from abstract to concrete
Last month’s attempt to ‘articulate everything’, to describe the most fundamental mechanics of the universe
and our experience of it, was decidedly abstract. For those abstractions to be affirmed they have to relate back perfectly to what we know about concrete reality, ultimately to examples that can be pointed to in our own experience. If not, my discoidal diagram representing ‘Existence: mechanical integration’ can be nothing more
than a decorative fiction. As Ayn Rand put it…
“…abstractions as such do not exist: they are merely man’s epistemological method of perceiving that which exists—and that which exists is concrete.”
The Romanic Manifesto (Chapter 1: The Psycho-Epistemology of Art)
Critiquing the diagram: does this set of abstractions help us perceive that which exists?
Please refer back to my previous blog post (October 2019) if need be for an explainer; a summary of what each labelled section means and the reasoning behind using black/white and grey.
Existence: mechanical integration
A few things to ponder and resolve…
- Can a circle/sphere adequately convey the actuality of a potentially boundless universe?
- Would selective blurriness help bring overall clarity?
- Are visuals a poor substitute for words when grappling with metaphysics?
- Might animation be a vital missing resource?
- What are the unlabelled outer grey areas — existence without identity? But doesn’t all existence have an identity?
- How can we avoid reading it as a Venn diagram with exclusive sets — rather than an integrated mechanical system ‘pulled apart’ for examination?
- Ought the core metaphysical axioms of Existence, Identity and Consciousness somehow acquire more prominence?
- Is the Identity/Identification pair a binary opposition to the same extent as the Digital/Analogue and the Entity/Process pairs?
- Are the Digital/Analogue and the Entity/Process pairs the true (and exhaustive) components of Identity/Identification?
- Is Identity/Identification top of a hierarchy or on equal footing as the other two pairings?
- Is the difference between Entity/Process and Digital/Analogue pairs real enough and clear enough (ensuring that the latter goes far beyond a mere descriptive differentiation in modern technology)?
- Does the model fail in describing a universe prior to the evolution of any consciousness (if such a stage ever existed) — or should potential consciousness (information processing) be always pencilled in?
- However, if consciousness is subtracted out, would Identification then become meaningless and be subtracted out or would the knock-on effect go further so everything would collapse into a grey soup of undefinable space/time existents?
- Might the diagram be able to describe just part of the universe (say a single planet, or even an atom or less) rather than the boundless whole?
- There’s an obvious logic to why Space relates to Entity and Time relates to Process, but it seems much more of a stretch to ally Space to Identity and Time to Analogue — what’s the underlying logic (or is this a case of shoe-horning)?
- The inner six concepts (Concept, Percept, Sensation; Entropy, Energy, Particle): — are they the correct words and are they all located absolutely logically?
- Is the diagram missing anything vital (or including anything comparatively trivial)?
Any thoughts?