Knowledge About Knowledge is Power

Note: I'm just trying to improve my writing with this, see if I can actually tie all this different stuff together for a pow to the reader. I'm working on an expanded version that clarifies all this gibberish, is properly structured, and offers a useful perspective but it'll take years for me to make something good. Please take this as a whole as you read it and don't take it too seriously. That's how I wrote it to be read, ain't nobody got time for that. Yeah. Also, all colored words are links to relevant topics, so please check those out.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut

Knowledge about knowledge is power.

Knowledge is language.

What is meta?

    Metaphysics explains the rules of different ways of thinking. However, to do so, philosophers use arguments like deconstruction. This is where they use the logic or language against itself to highlight its structure and absurdities. Kierkegaard, Kant, many Greek philosophers and playwrights etc. did much of their writing between the lines (using references upon references essentially), having to also write to appease the church or state or otherwise an audience. They used their own language against them by applying a hidden reason/agenda to the words, often political, or abstracting to make their works universally relatable (something I've gotta expand on eventually). Deconstruction shows the flexibility of interpretation of language, and many writers and artists highlighted that in their own ways, long before the word or idea existed (and I'm claiming Greek Irony is a deconstruction, even if that wasn't the intent, "but what is irony if not a trope of erasure?" - Kevin Hart). So here's the kicker: language is not just words, it's a way of thinking and being in general. Language is how we communicate ourselves with the environment in every sense.
  

    We see and feel everything because of the way we are built, and that gives us a certain base anthropomorphic language. We are raised to believe certain things, and only hear certain words with certain meanings. Certainty is a double entendre in this situation. It doesn't mean just one, it means one out of many. But to us with our certain views, we don't know of the many. Understanding is like growing up. 

   Kids don't have the capacity to understand many situations until their brains develop more, so one way we deal with it is to handicap them with bullshit ideals meantime to keep them alive or away from certain things. We also do it on a much grander, cynical scale to control a populous. Ways of thinking produce ways of acting, only natural to want that to be predictable over a region. But that's childish. In wanting that predictability, we dull ourselves or others with that singular interpretation of how things should work. That's a certain language, one that denies uncertainty. We use models of predictability to function, and functioning is communicating with ourselves and the environment (our self and other people are part of the environment). 

   Communicating is physical interaction and observation, communicating is the mess of thoughts we reach into for words, communicating is those words our mouths find. Communicating is also chopping down a tree or the need to take a shit. Communication happens at all different levels and in-between levels. The real influence comes from a system adapting to as many situations as possible, or holding more patterns and remaining consistent. Modern trade, consumerism, complex geopolitics, media, etc. are all acutely aware of this and take endless compassionless advantage of the idea to get the most profit, often also taking advantage of and crippling a generally much less aware population on deeply psychological levels, unfortunately.
  

    The reality we might or might not exist in, depending on who you ask, is one where it's all everything all the time. I mean that not only is the universe this constant, indifferent, shifting, all-encompassing thing, but our interpretations are all present as well, constantly, as physical phenomena. Therefore there's still a connection between our individual realities. It's now known that the reality we construct for ourselves is not a certain image. We don't truly observe time, it's relative to the size or urgency of the problem. We have tons of sensations and responses that aren't unified, yet are collated as consciousness to learn and solve problems. 
  

    The image of this page is a composite of dreams, of generations of dreams. It's only realized by me, the user, poking away at some lame essay. The dream is my experience of typing the words, of using the laptop as well as the functioning hidden components designed by engineers and artists. It's the room I'm in and the world and universe beyond. It's my dream because it's my thought process generating the experience for my own functionality, even though it is interpreting in part the remnants of the thought processes of others. Not only are my thoughts built on response to others, but on thousands of years of human history and language, billions of years of genetics, on my brain/body structure, on states of being. My thoughts exist as this structure, cells and impulses and all that, and they change just as often as everything else whether I realize/accept it or not.
  

    Point is, structure produces thought, and thought produces actions, conscious or unconscious, duh. Our actions interact with the environment. Our knowledge is interpreted from the environment. This knowledge is our language, how we account for everything. Metaphysics has revealed the fundamental flaws in many of these accounts. 
  

     Greek or Christian Logos (link for fun) or Continental philosophy in general assumes the presence of an Other in some form. In descriptive philosophy (called Set Theory in math), we can only add description to things, we can never truly encompass it, only approximate. In Continental, the Other is the thing fully realized, a singularity of knowing, though mostly in reference to other people. It is unreachable, since to encompass the thing you'd essentially have to be the thing, and the thing always requires a universe of complexity to fully describe or make real. That's the purpose of God in this case, a global, intangible, unifying constraint. I'm thinking beyond words for description here and into feelings and structures. The old idea is that the Other is our linguistic access to that "infinite," our foot in the door on tangible truth, so to speak. The lie is that language actually provides access to the truth. Metaphysics used to be considered that ethereal bridge between mind and reality. The reality is all mind of course. "Is a cat really a cat?" asks Derrida. Metaphysics then becomes the logic of the mind, the knowledge about the knowledge. A practical language for language we can communicate.
  

    So how is any language any better than the rest, then, if it's all just a dream? Two things. One, the world still behaves without us, and we are beholden to those rules if we want to participate. Secondly, it's also the inescapable idea that we're not alone. We dream together whether we like it or not, and that introduces ideas that wouldn't exist otherwise, mainly ethics. The thing with ethics is that even though it presents a rule set for interaction, it's contextual. Ethical decisions are approximations of the "right" way to solve a problem. Approximations require data, and the more data the better the approximation and the more complex the patterns that can be interpreted. Science. Why then is knowledge about knowledge power? It enables a much greater breadth of interaction with the world. It's a whole layer dedicated to finding patterns and inconsistencies in ourselves, and this can only build us in the long run.
  

    A fundamental ill of certainty is that it inevitably denies something like ethics. A certain language will have limits and fall back in on itself at those limits since it can't add more constraints to the system. I'm talking recursive loopty-loops of reason and stuff, and this incestuous self-talk only self-reinforces. It's a belief, in other words. This is useful for mastery of certain skills, sure, but it precludes the truth (or lack thereof) when taken too seriously. More seriously, though, we often commit horrible deeds or say horrible things in full belief that we are doing the right thing or doing our best. We may in fact be doing our best (as in making a concerted effort to accomplish something) with what information we have available when we fuck up. "Errors" are inevitable in any complex system, but only exist within a scope, as in some relation. The thing is, our language also limits the things we can decide to accomplish or the intentions we can have, not just the way we do it. It's all within our available scope. The "error" could be what we're reaching for, not just the way we reach it. Creativity is necessary but even that only reaches so far beyond what's already known before it's useless. This is what humans do. This is the what we call intelligence.
  

    I don't care much about "morality," but I care that I don't make life harder for others since we're all in this together and shit's hard enough with how little we have control over. I care that I can create good experiences for myself and others if I work for it and have found it rewarding to do so. I don't want to be alone, that intention speaks for itself. Existing is lonely enough and I have it pretty damn easy in comparison to most of the world. I mean I actually get to spend the time thinking about these things! I always want to do my best. I always want to better myself. I never assume I have the whole picture. It's really simple (but not trivial). Who needs confidence? I simply take in information, act on what I have, and am always on the lookout for something new. I make conscious considerations of my limits in any situation and measure gain in what I can learn or improve rather than spiral into loops. And my considerations are only what I'm aware of. I have to work for awareness, and it's never comforting. I take comfort in my ability to plan and respond, not my ability to be passive or pleased.

  
    It comes down to enjoyment in the end for me. It's felt in the act, in the journey to accomplishing things good or bad. It's a feeling of our will taking hold of ourselves in our crazy world to some benefit, not necessarily our own. That capacity to self-consciously do things (with thumbs!!!) is what makes us and dammit I wanna do them in the time I have, within my own constraints. I consciously added ethics and technology to my constraints because it helps me get what I and others want. That's kind of the point of society, that shit evolved for more than just survival, it frees us from it at the highest levels and gives us a new playing field that I like to call abstraction. It's art, it's science, it's absurdity, it's comedy, it's fun, it’s love. It's the ability and will to create infinitely, or till our heart stops, and that makes consciousness awesome. Combined we've made modern medicine, space ships, video games, kick-ass relationships, fucking artificial intelligence! Holy shit! All of these things began in our minds. They are colored by the individuals who think them and join a collective conscience as we articulate them. Society implies a responsibility. It only exists as we make it since we've freed ourselves from the rest, let's make it fucking awesome! For as many people as we can reach. And let's learn to laugh at and be honest about our inevitable naiveté/humanness so we can keep growing up to face the real nightmares holding us or others back. It's not supposed to be comfortable.

    Our brains can probably hold as much complexity as our brains. Think about that while you look around and realize that's also just your brain interpreting things. Then think about the zillions of other processes involved in just sitting still and breathing and realize that's all stored in the same place. Then think about the fact that this all arranged itself over billions of years from what was and is still just noise. Chaotic noise of ideas, matter, energy, whatever you wanna call it. Now think that this all can be interpreted with waves interacting at different levels over time. 
  

    Levels are local abstractions, all scaled and subjective. Think of a cell, then think of a colony of cells, then organs, then a living creature. Those are levels. A literal interaction between levels would be poking a cell with a needle. Another interaction between levels is the forming of a thought. It requires many stages of brain and body function and then even more cross-talk between those stages. There are millions more stages that could be considered, from waves and atoms to cell organization and impulse to the way you wrote the thought down and remembered it! Hell, the breath you expel adds moisture to the air, affecting a larger climate to some degree. Motion requires force, and knowing actions requires reaction, all movement we make is acted against the Earth, impacting Earth's rotational velocity to some degree. Gravity, no matter where or how small, technically affects every object in the universe to some degree. Each function enables or alters other functions. Nothing is really separate, though. We choose to organize what's otherwise incoherent.
  

    Functions at very large scales are made up of functions at very small scales and everything in-between. Larger functions can have effects on the smaller ones that could not happen unless those scales were achieved. All these functions are produced by a structure, the universe. This is the structure/function science emerging in modern times, built on all of our previous knowledge. A lot of the existential realizations of the ancients haven't changed that much for most of society, metaphysics has been in our vocabulary for millennia, but our language for it and our ability to explore life has changed significantly. We see that clearly in the perpetual action/reaction of art or science or politics and more.
  

    This is all a bunch of eurocentric hyper-abstract bullshit but the point is life is a chaotic fucking beautiful mess, and it's on us to do something (or nothing!) with that while we're stuck together, because that's what we have to work with, and that's awesome and terrifying. You feel me yet? 

"Break out of character for me. Time keeps on going when we got nothing else to give." - Spoon

Listen right meow!                                                         
 
Useful words: Hierarchical Interdependence.

Joshua Brewster
Computer Science student