Reflexive Reflections

There is no better place to begin than with this self-referential sentence. Yes, like so. After all, all things in this universe (and all universes!) are connected, so any place is as good as another. To be is to relate. Every single thing is linked to other things which in turn connect to yet others, forming networks that also connect to other networks, coalescing into a single network of everything, such that one quickly snowballs into infinity. What happens to one thing sends waves that ripple through infinity. One cannot contemplate something without taking into account its place in the network of things; to fully contemplate something is to contemplate infinity. And to contemplate infinity is to contemplate unity.

However, is the network of relations that comprises our universe unique, its connections defined by logic and rules? Or does it vary for each perceiver, according to his identity, experience and perception? It must be the latter, because everything is filtered through perception. Everything is phenomenology. Solipsistic, yes, but what we perceive of reality may be less real than our thoughts themselves, because we know for sure the thoughts exist, but we can only infer reality from perceptions. This in no way nullifies reality; the world in which the perceiver resides is by definition real, even if his perceptions may not be. It may be that our limited human phenomenology and perspective misses out on many connections, or even that relation is merely a human or biological illusion that does not hold for other systems. Nonetheless, we each carry our network of the universe around, such that the universe is really the superposition of all these networks, the network of all networks.

There is of course a network that constitutes the real universe, insofar as it exists. But this is not directly available to us. The Real is translated via the Imaginary into the realm of the Symbolic, where it gains meaning. As I'm using these terms, the Imaginary corresponds to working memory, the Symbolic contains all things and their relationships in a Platonic way even when not imagined, and the Real is the world which can be inferred to exist from the Symbolic. The network of everything interweaves all three realms.

He who contemplates is himself part of the network of everything. He must contemplate from his place in the network, but can contemplate only things as they seem from his locus. In fact, what is the self but the autopoiesis of this network, sitting in its centre like a Ptolemaic earth? The network itself is elaborated by his thought and perception; it is dynamic, and contemplation changes it. The thinker thinking of the thing thinks of the thinker thinking of the thing, of the thinker thinking of the thinker thinking of the thing... The network is infinite, yet at the same time incomplete in a Gödelian sense. Were it not, the thinker would be able to predict the world's trajectory through eternity in a deterministic way, though without the free will to manipulate it like a Kwisatz Haderach.

Our universe is a fractal. Through elements capable of thought, the universe is also self-referential. But thought is not merely self-referential; it is also other-referential, connecting this universe to a myriad other universes, extant or not, possible or not. To show how mind-boggling this can be, try the following Gedankenexperiment. Imagine your imaginary friend contemplating the universe. You would conjure also a nascent network of the universe as you imagine that friend would perceive. Now imagine that your imaginary friend is imagining an imaginary friend contemplating the universe. We quickly arrive at a proliferation of universes, of which our own is but an infinitesimal part...

But the thinker that exists within the mind can only be a representation. The conclusion of mind-body duality is inescapable. The real thinker must exist above the mind to avoid recursive reflexivity. The illusion otherwise (that an agent, homunculus-like, resides in the mind) is because we cannot perceive the phase transition when mental inputs affect neural elements which then effect mental output (although the official view is that mental events result from neural activity and are not translated back into the metaphrastic poetry of the brain).

The network of the mind is a dynamic structure which is continuously reconstituted by thoughts and perceptions. Perception leads to thought which leads to action which leads to altered perception and so on. But we are conscious – our thoughts are not silent computations, but are themselves perceived. This means thought can lead to thought which can lead to more thought. Ideas are subnetworks of the mind, aggregates of thought that live within our minds – organisms composed of res cogitans. They compete for survival and dominance, reproducing promiscuously and spreading to other habitats, i.e. people. Fitness is measured by salience, memorisability, compatibility, attractiveness and other characteristics. In microcosm, a recapitulation of evolution within organisms themselves evolving to adapt to evolving societies. Yet society and culture evolve based on the activity of ideas. The most powerful ideas are those that reorganise society to be conducive to themselves, establishing equilibrium states. These are eventually shattered by chance mutations of ideas. Language accelerates the whole process by improving accuracy of replication and expanding cognitive ecological space. After all, life only exists below a certain threshold of imperfection in replication.

Language is an algebra of meaning, in which words communicate by creating networks between and around themselves. Each word may be used in lieu of the actual network it is representing, and may itself be associated with a network of relations to other words, connotations and emotions. These networks of course vary with context, depending on both the communicator and the receiver. Words allow not just the crude transmission of networks from one mind to another, which is tantamount to the modification of one network by another, but also the creation of vast, hitherto inexistent universes – "word" is only one letter away from "world".

Art, then, operates on a similar basis. It is the reification of a universe conceived by the artist, one universe budding off another, transiting through reality before rooting in the inner universe of the audience. The audience too take on an artistic role, enriching that world with networks of relations, and finally assimilate it into their own universes. The consummate artist considers how and what with that enrichment may occur. In some cases he may be fortunate enough to have knowledge of his audience. In others, he may have to rely on Zeitgeist and culture. In yet others he might have to place faith in the commonality of human nature.

Similarly, the audience works backwards, piecing together the artist's inner universe in order to better understand the work, especially if the work prompts them to do so. If the artist anticipates this, he can fine-tune his work, restructuring the network that is the seed, but if the audience expects this anticipation, they too change how they view it, and hence how they enrich and assimilate it. The artist may anticipate this expectation of anticipation, but the audience may also expect the anticipation of expectation of anticipation. A loop ensues, in which connections burgeon between artist, audience and art. The network enmeshing and comprising (is there a distinction?) the art swells in this postmodern cold war between artist and audience, a game at once cooperative and competitive (though some may be more hostile than others, like that of the vengeful puzzle-maker seeking to confound in Life: A User's Manual). The audience has expectations of the artist even if he must sometimes break them in order to better entertain, which is where the apparent hostility arises. Ultimately, they are allies. In this game, the artist must make, nay, choose all his moves first. But all art has temporality, whether tight like in music, loose like in prose, fluid like in interior design, or seemingly random like in cuisine. The artist's moves unfold simultaneously as the audience experiences the work. Thus it is only with imperfect knowledge that the audience can feel the joy of being surprised.

But what if the artist himself becomes the audience for his work? This reflexivity occurs during the creation of the work, and when the artist sits back to admire his finished opus. It is an extreme case of epistemology: the artist knows everything about the process and intention. But the work is an assemblage of ideas – a symbiosis of living things has a life of its own. Thus nothing is stationary; the artist moves with time, and so does his work. The work is both a window to his past self, which is only defined by its difference from his present self, and a window into the world of the work itself. As the world at large and the artist change, the work takes on new meaning. Gaps seem gapingly obvious, but hitherto-unseen paths that lead to new cosmos emerge as well. The artist's effort is but a moment; eternity completes his work. The network he created continues to connect to other things, growing till it encompasses the world, becomes the world. Here my effort ends, and eternity shall do the rest.