Painting the Existence.

I spent a good deal of time one night about a week ago not necessarily dreaming or awake or asleep, kind of a mix of all three. Usually that's bad, but this time when I woke up I had a really clear vision of how to encapsulate much of my daily questioning, those mental blocks that keep me from budging, into a series of topics, laid out in order on some kind of framework that is either linear or maybe ever-ascending (like an musical fugue that ends right where it began, but an octave higher), or else just plain circular—I don't know which yet, that's a metaproblem which is one of the impossibilities about writing about "everything"—the writing itself must be included in the system it describes, or else it's not complete (it's not "everything"), but for mathematical reasons it's been shown that nothing can fully describe everything including itself; that there always has to be a metalanguage used by a meta-author outside the system. Einstein called them hidden variables. Bohr shrugged and went on with the rest of it and didn't worry about what it meant. Philosophers run up against it and get knocked over no matter how good the plays they diagram on their whiteboards. Gödel proved it symbolically then committed suicide. There always has to be "a little more that remains undescribed." This is why most of the true math geniuses in history have gone mad and killed themselves, why the existence of God is both required but also leads to the paradox of endless regression, and why Buddhism says not to ask the question in the first place!

BUT, if that point could be overlooked, like putting on a record that skips for the first two seconds and putting the needle down at the third second, we could procede after a fashion, and the rest of the mental challenges that I find myself pondering so much of the time do lend themselves to being described in a rudimentary way, such that relationships can be established between disciplines, hierarchies shown even when tangled or topologically loopy or even impossible, boundaries put around what questions can be asked, what is really just the same thing in another guise, and so on. So you reduce the entire realm of things and experiences and all the rest of it into falsely-discrete topics but ones that flow from one to the next using Occam's Razor (a postulate and mere tool but clearly identified as such) and attempt to turn it into something that is not as overwhelming as it was before. The form such a work takes could be a series of blogs, guides, or chapters in a book. Ideally it would be a book, like some magnum opus that one would keep adding to (hopefully not the way Philip K. Dick did, though) until it felt finished, or maybe it just writes itself and is fairly taut and cohesive and voila!—One's managed to solve it all (within the allowances, again, of self-referential no-no's; not dividing by zero, avoiding the bathtub drain, the balloon knots and logical bootstrapping, the asymptotic infinities, the strange loops, the singularities where everything breaks down completely) or at least reduced it to very basic building blocks (doubtful), or maybe one goes insane in the process (but that could happen anyway). Who knows? But something like this occurred to me in that semi-conscious state, which I hurried to jot down:

Meta's Guide to Everything.
01. Getting here.
02. How to be? What to do?
03. The mind and imagination.
04. The reality of the world.
05. Religion, philosophy, history, mythology.
06. Drugs, disease, and perception.
07. The dreamtime of the Aborigines.
08. Is there any objective truth?
09. Is there only one truth?
10. Is physical law absolute or malleable?
11. Found or invented?
12. Logic, mathematics, topology.
13. Relativity and modern cosmology.
14. The limits of measurement.
15. Quantum physics and chance.
16. Uncertainy and infinite worlds.
17. A universal theory of gravity.
18. What does it mean to have boundaries?
19. What exactly is time?
20. The validity of science.
21. Natural selection everywhere.
22. Art, aesthetics, mysticism, transcendence.
23. A roll call of tangential phenomena.
24. The larger tale of humanity.
25. Circular or linear? Open or closed?
26. Dividing by zero, black holes, singularities.
27. Paradoxes and their relatives.
28. The curious problem of infinity.
29. Magnitudes of infinity.
30. Self-referential systems.
31. Analogical structure at all levels.
32. Reductionism, chaos, antichaos, complexity.
33. Emergence and holism.
34. Entropy re-examined.
35. Is life inevitable?
36. Is mind inevitable?
37. Intelligence and information.
38. What does it mean to ask why?
39. Anthropic principles.
40. Something from nothing?
41. Climbing toward the light.
42. The existence.

It has to be said these chapter titles are as plain and descriptive as I could make them rather than trying to get cute and mess up what is obviously a very ambitious thing already, and that there are bound to be things I left out but will think of later, or subjects that need rearranging in this scheme, and so forth. Also these are just headings. Although I've got it in my noodle what each is about and could write lengthy subtitles after each title or just plunge right in and write the chapters themselves (the goal, eventually), it's impossible to really glean whether there's anything but the delusions of a madperson here just by looking at the list of chapters. As an article of faith (heh) you'll just have to trust that I know what each will basically say and how it will lead into the next, even if the precise details remain to be hammered out.

Getting it out and not messing up the beautiful construction is the problem, like trying to get a beautiful baby out of a woman without cutting her open. Inevitably it's not quite as beautiful when it gets smushed and smashed and pushed out, though (with a good editor in the case of a book, or a nurse or simply time in the case of an infant) it can be reconstituted to what it once was. Right now there's a huge baby inside my mind and only the tiny apertures of language and time and the handicap of being able to only think of one aspect of this huge thing at a time and never grasp the whole on all levels (I said it was a BIG baby) that is the chief problem of getting it out and not losing what is a nearly perfect construct in my mind in the process. I suppose I've been put off by the enormity of such a thing for years (while also working on seeing how things are more and more clearly, making connections and simplifying as I age), but putting it into topics like this makes me feel good that I've made some kind of progress, even if it's just an organizational task that eases that weight a bit since I can always refer back to it when I begin to veer down one of the infinite side roads that threaten to make me lose my way.

I'm starting to work on Chapter 1; we'll see how long my inspiration lasts. It won't be an easy read if it's ever done but maybe it will hold together somehow. It's hard to know what level of detail to drop into. What about nonhuman biological systems? More about the humanities, like linguistics, economics, and other systems? Etc. All these will be blanket-covered but the book would have more and more value the more real world topics it pulled in, explained, related to other strands of the overall web, and in turn provided both weight to my arguments as well as further axioms to serve as a foundation for subsequent topics. It's this sort of "nothing is given, that's one thing to look at and here are the ramifications of that philosophically. If x, y, and z are given (say, that there is one objective reality, and that math and logic are axiomatic), then we get all these other things following from the most basic principles, and I go through each one. Harmonics, sociodynamics, physical sciences, music, the works - each builds upon the previous and provides a foundation for more topics, like a tech tree. But change the axioms and the picture could be very different; science may not be valid in its initial presumptions and we may live in a universe where esoteric knowledge and mysticism are possible, and how would that then work? What systems are possibilities that are still internally consistent? Is there any way to know what kind of reality we actually are in, or is that question itself meaningless, and if so, why?" That kind of initial setup could be a Volume 1 in itself, but I intend to discuss it, make some arbitrary but reasonable assumptions (as few as possible just to get off the ground), and then proceed, or else nothing would ever get written and what kind of magnum opus is that?

Obviously it'll be a long work though I intend to make the language as terse as possible, and not get poetic at all, and only use analogy when it's truly needed, and when it truly works. This will necessarily make it a very dense read. I mean, somebody is attempting to explain everything in some kind of framework that holds it all together. That's not bathroom reading. You'll have to put on your thinking cap and pay very close attention to each transitional step or you'll lose the thread. And where threads split and come back together in different ways (a tangled hierarchy), there will be a way to handle writing that but it's going to take effort on the part of the reader as well not to get lost. You can only make things so easy before you start cheating and leaving important bits out. Think about it—almost every time you really understood something and felt changed because of it, it was the result of honest hard thought and following tons of steps, each implying the next, until you had that Eureka moment and something about the world became understood to you in a fundamentally new way. Every chapter will have to be like that in a sense for this endeavor to have real value.

And who knows, maybe I'll make a bunch of money.