Existential Ambiguity

Existential Ambiguity

Sentiens simultaneously bears characteristics of its component worlds, Scientia and Dementia.

This will be hard to write, hard to conceive of let alone to clarify. Keep checking back for revisions (send money, offer servitude). The sub-worlds will be developed separately for convenience, but in truth they are inseparable.

Whether or not Time or Pleroma or Creatura, as wholes, have Janus-natures I leave unconsidered for the time being; but Sentiens (and its components) have infrangibly dual natures. Self-awareness, sentience, intelligence, while they function semiotically to symbolize our world and our experience, cannot be separated from the semiotic liability of error: from mistakes to unacknowledged lies.

Sentiens, the universe of sentient existence, self-awareness, intelligence has an irreducibly double nature. The semiotic potential that enables us to model our world necessarily also allows us to model it wrong. A map is of a different existential category than the territory – Creatura/Sentiens is not Pleroma – but also the map can be wrong: seriously wrong. Neither King Ferdinand's map nor Columbus's had the Americas between Spain and India, and Columbus's map had India much closer to Spain than it was.

That's clear to all, but what isn't obvious, is that our society has the same liabilities as the societies of the late Fifteenth Century. My existential sets, going hand in hand with my theory of Macroinformation (with its informational sets), models awareness as having simultaneous and indivisible capacities for both sanity and pathology. Thus, at its baptism, I draw Sentiens. Korzybski bade us become semantically sane, Bateson (and I) second the motion (while our academic colleagues can't conceive of the necessity), but Korzybski, Bateson, nor I can delete the capacity for error from our semiotic processing. Waves have crests and troughs, they can't be separated. Tides have highs and lows: and indeterminate borders (in time and space). Image making can serve survival; the same image making can prepare our doom.

Good. That's exactly as it "should" be. Informationally and existentially we live in a perfect universe: mortal.

Time is infinite. All of the universes I am tracing exist within time (there's no where else for them to exist) and are finite. Pleroma will have a death. Creatura will have a death. Sentiens will for sure. (It may be committing suicide right now.) (I'm laboring to help Sentiens endure and evolve into the distant future; my society labors to make sure that no one hears me.) (Leaving artists unpublished, sabotaging scientists, censoring philosophers is exactly what we say are will not do, while we do it, left and right.)

draft of 2009 03 12

Macroinformation issues from frictions among categories within the mind of a sentience. I say that all sentient existence has potential for friction built right in. I'm revising this series of posts to emphasize some irreducible double-nature for intelligence, for awareness. Either can help us survive, help us model our world, improve predictability: we'll trip over the roller-skate less often if we learn where things are likely to be located in our world: and our trippings will be even rarer if we can influence that order: "Judy, don't leave your skates on the front walkway." But our models of our world are not always true: did the sun really revolve around the earth? people said it did. Does the priest really know more about God than you do? The Church says he does.

Humans divide experience into "good" and "bad." Sometimes "bad" is elevated (or denigrated) to "evil." Our emotions consist of things we love and things we hate. Some groups succeed in getting others to listen when they insist that they can separate the good from the bad, that they can identify evil, that they can eradicate it. Watch out. I insist that there are binaries in our models of experience that cannot be separated. Intelligence may be sane: in general; intelligence may not be sane: absolutely. I see the skate, I avoid stepping on it: someone else, or me on some other occasion, may confront the skate, but "see" Lucifer incarnate, "hear" Mozart, "smell" my long deceased love ... How I react to such "seeings" may be well-adjusted, or may be more than a little pathological. This is true of All of us. The population can not be divided between the intelligent and the stupid, the good and the evil, though some authority can incarcerate some portion of the population in an asylum, it's "map" may not be a perfect fit for the territory.

I cannot overemphasize my point. I've been making it in one form or another all my adult life without being satisfied that I've been understood. I see myself as number N in a long line of teachers who still haven't been understood. Pythagoras' Theorem, Einstein's Relativity, may not be understood by the majority, or by my landlady, or by your grocer; but both concepts are understood by more than a couple of individuals. I see Alan Watts's understanding and teaching precede mine; but what core representatives of the civilization understand either of us? I can identify none.

Here's another analogy. Freud divided the self-aware between Eros and Thanatos; he didn't say "I'm for Life; You're for Death." No: both Eros and Thanatos are ineradicable in our psyches. Creation and destruction are inseparable. The wave cannot crest without also forming a trough.

Whatever we do as individuals, whatever we do as groups, whatever our institutions do serve intelligence, to promote awareness, to maximize sanity, we will still be subject to pathology. No matter how healthy we are, we will still be mortal: or we will no longer be human: not as we've meant "human" in the past.

But I suspect that Existence will be unable to separate some basic binaries even were the one sentient species that we know were to triple its intelligence and fine tune its sanity. In other words, I am expressing doubt, out loud, that even God, could be purely intelligent, and immune to insanity.