Structures And Etc.

We all live inside structures. There are many different types of structures: economic, social, political, religious, geographical...ah but with that last we blur a line a little don't we? The rest of the list is more, shall we say 'ethereal' (sometimes called 'paradigms'), but that last is more concrete, more physical. And we exist inside physical structures too--I exist inside the structure of this apartment, for instance; but we also exist in bodies, which are nothing more than a kind of biological structure, of which there are currently many different kinds of biological structures (although some scientists tell us there are many types of biological structures dying off with each passing day). All of which, as far as we can tell, are dependent on a handful of the same types of protein strains--but that's another story.

Robert Anton Wilson called paradigms 'reality tunnels'. The reality tunnel is a more versatile concept as it can be intimately personal as well as a representation of a larger group mind--a structure of people who have some similar set of ideas about interpreting experience. Ultimately, each person has a reality tunnel--a structured way of interacting with the world--and this reality tunnel generally shares many common elements with the tunnels of some other set of people.

Something interesting to note is that the whole of an individual reality tunnel need not be internally self-consistent. Indeed, like Lovecraft reckoned, if we could only put all of our experiences into relation, then we would go mad with the absurdity of it all! But in the meantime, we operate through our reliance on, and relation to, structures of meaning and of being; further, within the set of interpretations that compose our reality tunnel, we selectively choose (consciously--with intent--or otherwise) from possibly contradicting methods of relating to our experiences of being.

I'm writing about this so I can set up the fact that it is likely that I'll be discussing structures quite a bit over the course of this blog. I probably won't always call them structures though, but rather I'll discuss them by name, like 'Christianity', for example, or 'magick' or 'quantum mechanics'--or even something like 'the Calgary Tower'. The point being here is that structures of all variety or kind seem basic to human experience--not merely my experience, but everyone's experience--and that's what I want to start getting at again: everyone's experience.

Yeah, I'm probably one of the last of the "great system builders"--their time in philosophy has past in the shadow of modern philosophical thinking, at least, that's what I heard talk of around the department several years ago, back when I was on a campus and enrolled in the hallowed halls of academia. Their time has past, btw, because it is generally accepted that no one system (or structure) can hold up to all forms of philosophical critique. I mean, Godel's theorem applies to the seemingly most rigourous and formal of structures: mathematics, and it states that the structure of mathematics cannot verify its own truth. So if the most logically consistent structure cannot establish its own absolute reality (I'm slanting the interpretation here, yes), then how can the structures that make up any one being's reality tunnel--which are generally more sloppy and fuzzy than mathematics--be mutually self-consistent and collectively verify the over-arching structure of the reality tunnel's own absolute truth?

They can't. And I'm OK with that. We only need to recognize that a description or interpretation of experience must take this contradiction into account. We merely need to realize that we live in the reflection of some unnameable ultimate absurdity and all we can do is laugh. Without the laughter, as Lovecraft feared, we simply go mad.