Michael Mitchell: Archive

This is a picture, a photograph, a digital image of a car. It's not an actual car. There are countless other things in this image, but just focus on the car. Now, where is space?

Most people will make this distinction between a photograph and the real thing by saying it's a two-dimensional representation of a car, but that's not a totally accurate, scientific, to-the-best-of-human-knowledge identification of what you're actually seeing. There are no "dimensions". There's only the car (or the screen you're viewing this image on). What we call "dimension" is a property or characteristic of the car. It doesn't exist in dimensions, it possesses them. In your mind, you can think of them as separate, but in reality they're not. What's separate in reality are the other objects, and abstracting out that area in between is how we form the concept "space", but where is it? Everywhere you look in this image, there's something there, "pixels" in this case, but it wouldn't be any different if you were seeing this scene "in real life". "Space" doesn't exist separate from objects any more than "dimension" does, but whereas "dimension" is a characteristic of the object itself, "space" is characteristics of the objects between two or more objects. When you think of space alone, all you're thinking of are combined measurements of dimension, but because in our minds we can consider characteristics of objects alone, we think space comes first and then objects, but space doesn't actually exist anywhere, only the objects.

In other words, everything that physically exists is three-dimensional (although even that is an abstraction -- left & right, up & down, front & back). You can imagine a line is one-dimensional and a disc is two-dimensional and a sphere is three-dimensional, but if you drew them on a chalkboard or whatever, they would all be three-dimensional. You'd just need to move in very close to see all the dimensions. The concept "dimension" doesn't actually exist as an independent object in physical reality. It's a characteristic of independent objects in physical reality. You can think of it as separate, which is the essence of abstraction and the start to all human knowledge, where we leave other species in the fucking dust, but it isn't actually separate.

The error is confusing metaphysics and epistemology, which is very easy to do even if you have the greatest mind in human history, because you can't actually escape your consciousness. You can't perceive things without your means of perception, not even with scientific instruments.

Metaphysics is the nature of existence, the entities themselves, including their characteristics. Epistemology is the nature of consciousness, our awareness of the existence of entities and their characteristics. "Shape", for instance, is an epistemological concept. It's only an abstraction. Our idea of shapes is based on actual objects, but shapes themselves don't independently exist. We've invented objects that represent them, just as we've invented math and language, but shape itself doesn't exist separate from things that possess it. You can draw a line around this car and the line will exist and the car will exist but shape is still a characteristic of the car and the line. Nowhere in the entire universe will you ever find "shape" or "color" or "space" or "dimension" or "length" or "weight" and so on, separate from entities that possess such characteristics. If you put those dependent existents first, as if you could identify and measure something before it exists, then you're putting epistemology first, consciousness over existence in your mind. In reality, however, it's just not true. If this car was driving at you, you wouldn't just imagine you're on a beach somewhere surrounded by naked women, you'd get the fuck out of the way. Existence comes first and consciousness is its bitch.

We tend to use all relational concepts like this incorrectly precisely because we confuse abstractions and concretes. For instance, the word "nothing" doesn't refer to something. There's no object called "nothing" anywhere in the universe. If someone was going out and asked what you wanted from the store and you said "nothing", they wouldn't nor would you expect them to bring you back something called "nothing". "Nothing" refers to the absence of fuck all, anything and everything -- but in a context.

Perception is limited, therefore everything we know is limited. That's why knowledge is contextual. You can't see, for example, if the car in this image has four tires. There could be a dead hooker in the trunk. No one can know everything. Even the concept "everything" can only refer to what you know exists. You can add every new discovery to it, but the new information is not actually included until you discover and identify it. The concept "everything" has a very different meaning to a child than it does to a hundred-year-old man. It functions the same because concepts are open-ended, but the content of concepts in someone's mind are very different from the content in the exact same concepts in someone else's. The concept is the context, whatever fundamental characteristics limit it, not it's content.

If you said you had nothing in your wallet, you wouldn't mean you don't have a car in there. You'd mean that of all the things that could be in there, none of them are. If some smartass pointed out that there's air in there, that even empty space contains something, he's not being clever, he's switching contexts, which is conceptual suicide, because you obviously weren't speaking from the viewpoint of a microscope or God. If you were you would've said: "Damn, my wallet's full of cool shit." Truth can only be judged within a context, so switching that context will lead to a different judgment. In order to form the concept "nothing" in your mind, you have to be able to think of something you've already identified and then imagine it not existing. That's what "nothing" actually means. It means the absence of things you're thinking of, rather than the presence of them, in reality. Just as "everything" doesn't refer to every single thing that exists in the universe, "nothing" doesn't refer to the absence of every single thing that exists in the universe. All knowledge is limited.

The same goes for the concept "space". It's a relational concept. It doesn't refer to anything that actually exists in physical reality. You can only form and comprehend it by reference to at least two other things that do, and then that area between is what we call "space", and then we realize that the objects themselves are also "taking up space" because all "space" really refers to is the measurement of the dimensions of objects themselves. "Space", however, is not an object out there in the physical world. It's purely conceptual, abstracted from properties of things that are out there in the physical world.

Everything that exists is limited, except God. The fact that our perception is also limited is not a problem, which is why no one has ever "solved" it. Nothing is infinite. Notice how I keep coming back to measurement, though? What's that about?