sin of thought

the universe is holy, and everything is a part of the universe, which means that everything is holy. as you know, i am holy, but also, a plastic water bottle is holy, and surprisingly, you, reader, are also holy, which i realise is a lot to process. holiness here is not a necessarily declaring something as more special than others, it is simply the structural fact of being part of the whole. but thought is the one thing that is simultaneously holy and unholy. holy because it exists, because it is real, because it is the universe doing a thing. unholy because it is the one real thing that points beyond what is real. everything else just is. a rock does not construct a rock that is not a rock. thought is the thing that is, and also constructs what is not, which is why i consider it a sin.

and before you clutch your pearls at the word sin, understand that a sin is not necessarily an evil; it's more structural. it is a missing of the mark, an overstepping. masturbation, too, is a sin, and yet both me and you enjoy it, and nobody with a functioning prefrontal cortex has seriously proposed we stop on theological grounds. the sin of thought does not invalidate thought, nor does it subtract one iota from its practical necessity. we still need hypothetical objects, frictionless surfaces, and perfect justice, because the abstraction is the sine qua non of physics and ethics, and without it both collapse into a very long list of slightly different surfaces. the sin is baked in, yes, but the utility is also baked in. a bridge that bears too much weight commits a sin against engineering, but this does not mean we stop building bridges.

but here is where every dualist who ever lived makes an absolute pig's breakfast of an otherwise straightforward observation: thought and reality are not separate substances. thought is not a ghostly projection from some immaterial plane into the crude physical world. thought is the physical world doing a particular kind of thing. your brain is part of the universe, the electrical activity is part of the universe, and the thought produced by that activity is part of the universe, in the way a wave is part of the ocean. the content of your thought may not be instantiated; the unicorn is not in the room, the frictionless surface is not in the lab, but the thought itself; the firing, the ink, the pixel, is real. it is part of the undivided mess of what exists. if you insist on treating the wave as ontologically distinct from the water, go fuck yourself.

consider 10^100. a googol. i can write it down. i can use it in a sentence. i can tell you it exceeds the number of particles in the observable universe, and we will both feel briefly clever, and no collection of 10^100 objects has ever existed or will ever exist or needs to exist for the number to be meaningful. "but what does it refer to?" asks the empiricist, sweating slightly, because his entire framework requires every meaningful symbol to correspond to a physical pile of something. nothing, my dear friend. it refers to a structural position in a system of relations. it means something because of where it sits in the architecture of arithmetic, not because surrey contains a warehouse holding ten thousand trillion trillion trillion identical spheres. you can represent what does not exist. what does not exist can still be represented. these are two facts, and the inability to hold both simultaneously is the problem.

if there was a god, he would hate categories. he would watch us sorting things into holy and unholy, physical and mental, real and represented, sin and virtue, and he would be profoundly exhausted. the categories are thought's doing. thought is the thing that sorts, the thing that draws the lines and then demands the universe respect them, leading to a reductio ad absurdum where the tool we use to map reality is the only thing that refuses to stay on the map, and yet thought itself cannot be neatly sorted, as it is holy and unholy. it is real and points beyond the real. god, if he existed, would not be sorting. he would just be. and he would find our little bins very funny, and very sad, and entirely missing the point. well, except me, of course, as i'm the exception.

and now, because i am not a coward, the self-reference problem. everything i have just said is itself a representation, and therefore subject to every limitation i have spent the previous paragraphs describing. this essay is ink, or pixels, or electrochemical activity in your brain. it is not the truth. it is a representation of a position about representation. it implies things i did not intend. it has little legs. it is already making promises i cannot control. somewhere, right now, someone is reading this and thinking, "but what about the implications for modal realism?" and i want you to know, with absolute sincerity, that i did not mean to imply anything about modal realism, and there's also someone who remembered to masturbate reading this. and so we arrive at the paradox: thought's ability to transcend what physically exists is simultaneously its greatest strength and the source of every epistemological catastrophe it has ever produced. the sin is the gift. you cannot have one without the other. and if you have read this far and believe you have understood it, you have almost certainly misunderstood something, and i would correct you, but i'd give away my advantage of being right.