The Ontological Particular

To be is to be something, and to be something is to be this rather than that. In other words, it is not the same as to run quickly. You can also run slowly while you cannot be other than something. Hence, an 'abstract particular' (the concept of being) is semantic nullity, a conceptual chimera. Unlike functional categories (a vehicle, a person; in fact all other categories are functional), the raw specificity of "this-ness" (haecceity) evades articulation through the lens of the universal.

Consequently, for an entity to emerge from the undifferentiated void, it must incorporate a specific meaning to attain identity. Here, the emergence of being and the emergence of meaning do not merely coincide; they are functionally identical.

But how does something become meaningful, or – given the above – how does it become what it is? And please note: not how a baby is born (an organism evolves), a code is written, a move is made or an artwork produced. We are not observing the productive acts of nature, logical rigor or art (birth, coding, or composition). We are interrogating the metaphysical event of identity itself: the eruptive 'how' through which a thing becomes its own definition: How something becomes what it is? A most peculiar question indeed; a profound puzzle nonetheless.

The Tautology of "Mind"

The common claim that the human mind "projects" the world as a meaningful realm is an explanatory dead-end. To invoke the "Mind" is merely to relocate the enigma, substituting one mystery for another without addressing the fundamental mechanics of emergence. Recourse to the mind’s "entrenched categories" to explain the origin of meaning is a classic case or circular reasoning; it begs the question by assuming the very categorical meaningfulness it is tasked to explain. We remain bereft of a vocabulary capable of bridging the gap between the raw physical process and the meaningful extract.

The true enigma lies in the very emergence of meaning amid the raw forces that drive physical, chemical and biological dynamics, wherefore and no conceptual constructs will do to resolve that gap.

The Meta-Problem of Philosophy

The perennial enigmas of philosophy are mere derivatives of this single mystery. The unique crux of the philosophical problem lies not in any specific phenomenon within the world, but in the very capacity to project the world as a coherent existential realm. This includes the capacity for inquiry itself. What are we doing or what is happening when we generate meaning? Not when coherent symbols (words, sentences) or their metaphorical substrates and functional analogues (thoughts, ideas) are exchanged in a medium, but when the metaphysical phenomenon of meaning-generation itself takes place.

Our descriptors fail us at the threshold: we oscillate between the language of production (generation) and the language of discovery (projection), while 'emergence' remains a metaphor for a conceptual impossibility – an attempt to name the leap from nothing to something. In what modality, then, does meaning reside?

The Absolute Leap of Language

Meaning is a fact that defies reduction to constituents. We do not construct the world as a carpenter builds a chair; rather, we project it as an all-encompassing habitat. This capacity is acquired through the mastery of speech, suggesting that language is not a mere tool for communication, but the very medium through which the Absolute Leap from neuroscience to existence is sustained.

Meaning is as evident as any physical notion, yet it remains transcendent – an eruptive "something else" that points toward a missing conceptual dimension.

We proceed.

From Archetype to Articulation: The Leap of the Human Faculty

The Pre-Linguistic Universal

The fox does not avoid the wolf by name, but by nature; it fears the archetype rather than the individual. Yet, the beast cannot "think" or "articulate" a Category. Its relationship to the universal is one of programmed response: its genetic makeup allows it to navigate a world of predators, prey, and objects as categorical domains. The animal operates within these categories without ever possessing the conceptual tools to denote them. It confronts the type solely through the medium of the particular.

The Conceptual Leap

Humans share this biological programming, but we possess a singular distinction: we do not merely "spot" and react to categories; we conceptualize them. We move from the animal's perception and navigation to a categorical projection. This raises a fundamental inquiry: How do we produce articulations that denote that which we never physically encounter - a "type," a "principle," or a "category"? How do we make the leap from the particular interaction to the formulation of the framework itself?

Subsistence vs. Denotation

To respond to various particulars is merely to subsist within a categorical domain. However, to denote the category - to articulate it as a discrete essence rather than merely "echoing" it through our behavior - is a radical departure. While the beast is destined to encounter the type within the individual, the human existential program allows us to formulate the type as such. We treat the category as the meaningful framework of reality, rather than a hidden rule of survival.

The Interior vs. The Exterior Vantage

The shift is best illustrated by the linguistic gap between the immediate and the abstract. "I am afraid" is a functional articulation, a verbalization of an internal state shared with the howl of a fox or the whimper of a puppy. In contrast, "Do you ever experience fear?" is a categorical articulation. It transforms the "fear" from a subjective experience (from within) into a conceptual object of inquiry (as if from without).

What is the nature of this leap? How is the "fear" of the experienced moment related to the "Fear" of the categorical question? We are attempting to step outside our own habitat to describe the air we breathe.

We proceed.

To acquire language is to learn the articulation of the world (this is what we do when we learn to speak). No linguistic application can transcend the horizon of the accessible (of what we've learned to articulate).

The 'World' is, eo ipso, that which is accessible, and language constitutes its total and final architecture.

Hence, it is not merely the esoteric that eludes speech, but the metaphysical. To denote the 'thing-in-itself' would be to assume a vantage point we had not obtained while learning to speak; one that is outside our natural habitat - a position that language, being immanent to that habitat, cannot occupy.

A parallel may prove instructive here:

When one masters the use of a rifle, one has not yet "learned" the act of taking a life; similarly, the study of medicine is distinct from the ultimate act of saving one. In these domains, the application and consequences of a skill conceptually transcend the technical skill itself. This transcendence is possible because the intended outcome – the "why" – originally inspired the development of the "how" within a wholesome accessible domain. Thus, the categorical leap from technique to consequence is contained within a single, unified conceptual framework.

The singular exception to this rule is the human capacity for speech – or more precisely, for dynamic conceptualization. Unlike a technical skill, there are no applications or consequences that transcend this capacity. We acquire the faculty of language as an absolute; every action, every existential milestone, and every referential dimension of our journey is subsumed within it.

Because of this, language cannot project meaning onto a plane that transcends its own. There is no vantage point outside of language in the way that there is an objective "outside" to mathematics or physics. This leads to a rigorous requirement: any attempt to denote a phenomenon – such as subjective qualia – must satisfy this same criterion. We must be able to demonstrate how we acquired the capacity to denote it within the linguistic framework itself.

But we cannot.

These ideas are simpler to transcribe than to inhabit (to think). It is generally highly challenging to inhabit something we cannot do. In real-time, with the actual conceptual tools, the air is too thin for eloquence, and the logic too rigid for intuition.

We proceed.

The Paradox of Unlearned Inquiry

Which is the proper object of philosophical inquiry: the mature act of projecting meaning, or the initial acquisition of that capacity?

We are bound by a fundamental constraint: we cannot articulate anything that lies beyond the mechanisms through which we acquired the capacity for speech. Our expression is seemingly tethered to the history of our learning to speak.

And yet, a paradox emerges. We never learn to articulate, let alone denote, something like agentic projection of meaning (projecting meaning into the world).

A parallel may prove instructive here:

For Isaac Newton, the journey from the empirical observation of the apple to the abstraction of the Principia was not a leap into the unknown, but a traversal across a landscape he was already acquainted with and equipped to map.

Observing ourselves speak and framing it as the generation of meaning rather than linguistic performance, is, by contrast, far more than a leap into the unknown. It is an act we never acquired the capacity to perform; a claim to command a vantage point beyond language's edge.

We've never learned to say something like 'to generate meaning' as part of our ways of life.

Indeed, the phrase 'generating meaning' isn't mere gibberish. It possesses a clear semantic resonance that we intuitively grasp as coherent. But we do so on the level of the person, the speaker, not the Mind. Yet, it is the Mind whose function is to generate meaning, just as it is the person’s function to speak or think (thinking is not synonymous with the generation of meaning; it is performance – the enactment of logic, the application of curiosity – upon a plane that is conceptually sustained by the "fabric" of the Mind), whereby a logically and conceptually valid claim to grasp this notion withcoherence would have to encompass, or rather target, the level of the Mind. Such terminological conflation, while permissible in psychological contexts, is inadmissible from the standpoint of philosophical rigor, specifically where adirect reference to cognitive qualia is concerned.

But, again, we've never learned to refer that qualia as part of our ways of life.

This raises a startling question: How can I refer to, or denote (let alone examine), a reality for which I have no learned conceptual map?

One might even go a step further and argue that the art of philosophical wonder and inquiry is itself unlearned. Is it, then, the singular act we attempt to perform – to confront the bedrock of existence – without ever having been initiated into the "how"? Does philosophy represent the one thing we purport to do without ever having learned to do or even speak it? How can such a thing be done? Is this abstract cognitive activity more like breathing than doing math or physics or even art?

We proceed.

The Ghost in the Machine: Meaning as Non-Performative Being

1. The Tautology of Meaning

What is the "agentic projection" of meaning into the world? It appears we cannot conceptualize meaning as anything other than the byproduct of conceptualization itself. Meaning is the intrinsic, immediate result of our capacity for reference - the very act of applying language.

How are we to penetrate this inconceivable link? It is a connection we can only assert, yet never fully grasp. Meaning is "nowhere" - not merely in a spatial sense, but in a conceptual one. Our existence is meaningful by the very fact of its being, yet that meaning remains nowhere to be found as a discrete entity, as a projection.

2. The Mystery of Infusion

Consider the raw capacity for conceptual behavior - for speech. I hear myself articulate words, yet I do not "hear" the meaning of the articulation itself. How, then, is this meaning "infused"?

A falling object is at once trivial and mysterious, much like the act of conveying meaning. However, we can construct a conceptual model for the falling object; we cannot do the same for the act of meaning. We cannot examine the latter from the outside; we can only be it. How, then, do we even begin to formulate the mystery?

3. Generation vs. Transmission

I generate and absorb speech in a manner fundamentally different from a radio receiver. The distinction is not merely that I am "conscious," but that I am a genuine generator of meaning. An algorithm may process, but it does not originate.

This path is treacherous and prone to error, yet we must persist. Meaning emerges from the absence of certainty - from indeterminacy. We must ask: can an algorithm operate upon truly uncertain ground? When a process is indeterminate, what guides its operation?

Probabilities? Their mathematical manifestation? What do these have to do with meaning?

4. Indeterminacy and the Priority of Existence

In algorithmics, indeterminacy usually refers to a lack of predictability in results. But we are speaking of a deeper indeterminacy: the nature of the act itself.

The indeterminacy of human operation stems from the fact that we are not merely performativeentities. Our existence precedes our performance - both materially and conceptually. By contrast, an algorithm begins and ends, in every sense, within its performance. It has no "being" outside of its execution.

Procedural dynamics and trajectories are foreseeable; ontological states are not. The 'how' is predictable; the 'is' remains a mystery.

The ground is slippery, but we proceed.

The Paradox of the Empty Category

Why are we driven to inquire into this abstract, "metaphysical" self? We find ourselves searching for the source of Agency—the prime mover behind every action—yet we must ask: does this Agency ever truly manifest itself?

The answer is a resounding no. Agency never presents itself as an observable or otherwise conceivable phenomenon. It is, paradoxically, a category without particulars. While a Labrador is an instance of the category "Dog," and the Tower of London is a particular of the category "Castle," the same logic does not apply to the self. Neither I, nor my uncle, nor any other human being constitutes a "specimen" of Agency in the same way we are specimens of a species, a gender, an ethnicity, or a temperament (even sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic have instances in the world).

If the category is empty of empirical particulars, what is the object of our bewilderment? We are forced to confront a startling possibility:

• "I inquire about the 'me' only cecause I articulate it."
• "I am investigating a phenomenon that may be nothing more than a linguistic application."

We are not exploring a "thing" in the world, but the shadow cast by the word "I".

Beyond the metaphorical 'shadow', however, lies a more radical truth: we are investigating a state that is conceptually contingent upon the use of the word, rather than one that exists prior to it. We are exploring a subject that is generated by, and inseparable from, its own linguistic expression.

We proceed.

Inquiring into the 'I' is a pursuit of a ghost that never manifests in the light of objective observation. From the first-person perspective, the 'I' is never seen; it is only ever articulated. We do not encounter our subjectivity; we merely hear ourselves declare it.

Why, then, do we seek to 'know' a subject that we only experience through the echo of our own voice? What do we strive to understand in a 'substance' that reveals itself but in the act of its own articulation and exists only as a recurring linguistic act? What is the nature of this peculiar wonder? Where are its roots truly anchored?

Far from being marginal concerns, these questions arguably hold primacy over all other philosophical investigations into the mental realm.

We proceed.

What is the nature of the 'subject' that remains when all its predicates are stripped away? I am an organism, a parent, and a professional; yet, I find myself puzzled by the 'me' that supposedly inhabits these roles without being defined by them.

In probing the 'I' that resides within my biological and social shell, what am I actually questioning? Beyond the tally of my roles and attributes - from my physical organism to my history as a student or an athlete - what is this elusive core of subjectivity that I find so puzzling?