I wrote in my first Substack post that I was (t)hereby moving on to more important things. It’s fitting, then, that trivia has inspired me to write my second post.
I mentioned that existence is trivial. That seems like a strong statement about something as fundamental as existence, especially since everything exists, according to me. When I think, I usually find it hard to let go, and I’ve had to come to terms with that. So, unable to let go of it, I was thinking about the subtitle of my first post, where I say that thing about existence being trivial. I didn’t plan this, but the inflection point about everything existing led me several years ago to conclude that existence must therefore be trivial if existence applies to everything. That’s why I wrote the subtitle I did. I did not realize at that much earlier time that the simple phrasing that I chose for this conclusion accidentally or coincidentally fit nicely with another notion that had been obsessing me for many years. That’s a notion of ‘threeness’.
‘Threeness’ instead of ‘twoness’. ‘Twoness’ as in yin and yang, 1 and 0, true and false, up and down, yes and no, true and false, good and bad, right and wrong, you get the picture. It’s tempting to characterize twoness using some intellectual-sounding word, so I’m going to avoid googling for the best word to use. Whatever it is, I’m not talking so much about that, but just the observation that so much of our experience runs into things being either this or that, or maybe both this and that. Call it what you want, but when I started taking an electronics course in college, it bugged me that all this digital technology stuff that was happening around me had this two-thing at its base. It just bugged me and I wanted to dismiss it and imagine instead what a three-thing technology would be.
All I ended up doing at the time was sticking with the electronics course and the computer science courses, everything with the persistent twoness at its base. Digital technology. 1s and 0s. True and false. How boring, I thought. I did mention my inclination for a different ‘trigital’ technology to a few friends, probably even without using the word ‘trigital’. I was inarticulate; I was like… “There’s just two choices…”. I therefore merely kept it in mind because, when I think, I usually find it hard to let go.
It did keep coming back in my thinking. I also began to encounter it outside my thinking. I began to see threes in my various, sparse philosophical reading. For example, one of my favorite quotes or paraphrases is “a word means the property that the concept it expresses is locked to.” This gem comes from the late philosopher Jerry Fodor. I totally love it. Well, when I encountered it, I’m pretty sure it was in Fodor’s book Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. The threeness here is the word, the property, and the concept. There’s actually another threeness: meaning, expressing, and locking. Cool, huh? Just to get you up to speed, there has to be a third threeness, because that’s the way threeness works for me. I have set my mind in motion on the third threeness, but I’m writing now, so you’ll have to join me in settling on what, more precisely, that particular third threeness is.
Back to the threeness of existence. In a future inflection point, I hope to touch upon my concurrence that definitions are passé. That’s not my phrase; I hope to dig up where I first encountered that phrase by the time I get to that inflection point. But the definition I want to consider now is that of trivia. Actually, no. I want to consider the etymology of trivia because of its prefix, tri-. Three.
Trivia is Latin, plural of trivium "place where three roads meet;" in transferred use, "an open place, a public place."
I do not know what the three roads are, but there are three of them, and that is literally, or etymologically at least, trivial.
In reaching the conclusion that everything exists, I had to notice that there’s more to something existing than there being a pretty much separate thing you can touch. If you’re going to be interacting with anyone at all, you’ll be calling such things by their names. But there is a lot to the names of things that we don’t usually consider when we use those names in ordinary speech, ordinary conversation. So, in thinking about this, over the years, I noticed that there was a physicality to things ‘existing’, but there was quite often this sort of parasitic naming of any of those things. I majored in linguistics, so my mind was - and still is - constantly considering the naming of things, how we use names of things when we speak, and the probable rule system underlying all this language activity. I also noticed that I wasn’t saying all this stuff out loud, let alone writing about it. This was all happening mentally, whatever that is.
I have just touched upon the threeness of existence without being explicit about what the three things are. But, roughly:
Physical. You can feel and see stuff.
Mental. You think about stuff, and that feels different.
Linguistic. There’s always language floating around.
I know you are objecting. Me too. Chill.
When I consider trivial existence in this context, I typically consider the existence of a thing. For example, a notepad: I can hold it in my hand (physical). It’s a ‘notepad’ (linguistic). Trust me, I’m experiencing this in a way that only I have access to (mental). That’s basically it, and I could stop here. But what about unicorns? The unicorn objection goes something like:
Physical. You can’t really touch unicorns because they ‘don’t exist’.
Mental. This is where it all takes place when it comes to unicorns.
Linguistic. OK, well, they are ‘unicorns’. But there’s no physical!
So, what about that physical aspect of unicorns? You can manufacture a unicorn and sell it as a kids’ toy. There. It’s physical. “But it’s not a real unicorn.” Well, that’s a different inflection point we’ll have to get to. But, for now, I ask myself how we can conduct this consideration without our bodies, and without the physical devices we’re using to write and read this stuff? “But those things are not the unicorn; the unicorn is not physical.” Well, that is what happens in the physical world - where physical things we suppose to be ‘real’ actually exist - when we are talking about things that are not ‘real’. Things that aren’t ‘real’ still rely on physicality in order for the consideration to take place. And the consideration is real, is it not? We are physical bodies and the consideration relies, in part, on our physical bodies. When things aren’t ‘real’, their distribution and dynamics among the threeness is different than the distribution and dynamics for ‘real’ things.
In another inflection point, I may look more closely at the kinds of distribution and dynamics of the existence of very different things. I have here presented a very rough philosophical underpinning of the triviality - the threeness - of existence. This is how I think about stuff. It does not need to be how you are anyone else thinks about stuff. I just repeat that, when someone says or writes that something absolutely doesn’t exist, I think they haven’t considered how trivial the existence of that thing that doesn’t exist actually is.