Seemingness

Seemingness

Samuel Bird

I opened the freezer to see that it had thawed. The single electrical cable that powered my cabin had been cut, causing the weak heater to barely dethaw out the freezer before I could afford a new electrical cable. I pulled out a package of beef liver that I felt fortunate to buy. As I grabbed it, it was not frozen, and my empty stomach sank. I smelled it to check my suspicions and was horrified to see this expensive treat was spoiled. Usually, I would cook it up and eat it anyway. Years of eating out of trash cans made me able to keep anything down. No, now I had changed and progressed. It would pain me, but I would cook the liver and feed it to my two kittens. After it was done, I grabbed the jug I used to fetch water as I had not had running water in years. Unfortunately, the freezer wasn’t able to keep the beef liver frozen, but the blasting winds and negative twenty degrees Fahrenheit made the water frozen. I shook it to see if I had enough liquid water to clean the pan, and cook some pasta. A dash of pepper, a shower of salt, a pour of vinegar, wine, and oil, and the pasta was rolling to a boil. I remarked that this would likely be a recipe I would be teased for. I had learned to eat what was accessible and recalled humorous thoughts I had thought about releasing a book titled: “Foods that Barely Kept Me Alive.” I stepped back to see the setting sun gently crashing into the tundric horizon. The diffused light was soft and full of warmth and soul. I watched as it bathed the wood boards that made up my small home and gave them a whole new way to be experienced. And then, I saw it. The perfect lighting allowed what felt like perfect viewership of my simple meal. I looked down at the sauce as the noodles slipped below the violent surface. It struck something within me, but I don’t know where or why. This moment and series of facts seemed to be more real than anything I had experienced in weeks. The day prior, a pretty girl told me I had the gift to put experiences into language. As she rejected me shortly after, I was left with only the compliment. Come on Samuel, you lonely idiot! Put it into words. If you can’t say what causes this experience, capture it, process it, and shove it into words. My mind raced and adjectives fell short. In the end, I was left with a realization of why it was so real to me. It was not something that could be put into words. I had spent the following days in conversations, procedures, and paperwork. This is the world created by the mind to give a governable pattern to it. However, this working of the world seemed to fail to approximate this pan of noodles. It was like I was the only person to ever see a pan, pasta, and a sunset. No one could describe them well enough to demonstrate it was what it was like to view it. That was it! What it was like. The world around me had grown skillful at describing how the world was. I sought to do so now. No matter how it seems to me, what is happening? I thought of the water molecules becoming heated and raising the probability they would shoot up as gas in the form of steam. I thought of the hydration of the fibers of the noodles. I thought of the medley of spices and liquids permeating the carbohydrates with compounds my taste buds would send a signal to my brain to value them. No, that was insufficient. Saying what the world was, was not enough to describe what it was like to me. Why did how it seems, seem to take precedence over how it was outside of me? Of course, I am not outside of me. Thinking of the world as it is, is always in the sense of imagining it external to ourselves. However, we have no immediate access to that. That is why simulation theory is unfalsifiable. How the pan of pasta seemed to me causally preceded me thinking how it was outside of how it seemed to me. In fact, I only think to wonder what it is like outside of me, to expand how it seems to me. This is where we get to the names I have given for the ineffable. What the world is like, is its externality. What the world seems like, is its seemingness. Dry facts to themselves become alive within me. The externality is outside of my accessibility, but the seemingness is the totality of what I experience. 

This seemingness captures two main elements. The quality of experience the subject has upon its perception, and the purely inferential nature of the facts being observed. These qualities of perception predate any word. They are the pulling in of adjectives as not just light and sound, but qualia to have that seemingness to my consciousness. As that data comes past sense organs that are not specialized to view the world as it is, it leaves out whole swathes of the world. I am often critiqued for my ability to edit my own books. The reason why, I can think of one word, read another, and then have my mind find the first on the page. Once it is clear I was wrong, going back and what it says now seems no less the case than on first viewership. This is where we get to my next big complaint of modernity. It routinely sacrifices the seemingness for the externality of our experience. I have spent countless hours reading scientific studies where scientists tried to make sense of the human experience in terms of the material facts. However, even if one could perfectly weigh all those facts, it would be insufficient to explain the emergent properties from the totality of the human experience. There is only one place where our existence happens and one great truth. That being in the world. The shadows and cavities of the mind are material innecsable. The depth of metaphysics is cognitively inaccessible. In that brief meeting place where consciousness, mind, and world meet is all there is, because it is all there is to us. In what sense could something be, if it was not in terms of us? I have viewed enough sunsets alone to know if I closed my eyes, there would be no seemingness at all because there would be no perception. This is where I see a great error. In an effort to make externality more concrete, we have lied to ourselves that we are unique subjects who are perceiving what is going on. We have cursed our selfhood. We have done the great disservice to ourselves, by cursing that which we are. We used the mental tool of supposing God’s eye to view and make sense of the world as the case outside of minds. Why is this dumb? God would still be a mind to perceive, just less positionally privileged. I repeat, there is only seemingness to the world via our experience. The facthood of externality is one we can only assume is a helpful tool. In our assumptions, we wanted the world to be self-consistent enough to be a whole system. The material now needs the immaterial to explain. Only local causation has led to non-local realism. The facts of causation change based on the scale at hand. It seems this externality is not a system unto itself. We certainly waste the cursing of ourselves for its trade. The human experience is religious, familial, emotional, aesthetic, moral, and meaningful. No rock or atom can explain what it can not sense. We reach out to the world and see a reaching back. We ignore some facts and accentuate others. We seek to make sense of the insensibility of being. I will be the last to give you this permission, so head it well. I give you the permission you look for in the world to affirm your experience. No matter if not a single soul post this moment even mentions it, there is one way your life is to you that is independent of what they will talk about with you. Don’t allow the material and social worlds to cut you off from the world of your experience and all it can be. If no scientist can explain, measure, or reproduce what it is like to be you, still revel in it. You are an honor for me to know, perhaps it is an honor for you to know you as well. 

You will notice in my writing, I don’t try to explain what is, but what it is like to me. This is why ideas are hard to separate from the mind they sprouted from. As far as we are concerned, there is only the seemingness of being. And the only thing that pertains to us, is this thing that is sole to what concerns us. I have earned back territory in my fight to make room for the human soul. We find this mindless and soulless look as it is to not only lead to the depths of the loss of value as nihilism, runaway skepticism, and cynicism, but it leads to rampant silliness. In my age, we will deny every fact of what it seems to be like to be you. You are a material fact at the disposal of material facts and altered only by such. This then leads to horros, because if we are only material, can a new mangod make us in his image? It is no wonder art, as the pinnacle of human seemingness, has become a perverse consumption product. Is my favorite piece of art true? What could such a sentence possibly mean? It is rather what that painting seems like to me, that is more than the paint and canvas some man purchased so long ago. We have mapped the world and ridiculed our ancestors for not knowing its shape. This is at the same time that we disprivilege and invalidate our own minds. We have forgotten how to see other minds. Our ancestors could possibly get carried away in such and find the trees and waters alive. However, we can’t seem to find our neighbor alive. Not having a resource to allow another’s seemingness to bridge them to our mind, we are left alone. I am back. I am back at the stove. That is just it. The conversations with clients, the forms, the books, they didn’t seem to capture the seemingness of this, because in part I can’t fathom the seemingness of other beings. This is a fault of mine, but I was certainly not aided by social systematizations. Fine, I don’t have to perfectly put the seemingness of the sunset and the pan on paper. However, can I hint towards its direction? I sat back and reveled in the experience and all its qualities. No, I could deeply perceive it. Engaging with my existence was being right in the face of the seemingness of this and all other facts. As far as I am concerned, there is no real way this pan of pasta is. There is only what it is like in terms of me, at least to me. No wonder modern man can’t appreciate anything when he is not allowed to be the appreciator. Fully engaged and enveloped in the seemingness of my existence’s experience, I was now allowed to value it. The image before me became good, beautiful, true, and finally in the embryo of my soul, meaningful. I was caught back to the world where my grumbling stomach reminded me of some other, less present-at-hand reasons why I valued the noodles. Blessed be the food that gave me the energy to write this, and to remind me that to me externality is preceded by seemingness. This and all things, what an honor to let them seem.