First principles

In the previous post I walked through the existential core of the seed — the first three principles. Being and language arise together (P0), language is relational (P1), and every subject experiences reality through its own medium (P2). That left us at the individual: one subject, one lived reality, no view from nowhere.

But subjects don’t exist in isolation. The next three principles are about what happens when they meet — how knowledge gets shared, how languages interrelate, and how the whole thing grows. This is the social and evolutionary core.

The first post ended on P2’s battleground: no reality without subject, no outside view from nowhere. But the outside view doesn’t go away easily. It persists tacitly — in how we think about truth, about objectivity, about what counts as knowledge. And that tacit persistence has consequences for how we understand sharing.

If you hold on to an outside view, sharing becomes referential — passing descriptions of a reality that exists independently of whoever describes it. The better the description, the closer to truth. But if reality is lived, not observed from outside, then sharing is something else entirely. It is subjects interacting in their (shared) environments, converging on a language and a vocabulary that works — not because it copies something out there, but because it is shared between them. A community is not something that happens out there, seen from above. It is born from within — subjects sharing, each from their own private medium, no outside view. That is the shift P3 makes.

P3 - Language is where subjects share knowledge about reality. Where P2 deals with the dynamic between being and the other, P3 deals with the dynamic between beings embedded in ‘the other’, the environment it’s in. From the individual interaction emerge the ‘being as a group’ interactions. The interactions between subjects are indirect. Each subject interacts with its environment, and reads the communication of other subjects from their effect on its environment. This language of indirect transmission is shared, it converges to a shared understanding — knowledge. The interactions shape the vocabulary and the way the relational is constructed. Vocabulary as a set of concepts, concepts as a form of being themselves (in the world of meaning). Concepts hide complexity and make it easy to create relational patterns and express thoughts. Sharing and evolving this language is about creating our reality as a community — a reality created at the grassroots level.

P4 - Languages are interrelational and have equal standing in potential. Languages interrelate in (many) different ways. Thinking of a language game as expression of an activity, there are many variations of how the rules of a game or activity are expressed. One could see these languages as equivalent, horizontally related. Whenever a language is used to spawn another language, it creates a vertical upwards relationship. When we analyse a language and clarify its concepts and grammar we create a vertical down type of relationship. Mathematics analysing the grammar of physics, a programming language born from mathematical logic, a community developing its own dialect from a shared tongue — each a different direction of inter-relation. But interrelational does not imply hierarchy, imposition from the outside inwards. These are concepts that exist within a language. Languages on their own are freestanding, and master of their own potentiality.

P5 - Together they form a web of growing complexity. Languages are living things — in fertile ground they will grow and multiply. The richness of inter-relation is just that: a fertile ground for language to evolve. It will create uniformity and variety. And go through periods of rich harvests and famines. However, it doesn’t deconstruct itself back to its primordial beginning. Evolution stays coupled to its history.

A lot said, not all explained. This is just the beginning.

This post is part of the seed series. See also the Seed section of the site.

Photo: Funen99 / Unsplash