Nothing is Everything, Everything is Nothing

I apologize for this rambling, shambling excuse of a post. I got a late start, and by the time I gathered my bearings, time ran out. We'll make more progress nextpost.

Nor did the previous post get very far into our ignorance before the clock cut us off.

Again -- to pick up the main thread -- man is less unique for what he knows than for what he doesn't know; or, more precisely, for what he is able to unKnow. After all, every animal, even a single celled one, knows something. But that's all they know. Unlike human beings, they don't know that they know, and they certainly don't wonder about what they don't know.

If you could represent the situation in a Venn diagram thingy, there would be a complete overlap between "the world" of the single cell, and what it knows of the world.

Conversely, think of how different the situation is for a human being. You have to be very naive or very stupid to imagine that what you know exhausts what there is to know, or that your knowledge of the world is a complete map of the world. Even on the most concrete level, they say that dark matter -- whatever that is -- accounts for some 80% of the matter in the universe. Thus, we know that we don't know, but we have no idea what it is. That's not simple stupidity or unalloyed ignorance, but proper unKnowing.

It's certainly the same way with the human mind. You could compare it to an executive on top and a swamp below, very similar to the situation Trump is confronting. In my training, it was taken for granted that the great majority of the mind is unconscious. This is obvious when we wonder how creativity works, or how dreams are formed, or even where thoughts come from. Who knows? We can no more (consciously) dream a dream than we can beat our heart or make more insulin.

I've read a number of works by Hayek before, but nothing as dense and evocative as the Law, Legislation, and Liberty trilogy, and I think I know why: it's because it's resonating with everything I already believe to be fundamentally true of the world. In a way, it's reminding me of all the ideas that first caused (or at least coincided with) my brain to come on line back in my mid to late 20s.

I especially see a lot of Polanyi and Bion in Hayek. Or, to put it the other way around, I first discovered Hayekian principles in Bion. I'm getting the same explosive feeling now that I got back then. Let me see if I can provide a concrete example.

By the way, they say that most intellectual types discover a few ideas, and then spend the rest of their lives rediscovering and repeating them in various guises. Indeed, sometimes it's just one Big Idea, from natural selection to white privilege. You could say that the idea of Not Knowing is strong in this one (meaning me).

By the way, Not Knowing is associated with frustration, which, in a healthy person, is tolerated. But many people -- we call then liberals -- cannot tolerate this frustration, so they paper over the gaps with a projection of mastery or completeness. This is how they know Brett Kavanaugh is a sexual predator, or that every man is an abuser, or that All Women Must be Believed. It's also how they know socialism works, AGW is true, and the sexes are identical.

Often -- perhaps even more often than not -- "knowledge" is simply a defense agains intolerable ignorance; what we think we know defends us against what we don't actually know. At the extreme end, this morphs into paranoia, conspiracy mongering, psychosis, and the DNC.

Why do so many people pretend to know what they not only do not know, but cannot possibly know? Not knowing is hard, I guess. A professional not-knower is what we call a mystic, more or less. Or, every mystic is a not-knower in some sense. Apophatic theology is the last word in wordlessness. One could cite thousands of examples, but Eckhart is always close at hand:

The final goal of being is the darkness and the unknowability of the hidden divinity, which is that light which shines "but the darkness cannot comprehend it."

Or The most beautiful thing which a person can say about God would be for that person to remain silent from the wisdom of an inner wealth. For God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.

All "in a manner of speaking," of course, and taking account of irony, playfulness, and paradox.

For the intellect to be free, it must become naked and empty and by letting go return to its prime origin.... We become a pure nothing by an unknowing knowledge....

I should hasten to add that Hayek, as far as I know, never associated himself with apophatic theology. Which is what makes it s'durned innarestin'. Conversely, toward the end of his life, Bion clearly began sliding off the psychoanalytic map and into mysticism. Some of his colleagues suspected him of madness, but he was simply following the absence of evidence where it didn't lead.

Bion associates a common type of thinking with the manufacture of graven images, which then beguile the one who manufactured them. This extends "psychoanalytic theory to cover the views of mystics from the Bhagavad Gita to the present.... The central postulate is that atonement with ultimate reality, or O, is essential to harmonious mental growth." And -- emphasis mine -- "Disturbance in capacity for atonement is associated with megalomanic attitudes."

Crazy! But what's he talking about? Well, there is reality -- O -- and our thoughts about it. A state of "mental health," or harmony, occurs when there is at-onement between thought and O, bearing in mind that O is prior to our thinking, and that it can never be contained by thought. If you think you can contain O with thought, then you, my friend, are a megalomaniac. Like Marx, for example.

And this is precisely what Hayek says about the left: in order to justify their dreams, memes, schemes, scams, and shams, they assume a kind of knowledge that is literally impossible for any finite mind to contain (a subject to which we will return).

Meanwhile, another relevant passage from Bion: in reference to the paradoxes of modern physics, "It would be ironical if an idea which the physicist is tending to discard should be taken up by the psychoanalyst.... The discovery of a 'cause' relates more to the peace of mind of the discoverer than to the object of his research."

Again, even if you were to figure it all out, where would this leave you? Right back where you started, just as the Poet told us ("And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started").

For Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery. So Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will not have explained anything (Dávila).