We are in the presence of something which is more profound than we can ever understand, and yet because we are operating on the basis of the thinking mind we cannot appreciate this profundity. We cannot acknowledge it, we cannot know that it is there and so – as far as we are concerned – it isn’t there…

 

 

This is quite something therefore – here we are in this infinitely profound, infinitely subtle universe, and yet it is all completely wasted on us! It is completely wasted on us just as long as we are operating on the basis of thought, and we are always operating on the basis of thought.

 

 

When we feel that we know who we are, and that we know what the world is, then we are in Rational Mode. That’s the proof of it – if we weren’t in Rational Mode then we wouldn’t be able to make any definite statements about the world (or any definite statements about anything) and it is by making definite statements that we feel get to feel that we know stuff. Otherwise (if we don’t keep making definite statements in the way that we do) everything is just left ‘wide open’ and no conclusions can be drawn…

 

 

Thought has zero subtlety, zero ability to appreciate the profound. This isn’t being mean to the thinking mind, we’re not trying to run it down or disparage it, that’s just the way thought works. Thought is a mechanical process and it’s no good expecting a mechanical process to be anything other than mechanical. That would be like eagerly expecting a toaster to write poems for you or engage in elegant philosophical debate. Toasters toast (just as can-openers open cans, or pencil-sharpeners sharpen pencils) and it would be bizarre to expect any other type of output from them. If we expected something non-mechanical to come out of the mechanism in question then the fault would lie squarely with us, not with the toaster (or with whatever other machine or device we are placing our unreasonable hopes in).

 

 

Thought is a machine, pure and simple. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that – the only way confusion is going to arise is if we fail to understand this, if we imagine – for some reason – that thought is something other than what it is (which is very much what we are doing). The way the machine which is thought works (or ‘the type of machine that it is’) is very easy to explain, and it is something of a marvel that it never is explained. No one ever says that thought is a machine. We don’t actually understand thought at all and the reason we don’t understand it is because we are always using thought to explain thought (the most refined outcome of this loop being contemporary ‘rational psychology’, which is the mystification of thought more than anything else). Thought isn’t mysterious – it works by creating categories which it cannot question (since no system can question the rules which operate it) and then asking questions about the world in terms of these categories. The question we ask is, ‘Does this incoming data does this fit into my categories or not?’ Via this protocol, everything is neatly transformed into binary code. But is it legitimate to convert the real world into binary, we might therefore ask? Can we get away with saying that the digital universe (which we have arbitrarily produced out of the raw material of the analogue universe) is directly equivalent to the Original Situation?

 

 

Obviously enough, when we spell it out like this (and, as we have just said, we never do) it’s not hard to see that the one isn’t equivalent to the other, that the digital world is not the same as the non-binary world that it is modelling (it’s not the same since it has not been created out of reams upon reams of yes’s and no’s). We can’t therefore get away with assuming equivalence in the way that we do – that would be like trying to get away with saying that chalk isn’t really too different from cheese after all. That would be like saying that chalk is actually a particular type of cheese. It might seem to us that ‘things work just as well both ways’ but they absolutely don’t – the problem being that the digital universe has zero subtlety, as we have already said. But what does ‘zero subtlety’ mean, we might ask? What exactly are we talking about here?

 

 

What we’re essentially saying is that the digital universe is ‘an appearance’ and the key point about appearances is that there’s nothing behind them. Suppose we have an image that is made up of pixels on a screen – no matter how sharp the image, no matter how good the resolution, once we actually examine the image all we ever find (of course) are these same pixels and these pixels – needless to say – aren’t anything in themselves. There’s nothing else there. The pixels are only pretending to be something, so to speak, and behind this pretence there lies nothing. We all know this, we all know that pixelated images have nothing behind them, we just conveniently forget it! That’s how the illusion works, it works via our convenient forgetting. So just – to reiterate the point – whilst it is true that there is an image, that’s all there is. This is why Baudrillard says here that the media is always quintessentially futile:

 

The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void…. That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.

 

 

This is how it is with all mental constructs – they only seem real to us because we’ve forgotten that there are mental constructs. This is ‘Cosmic Amnesia’; this is ‘the Downwards Arrow of Forgetting’. We live our lives in this World of Forgetting, we might say, and we never realize that things have gone drastically amiss. This is because once we have adapted ourselves to the digital universe then we can’t get back again (which, we might say, is the well-known ‘Hotel California principle’); we can’t return to the prior state because this crude binary modality of awareness (the conditioned modality) doesn’t have the capacity – as we said at the beginning of this discussion – to see that there is such a thing as ‘a Non-Digital Universe’. That’s just too subtle a thing for us to see – if someone comes along and tries to suggest to us that there might be such a thing as ‘a primary reality which is too subtle in its nature to be described or understood or detected (something the existence of which is quintessentially impossible to prove one way or the other) we will laugh in their face. We will laugh long and loud at the absurdity of such a suggestion and the reason for our mirth is that we can’t remember that we have forgotten. We can’t remember what we have forgotten, and we have also forgotten that we’ve forgotten. This forgetting is generated in bucket-loads via the process by which the universe gets digitalized (which is to say, it comes about via the way in which thought turns everything into a cheap two-dimensional appearance without letting on to us that it has done so). We transition from the analogue world into the digital in a perfectly imperceptible way and it is our ‘cosmic amnesia’ that facilitates this seamless ‘switching over’…