Existential Sets (or Categories, or Estates (in the medieval sense))
Distinguishing physical from abstract, sane from pathological
(not always easy, not always possible!)
pk’s Bateson-based re-modeling of our informational world:
0 Existence
0.n Pleroma: The “Physical” Universe
1 Creatura: The Universe of Life
2 Sentiens: The Universe of Awareness
2.n Pathologica: The Universe of Unsane Models)
3 Persona: The Universe of Personhood
(Note the diction: unsane, Alfred Korzybski’s term.)
Existence. What do we know about it? Only what we know: and we have little idea how much of what we “know” is wrong.
One of my favorite jokes — ever — is my own: a joke I have no idea if anybody has ever gotten: in the first (and original) story, First Week, of my series, The Model: the (student) creator of a universe tells the design critic that his theme is Existence. Later the critic commends the student’s project for limiting itself to the theme — “unlike last week’s”!
Huh? What’s the joke? What could there “be” besides existence? I don’t know. That‘s the joke.
Yesterday I wrote:
Existence: Zero! in a sixty-nine with itself!
All jokes. I don’t know: you don’t either.
Did anything precede the universe? We don’t know.
Was intelligent design involved? We don’t know.
Not seeing any other way it could have happened proves nothing.
In the midst of our uncertainty some things seem to be true:
0
Existence
Our zero state. We know of nothing before it. We can imagine nothing beyond it.
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