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The Fourth Point: The Matter of Space. 

Do human beings live in 3-dimentional space? What is the fourth point of knowing?

Challenging Space

I have some difficulty with the space of common knowledge.  

I work with it; I wander around in it; I think it is interesting that people base beliefs and assert truths of science.  I don’t think, however, that I have to think they are right, even as I do have to play in the same playground with them. I imagine there is no proof that could ever get me to think that they are saying something really important. Interesting, yes; rainbows and light refraction is beautiful and interesting. Large Hadron Colliders are wonderous and interesting. Kind of like making sandcastles at the beach though, for the most part. Amazing and cool, especially near the ocean waves. 

Not agreeing is not the same as saying that it is wrong, by the way, rather, it is simply saying that it is interesting but I don’t have to believe anything about it, even as many people figure that I have to.

For sure, there are popular people who say things that cater to and amplify the common knowledge. It’s probably why they are popular. But in the same way as there are people who in 5^th grade were picked on, who the by the time they are in 11^thgrade have made their way into being cool kids by saying certain things about things that people are saying; similarly the modern world is just like that. Modern capitalism is high school politics. Perhaps like the contemporary social philosopher Slavoj Zizek might have commented in some multiverse, no wonder it is so difficult to think outside of capitalism. 

But I diverge. 

(Keep in mind that everything I comment upon is intimately linked to your mental health. Just keep that somewhere in the back of your —healthy? —mind. )

Space

I’m going to share about two seminal philosophers, their ideas about space. 

Plato (427-347 BCE – 2373 years ago) might be seen as reflecting material that those folks were dealing with around ancient Greece, with his logic of solids. 

Rene Descartes (1596-1650 CE – 376 years ago) promoted his two substances, res extensa, and res cogitans, or, matter and mind. 

Now, when trying to get outside of the modern capitalistic high school, we apply a method that every significant philosopher that has come down to us has used but termed differently. For our time, I will say that this is: one must stop believing. This is the same as Socrates and Descartes doubting, Husserl bracketing and epoche’ing. Plato never really doubted or bracketed, which is why I am using him. He mostly just took what was given him to develop an ideal republic, a perfect social system in ethical alignment with a transcendent ideal. 

For our moment, though, what these and other authors said is nearly incidental; if you disagree we can talk a little more, but for this post the point that has been realized by more than a few authors in various disciplines is that the commentary is always confined by the moment. The meaning is always constrained by the moment in which it is pronounced, but also by the moment in which meaning is being made. For example, the beginnings of Biblical scholarship, e.g Brauch Spinoza (1632-1677) but more particularly Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), realized that theoretical commentary is framed in the political environment in which it is written, and they were making meaning in this way, in their moment. 

This opens us up unto physics, at least in as much as this situation is repeated in the findings of physics, albeit, using different terms and, what Jean-Paul Lyotard called, phrase universes. But they are more worlds within the universe, oddly enough. To put it in another way, there is something that an author meant by arranging terms in the way they did, and this meaning consolidates in one of two ways; either around the author, such that their meaning moves through time intact, as though by some law of nature as yet unidentified, or, around the reader, such that the meaning is centered in the subject. So, either there is a continuity in a universe that is never able to be conveyed in knowledge, or there is a disjuncture which allows for the relations of universal things. Particles or waves. 

This reverberates in every instance of knowing. For example, if we are following the line of thinking where we have set aside our believing (our particular set of beliefs about the way things are) then we come to a problem, or, at least a strange conundrum.

This conundrum can be outlined as the following: 

• What the authors meant gives us theoretical material to use as varied positions upon which to have an opinion which works to extend our beliefs into the past to be justified, such that our beliefs are justified as we take actions toward the future. This is political or just plain reality. 

• What we think this (the political inscription) means is not what the author meant, rather, it is only what is meaning now. 

The first one identifies what I call the modern method. As well, if we are honestly engaged in not so much suspending our beliefs but stopping them entirely, at that, momentarily — embedded in this method is a deep irony. I call this feature of experience, as a way of dealing with experience, reality.

The second one is not ironic. If I indeed understand what the authors are saying, understand the point or way they approached things in order to say what they said about things, then what they are saying must be about something very particular and specific, and not extending in any way through time to have reached me such that I have an opinion on what they are saying. What they are saying thus is just me making meaning in just that way. If I am saying anything about what they meant, then I must be having only an opinion on them because it is what I am knowing. I call this true. I am thus not merely having an opinion, as though I am not really knowing what they said and appropriating their meaning to my meaning, but indeed I am knowing exactly what they meant because I cannot possibly know what they meant, and this meaning is exactly the meaning I know for certain and thus not merely an opinion. How would it be possible for me to have an opinion on my opinion? Only within my meaning of the notion of an opinion, as opinion itself is a meaning that I already know with certainty.

Now, right here, I’m not trying to get into all the nitty-gritty discussion about all this. Here I am entering things through the example of space, in particular, about solids and extension, to develop and fill out the area that those two proposals delineate. 

Physical Space or Mental Space. 

If there is anything we are starting to realize in both psychology and physical science, it is that the separation of these two domains is arbitrary. What seems so apparent to us is exactly that: it appears that way in a physical sense, and as well from a psychological standpoint is means that way. In short, what contemporary knowledge is sorting out is exactly that there is a meaningful appearance which appears to have a specific and particular meaning. 

The 19^th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard called this specific appearance of meaning the “universal”, and he said the “ethical in the universal”, to which he then proposed a religious resolution. Despite what people have then argued over what new systematics Kierkegaard might have been proposing for Being, such as Jean-Paul Sarte and the mid-20^th century Existentialists institutionalized for the modern Being, the irony here is what is ethical is religious. This is what some late 20^th, early 21^st century philosophers saw, that is, what some noted as the correlation of Being and thought. 

So it is, the difference between physical space and mental space is upheld by belief. But a specific theology of meaning, a particular gospel of phrases and terms to which all reality is referred. By referring to this salient system of meaningful terms, which correlate with and link ideas in what appears and is thus experienced as a difference between the physical and the mental. Form here, all forms of modern discourse arises to debate and negotiation. 

The Mental Space

So it is, any argument that I might offer to say there is no difference is rooted and indeed digs up the system of ideas which keep them separated. Founding terms, such as spirituality, pose to get outside of this correlated loop of modern meaning by arguing that a particular term (say, spirit) is able to transcend the more mundane, corporeal, reality of physical things. In short it poses that the mind has access to a truth that the physical reality does not. So it is founding terms functioning in this regard do not in fact transcend what they pose to transcend,  but instead reiterate the modern reality as sacrosanct. 

But my point is not that anyone is wrong. For sure, spirituality is a very useful and can be a vital way to navigate reality. The more pertinent founding term for our issue of space is psychology. 

Psychology does something similar as spirituality, but it directs the meaning to the physical criterion. 

There is a bag to unpack a little here. 

Psychology is supposed to have a large enough meaningful space, so to speak, to contain all things that occur in a mind. So it is that quite soon after psychology started to assert itself partnered with the physical sciences, there was push back by the spiritual side. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are the two big philosophical names that crystalized this push-back, as each in their own way pointed directly into the areas of knowledge that Descartes (and Kant) neatly avoided by some odd sleight of hand, some sort of discursive magical trickery. Psychology supposes that whatever is going on in the mind it must have its basis in the physical brain, yet when we get into the “mind space” for what it is, for what it is doing, there is no more reason to believe thew mind has its basis is the brain any more than it has its basis in spirit. Spirituality simply tries to point its discourses to the founding term of spirit, say, and psychology to a brain. Nether get outside of the irony inherent the method they are using to assert the truth of reality. 

But again, my point is not to try and prove them wrong, but to point out what they were and are doing, and what was happening, by indicating what is indeed happening. 

For sure psychology and spirituality can be helpful in navigating reality. This is not the question if simply because neither suffice to solve the problem they suppose is occurring, which they then suppose they can solve. In other words, they simply propose a real correlation of meaningful terms. 

The res extensa and res cogitans are sensible founding terms based on what is given to the knowing of reality as reality, at that, given a certain tendency to believe how things are supposed to be known (the ethical universe). From the perspective of what is happening in the mind, as much as the mind knows of physical things but physical things do not know of the mind, the ancient Sumerians were no more incorrect or incorrect than the Aztecs, pagans, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, or Jews, because there is nothing there to substantiate what we could be talking about except that we believe we are talking about something.  

The question must become: what is space? 

Back to Plato 

Plato is the Western father of social systemization. He did not think so much as he applied thinking to what is given to knowing. He thereby used thinking as a tool, but the tool he was using was not Being as much as the Being was using a tool. This is the oddity that our contemporary philosopher Graham Harman laid out through his work Tool Being, albeit perhaps not so gracefully as I just did.  Lol 

Plato, as well as a bunch of ancient Greek philosophers in their own ways, understood extension as having something to do with space. For example, a two point line, concerns some sort of space, but it is not sufficient to obtain a solid. Taking a cue from navigation, not even three is sufficient; there must be at least 4 points to define a solid, what we could call a 3-dimentional object. 

From there, the ancient Greeks (at least) queried about what this could mean. For Plato, he posited the Ideal Forms, and by further extension, God. 

But, keep in mind this feature: what does this mean?  What does it mean that there must be at least four points to define a solid, 3-dimentional object? 

Recalling basic geometry, a point (1) has no dimension and a line (at least 2 points) has length but no breadth, and thus occupies an odd space, one with coordinates of 1 and an imaginary number. Three is the minimum point requires to have space, but it is a one-dimensional space, a flat space.

Relationships

I submit that in order for it to mean anything (and I’ll take the first-person here), there first must be an understanding that the thing there, like a coffee cup, is in a certain kind of relationship with me. It cannot simply be some sort of a relationship, but for common knowledge it must be in a specific kind of relationship with me. It is not that there is a neutral situation. In order for there to be geometry, say, the meaning of the situation must have a meaning that is taken as absolute, which is to say, not merely meaning. 

It is this feature of knowing knowledge that, with 19^th century industrialism, the early modern push-back philosophers realized, which in the 20^th century became calls for social justice. Yet we must be careful here because the notion that a specific relationship with things may be merely one supposed kind of relationship, does not mean that we have access to a different kind of relationship necessarily, even while it might be sufficient to use philosophy in that way. This is the philosophical issue of sufficient philosophy. 

….But it also brings up the issue of mathematics, the possibility of which is also an ongoing discussion. 

It really is never ending!  Which begs the question of if indeed we are engaging philosophically in an honest fashion and in good faith! For indeed we are not talking about overcoming any faith compelled by metaphor again, except as I take the philosophically sufficient route, which, as we have found time and time again, is contradictory to itself. Metaphor is the way we commonly overcome the contradiction.

However, if we do take the position that there is a truly neutral position on relationship with things, something incredible happens: we are repositioned in the universe. We gain access to having a knowable and actual relationship with the universe that is not couched in metaphor. We become a thing in the universe, like every other thing. And I might even go so far as to say that we find ourselves in the universe. 

We fill-out and arrive in the universe itself, instead of separated from it by a meaningful, subjective world.

Am I a solid?  

There is a difference between the metaphor of meaning and meaning itself. The difference is in thinking that everything not scientific is metaphor (or even that scientific knowledge is metaphor!)

Let’s move toward a clearing for that. The notion that what we are talking about, so far as being involved with the universe itself as an experiencing of knowing, can only be metaphorical is itself a metaphor, a meaningful way to navigate the meaningful difference between physical and mental phenomena. 

Metaphor says that requiring 4-points to be a solid body in the universe is, itself, metaphorical because the mind only comes up with meaning that is often not accurately conveying the actual state of being in the universe. And only science has access to the non-metaphorical universe. Beyond that, according to this common knowldge, human beings cannot have an experience of knowing that is an actual relationship with the universe.

Let us take the Platonic example. Keep in mind we can only take this example so far because of the nature of the two sentences above. This is not a debate about Plato’s thinking as much as it is a simple taking from what is there about Plato to be known and used.

Nothing is usable without a proverbial fourth point. We indeed can think, make meaning, and act in that meaning, but arguably we cannot take up space without another point.

What is this one point? What is a point? Is an apple one point? An atom? A star from 16 million light-years away? A person? Is it imaginary, abstract, or concrete?

If I pose a definition, is the definition a point? Is this point a metaphor or actually part of the universe?

Does any of this have meaning? How? What is making the meaning? Is it a brain? A soul? 

Do we find in reading this post and pondering this question a tendency to come to the conclusion that there is nothing that we can know for sure? That is, all means nothing? What is the meaning of nothing? 

Consider that those kinds of answers are based in the modern physical ideal of Cartesian space, the coordinates of that space are: knower, res extensa, res cogitans. And that in this space, human beings cannot have an experience of having more than two dimensions (3 points) in knowing themselves in a relationship with the universe. A human being can only have a metaphorical relationship with the universe.

Is that metaphorical? Is that meaningful? Go back to the beginning of this post.

What is the Fourth Point? 

Common knowledge is so insistent it seems we are very hard pressed to be involved with the universe with out it:

SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS