Note 60

It is precisely the nothingness of subjectivity that makes negation possible, which gives rise to the possibility of identity, and from identity applied to a myriad of frames, meaning.

Pat Metheny Quote

What I have learned is that all you really know is what you love—and that can be the only compass that one should use to guide oneself. As soon as you give the aesthetic reins of power to an audience, other musicians, a critic, the guy sitting in the third row, your girlfriend, your boss—you have crossed a line that is difficult to recover from. This is not to say that you remain stubborn and isolated in your "vision" because your vision has to be pliable and malleable to the reality of the conditions that you are actively participating in at a given moment.

Hive Mind

What if the self is the enabling mode through which the hive mind perceives itself?

What if reality itself is the imagining of the hive mind?

So in the Matrix, there is a scene in which Neo pulls himself free from the glass tank in which he is encased, and recognises his true condition. From the perspective of the individual, he is plugged into hive mind against his will. But from the perspective of hive mind, that realisation is self-realisation. Going out of one level of hive mind, he finds himself encased in another level of reality constituted by hive mind.

The locus of subjectivity of space and time then rests not in the individual mind, but the hive mind. Individualized subjectivity is the enabling perspective which identifies a thing within space and time, and provides a reference outside of space and time from which to point to it as it seems. However, the hive mind is the constituent of individualized subjectivity, just as the totality of individualized subjectivity constitutes hive mind.

Subjectivity, then is the specific modality of negation, or the vessel, through which the hive mind identifies itself. In perception, it represents itself in an external way. In meaning, it is the ability to think logically. In action, it manifests in volition, which gives rise to ethics.

Note 59

Negation of what it is not is the primary relationship in ontological being.

Insofar as being is being within relationships, it is defined as the negation of what it is not, as the constitutive aspect of its identity.

But because it is constituted by that negation, it contains within what it is, what it is not. Hence it is at the same time a specific form of what it is not.

Hence the definition of what it is is limitless. Or rather, it is limited by the specific frames which we apply to it.