The Fourth Dimension, 3

The Hard Problem of Everything

This is a an elaboration of the metaphysics presented in the opening sections of Self and Unself, and summarised in my audio piece ‘The System and The Self’ (which appears at the beginning of Ad Radicem).

Part 1, The Paradoxes of Consciousness presents an outline of the literal, subjective-objective self, and of that which cannot be literally spoken of; transdimensional, ‘panjective’ unself.

Part 2, Standing up in Flatland looks at how the metaphor of the fourth dimension does away with all the fundamental ‘literalist’ conflicts and mysteries of the ‘three dimensional’ self.

Part 3, The Hard Problem of Everything explains the fear, craving, violence, boredom, confusion, insularity, idolatry and madness that follow, of necessity, from taking reality literally.

Part 4, The Soft Solution to Everything shows how to arrive at absolute certainty as to the nature of ‘four-dimensional’ consciousness, and why this entails immense pain.

Under the Assumption of Literality

If we invert the stance we have taken up until now—the ‘both-and’ assumption that the thing-in-itself is a paradoxical non-literal ‘superstate’ which unifies both subject and object in four-dimensional space—and if we suppose that consciousness-in-itself is entirely confined to the three spatial dimensions perceived and conceived by self, unfolding within an essentially non-spatial, and therefore fundamentally inaccessible medium of change that it calls ‘time’; if we suppose that, in other words, the thing-in-itself, or noumenal reality, has the same form and structure as the literal, phenomenal self which apprehends it¹ and that, therefore, it is incoherent to suggest I can be both aware and unconscious (I think—or feel, or act, or sense—therefore, I am) or that I can ever be certain that consciousness is fundamentally other than how it appears to self, or that the metaphors of transcendence and imminence we’ve looked at so far (including the metaphor of the fourth dimension) are meaningful; if we assume, in other words, that I am not you and cannot possibly be, that there is an insurmountable wall between subject and object, and that, like Flatlanders, self exists as a separate being in a reality that is, fundamentally, as it appears to be, an ‘either-or’ constellation of factual things (either subjective things or objective things) causally related to each other though non-spatial time; if, in sum, we assume literality, what are the consequences, for self and world?

Firstly, under such an assumption, self cannot found its experience, and therefore its thoughts, feelings, desires or sensations, on anything but its own representations. Such a literal, three-dimensional, self-informed self or ego (‘ego’ here referring not to the Freudian ego, or to the everyday use of the word²) must be committed to existential selfishness, its fundamental orientation to reality being one it can only generate from within itself. The only operative principle by which such an orientation can function is ‘expand forever’ or ‘never die’. Contraction, self-sacrifice, self-surrender and death are as inconceivable for ego, so defined, as they are for any other self-informed mechanism, which is why ego is so comfortable with rational, self-informed mechanisms and within rational, self-informed systems, and why, as we shall see, it is so uncomfortable in situations which demand non-attachment to self.

Following from the existential selfishness of the self-informed self under the assumption of literality, ego is necessarily subject to an existential uncertainty that it can never do away with. It can never experience anything in itself, and so it is bound by the limits of representation, the limits, that is, of the subjective inner world and the objective outer world it produces. This essential solipsism (or self-enclosure) gives self the appearance of objective realism, because it accurately grasps objective forms—the objective fact that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, or that other minds exist, or that π is 3.142—as well as the appearance of subjective realism, because it forcefully registers subjective forms—the subjective sense that I have such-and-such a feeling or sensation, or that I possess such-and-such an opinion or identity. But what these things actually are, remains as mysterious to the literal self as the end or absence of self (i.e. death). Ego thinks (or feels) it knows what things are in themselves, but it does not. It only knows how things appear to self. Based on the necessity and utility of such demonstrably accurate knowledge about the outer form of things, self then makes an unwarranted further step that it has gained existential insight into their inner nature. But it has not, which is why ego-justifying philosophies endeavour to define self as reality,³ and why self alone, howsoever defined, inevitably makes extremely poor judgements about what is actually (as opposed to what appears to be) happening.

Being confined by literal appearance thus leads to; the existential confusion of never really knowing what anything (or anyone) really is; the existential anxiety of never being quite sure if the self is safe from those things (and people); the existential exhaustion of having to spend one’s selfish, mortal existence, struggling to exist in a world of selfish, mortal things; the existential frustration of never being able to grasp the objects of one’s desires, only ever an external form; the existential disappointment of the egoic need to expand forever being doomed to frustration (i.e. certain to end in death); the existential loneliness of never being able to ever really be with another (person or thing), only ever with how they appear to the self; and the crushing existential ennui of never really encountering anything that is really fundamentally different to self, only ever reconfigurations of the known.

All of this is inevitable. The self-informed self, unable to experience beyond objective fact and subjective preference can, as we have seen, never judge the preconditions for its own existence, because it has no way of independently accessing them.⁴ The existential fear, futility and nihilistic misery of the egoic self are all consequent upon it being unable to ever consciously experience beyond its own limited attention (on thoughts, feelings, desires and sensations). When forced to step beyond objective knowledge the literal self either panics and clings even more desperately to literal thought, feeling, desire and sensation, or it finds it has nothing more substantial to go on than subjective preference—its likes and dislikes, its beliefs and opinions and its vague mystic intuitions (common even in so-called ‘atheist’ selves)—which, consequently, it completely identifies with and then is forced to defend with psychotic fervour.

The foreclosing of the possibility of independent access condemns all forms of literalism to uncertainty, because self has to make a non-literal leap over the factual-causal fence in order to do so (without ever knowing such a leap is possible). This dooms ego to existential insularity, to only being able to judge the present moment—the unknown—from what has already happened—the known. Under such conditions, knowledge—of whatever kind, explicit, implicit, factual, procedural or emotional (even ‘spiritual’)—is no longer the medium of consciousness, but its precondition and horizon. Totally convincing, but unable to judge its own standards, which results in a kind of existential idolatry, worshipping the representations of self as reality itself, and existential arrogance, the unreflective assumption that things are as they seem (or that any step ‘outside’ the self, must still be an experience of the self).

An inability to conceive (or apperceive) that there is any other way to approach phenomena other than via the objectively knowable or subjectively preferential compels the egoic self to a lack of spontaneity, or existential awkwardness. The representational forms that the literal self apprehends, bound by literal space, take time to reach awareness. Ego does not respond to the present, but to a reconstructed representation of the present conditioned by an awareness that, in lieu of existential certainty, must yield either to programmed instinct or to abstract analysis, both of which are founded not on what is actually happening, but on precedent; which is to say, on the past. Self then discovers either that the past is so different to the present that its learnt instincts are wildly inapt (such as when, for example, animal anxiety needlessly overwhelms awareness and turns the civilised mind into petrified prey), or of reaching a decision too late (or, as is often the case, not at all), paralysed by an inability to apply the reasoning mind to a situation which demands absence of reasoning.

That is the end of the free portion of this article. To read the rest, either throw me a bone, or write and tell me something good.