Meta Ignorance: The goest and the invironment

Part 4 of the Theory of Emanism Series

I need to make a proposal that I think is true. I’m going to speak from the I, talk in the first person, although I believe it’s not simply my personal subjective truth. I believe it’s an intersubjective truth at least. To do this I need to define two words, two nouns: goest and invironment.

A goest is the subjective conscious observer of all my experiences. It’s the part of me that is aware. Its the sense that senses all the other senses. It’s the sense common to all other senses. Common sense. I’ll use this word because saying conscious, subjective, observer is long. Its a mix of the word guest and host, and of course brings connotations of ghosts along with it too.

The invironment is like the environment, with an extra distinction. It’s the environment including me, my body, my heart, and my mind. I’m part of my invironment. Its also the environment including everyone else, their bodies, hearts and minds included. It’s simply the environment with the added connotation of the environment also being me. It helps me remember I am not only in the environment, I am it.

Recently I’ve been talking about perspective as a lens with a friend. We use the metaphor of perspective as a lens to show that we can change our perspectives, like we can change contact lenses. One day I could have rose tinted lenses. On another day I could have a lens that dulls all the colour in the world. This is what we meant by perspective as a lens.

Here I want to take that metaphor as far as I can to describe human psychology and metaphysics at the same time. I want to suggest that the lens I view the world with has a variable quality, my knowledge of myself.

More to the point I want to suggest I am the lens, I’m my lens, and I’m a lens for others too . The world passes through me, and the amount I know myself is the amount to which I can know about the world. I think this idea might be validly expanded to all of humanity, and maybe even to all of existence. I might be wrong, as that’s quite a big leap.

What I do know is that I’m not only in the environment, I’m part of others invironments too. My body is part of the invironment for my goest. Even my mind, the thinking, reasoning, calculating, mental part of me, is the environment to my subjective, conscious, observer self, my goest. The mind takes in data from the invironment and constructs an image of the invironment for our goest. To my goest, the invironment, is everything it observes, including my thoughts and feels, and body and beyond.

I can articulate, manipulate, move, navigate, my invironment to varying degrees. Let’s for a moment look at the separation between the goest and the invironment. The boundary is a chain link fence between the the observer and the observed. The ‘body’ is the name given to the part invironment that’s seems to be a directly, consciously, moveable part of the goest’s.

I referred to the boundary between the goest and the invironment as a chain link fence as opposed to an air tight room. My invironment has stronger ties with my body than the bonds between my goest and my body. It doesn’t seem this way most of the time, because of how we flow through time. Of course the link between my goest and my body is stronger than the connection between my goest and my invironment, even though my invironment still includes my body.

At the moment I can only say that my goest exists in connection with my invironment. I don’t know if my invironment and my goest are connected beyond my body. We do appear to each have a goest and we experience the invironment through a piece of itself, we call it me and my body.

My body includes my brain. Therefore my body viewed through this lens includes my mind and the thinking and reasoning and calculating and the deciding that my mind does. I articulate my body through my mind, which is the part of my body that forms the bond via my brain to my goest. At least it appears my goest is closer to the articulater than my invironment is. It also seems that my mind forms a join between my goest and the rest of my body via my brain

The consequence of such a set up is interesting. The more knowledge about the lens, the body, the articulatable part of the invironment, I have, the more I’ll be able to focus my lens to view the rest of the invironment through. The more I increase resolution the more I can see what other lenses, other parts of the invironment, sometimes with bonds to other goests, look like. No matter how articulatable, however able to be articulated, they are, or would be, by their resident subjective conscious observers, their goests.

The more I know my lens, the more I can focus it, the more I can see other lenses, the more I can focus like they focus, the more I know other lenses, the more I can focus other lenses, the more I can see the lens of the world from an intersubjective perspective, the closer I become to seeing the objective truth.

If you’ve been agreeing so far then this leads us to an unavoidable conclusion. If you haven’t agreed I hope to see you in the comments. According to this line of reasoning: once I have perfect knowledge of myself, I will be able to see clearly enough through my own lens to see clearly enough through all the other lens that make up the invironment.

The invironment, as one huge lens of existence, would become transparent, see through, and so would be invisible to me. This means if I, Germane’s Host, my goest, were to be able to know myself, know my invironment, perfectly, I would become invisible, to myself.