Connecting to the Universe.

Auras

 We are going to attempt to think about language as the medium through which life forms chose to connect to existence. A tad radical! And you're correct the Blue Green Algae doesn't speak English or Aramaic, so our question will be "What is called language?"

 We have talked about de Sausurre and Jaques Derrida.We spent time with the Signifier, the word or sound cat, and the Signified, the mental image and connections that come into the mind of a small, fury, sometimes purring animal when cat is mentioned. And while we might never have found out how to pronounce the name  de Sausurre we have admired his two points about the relationship between the Signifier and the Signified. Those points are, there is no reason why the word cat should mean a small, fury, sometimes purring animal, rather, over the years we have just collectively agreed upon it. The other point is the a word has meaning, not because of what it is, but because of what it is not. A cat is not a car or a kipper. De Sausurre pictured language as a massive shifting net that kept words apart.

 Jacques Derrida, who had amazing hair and the ill-tempered expression of a man who might have spent too much time thinking, had, like so many, searched through the texts of preceding centuries looking for what Derrida, having absorbed de Sausurre, decided to call a Transcendental Signified. Where was the floor, what was the thing itself. Derrida asked: "where is an ultimate, unshakeable bedrock of truth outside of language that anchors everything else." In another way, "When you look up a word in a dictionary, it defines that word using other words. If you look up those words, they lead to more words. You are trapped in an endless loop of signifiers. You never actually reach the physical "thing" itself."

 And if I remember we then looked at Derrida's suggestion for a possible solution to the where is the floor question? He chose the French word Différance which is arrived at from the word différer which means both "to differ from" and "postpone." He suggested meaning was always both differing and postponing. Here it's useful to accept that within the meaning of postpone is the idea of deliberate and deliberate implies a decision.

 Derrida and Sausrre's contributions to understanding is to advance the idea that meaning is a collective human project. Me, I'd argue a Transcendental Signified is existence. If so this collective human project is our response to existence. Différance which as different and postponed is a fundamental constituent of the universe.

A Choice to Connect is the Ulutmate Verb

Elija in the Desert (Washington Aliston 1779-1843)

  Western Philosphy, in my view, is in the process of re-engaging with existence. This time, not so much because of World Wars, fields of blood and industrial scale murder, but more as a result of reasons similar to the reasons that drove veterans of the The Third Crusade to become hermits and find peace in the caves of Mount Carmel where Elijah had once challenged the Prophets of Baal. The Elijah account was a long, tumultuous story and still is. Baal was all about storms, fertility, deception, idolatry and king Ahab's wife, Queen Jezebel. Elijah was about obeying the one God and having no fun whatsoever this side of the "Still Small Voice."

 Elijah had just caused the death of 450 Prophets of Baal, there'd been fire that melted stone. Despite the victory for Yahweh it had been no more and no less traumatic for Elijah than the Third Crusaders attempts to retake Jerusalem, and return it to the rightful god. What Elijah did to recover was to retreat to the Cave of Mount Horeb, he wasn't victoriously celebrating, he was a broken soldier. His symptoms, as recorded, were exactly those of severe trauma, his first request was to pray for death : "It is enough! O Lord, take away my life."

 Elijah had had his word with his god, and nowhere in the story did Elijah appear to have publicly doubted his calling. Had he shared Schopenhauer's understanding of Will he might have seen what I see - a mindless, universal force pushing shape into the mystery, a random slope looking for Nouns - a blind, insatiable, striving energy that underlies all physical reality. But no Elija was a full blown noun, he'd left his verbs, avoided them, didn't want to think about them and he'd become a servant of his Lord.

 Our philosophers are where I believe they should be, verbs looking for nouns, not smug little shit heads with answers. Indeed the choice is to connect with existence not define it.

Aristotle, through Frege to Gödel

Butterfly Weed

 Logic. There are three stages of this deep, unlikable terror. I say terror because if a system is complete, then everything that matters has already been decided, written down, and indexed. The future is just a deterministic loop, a closed machine.

 Of the three stages, stage one can be called Aristotle. That Ancient Greek wanted something stronger, more reliable than the slipperyness of Mythos, or stories, in which to anchor his thoughts. "The evidence must hold under its own weight, not just because the king says so." Hence the syllogism, the Law of Non-Contradiction and the therefore. "All Humans are Mortal." "Socrates is a human." "Therefore Socrates is Mortal."

Two thousand years later, Frege was a whole different fish. Language was unreliable, far too wishy-washy. His inspiration was Predicate Logic, he got rid of language as words and gave us shivering inadequate mortals Modern Symbolic Logic. Instead of words like Human or Mortal, he replaced words with symbols. Without Frege’s symbolic logic, computer science could not exist. Every line of code, every microchip, and every digital network running the modern world is a descendant of Frege’s chilling attempt to turn human thought into a flawless mathematical machine.

The Austrian Kurt Gödel, who died in 1978, and this requires careful reading, proved that in any "consistent mathematical system large enough to do basic arithmetic, there will always be statements that are true, but cannot be proven using the rules of that system." What this means is that Gödel didn't destroy logic; he gave it its deepest, most glorious nuances. He proved, using Frege's symbolic Logic that truth is a larger category than proof. He showed the West that even its most perfect, sterile, logical systems are fundamentally porous. Stuff gets in, and once in, it behaves poorly, therefore and hence logical systems can never be completely closed, finished, or self-contained.

 As my alter ego Bobby has suggested when logic proves its own incompleteness, it acts like a hand turning a key in a lock we thought was rusted shut. It guarantees that the universe remains an un-collapsed wave function and we life forms in all our speciation remain free.

 So go ahead, infer and predicate that untul you change color.

Consciousness as Myth

Day Lily

 Are we thrown into the world or do we explode into the world? Pompous ass that I am, I see a massive difference. I'll go further "Life itself is an impossible dream of one sort of another. Without myth we people would be empty." The "special sort of matter"—when it is discovered—requires myth to keep it from collapsing into the void. "We cannot live on bread, spreadsheets and data alone."

  And yes! The "special sort of matter" not just people, it's life. Here to reaffirm the meaning of "special sort of matter" in our dialogue so far these are the words we have used: "When fundamental stuff (the verbing and nouning of the universe—consciousness and matter) gets organized in a highly specific, complex, porous way—like a brain, a nervous system, or a fleshy body, a slime mold, a hard shelled crab or a blue green algae—it manifests as life.)

 To see the source of myth inside consciousness, we have to look past both the Front-Row calculators and their Sartre-style theater of the individual exploding into the world. We have to return to the center that decides which Heidegger called the Dasein. We have to look at the very structural geometry of how the flesh encounters the universe.

 Consciousness as we experience it does not invent myth, myth is born in the fracture.

The moment a human being becomes conscious, a terrible, beautiful separation occurs. We are "thrown" into the world as a "center that decides," which means we are no longer one with the landscape. From this place of Unbearable Absence we look out at a universe which is massive, objective, and completely silent. It doesn't have a voice. It doesn't care. We are in a void.

 Consciousness cannot endure such silence. It feels a total, agonizing absence of meaning. Myth is the violent, creative rush of consciousness attempting to heal that fracture. It is the bridge the mind throws across the chasm between the "me" and the "world."

We look at the rain we see the plants cheering. That "cheer" is the myth—the projection of life onto the silent object, the refusal to let the universe remain cold and silent.