On the Metaphor of the Sinking House.

On the Metaphor of the Sinking House

 

I will now coin a formal term for the predicament that I delineated in an earlier entry: The Sinking House Problem. This refers to the situation wherein, in the process of completing a calculation, one finds that, in the time that elapses, one is no longer certain, by the end of the calculation or partway through, about what the initial step(s) of the calculation were. The reason, I assert, that one would persist in performing different permutations of the same calculation would be, consciously or unconsciously, to attain a form of CERTAINTY. This would serve, though it is not necessarily necessary that it does, to justify the time spent performing the Calculation. This use of time would be consequential if the World is defined by one’s Thoughts, rather than independent of them.

Certainty would be impossible simply because of the POSSIBILITY* of distortion occurring during the time that is required to perform the Calculation. Certainty would be a substitute for ASSUREDNESS. When any calculation is performed, if it requires time (which may be the case for all calculations), one can only be ASSURED of the proper execution of the problem. This ASSUREDNESS can only be attained by attributing REALITY to the abstractions at work and their manipulation. Because abstractions are only REAL insofar as they are IMPORTANT, the moment that a calculation becomes irrelevant (not by virtue of being DISPROVEN, as by Analysis, but by no longer serving PURPOSE), it ceases to be REAL. ASSUREDNESS is lost, and we seek CERTAINTY to validate the waste of time. This “waste of time” may be illusory in some instances, however, given that we discontinue the thought quickly enough.

It is for this reason that some logical thought process may be REAL and relevant in one moment but may appear absurd the next. It is not necessarily that it was ever “false” to begin with, but the situation has changed so that the abstractions used to represent the situation are now null and void.

My philosophy of memory is not pseudo-philosophy as it is defined by “using Reason to prove why Reason is impossible or futile”. I am not attacking Reason, but, on the contrary, supporting it by describing the way in which it morphs over time. What I am attacking is the sense of constancy that we feel when we employ Reason with an excessive dependency upon MEMORY.

My philosophy is not post-modernism. Post-modernism is based in the deconstruction of language and other symbol systems. Yet this deconstruction is subliminally presumed to occur within a timeless space. My philosophy proves that, where abstraction is concerned, Time, even if it is essentially only an Abstraction, is also involved, even as only a measurement of the decay of abstract entities in the process of their manipulation. The metaphor of the man trying to construct a house from mud and then to occupy it while it is all ready collapsing is an apt metaphor. The very process of contemplation can try to approach the limit of Certainty when its necessity has run its course, but each time it will only fall further short from its goal.

The post-modernist will try to deconstruct a sentence to deal with the process of thought at work in making that sentence “make sense”. I show why even this process may be futile because of the inherent fallibility of human thought over time.

*However Minute.

 

dm.A.A.