Avenging Zeno

Any decent fellow is required to have a few devils that sit on his shoulder a little longer than they ought to. Zeno has been one of those to me. From my initial reception of him, I haven’t been able to shake his arguments. I’ve seen the proofs refuting his claims. They say that reality is different than theory. They show how the math can make sense, as long as you ignore its incomplete nature. I prefer a solid resolution. One that doesn’t counter the intuitive judgement of mortal man. Not that this judgement is perfect, but I’ve often found my gut to outpace my brain by at least two measures.

Should anyone take to the antisocial habit of learning formal logic and set theory, you’ll find that the world is littered with inconsistencies that we look past in order to function. These seemingly tiny things are usually made up of infinity. You’d think it would be hard to smuggle such a large thing past some people, but it’s really the only way to look, since the wrinkles in our brain have trouble coming to terms with such a proposition. It’s not that it’s just some big thing to us, it’s that there are an infinite amount of them as well. Infinitely divisible numbers are unavoidable, and we do our damnedest to account for them. There is just little use wrestling with such a whale. You’re likely to be swallowed whole.

This distaste for not knowing how things functioned at the most fundamental level made me constantly question how they ever could work at the larger scale. Not that knowing the exact number of hairs on a lion’s mane will prevent it from biting you, but it’s a fun fact to cross through your mind before the end. It’s something within our nature that won’t let us leave such things be. So as my devils danced around my head, denying me any peace I might have, a few of them collided. Namely Zeno and Gödel. These two came together in such a way as to make one wonder why the connection hadn’t been made before. A student could manage an entire thesis out of the concept. The arguments Zeno had made for monism were starting to look like the earliest claims to incompleteness, in a truly logical sense. Incompleteness was his argument for monism, even if he didn’t have the formalization of it yet. Could such a thing be the backbone of our understanding of reality? It was a better answer than most, but it did not fully realize itself without an accounting of myself. My consciousness exists within this reality, but it’s a bit narrow of a scope to encompass the entirety of it. There is a sequence and order, not just pure potential. I am an organized structure within this system, so monism doesn’t quite answer it well enough. What if my view was just too narrow to understand this monistic reality?

I, as a being of consciousness, exist. Since there is existence, there is a reality. Therefore, I exist within reality. If this reality is monistic, then I am also part of this pure potential. Somehow I am not dissolving into the infinite substrate. I have coherence, I have differentiation, and I can see very little of this at all. This monistic substrate has built me while retaining its own nature of being all encompassing. I must be wholly part of it, but a structure within itself. As a wave crashing on the shore has its own nature and mechanics, so does consciousness. This does not separate the wave from the ocean, but merely provides a brief view into the structure of the ocean as a whole. It hardly provides much information at all, but should the question we ask be “Is the ocean wet?” then the toddler knocked to the ground by a swift tide can answer with a resounding “Yes!”

This started a feverish hunt for answers. I started building this reality and what the simplest terms of it must be, in order for it to make sense. It had to have some fundamental proclivities to have built consciousness within itself, with “building” being one of them. I formed a theory on how this could be managed and named it Monistic Ontology/Pluralistic Epistemology Theory or MOPET for short. It proved to be the most rapid development I have ever made on any subject. I had this simple, fundamental answer that seemed to be able to withstand anything I threw at it, as long as I could build the right axioms around it. The point was to build a system that wouldn’t fall apart with incompleteness. That is what led me to it. It is that incompleteness was a feature of it. It was our limitation for perceiving the entirety of it. I could never give the monistic substrate the justice it deserves by trying to define it. It is the thing beyond definition. Not that it isn’t everything I say it is, but that it is more than I could ever say. I like to say that it “is”. This is the purest definition to an intuitive mind. It doesn’t sully it by trying to contain it, it is a soft admission to it being beyond any comprehension of mortal man.

Once I had put together my theory, it took a fair bit of refinement to really make it as simple as possible. The core paper doesn’t do much in defense of that statement. It can certainly be a bit dense, but it is trying to explain the fundamental nature of reality in less than 20 pages, and in a way that is hard to argue against. The real gap in between my understanding of this and publishing a paper (2 weeks) wasn’t that the answers weren’t abundantly clear to me now, but that I was overloaded on the implications of it. From fundamental physics, information theory and cosmology, to mapping exceedingly well to the book of Genesis. MOPET can provide an explanation of the emergence of consciousness that I feel to be both novel and strong. It has even begun to explain what it is. I don’t presume to know too much anything, but this was the first time I could see the nature of things and not be presented with questions I couldn’t begin to answer.

I don’t imagine my system as complete and there are many brilliant minds out there that are bound to make me think of it in new ways. The more coherence I bring to this, the more I find I do not know. I hope I could provide Zeno a bit of justice. He showed me where the explanation stopped feeling honest. Even if the world has thought of his paradoxes as impractical thought experiments, it didn’t change the line for me. I knew he had to be right to some degree, even if his opponents also have their claim to being right. This blog will serve as my record for progress towards these things and as a journal to the me in the future who can look back at the current me as a fool who could barely hold on to the ideas he was grappling with.