Can radical indeterminacy be used as a basis for constructing a black-and-white picture, for constructing ‘a definite story’? Clearly it can’t – we can’t start off from indeterminacy and somehow go on from that beginning to create a story which is determinate, a picture of things that is nailed down forever. There’s no possibility for doing this, no way of bringing it about…
Building certainty on top of radical uncertainty can’t be done – indeterminacy is the lack of any basis, the lack of any solid ground, the lack of any bias (or ‘lack of symmetry’) that can serve as a risk-free foundation. If we want a nice, reassuring determinate reality to hang out in then we have to come up with some sort of gimmick therefore, some kind of trick. We are somehow going to have to be super-inventive and ‘fly in the face of reality’. The trick or gimmick in question is ‘bootstrapping’: we bootstrap the world into existence every day, one opposite giving rise to the other in a perfectly cost-free manner. ‘Everything arises in this way, opposites from their opposites’, says Plato. The trick – in other words – is the production of the Hyperreal (which is where one image is constructed in terms of another, where one thought is created by reference to some other, equally unreal, thought). The gimmick is self-reference, in other words.
Self-reference as ‘a method for achieving certainty’ falls flat on its face right from the start – it falls flat since there is no such thing as a ‘self’ to refer to. In the symmetrical situation there is no such thing as ‘a stand-alone thing to refer to’ (or compare with). The symmetrical situation is beyond comparison, therefore. Not for any fancy metaphysical or spiritual reason but because it’s just plain impossible – we can’t categorize something that has no features and if we can’t categorize things we can’t compare them. Space can’t be compared to space; emptiness cannot be compared with emptiness. Self-reference as a ‘launch vehicle’ is a complete non-starter therefore – it’s a total dead end. By ‘self’ – in this context – we mean anything fixed (fixed like a solid wooden post driven into the ground), anything we can use as a reference point. ‘Self’ – in this context – simply means anything that can be defined or specified in an exhaustive manner (so that we can then relate everything to it and therefore – via this act of comparison – ‘know what it is’). ‘Self’ is anything we can identify with.
There is no such thing as ‘an independent reference point’ however; we can’t draw a line all the way around something to isolate it from its environment (we can’t ‘define it exhaustively’) since that simply wouldn’t be a legitimate action – “Truth is whole and cannot be broken into parts”, Parmenides tells us. Or as we read in the Gospel of Thomas – “Jesus said I am the light that is above them all. I am the All. The All came from me, and the All has returned to me. Split wood and I am there. Raise a stone and you will find me”. When we split wood (or raise up a stone from the ground) we’re trying to get away from the All, we’re trying to find something that isn’t there, which is the ‘stand-alone reference point’) but as Jesus says in the verse reproduced above, we’re just never going to be able to do this. We seek to escape the Whole by dividing, and then by dividing again and again, but no matter how finely we slice the cake, we can still never get away from it! A slice of the cake is still the cake.
We can’t get away from the All because there’s nothing that isn’t the All (obviously enough!) but the All is no good to us because we want to engineer a definite picture or story and we can’t do that on the basis of radical indeterminacy. The All isn’t a ‘basis’ for anything – the suggestion is entirely nonsensical. No matter how long we search, no matter how hard we exert ourselves in the task, we can’t find a platform to act out of (or survey the world from) so that it all ‘makes sense’ to us. What we can do however is to bootstrap the logical continuum into existence (which will then fulfil our need for a determinate universe, a universe in which all the possibilities are mapped out in advance in such a way that – no matter what – we’re never going to be surprised or caught off guard in any revolutionary way).
Self-referentiality is how we create ‘definite values’; via SR we create positive versus negative, affirmation versus denial, go versus stop, and so on, and in relation to each other these opposites are ‘as definite as definite can be’. This is a ‘double-act’ – the one is defined in terms of the other. Within its own sphere, polarity – which is another way of talking about logic – can be absolutely certain, the proviso here being that this crystal-clear clarity, this perfect lack of ambiguity, is also completely redundant at the same time. It’s meaningless, in other words. The only way logic gets to be ‘certain’ in the way that it is – we might say – is by ‘taking over all the space’ and then implicitly denying that there could ever be anything else other than the banal show it is putting on. Logic ‘takes over’ and then – having done so – it denies that it is done anything (implying thereby that this is the way things are all by themselves). This is what Berger and Luckmann refer to in The Social Constriction of reality as the principle of reification, and it is also – we might say – the Principle of Simulation.
Prior to the ‘takeover’ by the system of logic there was no certainty about anything (and there were also no ‘things’ to have any certainty about). Prior to the takeover there was ‘the Whole’ and the Whole is – as we might expect – unitary (meaning that comparing one particular thing with some other, different thing isn’t actually ‘a thing’). Without comparison there can be no certainty, no ‘knowing’ of anything, and there is no ‘comparing one thing to another’ when it comes to the Whole (obviously enough). Prior to the hostile takeover of logic (or ‘the hostile takeover of thought’, if we want to put it like that) there was the All (the Unus Mundus) and the All can’t be known because we can’t get outside it. There’s no basis from which to interrogate the Whole and obtain concrete facts to put in our inventory; there’s no starting point for any type of logical process, any type of extrapolation. The rational mind can’t gain a foothold here because there aren’t any ‘angles’ for it to exploit. ‘Ratios’ (or ‘proportionalities’) don’t come into it…
We can’t find a basis – which is to say, an ultimate (and therefore inviolate) level of description – but we can all the same assume one and then (within the limits that we have opted to see as being ‘real rather than freely chosen’) we absolutely can do this. We launch into a finite game, in other words. We ‘turn in on ourselves’. There is a very important clause in the deal that we never pay attention to however – the clause that says that our assumed basis can only function as a basis when we never look beyond the context that echoes it, the context that reflects itself back at itself in a closed loop of logic. This assumed platform actually comes as a ‘package’ – a package complete with its own framework (the platform couldn’t function as such without it) – but the pertinent point here is that we completely fail to see the essential relativity of what’s going on – we don’t see that the ‘starting-off point’ for our logical investigations into the world only makes sense (or only functions as such) when we assume the existence of a world that is – actually – nothing more than a linear development or extrapolation of the very same viewpoint that we started off from. We’ve set forth on ‘an imaginary journey’, therefore. The only journeys we know are imaginary ones.
The assertion and the framework within which that assertion makes sense (which is to say, the logically-constructed statement and the set of rules which have been used to interpret it) are the same thing – there aren’t two unconnected sets of rules for ‘constructing’ and ‘interpreting’. Clearly however this is something we don’t see – what we’re assuming here is that the ‘fact’ that we are asserting comes without any special supporting framework (without any ‘trainer wheels’). This is an absolutely colossal assumption to be making – and it’s also totally false into the bargain – but we can’t help making it all the same since looking at the world from a particular point of view requires us to do this. This is basic mechanics – utilizing a particular POV means ‘taking it totally for granted that the POV in question is a meaningful or valid way to see things’. Adopting a viewpoint equals ‘making an assumption’, and ‘making an assumption’ means ‘taking on the entropy debt that goes with it’. We never see the blinkers that have come down over our eyes and the result of this is that the world we have available to us shrinks without us ever noticing it.
We lose perspective without knowing that we have and thus we can’t see that our ‘viewpoint’ is actually our limitation. We can only have what we want (i.e., a determinate or non-fluid pseudo-world to live in) by incurring a big fat cognitive blind-spot and incurring a big fat cognitive blind-spot means that ‘the truth of what’s going on’ is going to be something that we will just never glimpse. The truth is precisely what has been eliminated from the package. To choose to view things in a particular way is to be unable to see that any choice has been made since once the choice has been made then it straightaway becomes the basis for everything that we know. This is where the irreversible ‘loss of perspective’ that we’re talking about comes in – to ‘make a choice’ means to discard information without recognizing that we have, it means ‘creating an entropy debt’, and so the impression that we have that choice is an empowering kind of thing is purely hallucinatory. It’s the reverse of ‘empowering’ – it’s enslaving.
The only way the Determinate World can function for us (apparently function) as if it’s totally unambiguous – if there were to be any ambiguity at all regarding what we are seeing then then that would invalidate the whole thing. Nothing would mean anything then. We don’t want to be faced with a plurality of competing answers because that would fatally confuse us (because that would ruin the game we’re playing, because that would shred the illusion of ontological security which we have created for ourselves). We want just the one (uncontradicted) answer, not a multitude of them, and we are more than willing to overlook the fact that this ‘one black and white answer’ is completely unrepresentative of any greater reality. In order to have the totally unambiguous view that we want to have (because it feels secure for us) we need to have ‘just the one nominated VP’ and so that’s the package we are forever buying into – perniciously meaningless and self-defeating though it might be. It’s ‘the Package Everyone Wants’ it’s the Samsara package’…
To obtain the sharply defined image we desire we need to make very sure we stay in the box (the ‘box’ in question being the rational mind) and this is exactly what we do. This is the rule we’re not allowed to break – our whole life has to take place within this ultimately sterile domain. Reality – before we get to work editing it and chopping it up – is made up (we might say) of an endless flow of viewpoints, and so when we view the world on the basis of a fixed position we are departing from the flux. We believe that we know what the word ‘flux’ means, but just so long as we’re seeing the world in the logically consistent way then there’s no way we can – we can’t appreciate what ungrounded change means because we never change our VP. We are out of sympathy with the nature of reality itself, therefore – we are forever ‘looking in the wrong direction’. The static point can only extend itself – it cannot relate to anything other than its own projections. Thought can only ever perceive is linear progression (i.e., cause-and-effect) and this is the illusion of change, the illusion of movement. In order for us to be able to perceive real movement we would need to drop our established viewpoint and then ‘see what happens next’ and the problem here – as far as we’re concerned, anyway – that the one who sees what happens next wouldn’t be me since I can only have a defined ‘me’ when I’m safely in the box, when I’m only looking at things the one prescribed way.
The crux of the matter is that whatever we see via the VP is the VP, whatever we understand via the device of the FW is the FW. The VP can’t show us anything that isn’t it – that’s not technically possible – and for this reason and it is for this reason that we can say that thought doesn’t ‘see’, it projects… The thinking process is positive rather than negative, in other words – it is ‘output rather than input’ and this means that when we’re in the rational purposeful mode we are forever reacting to our own projections. This is we might say the definition of unconscious activity – it is ‘activity that never breaks through to reality’. We are reacting to our own constructs as if they weren’t our constructs, as if they were an inviolate external reality and this is the Mechanism of Self-Reference. SR is the trick we use for producing certainty in a universe where there is none. It’s a cheap trick – is the cheapest (and nastiest) trick there is – but notwithstanding this – it is universally effective. On its own terms it can never be defeated. It has unchallenged sovereignty in its own domain. This – we might say – is the hidden meaning of the often-quoted line in John 14:30 where Jesus refers to Satan as the ‘prince of this world.’ Satan is the Great Dragon we read of in Revelations who ‘deceives all the nations of the earth’ and causes them to be incapable of seeing the truth that is right there in front of their very eyes…
