On the matter of Worlds

 Day 5

Everything here was written in October-November, 2022. There are 52 posts total, one for each day I wrote.

What does it mean that a world is a logical field? It means that a world has a certain order, a certain logic. There are connections and paths within the world, ways in which energy tends to flow and information tends to be passed. A world does not have to hold a certain, specific logic, but we can imagine that a world has a logic of some kind. This logic does not have to conform to specific rules, and indeed can be any kind of logic that you can imagine, experience, understand, touch, or do something else to. A world can be closed or open. A closed world is one that does not acknowledge the existence of any unknown beyond the bounds of the world. That is, whatever is beyond the bounds of the world is not something that impacts the world in any way whatsoever. A closed world is a complete world if nothing from beyond the bounds of the world can impact the world at all. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell if a world is closed or open until something happens that the world cannot handle.

For example, something happens that is considered impossible in the closed world, or there is some question that the world cannot answer. In either of those two cases, the world is considered to be a non-complete world if the world accepts the problem of is is, or cares about the issue, and a closed world if the world ignores the issue and treats it as unimportant. As far as I can determine, closed worlds are mainly just hallucinated worlds for the utterly insane, and no world that I have thought of is a complete world so far. Accordingly, we will be focused on 'open worlds', that being worlds which are between the two unknowns of reality and free will, in which not every question is answered and we do not know what is impossible. Based on the principle of the known unknown, which is the idea that there 'is something that we know that we don't know', we do not actually know what is impossible until we have a complete world. After all, it may be the case that we have somehow made a mistake and that if we learn what it is that we don't know, that then it will be revealed that some law of the world is not actually a law, but rather an illusion in the Cartesian sense. Thus, all 'rules' of the world are at best probabilities, and are usually hopes. Yet, there does seem to be more to the structure of a world than this.

When I consider the world around me, the world that I think exists and that I experience and live in every day, then I realize that there are many parts of it that change every day. Right now there is nobody ringing my door, there is not a plate of hot soup in front of me, and I am not cold. Yet I am prepared for any of those 'facts' to change at any time. I am not a physicist, but I can at least understand the Newtonian rules of gravitation, some of the basic ideas of quantum mechanics, and the idea of the laws of evolution. Yet, at one time these rules were not part of the world at all to a great many people. Rather, they appeared to be part of reality, the hidden rules that determined how rocks moved, Zeno's arrow hit, and why people had different colored hair. All those instances were physical facts that people could experience, and yet the rules behind them were hidden, were not understood and not part of the world around us. However, today that is not the case. When we see some physical phenomenon, we attempt to describe it and measure it using physics, when we see a child born that looks nothing whatsoever like the father, we think of a reason why that could be the case. When something extremely surprising happens in an experiment of ours, then the first thing to ask is if the experiment had any flaws, not if the rules that underpin our understanding of the world are wrong. That comes later – that questioning of the rules or logic of the world happens after we experience something that is surprising. When we only have experiences that are not surprising, we do not see if the world is wrong or right, we simply accept it. Note that by 'experiences that are not surprising', we really mean we run into a gem or shard that we cannot fit into the world. That gem or shard can be a thought as well, such as a hidden desire or a thought experiment. Really, anything surprising at all.

So we have two types of surprises here. The first type is the surprise that we are prepared for, that we accept may happen, that we have adjusted for within our understanding of the world. We understand that a certain gem may be malleable. Then we have other parts of the world which are more ridged, ideas about how the world works that, if they are shown to be wrong or incomplete, necessitate a re-thinking of the world. We can say that when we introduce a new gem or shard that does not fit one of these rigid gems, that the world shatters and needs to be re-organized. These types of rigid gems are not always the same for each person. They differ based upon different mindsets, different structures of belief and knowledge, and so on. I think that they fall into two general camps. The first camp is a rigid gem that, when it breaks, we need to change a small part of the world. For example, when what we think of as physical laws break, we have to of course change how the gem of 'physical laws' is constructed, and we need to change how our experiments work, how we measure things, and perhaps look at old experiments in a new light, as a few examples. However, the change of laws such as a more exact number for the speed of light, a new elementary particle, or the discovery of water in an extra-solar planet generally does not, unless you study one of those things for a living, really change the way the world is put together. If you learn one day that you only thought that you had the chicken pox as a kid but really you never did, then your world is probably not going to change very much. On the other hand, if you learn one day that your grandparents had died in an accident, that you were adopted, or that your country really was run by alien lizard people from Saturn, then your world would probably be turned upside down. Have you ever lost something that was so important to you and the way you dealt with the world, that upon losing it, it felt as if the world was forever changed? The feeling that your conception of reality, the faith you always had that you could go to grandmas house and cry when you were sad, that your parents really loved you, that what you had read in the history books was the truth – these things are, for me at least, assumption, which until they are challenged, I don't even know that I have. They are simply pillars of the world, the hidden basis's upon which my world , my understanding of what is and who I am, and my place and relation to life, are founded. They are foundation pillars of the world.

We have spoken of the world as being a logical field between two unknowns. However, we can also think of the world in other ways. Speaking of the world in one way does not mean that the other ways of speaking of the world are wrong. Remember that we believe everything, and so each way of seeing the world is the correct way, and each construction of the world is the correct construction. One way of seeing the world, or one structure of the world itself, is not more or less correct than other ways of the world, though there are differences between them. For example, one way of seeing the world might reveal a different fact, or give you a better way of describing something, than another way. One structure of the world might be more powerful than another, or be able to totally describe a different world. There are open possibilities.

However, for now let us continue; instead of the world as a LF, think of the world as a plate balanced upon several pillars, just like the idea of the world as balancing upon the back of elephants, which are in their turn standing upon the back of a turtle. The edges of the world are constantly crumbling as the water was over the edges of the world, they are constantly changing. This represents the common, non-essential parts of the world. When the plate chips along the edge, it is still usable as a plate. The interior of the plate is more solid, for the structure rests upon it. When there is a crack or a chip at the center of the plate, then the entire plate is weakened. You need to repair the crack if the plate is to be stable, and if there are to many cracks the plate breaks up, but one crack is not going to ruin the entire function of the plate, which is to hold you up. Under the plate are the pillars, and if one of them breaks, then the entire plate is unbalanced and inevitably falls down, breaking upon the back of the turtle. The turtle here represents reality, the hard shell that you cannot pierce nor bend.

When the plate breaks, then we say that our world shatters. We have nothing to stand upon, no way of standing tall and strong. We fall tumbling through the void around us, never sure of who we are, feeling lost and afraid. It is only when we reconstruct the plate, when we have a firm ground to stand upon and a firm logical field to live in and move things in, that we are safe. Since we are also a part of the world, it shows that the destruction of the plate, the shattering of the world, also makes us unsure of who we ourselves are. This is of course similar to the ideas of existentialism, that we find ourselves alone and afraid in a world we never made, and have to somehow create ourselves to survive, for if we do not, then we are not. Existentialism also contains the idea that we must survive, that we must be – that is, that any action, even non-action, is also an action. Simply by existing at all, we create shards. I am simply adding on to that the idea that we also create gems, and worlds out of those gems. I don't think there is a grand new idea here, but rather simply a new way of considering what I see around me. A way that makes sense to me, a world that stands for me.

Yet the destruction of the world does not preclude the total and never-ending destruction of us, and the new world often looks remarkably like the old world. Why is this? Well, we can think of a hierarchy of worlds. I said earlier that each world is just as correct as another world, but that there are nevertheless differences between them. I named a few of those difference, but I think that there is one difference that is most essential to how I think of the worlds. This difference is 'stability'. That is, that some worlds are more stable than others. Some plates can deal with more cracks and a faster rate of erosion, or have more of an edge and less of an inner surface area to disrupt. That is, we prepare worlds that are stable over time. This isn't terribly surprising, if you think of the destruction of worlds as the destruction of a self-identity. It is true that the world-plate shattering does not destroy us entirely, but it does destroy a goodly part of us. The castle falls down, the council scatters on the four winds, the realm is lost and so on and on. Yet, the core remain, the mere fact of our action, of our existence, of our free will. From this, we find that we build ourselves up again. Thus, in the midst of a great depression and confusion, when loved ones pass and the world is ashes to us, we find that we eat. We gradually fall out of our unconscious state of grief where all is pain and loss, to find that we can see flowers and feel our tears. Reality intrudes upon our grief. We can of course close off the world and become comatose, or we can die and pass beyond any pain, but we rarely choose such fates. Rather, we live. And so, because the destruction of the world is such a terrible even for us, we try to have worlds that are stable, that can handle disruption, that have a place for surprises, that when something, anything, happens we are able to assign it a name and place it in a box where we can say that we have understood it. Then, we can pass it by without bothering about the unknown piece of reality inside it that we can't place in a box.

We can also think of the world as a field, where there are continuous areas, and areas full of holes. Holes in the fabric of the world are problems or issues, such as paradoxes or things that we are upreared to accept. More holes leads to a weaker fabric, and we can avoid these holes when we are moving on the fabric. However, when we fall into one of these holes then we are off the fabric and tumbling through the void, until we catch ourselves on another piece of fabric, another logical field. The thing I am describing, wither it be a world between two areas, a plate on top of elephants on top of a turtle, or a piece of fabric, in each case has a sort of structure, a series of general rules and guidelines that we understand them with as we talk about them. They are metaphors, something 'like' the world that I am describing. Other ways of talking about them would do as well, other rules and structures might be just as revealing, it is simply that this is my way of thinking about and comprehending all that is to me.