dogma that we have accumulated is being shaken off. The goal after all is freedom not a donkey dragging a cart of truth and dogma. This is us after we have established some truths that we like:

However very quickly a "truth" becomes a "Truth" set in stone and no longer living; it becomes a burden we must carry with us and possibly forget even so we keep remembering it and thinking about it to keep it alive. We actually erect it as a monument to our achievement and then walk off!!! What we need to do is live within the truth all the time. That means constantly not grasping and seeing everything as if it was the first time we faced it. Not-Grasping is a activity we must do all the time, just as grasping is an activity we want to do all the time. I realise my own search for truth is typified by a desire to grasp at some solidity. But now it dawns on me that this grasping is the problem it raises a complete revolution in my approach. Instead of grasping a  truth and holding it for the future, actually I should examine the need and process of grasping it in the first place!

Reference, including self-reference needs a Proxy and so an object cannot refer directly to itself.

With "Mise en abyme" or the Droste effect we can provide a first axiom for SRH:

(1) In Reference there must be at least two entities: the main object or Referent and the Referrer which is a proxy object that in the context stands for the Referent.

In the sentence "he took the ball"

`the ball` is the referrer because obviously this is not an actual ball and you can't throw those words. A ball might look like this picture.

But you can't throw that either. Borrowing from later Wittgenstein we would say that all these objects can be used in many way. In the context of this blog we are most interested in objects taking the place of other objects. We could substitute an apple for the ball and he could still throw it.

So we can construct this odd sentence:

"he took the ⚽"

Yet we all know what it means because the picture ⚽ has taken the place of the object we mean, namely the ball that he took.

We have Quine's "use" and "mention" here. But really those are just specific examples of the more general Wittgenstein "language game" idea. "use" is very subtle and diverse, we can use something in many different ways, often only subtly different.

"I took the symbol ⚽ and then ⚽⚽ meaning that all together there were ⚽⚽⚽ written twice"

In this sentence am I "using" or "mentioning" ⚽? In the last sentence I am actually using the symbol ⚽ itself.

And other examples like "If we kick we can send it to the end of the sentence ⚽"

Here the symbol ⚽ is the actual object of the sentence, and while the implication is that ⚽ obeyed grammatical rules and existed in the right syntactic place (after kick) in the sentence it has under the pressure of semantics been kicked to the end of the sentence. I've no time to unpick this but its a very complicated example of the use of symbols.

However it remains that the process of one object taking the place of another implies that there are 2 objects. A referent and a referrer.

This must then also be true in self-reference, which is just a type of reference.

So the referent and a referrer are not the same object in self-reference. Which means that self-reference is not like an infinity mirror. The referrer by which we set up the self-reference is not the same as the self. We just move from self to a proxy and then back to self again.

Take the example:

"This sentence contains five words"

There are two objects here:

The referrer: "This sentence" and
The referent: "...the characters between the quotes..."

So we can use any referrer, let us call that sentence A. Many things are called 'A' but within the limited context of this page, the "state" of this object to use programming idioms, 'A' can be substituted with the sentence above.

'substitution' is the key operation that explain reference.

Given the rules above and the object

'A'

We can apply substitution to replace A with:

"This sentence contains five words"

Now semantics gives meaning to things in wide rule sets. The sentence is part of the English language and it means that were you to count the words in the sentence you will get a count of 5.

Clearly substitution does not preserve meaning:

While 'A' can be substituted with "This sentence contains five words" to give "'A' contains five words" they do not both have 5 words, they are not the same sentence even though we only substituted referrers with the same referent.

This means that "This sentence" cannot be substituted with A.

"A contains five words" is no longer true,

So while A and "This sentence" are both referrers to the sentence "This sentence contains five words" they cannot substituted.

This is because "This sentence" is used in two ways. It is both a referrer and a part of the referent itself.

We can introduce another dialectic here between Form and Content. "This sentence" and "A" have the same content in that they refer to the "same" sentence, but the Form is different. Indeed we use the form to determine the object. I have written 'A' many times in this page and so there are many objects here, but because they have similar form we call them the same "type of object" or "letter of the alphabet". This is only the first level of meaning however, and we take that "letter of the alphabet|" abstraction and then make a deeper level where it can be substituted by the "This sentence contains five words."

So we can note here that there are Forms with Contents which are themselves Forms with Contents. There is no absolute Form and Content level and Objects and Symbols can occur at any level of abstraction from the physical marks, to membership of an alphabet or set to part of a Linguistic net of meaning.

So returning to:

A = "This sentence contains five words"

This is a swirling mass of similarities, memberships and substitutions. How can "self-reference" be simple!

But we can say that the referrer "This sentence" is bound by another condition that it must have the right form as well as referent to maintain the truth value of the sentence.

Not all referrers are equal!

Perhaps I should introduce some syntax to separate the Quine issue here. 

"This sentence" is just marks on a page.
«This sentence» will  be used to use the sentence.

There is no reference with these characters "This sentence," they may as well be "jdhbstyvsmqwt"

While «This sentence» is semantic and refers to the physical part which looks like "This sentence"

SO «This sentence» is actually one of the shortest self referential statements. Perhaps only smaller is 

«Me»

When we ask what is referring to itself we find the sentence "Me"

Note that "" and «» are operators on the underlying characters and are not part of the sentence themselves.

In these immediate self-reference statements like «Me» the Form does not matter.

 «Moi» 

«मुझे»

It makes no difference. Pop those into the context of the language world's they come from and self-reference is semantically set up.

And if we ask what is «मुझे» referring to we could answer "मुझे". This gets into metaphysics because if someone was to say "मुझे" out loud we would take that to mean a "person" even if a computer said it. I plugged the Windows XP speak recognition into an AIML chatbot once and routed the output to the speech synthesiser. At 2am having a conversation with a computer made me feel like there was someone else in the room. Forget Frankenstein, making the illusion of people is really easy. I don't think we should read too much into a person saying "मुझे" it is just part of the language games, cultures and words we belong too. Ideas of ethereal spirits and souls is completely unnecessary.

Not sure I ever explored into this as deeply before. But hopefully it still remains that the referrer and the referent are different. Not a simple dualism as they can have interconnected forms but they cannot be the same.

"This sentence contains five words"

«This sentence contains five words»

are different.

Consider again that we substitute the sentence for A

A = "This sentence contains five words"

«'A' contains five words» is still correct.

"A contains five words" is just a new sentence like "qhg weqew qweqwe"

I miss one case:

""This sentence contains five words" contains five words"

is a new sentence from the following substitution:

"This sentence" = "This sentence contains five words"

«"This sentence contains five words" contains five words»

Is correct.

Anyway to wind this up the point is that an object cannot really refer to itself. It needs a proxy object that can be substituted for the referent object. These two objects need to be separate.

However it is noted that the Form of the object becomes important if the Referrer is part of the object. This adds conditions that limit the substitution.

I note here Douglas Hofstadter mentions somewhere in Godel, Esher, Bach that self-reference is always limiting. [need find a reference!]

A PDF of this remarkable book is here Godel, Esher, Bach

"But might there not be some vaguely Godelian loop which limits the depth to which any individual can penetrate into his own psyche?" [Godel, Esher, Bach p692]

 

     

  

What is the probability this is correct. Another view on self-reference than SRH

 

Here's a self-reference statement to study.

Now SRH says that the existence of self-reference opens up a fixed-point, and a possible self-dependency and inconsistency.

To study let us imagine that a bag contains coins with a text written on them. There are N coins. Text 't' occurs with frequency F(t).

So picking out a coin we can say that the probability that this coin carries the text 't' is:

p(t) = F(t)/N

No self-reference no paradox.

Now we write probabilities on the coins. We have a function r(t) which returns the probability written by the text.

We pull out a coin and it has "10%" written on it. Very pedantic but r("10%") reads it to give us the probability 1/10.

Now if there are N=100 coins and 10 of then have "10%" written on them, then when we pull out a coin with "10%" on it then r("10%") gives a probability of 10% which is also the probability of pulling out a coin with "10%" written on it. We can call this the coin being correct.

Now if no other coin has the frequency that it occurs written on it then we can say that the probability of pulling out a correct coin is 10%.

No paradoxes yet.

So returning to the top we take 4 coins and write the frequencies on them: {0,25,25,50}. Then we ask what is the frequency of pulling a each text:

0     probability 25%
25   probability 50%
50   probability 25%

So there is no way to pull out a coin with the text on it that matches the probability of that text.

Now it is tempting then to say that the probability of pulling out a coin with the correct text on it is 0%. But now there is the contradiction because that is already taken by the text on the coin "0%" and the probability of that is 25% so it can't be 0%.

Indeed the coin "0%" is already slightly problematic because the existence of the text gives it a non-zero chance of being selected an so "0%" already contains a contradiction. It's not quite right to say it is always false, it is actually a contradiction.

So the problem is that we have 2 ways to refer to the coin "0%". One way (1) is to select that coin from the bag as stated in the game. The other way (2) is to select it as the answer to the question "the probability of pulling out a coin with the correct text on it."

So the answer is none. But by using method (1) the probability of selecting "0%" is 25%. But by answering the broader question of "which coin carries the probability that it is chosen" we select the "0%" coin.

This is actually a bit of a cheat. The context of the 25% is selecting randomly. The context of the 0% is selecting not randomly but according to a meta-criteria. They are different methods!

I wonder whether paradox can be avoided here by maintaining the context? Is this always true with paradoxes?

Rather a different solution to SRH which raises questions about self-referential methods of "selection".

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What I wanted to do was use this simple paradox to explore the full set of "fixed points" and whether each one can be used to generate an inconsistency. #TODO

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So a fixed point for a function f() is an element from the input set which maps to the same element in the output set

p = f(p) where p ∈ Sinput, Soutput

so f(x) in this case takes a quote of a probability and returns the quote of the probability of picking that from the bag. we assume that coins only have probabilities on them.

So in a bag of 100 coins then any coin with a number on it that matches the number of such coins in the bag is a fixed point.

In this smaller bag of 4 coins then: {"0%","50%","50%","70%"} means that 50% of the time you pick a coin with "50%" on.

"50%" = f("50%")

Note that everything is a "mention" of a probability in quotes no actual numbers.

Now the actual scenario involves a meta function g() which returns the probability of a coin being "correct." That is a coin being a fixed point of f().

So g("50%") = "50%" in that because "50%" is a fixed point then every coin with "50%" on when picked is "correct."

However "0%" is not a fixed point. The probability of picking "0%" is actually 25%. So the probability of it being correct is 0%

g("0%") = "0%"

So 0% is a fixed point of g() but not f().

Actually I can't see a problem here. To be completed...

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Is there a paradox actually?

There are 2 questions in the above.
(1) What is the probability of picking a certain probability in the answers. Call this f(p)
(2) To be "correct" the answer you chose must have a frequency equal to itself. That is f(p) = p. Call that g(p)

So we can define f(p) as:
f(0) = 25
f(25) = 50
f(50) = 25
Sum of f(x) for all x = 100

Great defined f with no problem.

Now g(p)
So for all p: f(p) != p. Then g(p) = 0 for all p.

Now that is a perfectly safe definition too.

The problem arises because the original question combines these so that the answer given by g(p) becomes a probability within the domain of f(x).

But isn't this apples and oranges. f(x) applies to the frequency of tokens in the question. g(x) applies to the frequency of a different domain namely the range of f(x). "0%" is a token being used in different domains.

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Let's try this on the classic "this statement is false"

If we really smash this up let us have two sets with names 'T' and 'F'. T ∪ F is everything. T ∩ F is empty. This is supposed to parallel True and False. Naively taking on Tarski here ;-)

So we could say:

What is the statement? "this statement is false"
This is just a sequence of characters.

Call that sequence of characters 'A'

Now semantically we can have a function f(x) which defines x is a member of F.

So the meaning of the statement A is f(A) which says that A is a member of F.

The problem is that we start with A being a member of T. But okay lets put A in the set F.

Great that makes sense. "this statement is false" simply says it is a member of the set F.

But we have missed something. If being a member of set F is supposed to parallel the behaviour of "false" then really it must mean "cannot belong to set T". You get put in set F only when you fail to fit into set T, otherwise you belong in T. I've always noticed this implicit bias to Truth in logic. All statements assume Truth to begin with. "There is an elephant on the Moon" we normally approach by looking on the Moon and if we don't find an elephant we assign it to false. Even if we assume it is false to start with we take the "There is not an elephant on the Moon" to be true. We always start with Truth. Maybe I misunderstand something here.

So actually we try and fit "this statement is false" into the T set. But it says that it belongs to the F set. Now it gets into the F set not because it says it belongs in F !! It gets into the F set because it does not belong in the T set. It says it belongs in the F set and so doesn't belong in T.

This very subtle difference is the difference between something being false because it is just false, and something being false because it is a logical contradiction.

"I am made from six words" is a truthful sentence. "I am made from five words" is a false statement.

"I am made of five and six words" is always false without counting because it is a contradiction. If it is made of 5 then it can't also be made of 6 of the same thing.

"I am a member of F" is the same in the rules above as "I am not a member of T" 

"I am not a member of T" cannot belong in T not because of its assigning membership but because it is a contradiction. Contradictions go in set F.

But we have 2 ways to get into set F now.

f(x) from above which says that x is a member of F.

But also anything that is a contradiction e.g. x & -x. says c(x) which also says x is a member of F if it is a contradiction.

Run out of time. But suppose we separate these two function domains as we did for the probabilities.

A = "I am false" maps to f(A) meaning put me in set F.

We could borrow the - sign to mean put me in set T. So -f(x) means put x in set T.

B = "This statement has both five and six words" belongs in F under c(B).

Now we can mix them.

"I am in both set T and F" belongs to F under the operation c(B) while it also assigns itself to T and F with f(x). This is fine.

C = "I am not in set F" is a set assignment and so is -f(C) which puts it in set T.

OKAY need another look. TBC