SELF-REFERENCE

I am fascinated by self referencing. It’s one of those things, that, once you get it in your head, you can’t seem to get it out.

I appealed to its seemingly irresistible presence in my very first book, The One Thing, which was essentially a metaphysical tour-de-force; and believe me, when you’re dabbling in metaphysics, you inevitably run slap in the face of self referencing.

It’s unavoidable. When you set out to explore the fundamental nature of the universe, to uncover whatever ultimate mystery might lay behind it, who is it exactly that is setting out? You!

We cannot deny then, that whatever we discover, we discover, our sensory equipment, our mind, our powers of reasoning and so on.

I once heard it said that scientists do not so much describe the universe to us as much as they simply tell us how they feel about it.

The rationale is simple. If you're describing an object, you're proceeding on the basis of your observation of it. But how do you observe, other than by using your own built-in sensing hardware?

Light, for example, enters our eyes and strikes the optic nerve, which sends the information to the brain. Simple enough. But here’s where it gets funky. The brain then creates images with the data so recently arrived from the universe out there, and the image in the brain does not have a one-to-one match with the one outside the brain.

As a matter of fact, it is utterly impossible for the two images to have such a match. The outside world is unavoidably filtered by our own sensing equipment. Therefore, what we know of the world (i.e., what we feel about it) cannot help but be affected by that same equipment.

In other words, we are only expressing what we feel (about a particular object), not necessarily describing what it actually is.

The knotty German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, pointed this out over two-hundred years ago in his famous “thing-in-itself” tirade, in which he flat out said that we cannot know it. We can only know what our senses are telling us. We are involved in an endless loop of self referencing.

So what is the point? Only that everything we say is most likely totally meaningless.

Does it mean anything for you to say that you are intelligent or good-looking? No, it only means something if someone else says it. If you say it, you’re self referencing, which means that you’re going round in circles.

But here’s the thing: nearly everything we say is a form of it. For example, if we point to someone and remark that they’re good looking, does that make it so? What does it even mean to be good-looking?

Do you know what’s really happening whenever we engage in this kind of talk? We’re doing nothing more than expressing our own aesthetic taste. We’re just like those scientists; we are not describing the world, or anyone in it; we’re just saying how we feel.

And how we feel means only one thing: how we feel.