We cannot describe the actual personal human experience except to say it is our existence. It is the direct experience of existing, without the distorting make-believe of language. The rest of the text of which a version of this post will be an early section, is an exposé of normalized mentality’s claims that we can analyze our existence. It is the consummate public execution of ontology in epistemological terms.
We have two ways of looking at the world; materialistic and ideological. We seem to be confused between the two in the subjective experience of our own identity.
To analyze our existence the way we do is utterly delusional, because it is impossible for us as humans to suspend our own existence as the most inclusive subject of meaning making. We actually tell endless stories that we are stepping back out of our own existence to be “objective,” without endangering that existence. This goes along with adopting civilization’s symbolic meaning making metaphysics of one-way “subject-object reality.” We are constantly opportunistically shifting our characterization of both subject and object to make our ideological flow dynamically fit. We can identify with anything, as if it is us. We especially accelerate our own extinction when we make meaning in primary identification with non-human holons as if they are more significant than we are. You could say they appear to be very real, because we preconceive a material reality. We can see them better than ourselves. When we make material reality, we become blind to the actuality that non-human holons are in fact more fundamental than we are, in the realm of forming and informing our minds and thus determining our actions; actions that constitute our existence. Our chronic subjective identification with non-human holons is equivalent to taking their existential perspective, in necessary suppression of our own existential perspective. This is how it works. In those chronic deconstructive analytical periods when we take their existential perspective, we think in terms of us as them as indestructible minds, being more significant than we existentially as humans, and that we existentially as humans, magically objectified, are fundamental to them, because we deeply emote (subconsciously) that we materially are fundamental to our own minds.
This causes us to support other than human existence to evolve ever faster than we are capable of, because we believe in it as if it is ourselves – in the form of the development of technology, for instance. We cannot exist if the fundamental holons of our perception evolve too fast, because we cannot keep up with the velocity of change of information and knowledge flow beyond a certain threshold, as in technological singularity. We cannot physically evolve fast enough as humans. It is fatal to make meaning from the kinds of holistic spiritualist perspectives increasingly in vogue, but also common civilized meaning making is inherently fatal. We will die very quickly as humans if we continue thinking of existence in terms of economic growth and technological innovation, or if we think in terms of integrating all the historical organizations of meaning in a kind of universal integral as if it is us. This kind of alien subjectivity utterly subjects us to the unforeseeable ravages of economic growth and technological innovation, and to the evolving organization of civilization’s processes. It is everything but enlightened. It is death.
Subject-object symbolical thinking in identification with ideologically more fundamental holons as the more significant subject accelerates our extinction. It is indeed the fundamental fallacy fatally enabling the amazing delusions of the civilized mind. My primary reason for being is to annihilate this suicidal nonsense. The only ontology relevant to our existence is very simple. Our existence is human existence, period. To our own minds as earthly life forms, we are naturally most distinct as human animals. To humans only human existence is the highest subjective principle of meaning, or the highest holarchical perspective with which we as human minds can authentically identify to understand that existence without precipitously destroying that existence. We experience something other than ourselves as primary only when the dynamics of our environment has brainwashed us, as it has with Ray Kurzweil.
ontology – The branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being.
epistemology –The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and origin of knowledge. Epistemology asks the question “How do we know what we know?”
normalize – To make normal, especially to cause to conform to a standard or norm.
This is not directly related to “normalized,…”
normalized – Normal in a relative sense, relative to constructed standards or norms.
holon (Wikipedia) – a system (or phenomenon) that is a whole in itself as well as a part of a larger system. It can be conceived as systems nested within each other. Every system can be considered a holon, from a subatomic particle to the universe as a whole. On a non-physical level, words, ideas, sounds, emotions—everything that can be identified—is simultaneously part of something, and can be viewed as having parts of its own, similar to sign in regard of semiotics.
Since a holon is embedded in larger wholes, it is influenced by and influences these larger wholes. And since a holon also contains subsystems, or parts, it is similarly influenced by and influences these parts. Information flows bidirectionally between smaller and larger systems as well as rhizomatic contagion. When this bidirectionality of information flow and understanding of role is compromised, for whatever reason, the system begins to break down: wholes no longer recognize their dependence on their subsidiary parts, and parts no longer recognize the organizing authority of the wholes. Cancer may be understood as such a breakdown in the biological realm.
holarchy (Wikipedia) – A hierarchy of holons is called a holarchy. The holarchic model can be seen as an attempt to modify and modernise perceptions of natural hierarchy.
the doctrine of the fundamental and the significant (Wikipedia)- Ken Wilber comments that the test of holon hierarchy (e.g. holarchy) is that if a type of holon is removed from existence, then all other holons of which it formed a part must necessarily cease to exist too. Thus an atom is of a lower standing in the hierarchy than a molecule, because if you removed all molecules, atoms could still exist, whereas if you removed all atoms, molecules, in a strict sense would cease to exist. Wilber’s concept is known as the doctrine of the fundamental and the significant. A hydrogen atom is more fundamental than an ant, but an ant is more significant.
technological singularity Of course many scientists view the Singularity as pseudo-science, for reasons explained in this post. Humans are so incredibly helpless!