On Quiddity and the Dipole of Truth

In scholastic philosophy, quiddity ( /ˈkwɪdɪti/;Latin quidditas) was another term for the essence of an object, literally its "whatness," or "what it is." The term derives from the Latin word "quidditas," which was used by the medieval Scholastics as a literal translation of the equivalent term in Aristotle's Greek.

It describes properties that a particular substance (e.g. a person) shares with others of its kind. The question "what (quid) is it?" asks for a general description by way of commonality. This is quiddity or "whatness" (i.e., its "what it is"). Quiddity was often contrasted by the scholastic philosophers with the haecceity or "thisness" of an item, which was supposed to be a positive characteristic of an individual that caused them to be this individual, and no other.

In law, the term is used to refer to a quibble or academic point. An example can be seen in Hamlet's graveside speech found in Hamlet by William Shakespeare. "Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures" says Hamlet referring to a lawyer's quiddities.

One of the reasons this notion of quiddity comes up persistently is because it is inescapable; the popularity of the expression "it is what it is" is an indicator. No matter how many abstract maps and categorical sortings you impose on the universe, there remains the notion that behind them all is the territory in its very whatness, unimpressed by labels or measurings, one pole of the dipole "truth". The quiddity of x is certainly closer to the truth about x than any proposition concerning it can be, including this one. The other pole of the "truth" dipole is sheer vacuum, the zeroeth power of apparent reality where the consciousness abandons all postulating of form and resides as awareness of awareness of awareness without any dimensional artifacts.

...

(Dipoles in material science are funny things, and the word is probably not wholly appropriate for a discussion of kinds of truth. But it seemed like a good idea at the time).

...

I think the dynamic tension between these two forms of truth -- pure consciousness and pure quiddity--may be the key to understanding the universe as a whole, both the conscious and the mechanical aspects of it. There is not a lot of science around that integrates these extremes (if they are extremes). Most science slices, dices, chops and fries without taking the conscious end of things much into account, and often chases maps and categories in endless loops of signification far removed from any sense of quiddity.

...

Of course, such a "subject" would have to come up with a way to talk about things that avoided the trap of maps and categories. Without such a vocabulary we're kind of limited to making crude signals toeach other about it, like pre-language ape-men trying to organize a group hunt.

On the Origin of Forms

The ultimate common denominator of anything which exists in a time-space continuum is form.The gross material objects you trip over or manage during the day are the most ready example. Nuclear particles have their own way of being a form, just as definite and automatic. When you start discussing mental energy and objects, there is another array, ranging from heavily massive mental objects to high-frequency creations which oscillate around beauty itself as a frequency. The spectrum _seems_ to have a discontinuity between high-level frequencies north of EMF radiation, and the class of energy and solids which are experientially mental things, not physical ones. But they do overlap, as anyone who has seen a good old-fashioned glare-fight between highly endowed spirits can attest.

But all this is an array of forms. Where does form end and background against which forms are viewed begin?

A being growing up in a body, forced to endlessly communicate to forces and energies of a fairly low scale (such as nerves, light, sexual vibes and the like) grows more and more into the conviction that he is among those things -- a form or compound himself. This is not true -- it's a special effect that comes with long-term habituation to the physical universe. But is a popular addiction, probably the most popular religious belief in our species: the physical universe is the Real Universe; Thou Shalt Have No Other Universe Before It; and It Contains You. This is a great pile of dung and smelleth strongly. But it is the belief system among which we travel.

If you shed or strip away or release all attachment to forms, desires or resistance about them, and let go of all pictures, and efforts, you find yourself creeping back into contact with the ultimatee zero-wavelength phenomenon called Pure Consciousness, the awareness without object that is the end point of all exploration. This is the engine of the mind, the creative seat that makes the decisions which get so convoluted, and who you are (the I before you started generating a self to be). It is an infinity, and a zero, because it is something beyond the pale of numbers and dimension, and has none of the wavelngths of the material universe; although it certainly has qualities of the kind called ability: to intend, to perceive, to postulate what shall be.

It is not that a lot of attention has to be put on this background existence which precedes all form and defines it. It is simply a good thing to be reminded every once in a while what comes from which, so as not to be fooled too seriously.

Information Systems, the World and Everything:

Information as A Spiritual Product

This is a long essay, extracted from a book called Notebook 15, which seeks to lay out some clarity on the nature of our information systems where they reach their final destination — you and me. I apologiz e for the length of it but I did not have time to make it shorter, as a famous writer once said. If you do take the trouble to read it all, I applaud you and hope that you find some part of it valuable.

The first section discusses what we use to relay information — the signals, symbols and semaphoes from which we miraculously get understanding.

The second section provides some deconstruction of what occurs when we send each other postcards or e-mail.

The third offers a bridge to the real driving force behind information and communication — again, you and me. Let us move out, and see how we might get ìthereî from ìhereî.

Signals, Semaphores, and Systems of Symbols

Information and information technology rule the tide of our late twentieth and early twenty-first. centuries No other discipline attracts as much new attention, or comes anywhere near as close to replacing sex and food as the topics of the hour, hour after hour, in the cafeterias of western mankind.

Given this amazing and still-swelling transfiguration, it may be worthwhile to notice what all the blather concerning the Information Age and informational economies are about.

First, the machinery. Ever since a transistor began making the rounds at Bell Labs, we have been accelerating on an autobahn defined by switching machinery. Our halls are littered with boxes — 286es, 386es, Suns and Amigas, Macs and Pentiums and beyond. The boxes contain switching machinery carried to the absurd limit, it seems. Where we were raised thinking of switches as finger-sized, we now carry pockets full of them, numbering in the millions and now trillions. The terabit, a number of switches once exceeding all the switches on Earth, now fits into a large human hand.

And, make no mistake, all we are working from in this tidal wave is switches. Someone noticed that a switch has two choices built into it; that if you have two switches you have four choices; with four, sixteen choices, with eight, two-hundred and fifty-six choices. Compounding the numbers of switches, each only representing two states, allows the entire universe to be condensed into a simulation, given enough switches and the power to set and reset them quickly.

There are grosses of fat tomes available on the rationale of this approach to information representation. A switch represents whether or not person ìAî is in the room, whether a plane is in motion or not, whether a motor is running or cold. Eight switches can count up the number of times a fly breathes, or the gallons of fuel used in one minute of operation by a flattop. This power to represent extends from the instant to the dynamically changing: communications become possible as soon as an energy pulse can be agreed to represent a switch in an on state or an off state.

So far has this wave extended across our cultural horizons that these notions, once the bleeding edge of cybernetic theory, are now grade-school stuff. The machinery to combine and design more and more of these switches has become the hottest industry of the century in less than twenty years.

This is a migration past a third-order abstraction of awareness. This is not a difficult thing to notice.

First, notice the simple and highly energetic condition of being aware of something. Make it a cat, if one is nearby, or your own shoe if you are wearing one, or any object; notice the action of being aware of it.

Second, conceive a memory of that experience in the form of a mental representation of the cat or object. This is a first order abstraction, taking the raw experience out of its place in time and carrying it forward with the owner's attention. You are a viewer; you see a picture of the cat or whatever you just chose to look at. It's not an experience of the direct sort — you're experiencing looking at an image in a different space or way than you were looking at the object. The experience is abstracted into a different kind of experience.

For a second level of abstraction, conceive that language exists, and that you use some of it to describe the experience of facing a cat..Think of the words you would select to parallel the picture which in turn reminds you of a past fact. Don't do anything with them, just choose the words. In so doing you have constructed another half-step away from the experience, abstracting from a picture to words. Now, decide to make some noises to express the words chosen to relay the experience of this cat (or whatever) across a distance or across a span of time (Yesterday, a cat watched me; today, I watched a cat).

Notice the experience of making the noises is a bit more abstract than the experience of seeing the picture (recalling an event). If someone else is making the noises (leaving it to you to understand and reconstruct what pictures they might be looking at, and from there what they might have experienced), you have an additional step of remove from the raw experience of seeing.

For a third level of abstraction, take the noises of language, with which you have draped your intention to communicate the fact of facing this cat, and make up some symbols — odd shapes or pieces of felt or copper or some such — that will do to represent the noises that you would make if you were using noises to express the words which represent the concepts which represent the the image your mind contains which represents the experience of facing this cat.

This symbolizing process actually requires several layers of abstraction.

1. Experience a cat
2. Make a mental picture of experiencing a cat
3. Make concepts representing the memory image
4. Make language representing the concepts, including morphemes into which you may embed abstracted bits of meaning and phonemes containing agreed-upon sounds
5. Make an alphabet of shapes to represent phonemes of sounds (omit if using Chinese)
6. Make spellings, using the alphabet, to establish forms for the word-sounds used to represent the abstracted memory
7. Carve, paint, or build from sticks symbols representing the alphabet forms agreed on for the words needed to represent the thought representing the experience. Or draw them on paper. An A drawn on paper represents all A functions which represents sounds Aww, Ahhh, and Ay, one or more such letters representing the phonemic component of a sound series agreed upon to represent a concept of an experience.
8. Make a numbering system based on your fingers or toes, or both. If you are a sloth, multiply by six and call it hex. Now, take all those forms representing sounds representing words representing A , O, etc., and choose a number to represent each one of them. This is a Good Thing because numbers are better than letters anyway.
9. Now build a switching system to make digital (binary) representations of the numbers which you have mapped to characters in the alphabet, and a complicated electronic display system to translate those digital representations back into shapes (analog) that your eye can translate. As you have already learned, probably, you can do all 27 of our letters plus numbers and symbols using 8 bits.
10. Using a modem, send pulses representing the bits of the binary representation of the characters combined into words representing sounds representing concepts representing the memory of the experience of looking at a cat.

Not all these steps are actual abstraction, but note that we have abstracted experience into memory ,and memory into words, The other steps have to do with symbolizing, which is similar but different.

The use of switches has added another and subtler layer of abstraction or at least derivation. Electronic mail, for example, represents the act of one person communicating to another, but it provides a far more abstract experience because there is no contact between the effort at source and the experience at receipt. It is more of a semaphore than a hello.

Even in an old-fashioned hand-written letter you could see the personality of the individual revealed through visual cues in the formation of the characters, the sweep of the connectors or the spikes of the risers, etc. The new medium not only removes the visual cues, it also abstracts the experience of reconstructing the senderís view one more level by removing even the fingerprints and sweat one once knew were present in a hand-written letter. Given that e-mail does this, why does it seem so rapid and intimate and yet easy to understand when it does? Ah — there ís the mystery.

How does understanding leak through all these layers so that we see clearly what Joanna is saying and meaning even though we only have a trace on a screen to look at? Most ordinary thing in the world, happens millions of times a minute in the world. But how? How does such a diluted trace enable us to not only understand what Joanna is saying, but even better to intuit what she really meant? (I hasten to add that for the sake of clarity and simplicity we haven't even gone into the subtlety of deciding to say words other than those that reflect your meaning, so that they will be altered on receipt and somehow get your meaning across without your having to articulate it––which is neither abstraction nor symbolizing but often just aberrant communicating).

This digitizing and undigitizing of messages places sender and receiver one step further removed, and in doing so brings about dependencies. These are one generation more complex than the dependencies which informed Marshall McLuhan when he discovered the medium was the massage. Most such massages were not digital when McLuhan wrote, but the advent of email is certainly a coherent extension of the trend he was brilliant enough to identify. It abstracts from a direct experience of communication to one which is a step removed through a digital laundering — the communication without the substance of the communicator or his direct efforts.

The current raging growth of the technology through which these abstractions are created and used is what is being called the Information Age, not because the mechanisms are binary but because a new order of magnitude has been achieved in speed of relay of signals, including pages of words and numbers, and because networking technology has raised the inter-accessibility of information to new orders. Whether or not this is a Good Thing, it is certainly an interesting one and it remains to be seen how the human race will adjust to this new power of exchange of information. So far, it has made definite differences. The networking of the species, as far as it has gone, has been a power for the better on balance.

Deconstruction

The process of information abstraction and interchange is a wide study and it cannot be done full justice here. Suffice it to say that modern information technology has fundamentally modified the quantity of explicit information, by orders of magnitude, which can reach the ordinary individual. It has also subtly modified the quality of that information. Thus, it has become popular to refer to the period as an Information age, running Information economies. Before too big of an issue gets made of this, it might be useful to look a little closer at what information is.

The largest and most obvious component of any information is the system of relays via which it arrives. The information itself is less palpable, although it may be more far-reaching and far more important.

Consider the receipt of an ordinary postcard, on which your cousin in Indiana writes to tell you he has seen a cat. The obvious, real and immediate components of the experience are the card, the writing on it, the mail box from which you recovered it, the postal person who brought it, the truck which brought it from the airport, the plane it came from Indiana on, the intermediary steps it went through after it left his hand, and so on. It may evoke, when you read it, images of the table at which he sat while looking at his cat, or the weather in Indiana on the day he saw it. But on a physical level it is the vias, the physical relays of the communication which are tangible and obvious.

Systems of information exchange deal primarily with these "via" or "relay" issues and have little attention to spare for the event that occurs after delivery or before transmission. The technology is not truly about information, for the most part, or even remotely about communication in a living sense. It is about the design of relay systems and the architecture of vias, mechanisms for flooding the channels of networks with signals.

But no matter how complex the network, how wide the WAN or how fast the throughput, there is an alpha and an omega in information. We touched on the alpha when we examined the abstracting process in part 1. It involves the creation of representations of experience. At the beginning of any system, system of systems, layer or concatenation of layers, is the simplicity of this initial process: the representation of experience. The beginning of all information is the apprehension by an awareness of experience. From this all else derives. You could say the alpha point occurs when a source of understanding generates an intention to bring about understanding.

Similarly, the end point of all information and its measure of value is not anywhere in the formatting process or the transmission or the correlation. These things serve to support the value that occurs, but the value does not occur until a source of understanding appreciates the information.

It needs to be said that the alpha and omega points described here are different than any other part of the information process. It is not that the information enters the brain where the circuits are so subtly complex that they bring about understanding. The most complex correlation of neurons in the universe contains no information until the omega point of appreciation by a source of understanding occurs. This is so simple it is possibly mind-bending, but it is as close to absolute as a proposition ca get in this universe: the understanding that precedes the creation of information and which appreciates information at its receipt is qualitatively different from any process involved in relaying that information.

IF you can imagine the series of transformations which make up information processes as a straight line, it might help. Like a straight line, the process is made up at least theoretically of a series of points which can be made to seem discrete, although perhaps they are not. Within any such point you can scale down your inspection and examine finer and finer subroutines: the mechanism of modulation and demodulation, the physics of bandwidth in twisted-pair configuration or optical fiber, the intricate storing of voltage pulses as binary data in registers, and so on. Each of these in turn has its own subset of intricate processes. Nowhere in any of this, however, has information occurred until the qualitative difference is entered in of an understanding appreciating the meaning of the information.

Please also notice that a source of understanding, as a phenomenon which shows up in the physical universe, is different than any other class or kind of phenomenon in that universe because it adds the non-material ingredient of understanding. Understanding is not exercised by material systems. Computers do not understand; dogs understand more than the most complex mainframe. This is not to say that just registering an analog display of information in front of an eyeball produces understanding. Misunderstood displays or comatose internal states can prevent understanding, as when you see your first Arabic car advertisement or when a teenage street punk is invited to the opera.

Neither you nor the street punk is short of potential understanding, but the necessary via of symbols and the dependency on them have combined to prevent it from occurring. It is easy and lethally wrong to conclude from this that the registration of symbols linked in enough ways will produce understanding. This is a fallacy of confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions. If you believe understanding must only occur when symbol-linking occurs, there is no way to account for instances where it has occurred spontaneously, as in imagined or dreamed circumstances or when inventing new algorithms or designs.

We are, after all, talking about a source of understanding, meaning an emanation point, not just understanding as an unaware reflex following the right inputs. The whole point is that the latter is nonexistent. Awareness is not just another reflex. It is qualitatively different — a different ìwhatî — not just a different number of switches at work. There is a leap to a different — entirely — class of event. The more you compare the nature of switches and relays with the natures of insight and understanding the more obvious the qualitative difference between them becomes.

Catalogues of Knowing

Any viewpoint can be considered as a collection of known realities or a catalogue of ìknowingnessesî. Your first boy- or girl-friend had such a collection, which you found out about gradually, remember? And you certainly brought such a collection into the day when you finished waking up this morning. One reason we never seem to run out of things to laugh about is the endless tensions and collisions that can behad between these different methods and packages of knowing.

The sum total of experience being had at any point in time by one viewpoint is the sum total of "forces of knowing" composited in the individual catalog. If you want an example of forces of knowing, imagine or remember what it feels like to know you are inadequate to deal with a very important situation which is demanding your attention right now. Another example: recall what it feels like to realize you are completely on top of things.Recall the feeling of encouragement that comes from knowing you have done well, or the force of self-devaluation that can come from being harshly criticized by a relative.

Think back to a time you took a stressful exam, or passed a tough test, and what you were knowing at the different extremes of the experience.

Within any catalogue of knowing there may be contradictions - sets of knowledge that do not harmonize well, such as knowing you are extremely important but not knowing how, or knowing you are nothing but must be something, knowing you feel fear but must be brave, and so on. These fields of ìknowingî address all vectors and all dynamics of the spectrum of life. Example: knowing there is no ground fault in a circuit, but knowing it looks like there is one and knowing that you donít know where it is, at the same time that you know God is on your side in this matter, and knowing He should hurry up and clarify things for you. Compounds of knowing, some parts of which blend well, others of which conflict. Another easy example: knowing that high school history is about as dull as a living person can stand without weeping and also knowing you need to placate the professor for the sake of your diploma and domestic tranquility but knwoing that the only thing interesting within fifteen miles is Sally Wethersfield in the row ahead of you.

Everything

Armed with these complex compounds of Know, people use business to earn money; they use money to buy futures and positive experiences of the present. They buy futures in order to contemplate varieties of experience. There is no objective standard that requires what sort of future experience should drive any given individual or market sector. But it is clear that there is a spectrum of possible experiences which constitute the driving energy behind the accomplishment of future experience.

This spectrum includes individual experience, including individual material well-being`. It includes future familial experience, starting with the affinity of romantic and/or sexual bonds. The energy of this kind of knowing leads some to believe that the driving consideration in life is love, getting laid, making babies or "family values" built around the generation of new humans.

In addition, efforts to achieve the future of groups experiencing as groups - be it Rotarians, citizens of Smallville, Urbane Cosmic University Graduates Associated, Denizens of Earth, Employees in Revolt, or Butterfly Lovers International . Each individual builds a set of these groups which function somewhat like a template, in his mind, of things he belongs to, and about which he knows. Great philosophies have been built up on the notion that this kind of knowing is really the dominant one — Marxism and capitalism are two that come to mind.

The species itself, sensed as a whole, is another zone of future experience, as are the planet as an environment, and the space-time continuum. Another is spiritual experience, individual or organized. Sometimes the groups category is substituted for the spiritual as a token to hold the place of spiritual experience by at least participating in a group. Church service is an example — it may or may not be a spiritual experience but is usually an experience of group and group agreement in any case. Not the same thing, though, and certainly the two involve very different kinds of knowing..

There may also be some sort of Infinite vector of experience, which mystics have historically tried to describe, but since it approaches All, both in experience and time, it is not evidently nameable as something we can map here.

For any given viewpoint, then, there are compounds of knowing on all these vectors, and probably a few more as well, and at any given moment some of them are in play in his or her makeup while others are dormant. The set of knowing that is operating at a given moment is highly variable, is relative to other sets of information and the individual himself and a host of emotional variables; and the entire complex becomes more or less transparent depending on how free the individual is to stay up with the moment,

un-subdued by having his attention sucked up by complexities of unreconciled knowing. It could be said from this perspective that all problems are problems in knowing, including knowing not.

Something to be known about the use of certain systems of knowing is that they can be self-solidifying and can have triggers built in to them such that when they are threatened with understanding, they automatically refresh their own solidification by being harder to understand. Some people generate these paradoxical minefields of knowing as a method of defending themselves against simple attention and understanding, but only after they have drifted pretty far down the spectrum.

This self-preservation and self-solidification feature appears as though it operates without any participation by the viewer. This apparent condition is untrue and the alteration enables persistence by making it hard to understand what one is really looking at.

Self-reinforcing, self-solidifying beliefs LOOK like they are the reality structure - because they get more solid when you look at them. Therefore they must be "what is real", because it appears not to change.

The actual reason it appears not to change is a time-loop built into the mocked-up, generated knowingness. The loop acts as though it is saying "I am what I was before, only more solid".

You can buy into (agree to know) the assertion, and your perception will be of something persisting and growing more solid. Then you will know how solid things are, how hopeless hope is, and how useless trying.

As an alternative, you can see through this assertion, peel it away, and your perception will be of an apparent but untrue assertion, a marketing day-mare, a neon fallacy twinkling in the sea of consciousness, a belief like many others. Like other beliefs, a structure erected by, for, of, with, in and from consciousness.

This trick can turn the catalog of knowingnesses into an instant of raw knowing, a window of direct light rather than a complex maze of allowed reflected perceptions.. That is the moment where the Knower transcends his own Knowing and gets back home.

If information systems have any ultimate Good to steer by, that very moment may well be it.

# # #