The Universalism of Unified Experience
On so-called phenomenal combining/binding, or the emergence of a thing from smaller things, and the relative challenges of sneaky, persistence of dualisms.
What am I talking about?
The “binding problem”. The unresolved question of how experiences combine, or how seemingly unified experiences emerge from smaller, seemingly disjointed ones.
The dualism of unity and disunity, continuity and gaps, quality and quantity, self and other, subjective and objective, part and whole.
The question of how complex things emerge from less complex things. The complexity of how things become what they are when they weren’t that before. The becoming of things. The thing itself.
Experience.
Why am I talking about it?
It’s confusing, complex, a conundrum for many. It’s driving perspectives about the world, reality, and social organization. It’s impacting those who influence large portions of life on earth.
What is my central point?
That everything is related, and that experience is fundamental.
That we can transcend these dichotomies and conundrums by digging deeper into the meaning of experience, and the connections between varying experiences.
That the so-called “binding problem” is nearly identical to the problem of how any set of things comes together to form a bigger thing. This happens with everything in the world, and with every experience, and is a result of emergence.
That emergence represents novel creation, and that it is also completely determined by its “parts”: creative emergence is an innate part of reality itself. Parts are ultimately related — they are relationships in motion — and are always evolving into and determining new forms of themselves.
That, therefore, building a house from Legos, or building a house from wood, or making a wall of bricks, or constructing an experience (“of oneself”), is fundamentally the same kind of thing. Many relatively independent things come together to create something relatively more unified and relatively novel.
How can this argument be more systematic and rigorous?
People talk about first-principles thinking. I think “first-principles” often begs the question of “what is really true, or known for certain”.
So, I ask, what do you know for certain? What is certainty? What is knowledge? How can we know? How do we know?
I think it’s safe to assume we can agree that we know we are experiencing something. The existence of experience is certain.
Why is this certain? Can we know why?
It is certain because it is immediately apparent, and continues to be so. It doesn’t stop being immediately apparent. It is reliable.
Even more than simply being reliable, it is at least as reliable than anything else. Any other reliability (all other reliable things / experiences) relies on the trustworthiness of experience — the continuation of something that has been a continuous facet of our experience. For example, earth’s gravity has continuity within our past experience, so we can expect the ongoing continuity of earth’s gravity. Just so, we predict the ongoing continuity of experience — both ours and others. Just so, we know earth’s gravity is negligible in many places. Just so, we know our own experience will radically transform (many would say it will “end”), but experience and gravity more broadly will go on.
Gravity might end, too, if some of the scientists are to be believed that the universe is tending towards nothing (the “heat death” from increasingly little free or potential energy, diminished as entropy increases continuously, known as increasing disorder/randomness, increasingly equal distribution of energy, or increasingly perfect balance of forces — symmetry.
Experience tells us otherwise, though. And scientific theories evolve. Even seemingly foundational ones, eventually. All things change, this we know, and science knows, through the continuity of our experience.
“I believed in in solid ground,
until I saw the earth in motion,
In the winds of steady change,
and in the ever flowing ocean”
I invite us to take a deep breath
I invite us to simply recognize that all we know comes through experience,
and that therefore, experience is the ground of our existence, our world, our reality
This reality.
Just so, we experience unity and disunity at once, in varying degrees, changing over time. Never complete unity, singularity, sameness, unchanging. Always some connection, togetherness, similarity, continuity — always some unity. Always change, always relationship, always experience.
Just so, reality always in relation — degrees of togetherness.
No true problem. Just some uncertainties. No total binding. No ultimate binary. No excluded middle. Just a matter of degree, of precision, of modelling, of a math which is less fixed, more dynamic, more in motion, more gradient. Less binary. More continuous, wavelike. Relative unity. Relative certainty. Relative change, flow, energy. Relative being. Relative coherence.
More unity in some places than elsewhere, more sometimes than other times. The same as everywhere else, everything else.
Unless, of course, you’ve experienced full, complete unity, unchanging, nothingness, eternity, changeless-ness.
Have you?
Please tell me if you have. That would be important for me and my navigation of the world. Let me know what you think!
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