Cosmin Visan wrote: ↑Sat Dec 16, 2023 8:56 pm
I invite you to discover my new paper, "How Self-Reference Builds the World", in which I explain how the entire world is created by self-reference looking-back-at-itself, world which of course is consciousness:
https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan
Hi Cosmin, thank you for sharing your work. I’ve read both parts and I’m glad that such ideas are breaking through. We have discussed here various attempts in which the intellect tries to break the strictly physical framework. One example is the work of Michael Levin. Recently Eugene referenced
Justin Riddle, who you may find much closer to your vision (if you haven’t stumbled upon him already).
I’m especially glad that you brought the question of Time-Memory. This is something which still lies in the blind spot of many thinkers. We have spoken about this here many times too. It’s interesting how simple things are, yet how strongly the thinking habits of the past hold. For example, science still tries to figure out why time flows in one direction and not the other. There’s some movement in this area too, for example Carlo Rovelli attempts to explain time as a macroscopic effect of otherwise directionless time. Yet things become much clearer at the moment we
stop thinking of reality as something that exists in itself, having the direction of time as an intrinsic feature which consciousness simply acknowledges. When we look at Time in the way you indicate in your article, it is obvious that time can be experienced only in a direction of integration of memory. This is as obvious as the anthropic principle. If every next state had less and less content, this wouldn’t be an experience of existence through time but movement from forgetfulness to even more forgetfulness. And we wouldn’t even be able to realize that this is happening since there’s nothing in the lesser state that suggests that we have dropped there from a higher state. We don’t need to assume as some law of the universe that time should flow in that particular way. If we want, we may even imagine that state transitions in all directions do happen. Yet only those states which embed the echoes of the previous ones can be experienced as a stream of existence.
I don’t know if you have been drawing inspiration from other sources but the principle of self-reference have been known and explored in the mystery centers through the ages. For example, in the Rosicrucian stream these initial reflections are a meditative way to approach the mystery of the Trinity – the three Logoi.
Today we are in an age where anyone who thinks things through, will inevitably reach some version of this primal self-reference. This is the natural outcome when our ego probes its thinking space sufficiently. When we encompass our thinking world we reach the experience of being at the center of a conceptual fractal. Every concept can be traced to the center. The next step is simply to conceive that this experience is self-similar to the Cosmic fractal.
Fichte’s philosophy was precisely one where the Self is the fundamental reality which is both the source and the limit of all knowledge. This translates one-to-one to what you call the form (the limits of any formalized knowledge) and the formless, which is the source (Everything and Nothing). From this perspective also naturally comes his thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad (often mistakenly attributed to Hegel). This is completely expected if we conceive that the Self is the unitary source. It’s necessary that any manifoldness should be traceable to a higher unity, culminating in the singularity of all.
Hegel went a step further by recognizing that not even the Self can be considered as the foundation. Why not? Because after all, what we call ‘the Self’ is really a concept within the thinking process. We can
infer something like a self, which we imagine acts as a container of thinking, but this inference
is already a product of thinking and as such it doesn’t get us any closer to the reality of the self. For such reasons, Hegel felt that in the concepts of thinking we live in a more fundamental process of reality.
I know that this may sound very false at first. You’ve built your whole fractal starting from the self. But try to feel what you are
doing when you spin that theory. You are
thinking. I know that you can say here “Of course, these are only thoughts, but they point at realities. Thinking is not fundamental, it results only when the self-recursion has reached much deeper levels.” This is all good. But in the end this hierarchy is spun only like a conceptual mockup of the supposed true reality.
This is easy to see. Even though we imagine that self-reference produces all qualia, we can’t repeat that process in our thoughts. For example, no matter how we recurse our thoughts, we can’t reach the experience of a color that we have never seen.
You know this, of course, and you went in details to explain the formless, or rather to show how any explanation of the formless only leads us away from its ungraspable essence. And that’s perfectly fine. The whole point is to have a very lucid sense that from our
current conscious perspective, the
first thing that emerges from the formless is
the thinking process - not a self that can be beheld. Our whole attempt to explain the formless, including speaking of the self-referring self, is already further manifestation of the thinking process and as such is even more remote from the
essence of the formless.
This is very easy to introspect if we try: our thoughts about the self-referring self, we can phenomenologically backtrack to our thinking voice. We can certainly say “I speak forth these thoughts about the “I am “I am …””” But then our tracing reaches a halt. As soon as we reach our thinking voice we can’t find anything within the contents of our consciousness from whence that voice is seen to emerge. We can of course, philosophize about it, we can imagine self-referencing selves, which somehow produce the thinking process, but in doing this we easily forget that it is still that same thinking voice which philosophizes. The whole theory is still only an assembly of thoughts that we have produced.
About two years ago you were talking with Ashvin about similar things. I wonder if in this meanwhile you have tried to approach this question more closely. I guess it is quite clear that any kind of intellectual modelling leaves us on the formed side (even if we assume that the model points at the true formless reality). In a sense, the formless is behind the back of our head, the borderline is the precipitating thinking process in the head, and the finished spoken out thoughts are all the way in front of us. In other words, are we destined to forever arrange formed thoughts through which we try to imagine the hidden reality of the formless? Or true progress of humanity consists in gaining deeper
direct consciousness (not deeper philosophizing, which will only increase the amount the formed words in front of us) of the way the so far invisible essence of the formless guide the formative process? In other words, have you considered the possibility to understand more about the cognitive process that spins the theory? Not by doing even more theorizing (which keeps the true process in the blind spot) but by reaching some more fundamental form of consciousness which lives in the reality of that which is otherwise only described in mental pictures?