CREATIVE OBSESSION
Philosophic — Part 2
“Veritivity” vs. Representationalism
Language perfects facts.
Language does not define Reality, nor does it describe the essence of things. We should not presume to be so eloquent, nor shrink from what is truly momentous: Language perfects facts. It is a lattice of our own making, through which intertwine immense compendia of ephemeral and ineffaceable points of agreement. From those first cries to the last word, language traces the aesthetic, delimits the object, and delineates existence — from the subliminal to the hyperconscious, language renders memorable and communicable the abductive inferences (facts, ideas, “raw feels,” etc.) that someone experiences grammatically (presently, subjectively, meaningfully). Accordingly, I could be sitting next to yet another fire, toasting my marshmallows, telling the guy next to me that the fire was really and truly hot, but if that fine fellow were trying to make high carbon steel, she might insist that the fire was as cold as hell. Therefore, no matter how intemperate the discussion, it is not the “essence” of fire to be hot and cold, to make us feel cozy, nor to forge steel, any more than it is the essence of fire to be called “fire.” (Sadly, impeccable arguments and weighty conjunctions settle cases and controversies only. Our minds and manners are another matter.)
Writers delude themselves that they merely describe the things in their heads. However, readers do not doubt that each modern mind is the consequence of a written language. And thinkers think that memory is an autolinguistic discussion (an experience of consciousness) that one keeps having with oneself. Whether by thoughts, words, memories, or telepathy, human language is a human tool, molding human minds for human needs. Wandering ponderers and virtuoso scholars do not receive, perceive, and conceive exalted, esoteric essences from sunny, far-off Transcendencia, so that they might adequately utter sentences corresponding truthfully to some necessarily real and thereby ingeniously christened Things-in-Themselves! (This sordid sort of lilting language is affectatious, pure poetry — nobody actually thinks this way.) But in fact, we do perceive countless trillions of pixelated, chemo-neurological impulses, which the abductive mind fashions aporistically into sensations, memories, concepts, and in due course, our presumptively preconditioned, nominally mediated, fictive, certain, and indelible apperceptions of Reality.[1] We do not communicate sensations, apperceptions, fact-free analyses, Truth, nor any other matter of the mind. Instead, we offer smattered facsimiles of our reasonably stable impressions, using “signs” (compelling images, familiar smells, and well-placed words make good signs) that bit by byte, further conjure ideas and fix memories, in the intermixing milieux of humankind’s ultra-connective unconscious.
These bit-based, neural networks (the pointillistic mind-movies of thinking) crystallize selectively and progressively, first into bare awareness, then into mosaics of intensifying intelligence, and culminate with humanity’s timelessly finite and conventionally unassailable systems of belief. The brain’s crystallizations — perhaps swirling out of ecstatic rapture, inspired quietude, or dull habit — provide a palpable, poetic veneer for a pervasive “veritivity,” a molecular meta-metaphor that stirs-up notions about how we get to True knowledge. According to the hair-splitters, veritivity “warrants” (justifies) “assertible” (true enough, one way or another) “judgments” (conclusions), which range exhaustively, from baby’s primitive, protolinguistic recognition of “light,” to the most math-mad methods of philosophical analysis, to the fully formal, fictional, and final findings of fact adjudicated in hotly contested legal proceedings. The practitioners have meticulously observed that veritivity shapes ranges of shuffling judgments, whether by pure logic, punctilious dialectic, farce, poetry, etc.
The latent glow of humanity’s disrupted, “heliocentric turn.”
So much delicate hair-splitting leads to bald spots and blunt results. Veritivity treats True knowledge as the product of a process (Truth being functional), rather than some static, question-begging relation (“correspondence”) to Reality. And with no more instant Reality, it’s getting uncomfortably obvious that the Truly True Truth is thoroughly absurd, and not just ubiquitous. Also, veritivity manifests an inherent communicability of Truth (like mathematical properties attaching to numbers, after we’ve learned to count). Wrapped in time and riding the odds, Truth is delimited by — coextensively, it is communicated as — the arts of creation (method) and the sciences of nature (knowledge) stewed in the hot pots and fat vats of language. In a strikingly restrictive mélange of meaning, the flowing crystallizations and dissipations of veritivity, comprising hub-like “vertices” (the nuclei of Truth), materialize in an earthly ether across vast, cyclical assimilations of sciencey facts and artsy arguments, spanning open and unbounded sets of neural transmissions forming abductively reconstructed, linguistic amplifications — these probabilistic (measurable), radiating molecules of mind transposed through sequences of neurologically propagated and aporistically apprehended “spokes,” and revealing to the intellect a fully naturalized logic — this Truth, and all that goes with it, gets “existed,” so to speak, inside-out from the outside-in. Consequently, the communicability of “The Truth,” like the experience-ability of “The Real,” efficiently impresses upon each mind the fundamentally un-subjective causes and effects of knowledge. In this light (the latent glow of humanity’s disrupted, “heliocentric turn”), Existence-in-Itself is a postulate, any humanly imaginable Uni-verse is incompletable, “Being” morphs into a transitive verb, and Truth becomes quintessentially communal (not simply heavenly).
Veritivity conforms our evolving neurophysiology to an impenetrable, cosmic predicament.
Meanwhile, back in my brain, and for as long as I can remember, my sentience keeps sliding into one big, solid and exceedingly clear inference, appearing unremittingly real and continuously, intuitively substantive, as the hypothetic genesis, probabilistic antecedents, and deducible consequences of “warrantably assertible” ideas permeate and subsume complementary subprocesses of pragmatic dialectic and contextual reification. (Whew, again!) Veritivity conforms our evolving neurophysiology to an impenetrable, cosmic predicament. This naturalized, “new logic” is not merely prescriptive, it is methodologically suggestive — in the twisting, unorientable planes of an edgeless universe, Truth becomes conjunctive and adaptive (creative), rather than discursive and final (authoritative).
If the neuroscientists and poets ever produce offspring, we’ll get unimagined insights into the “grammar” (broadly conceived) of “veritivity” (even more broadly conceived). I’ve come to believe — which means I’m still speculating, but less indistinctly, more habitually, and on steroids — that a grammar of veritivity, starting (and ending) with a rock-solid description of the neurocognitive basis of creativity, may be envisioned from the far reaches as having evolved hardwired over one hundred fifty thousand generations, across the eternal ecstasies of existence and the unforgotten anguish of dying cultures and extinct human species, into an autonomously motive, self-reprogrammable BIOS of the brain. In the ages of intercommunication yet to come, veritivity may supplant language and logic as our primary interface with knowledge. Until then, our woefully imperfect, however scrupulously honest understanding of rhetorical methodologies and grammatic constraints is what the early Ancients called wisdom (and respectfully, so do I).
Veritivity mediates the confluence of fact (aggregations of effects) and logic (memories of consequences), and mirrors diverging emanations of crystal clear cognizance (more facts) and distinct, conclusive consequences (more logic). Like mapped-out strands of DNA, a grammar of veritivity predicts the tornadic transpositions of linguistic behavior and controls the ensuing, homeomorphic progressions of the mind. It channels an aporistic acuity that sculpts our metaphoric memories of scientific certainties, for example, of an immovable, flat Earth. It molds undulating conglomerations and sums of vertices, out of the genome of each vertex, from which thinking conjoins and visions materialize. Grammatic inquiry probes the naturally extradimensional, reciprocating displacements of these uncountably infinite centerpoints of existence, inciting an incisive, consuming contemplation of the enveloping domains of potential creation — all of which is one more miniscule, soulful sentience in a gargantuan process of assimilation. (Or if you’re in a hurry, just say “therefore,” and then say, “I am.”) Our more perfect description of how matters of intensifying interest “hang together,” constitutes a more general (philosophical) understanding of True knowledge.
[1] See James, W., Some Problems of Philosophy (Bison Books, 1996), pp. 47–112 (percept and concept).
