I1

conceptual inquiry regarding meaning » reality

 
The question of reality inquires into the nature of that which is. Most immediately, we can say that experience is. Beyond that—addressing what experiences are essentially of, for example—we begin to enter the realm of metaphysics. To keep the question open, the core of this Project ought not advance a metaphysical position. Rather, the terms of its inquiry will address the more immediate domain of experience, phenomenologically.

The terms' conceptual forms (hereafter simply forms) constitute a conceptual analysis of the abstraction experience as such. The initial analysis identifies the three constituent parts of experience as such as experiencer-experiencing-experienced, where these are understood not as separate parts of a whole, but interdependent conditions of possibility. At this stage of analysis, the terms experiencer, experiencing, and experienced bear only formal meaning. To bear actual meaning, we must consider what actual experiences they indicate. From this level of abstraction, the actual experiences indicated are quite broad:

• experiencer = that for which experience occurs; that (point of view) from which experience occurs
• experiencing = the process of experience occurring; attending
• experienced = that which appears/ is presented as experience occurs; the intelligible pattern according to which experience occurs (and presentations appear), as determined by the domain in which experience occurs

At this level of abstraction and at this stage in our analysis, experiencer means no particular experiencer, experiencing means no particular experiencing, and experienced means no particular thing experienced. For this general analysis, we might use the terms experiencer as such, experiencing as such, and experienced as such. As the forms are interrelatedly defined, as interdependent, so too must the actual experiences indicated be interrelatedly determined, as interdependent. For example, without experiencing and experienced, experiencer is no-thing at all, and likewise for the other two. As we identify the actual experiences indicated, we must be sure not to interpret actual experiences as evidence for independently existing entities modeled on any three of these. For example, when we speak of experiencer as that for which experience occurs, this does not mean that it's an independently existing entity to which experience is added—an entitiy that can exist without experience. There's nothing about it that exists independently of experience, and so it goes for the other two as well.

Keeping this in mind, we can begin to consult our actual experiences as we attempt to provide actual meaning to our formal terms. We quickly see that the notion of experiencer was in the first place abstracted from the experience of our-selves together with others we experience, all of whom are them-selves. Experiencer is thus paradigmatically self. We also quickly see that the notion of experienced was abstracted from our experience of our world, which at times includes an experience of ourselves as a part thereof, but usually concerns matters we'd typically identify as being other than ourselves. Experienced is thus paradigmatically world. Finally, we can see that the notion of experiencing was abstracted from our experience of the dynamic relationship we have with our world. Experiencing is thus paradigmatically this dynamic. These terms—self, dynamic, and world—get us closer to terms bearing actual meaning (and not just formal meaning), but we've got a long way to go. Before we continue, however, we must pause to remember that none of these new terms can refer to independently existing entities. Insofar as we're inquiring into the meaning of experience as such, we're only interested in self as experiencer, dynamic as experiencing, and world as experienced.

In fact, as we're ultimately interested in the meaning of experience as such, we must keep in sight how experiencer-experiencing-experienced—thus self, dynamic, and world—are fully interdependent. Again, this means that, to the extent that one of these terms is defined in its own terms, it must simultaneously be defined in terms of the other two as well. So, to maintain the integrity of our analysis, we have to consider self, dynamic, and world, each not only in its own terms, but in terms of the other two as well, like so:

Formally these self-cancel. To work out the actual meaning of each term, we must ask How is experiencer shown (separately) as dynamic, self, and world? How is experiencing shown as world, dynamic, and self? and How is experienced shown as self, world, and dynamic? These questions will be taken up at the node-level. As we take them up, it's important to keep in mind that the forms involved in and the actual experiences indicated by our terms are only ever fully reconciled as they converge toward infinity. Remember, the Project's structure is fractal in nature. This presentation only outlines its basic layer in the most general terms, so the forms at this level are quite abstract and far removed from actual experiences. The forms and actual experiences can only fully meet as the level of analysis becomes more fine-grained. This occurs as each phase and node is treated as a tree in itself, each reflecting the entire system, and each with its own phases and nodes which are themselves treated as trees in themselves, ad infinitum.

 
Should we wish to discuss reality in terms of being, insofar as we're interested in reality as meaningful, we'll need to keep our notion of being connected with the notion of experience by thinking of being in terms of existence. To exist means to stand forth (from [L] ex "forth" + sistere "cause to stand"). This evokes multiple questions: what is standing forth from what and into what? In terms of experience, what stand forth into presence are particular experiences from an absent, unexperienced field of all possible experiences. In terms of being, what stand forth are beings/entities from a field of all possible beings that is itself no-thing. In each case, something always stands forth for something (or someone). Taking experiencer as paradigmatically self, experienced as paradigmatically world, and experiencing as paradigmatically dynamic, we arrive at this arrangment:

At any rate, we'd want to keep in mind that self and world are trajectories of being-thrown rather than static entitites. We'd want to resist thinking of self and world in terms of subjects and objects—that is, as radically different types of entities that exist independently from each other. We get our tendency to do this in part from the historical popularity of substance dualism, but we also get it from grammar. A sentence has a subject and predicate, and the predicate often contains an object (direct or otherwise). We tend, then, to impose the way we talk about reality onto reality itself, but that's a mistake. Subjects and objects (as fundamentally separate kinds of things) are abstractions. An experience is mixed together as an unitary phenomenon, and only when we reflect upon that experience do we begin to tease apart its constituents—we begin to abstract away from experience different aspects of the experience such that we can talk about it—like so:

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