There Is No "I" without the "Not I"

 

(Authors Note: This essay was originally published online on March 14, 2023. This is posted here for the author's personal document collection and shows previous readers' highlighted sections.)

World Science Fair, On-Stage Conversation:

Theoretical Physicist Brian Greene:

How do you know that math is the language of the universe?

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson:

(sarcastically) The universe told me.

Theoretical Physicist Brian Greene:

I have a question about this. Could you imagine that one day far in the future we encounter some alien civilization, and they say, “Show us what you’ve done to understand the universe” and we bring out our math books with all of our theorems and physics, and they turn to us and say, “Math … We tried that. It takes you just so far.”

When one really takes a step back and asks the question, “What is the foundation of a human being’s knowledge?”, it becomes clear that the answer lies in what we think we perceive as a subjectively formed understanding of what we ‘know’. But to intently ask ourselves what can be known is to recognize that the foundations of all human knowledge began as a series of defining one unknown by means of another unknown. It is by experience that we observe an event and cognitively map what we sense as a cause and effect. Our perception of an event is always at a minimum inaccurate or incomplete because it can only be sensed or experienced through our limited personal perspective. Our mind then retains the inaccurately or incompletely observed event and maps it into our cognitive process for future access. And as we navigate through our life and subsequent experiences, we constantly refer back to our personally charted map illustration that has grown along with us on our journey.

This map is inherently ingrained into our process of becoming who we are and how we interact with our perception of the world. It assists us in deciphering events as they are happening, and there is no way to differentiate between our self as an observer and the conglomeration that is the sum of the effects of our experience. How can we be certain of what we perceive? As you are reading along through this paragraph, you are probably beginning to see the difficulty in this description. There is a vagueness that is nagging and persistent. Carrying doubt is an undeniable aspect of being human. Certainty is unreachable, and our ability to survive depends solely on the imperfect expectations of what experience has previously only indicated.

We assign knowledge of some thing or some event by how it fits onto a continuously morphing, imperfect map, and often find our ‘self’ floundering in our attempts to grasp what it means to us. We carry our own special bundle of these meanings with us wherever we go. They are wrapped in a huge tapestry that bears scribbled notes, torn out sections, and highlighted coordinates. Our cocooned meaning bundle represents how our perception affects us internally, while our tapestry swaddle acts as a threshold to what we perceive as being outside of our self. We recognize our status with respect to these circumstances by subconsciously assigning what is ‘I’ compared to what is ‘NOT I’. What is even more difficult for us to discern is the composition of this threshold between what we observe as ‘I’ and that which we observe as being ‘Not I’. We consider our self to be an entity within itself; having attributes that are familiar and prone to acquire habits of function that develop into what becomes what we and others perceive as a description of our identity.

Philosophers have long debated about what Immanuel Kant introduced as a thing-in-itself. In consideration of what we should now acknowledge as personal threshold maps, is it even possible to discover what a living thing is in itself; independent of an observer, and independent of what it represents to self and others? Identity is a deeply complex and sometimes seemingly illusive coordinate of consciousness. To assist in our navigation towards those desired coordinates of personal identity, our subconscious skill of negation remains aware and active in the background of our cognition as we make those assignments of what is the ‘I’ and what is the ‘Not I’. Whatever represents the Not I, whether it be a living or a non-living entity, acts as a buoy representing an ‘other’. The other is clearly just as important in the homing in to identity process as is the developing ‘I’, or self. There would be no seemingly individual self without the reflection and our discernment of the others. Understanding this means to understand that personal identity is immersed in and emerges from being irreducibly and inseparably continuous and contiguous to all that surrounds the self. There is no abrupt division between the self and others, only a threshold of a condensed but still gradient phase transition.

Perhaps this is the root of the doubt that clings to the human condition. We are inherently and incessantly navigating as we go through life, with that negation skill always running in the background. We want so much to finalize our travels and be home in our coordinates, but the striving of the journey is its actual lifeforce. It feeds itself as it proceeds, in that each new presumed understanding of a representation along the way, combined with the melding of each into our personal meaning bundle, opens new pathways to the deciphering of even more others. Certainty illudes us, while at the same time acting like a dangling carrot. We cannot help but want to believe in something because belief settles our doubt. And when the accumulations of our doubt-settling lead us to a belief system, we have then assigned ourselves to being even more so of an ‘other buoy’ to those in differing juxtapositions along the journey. The point here being that if we were to have a better understanding of how brutely and relationally influencing we are to each other, and how we are necessarily striving as One, we would stop engaging in mere fly-by behavior, and combine our navigational skills to reach a healthier common understanding. Not doing so only results in a massive tug-o-war storm, where because of the detrimental fracturing effect on the Whole, even the so-called winners lose.

A major aspect of this scenario that cannot be overlooked is the reference to representations. As we grow and develop in life, our tapestry accumulates chartered reference representations, or signs. These signs speak to all of our senses, including our cognition. And when we encounter and reflect upon them as we journey along, in succession, they become the next revealed indication prompt on our map. As we gather these signs as tools and clues for deciphering our continuously developing navigational chart, it is extremely important to be aware that the map we are charting is not the actual terrain that we travel upon. Rather, our map is a journal reflecting our life, and the terrain is the stage that, as we encounter it, illustrates right before our eyes and mind. And as our navigational chart expands and accumulates more reference representations, a map legend gradually manifests in our conscious and subconscious mind, streamlining the process. We become our own cartographer, directly orienteering ourselves, and indirectly orienteering others. Over time, the signs we use and begin to rely upon become ingrained in our culture. And if we factor in the inherent vagueness that we touched on earlier in this chapter, not only does this add an element of diverse chance to our journey, but it also becomes clear that if the language of humanity’s signs is misinterpreted, we could easily steer ourselves off course.

There are countless variations of signs in human culture, and other living beings have their own versions and variations of signs to aid them along in life-striving. The expression and reception of the meaning to be found in these many different representations can be fundamentally considered as biological dialogue. The term for this supportive and creative dialogue is ‘semiosis’. Humans express and interpret semiosis in such commonly understood categories as mathematics, alphabet letters, words, traffic signs, flags, symbols, as well as associating colors and sounds. As far as humans can perceive, other animals engage in the dialogue of semiosis with color patterns, web and nest designs, sounds, odors, courtship dances, territorial displays, and other ways that we are not able to discern from our limited perspective. Just as it is with human communities around the globe, semiosis is relative to each living species, community, culture, and locale. The word used to refer to these variations in biological dialects is ‘semiospheres’.

When we recognize that mathematics is just one form of the many semiotic cognitive expression and reception tools that humans can use to navigate our terrain, this one by means of measurement, it is very important that we keep reminding ourselves that our perception of the terrain is only the human perspective. If we want to be upfront and honest with ourselves, we must recognize that we are measuring a reflection of an ever-changing, continually morphing illustration that is constantly in process. Mathematics has been very useful as an engagement-assisting-device for our journey, and there are countless ways we can ascribe its successes in specific healthcare scenarios. However, we must keep in the forefront of our minds that whenever and however we apply a representation to our map, it reflects on the journey in untold ways, potentially directing us down paths leading to greater challenges. Mathematics is not the language of the universe. Semiosis pervades throughout all of life and all living beings. This biological dialogue is a multidimensional, successional event, with no clear beginning from birth, or even prior to birth. Mathematics and language are merely culturally learned semiotic tools. Semiosis is the language of the universe.

Thinking back to our tapestry, mathematics may be able to measure the leftover, stationary, or inactive portions, but it will never be able to accurately tell us everything that went into how existence came to be, or expectantly provide us with an accurate prediction of where it will go. The story of the tapestry is that it folds and unfolds, writes and rewrites by way of semiosis. As our most recent science of physics is pointing to in quantum coherence and decoherence research, mathematics as a measurement tool expecting to fully understand our universe as a thing-in-itself, will always be chasing its tail and lacking in the necessary metaphysical acrobatics. As of this writing, the De Broglie-Bohm Theory explains itself as explicitly non-local, indicating that the velocity of any one particle depends on the value of the guiding equation, which depends on the configuration of all of the particles under consideration. This certainly seems to be the semiotic tool of mathematics’ way of describing all that we have previously explored in this chapter. However, this mathematical perspective does not satisfy the materialists, who want so much to settle their doubt by assigning their belief to other local, non-dependent, individual particular cause and effect mathematical scenarios. They should not be blamed for their desire, as they are unknowing victims of a thought virus. This same reach towards a desire to settle doubt was initiated by and exponentiated in our languages and modern predominant global discourse by means of something called nominalism. The roots of this thought virus began in philosophy and theology, when monarchs, oligarchs, and religious leaders chose to change ancient oral traditions and understandings into written words laced with rhetoric in their desire for more territorial power and more constraining rule over the common people. The necessary organic processing of oral traditions and stories that had built cohesive bonds among families and communities was now infected with something that would, in the coming centuries, slowly tear them apart. The early development of this thought virus took hold in the years of the pre-Socratics, when rhetoric was combined with the written word. It was a muddled time in human history, as there remained an effort by some to prevent this direction, but their intentions were drowned out by the Sophists and their teachings of the elite in ancient Athens during the birth of democracy. This nominalism went on to exponentially accelerate in what we know today as Western Civilization. Due to the historical timing of certain events, and the statuses of some of the most detrimental carriers, the growth of this divisive thought virus can be observed and reflected upon by studying the theologian Roscellinus, the work of Peter Abelard, and especially the philosopher and theologian William of Ockham.

It was during this period in the Middle Ages that saw the theologian scholars struggle with the ability to back up the Church’s written teachings regarding morality, the Trinity, and God’s omnipotence. The ancient additions of rhetoric to oral teachings had been cast into written works that were now being questioned by those trying to oppose the Church’s heavy hand. This created conundrums for the ruling classes. To assist in their control of the common people, it was extremely important for them to profess to the masses that God’s will possessed the ability to selectively damn an individual sinner or save an individual saint. This strong individualism of nominalism was adopted and promoted, and the most common way of quelling any questions of why God would allow bad things to happen to good people was to recommend focus on asking for forgiveness and devotion to stronger faith. Scholars to this day still debate nominalism versus realism, and faith is still the most common way to settle any doubts born of reason. The philosophical proponents of nominalism tend to be atheists, who are blindly unaware of the theological roots of their atheism. Followers of nominalistic religious theologies are sadly unaware of the thought virus they carry and promote.

Following the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, nominalism went on to further influence Catholicism, finding a ripe feeding ground in the Protestant Christianity of Martin Luther, then swiftly spreading by the invention of the move-able printing press. Judaism, Islam, and other theologies were not immune to its far-reaching influence. This theological element went on to have further effect on philosophy through the work of Rene Descartes, his individualistic and particularistic “I think, therefore I am” and those that followed in his vein of thought. This short-sighted thinking went on to promote dualism and the materialistic sciences of classical mechanics as seen in Leibniz’s absent-of-time equations meant to mimic the eternal and separate-from-us, casting-at-will nature of the nominalist God. Today’s sciences are finally beginning to realize the difficulties that lie in trying to rectify and consolidate what they inherited from the past with what they have since learned, and they are now being challenged with conundrums very much like the theologians of the Middle Ages. In fully recognizing the influence of the nominalism thought virus on our now global civilization, we can see that what some believe is an ongoing debate between materialistic scientism and the theological religions is actually a debate between two camps infected with the same virus. Not only has this thought virus infected science and religion but it has a strong foothold in our politics, the way we treat our planet, each other, and even our closest neighbors and family members. Symptoms and casualties of this virus manifest in mass shootings, domestic violence, drug addictions, suicides, hate crimes, climate change, the ongoing destruction of our biosphere, and so much more. Its modern-day major food source is social and mass media algorithms that move much too fast for proper organic dialogue and cognitive processing. In reaching an understanding that the value of otherness is absolutely crucial to identity and the Whole of our existence, the question that now confronts us is this, “How do we unravel that which has unraveled us?”