Panoptic Interlude
The Magical Flower of Winter is an essay series exploring reality and our relationship to it. It deals with philosophy, science and our views of the world, with an eye on the metacrisis and our future. Sign up to receive new essays here:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Elliot - Little Gidding
In this article I will be taking a brief break from the “progression” in order to look both back and ahead: a panoptic interlude. I will make use of this piece to make some personal observations about this project, The Magical Flower of Winter, as well as pose some questions I do not have answers to. Most of what I will say here is equally relevant to the project as a whole, which is one reason for why I have put “progression” in quotation marks. Another reason is that progression, at least to me, implies sequentiality, that there is some natural and sequential order leading from one point to another. The tapestry I am attempting to bring into view stands, at least so far, opposed to naturally sequential exposition, and by this I mean that I see no division of this project into starting, intermediate and end point(s) that is more natural than others. There is also the idea, or the image, that by pulling too hard on a thread there is the fear that the whole somehow shall come apart, and I mean this image to say that the process of pulling at the threads in order to find a natural or unique progression may warp and distort the very part of the tapestry we want the threads pulled at to bring into view.
These observations should seem familiar - the view I have been attempting to write about is an autonomous view, a view grounded in itself, without recourse to some inaccessible foundation. Shifts or changes in any part may affect the whole. It is with purpose that I do not call this a theory. The “structure” I am writing about, if I can call it that, is a meta-structure: this structure is one that other structures fit into and make sense in. This is an epistemological dimension to my position, it is a statement that the epistemic is a plurality of views/theories/frameworks. This is what we observe from the vast differences in opinion and claims, not only in science and philosophy, but in all spheres of life. In order to have a view of reality as a whole, the view must be capable of accommodating this plurality, thus it is not “only” a theory, but a meta-structure. Having this “web” be holistic is also the only way to coherently make sense of the idea of evaluating the meta-structure itself, within the meta-structure, of placing itself on par with alternatives within itself. The absolutist, foundationalist, reductionist or realist position cannot do so in the self-contained manner the holistic position can. The holistic web is furthermore a self-similar structure. I have in the previous few articles attempted to lay forth a holistic view of language and meaning, and I will in the future do the same to other disciplines. It might be a cognitive fallacy, but I am unable to see these similarities across disciplines, as well as the similarity from structure to meta-structure, as mere coincidence. I believe these epistemic dimensions cannot be separated from a view of reality as a whole.
This brings me to variance. We are each of us immersed in a context that defines and shapes our outlook and experience of reality, a context that is historical, psychological, cultural, spatiotemporal, epistemic and much more. This context is also constantly in flux, time moves on unerringly and by our interactions in reality, our context varies: your historical context varies as the events of the world propagate to you, your psychological context varies as your moods and feelings vary with a range of factors external and internal to your body, your epistemic context changes as you read or learn new things, and so on. These dimensions of context are of course not separable, they are all intimately entwined, mutually shaping each other, and in coming together in each of us, we in turn shape them. One issue I experience with this, miniscule in comparison to the bigger picture, is the act of writing within this reality described by variance. I don’t expect this to be relatable to everyone, but the issue interests me. How to accurately represent one’s thinking with words (or other media), when one’s thinking is constantly changing? How to put into words, discretely and one by one, an experience that is altogether continuous? And how to do any of this when the experience I am trying to capture, is itself changing as a consequence of my trying to capture it? I may be exaggerating the issue with these questions, it might simply be “artistic” anxiety, but to me this phenomenon says something about the limitedness or provisionality of all art1. I know I will change my mind about certain aspects of what I write about, it happens continuously, either from reading a new (or old) work, or from seeing new or discarding old connections. This is the flux writing occurs against, and if one wants to write (or create in general), the leap has to be taken and the risk accepted that what is created sooner or later will be disagreed with, even by yourself.
This phenomenon also presents itself as a case of analysis outside the proper context. For clearly, the creative act occurs, and only retrospectively and by thinking too hard about the process do the issues related to writing and the flux of experience come into view. In this, and in related problems connected to decision making, rationality, causality, free will, etc. we expect to be able to see a crystallized structure that somehow explains the occurrence, to find causes and reasons that in an intelligible and complete sense is sufficient for what we experience. However, when we look closer, we realize that any structure we can come up with that could perform this task is limited or insufficient. Is this only because we are looking at these processes and phenomena outside of their context? Or is there something to the notion that only retrospectively do we structure our experience in terms of reasons, causes, will and decisions? How can we limit the cause of or reason for an occurrence to a set of other occurrences, when our experience is a seamless whole, interconnected in space and time? How can we talk about making decisions or having free will, when more often than not we fit the occurrences of our experience into the narrative that is our life only after the fact? More often than not, when we stray outside our comfort zone the future takes us by surprise (though we are fond of pretending otherwise and changing narratives), so how are we able to justify our own agency in bringing it about? Experience, in its vastness, happens, but our attempts at structuring it invariably fail to satisfyingly capture it. Experience seems irreducible to the epistemic.
The “artistic” anxiety I mentioned not only manifests itself in the process at large, but also in its contents. I am writing pieces and articles, essays, that bring together topics I in no way qualify as an expert in. These topics have interested me for as long as I can remember, I have read extensively about them, and while I have a MSc in physics and mathematics, I am not in academia, and I can claim no academic credentials in philosophy. The only originality I contribute in these essays is for the most part a synthesis of existing views, but the synthesis is to my current knowledge unique. In writing the things I write I inevitably both make and critique philosophical claims, and I am outlining a view that I not only claim is philosophical, but of reality as a whole. The questions I ask myself in this context are likely not unexpected. What possible substantive claims can I have that are worth saying? Why should anyone care about my view? And how can I claim any manner of authority, or expect the recognition from or attention of anyone with authority, when I am not taking part in the academic publishing process of peer-review? I don’t have particularly good answers to these questions except to say that reading and writing about the things I do fills me with more motivation and purpose than anything else have done previously. I feel driven, and sometimes I feel like I am in a state of flow2 where I can (metaphorically) see for miles in high definition. And this is what I want to share with my writing, that which is able to stimulate and exhilarate me to this extent.
When in these situations of flow, I get the sensation that, when not looking too hard, I see the tapestry as a whole, all at once. Another image I have (or have constructed?) in these situations is that of my project coming together like a self-assembling jigsaw puzzle. Do these sensations mean anything, or are they delusions? The issue is that in trying to answer this, I have to reduce the sensation, I have to break it apart in order to see it more clearly. I have to get closer, but by moving, the view changes. This is a phenomenon I have been attempting to relate to philosophy and the nature of experience, inquiry and language in the writings I have published so far. For the issue seems rather universal, that both our experience and specific phenomena “evaporate” in our attempts at structuring or understanding them, what I termed epistemisation in the article on Wittgenstein and the Private Language Argument. Is this epistemisation due to a peculiarity of our language and its fundamental subject-object composition3? Or is it due to how our brain models ourselves and the world4? McCarthy (2017), in the only published piece of non-fiction writing of his, touches on this peculiarity and relates it to the “unconscious” and its ability to work problems and make leaps we cannot after-the-fact “consciously” account for. But do these experiences only cohere with explanations that bring in the unconscious? Isn’t this another grasp at the inaccessible ontic? Or do they point to the need for a shift in our understanding of experience and reality? Another possibility is that once again we have taken concepts out of the contexts in which they are meaningful, exactly what Wittgenstein warned us is the cause of many philosophical headaches.
I would also like to make use of this interlude to briefly comment on what I imagine can easily be construed as my having an anti-scientific or anti-rationalist attitude, due to the questioning and critique of science, method, dogma and more. I will start to go in more detail on this in upcoming essays, but for now let me state that I in no way question science as an enterprise, provided that we also view science as a constellation of paradigms or world views. It is only in the context of one or several world views that we may state that a scientific method is one thing or another, or that we have theoretically or experimentally found something to be the case. What I may be critical of are claims following the pattern “According to science…” or “According to physics...”, and related to this, views or claims that have no regard to their own dependence on context. The reason why I question (see the end of my last piece) whether the way science is practiced may have adverse effects on our reality is precisely because of the tendency to disregard context and pluralism. I believe the full impact of holism lies in a world view that is radically pluralistic, completely foreign to the particularist view our civilization is largely fostered on.
This then was his thought. If the world was a tale who but the witness could give it life? Where else could it have its being? This was the view of things that began to speak to him. And he began to see in God a terrible tragedy. That the existence of the Deity lay imperiled for want of this simple thing. That for God there could be no witness. Nothing against which He terminated. Nothing by way of which his being could be announced to Him. Nothing to stand apart from and to say I am this and that is other. Where that is I am not. He could create everything save that which would say him no.
Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing
As I mentioned, I have so far been tracing out one path (related to language and meaning) over the landscape I am trying to show you, and I want now to tentatively outline some of what is to come. The order of the list below does not necessarily correspond to the order of publishing, and this list is by no means comprehensive of what I want to write about. I will give a tentative title for each planned essay, and a short description of its contents. From (the brief) experience I have had of publishing these shorter pieces, the order and content will change, and what is listed here as a single essay may be split into several.
Philosophy for our Future. In this piece I will attempt to explicate (parts of) the background of our present global quandary: how the imbalance and division we now see in the world is intimately connected to our view of reality.
Science and Explanation. This essay will be focused on philosophy of science: what is the aim and role of science, what is explanation and prediction, what is the observed relationship of science to us and reality. Kuhn and Feyerabend are central figures to this piece, with their contributions on pluralism, incommensurability, paradigms, scientific procedure etc.
World Views. This is a likely follow-up article on how we can understand the multitude of world views, the importance of plurality, as well as their constructive nature. It has an overlap with Philosophy for our Future.
Wittgenstein and LLMs. How is the success and efficacy of Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g. ChatGPT) explained? Can the view of language and meaning I presented in Wittgenstein and the Private Language Argument aid us in better understanding how LLMs work?
Entanglement and Non-Separability / Quantum Theory. The quantum theory, its experimental confirmation and the technology it has led to has been revolutionary for our society. In its radical break from classical physics, issues of interpretation, meaning and consequence have proliferated, and still do. I will attempt to trace the main radical breaks with classical expectations quantum theory brings about, and go over some ways we interpret quantum theory.
Background Independence and Covariance / The General Theory of Relativity. Not only did quantum theory break with the classical view of the physical world, so did the general theory of relativity a few decades before. In similarity to the essay on quantum theory, I will trace out the features of general relativity that radically broke with classical thought.
Holism: A View of Reality as a Whole. This will attempt to summarize progress and provide an account of what holism is and isn’t, in particular how its view of reality stand in relation to other “isms”.
Limits. Completeness, consistency and contradiction are central concepts in mathematics, logic, computation and epistemology. Advances in the foundations of these disciplines have revealed inherent limits: for instance, there exist statements that cannot be proved yet are considered true, and no axiomatic approaches to mathematics can prove their own consistency or uniquely determine their own extension. In what contexts are these results meaningful? Are they solely due to self-reference and ambiguity of meaning, or do they say something about reality or the limits of the epistemic?
World, Model and Mind. What do modern approaches to neuroscience and cognitive science say about our relationship to the world? Several of the cutting-edge research teams within these disciplines model the relationship between brain and world as an active one: the brain (model) isn’t passive and what you experience isn’t the sensory data from outside being let in, like through a window, rather, the brain (model) generates your experience, and sensory data is used to correct this constructed world. How can this reciprocal and highly participatory conception of the world, model and mind be understood from a holistic perspective, and what does it say about reality as a whole? A related question is the separation of brain and body, when they are inseparable in terms of what biologically correlates with experience or mind.
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References
Bohm, D. (2002). The Rheomode - An Experiment With Language And Thought. In Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge.
Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1991). Flow. HarperCollins.
Elliot, T. S. (1943). Little Gidding. In Four Quartets. Harcourt.
McCarthy, C. (2010). The Crossing. Pan Macmillan.
McCarthy, C. (2017). The Kekulé Problem - Nautilus. Nautilus Magazine. https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/
I also think about permanence in this connection. Do people have a differing notion of permanence? Is there a correlation between the individually perceived permanence of the past (events, actions etc.) and anxieties?
See Csíkszentmihályi (1991).
Bohm (2002), and likely others I am unaware of, have made attempts at language grounded on a different conception of the relation of language, thought and reality.
See further down in this article for an overview of planned essays, one of which (World, Model and Mind) will investigate this question in more detail.