Meta Meta Meta.... Well meta literally and logically means anything which deals with a subject from a higher level of abstraction... like meta-subject, now the bold part is a place holder, like 'meta-physics': a physics about the physics and so on. So what the hell is meta-reality..... well I assume you would know that it is a 'reality about reality'. But of course I can't think of any concrete examples where we can term the subject as reality about reality.
Here is a funny memory, I just remembered something from my college days.... There was a Girl, whome whenever I use to ask 'Are you in love by any chance', she use to say that 'I guess I am in love with love'.... Huh... now I understand... she was in 'meta love'....
Did you notice my Blog's name.... Well lets see... 'Meta-Muse', it's a muse about musing.... Ahaa what an enlightenment... I am starting to get headache.....
Let me return to my original title... meta physics... going by the above rules.. you would say metaphysics is physics about physics.... But what is that?..... well lets see... String theory.... is it meta physics?... Who said?... That is physics! But String theory does shapes the Physics we know... and thus it influences what the current physics is like... and thus logically it's metaphysics.... am I wrong there? I think I am wrong there! Well when you need to decide what is metaphysics... before doing that you need to decide what is Physics, once you decided that what it is, what all it covers, then anything outside that, anything outside that domain of existing knowledge of all physics is meta physics, that which resides out side the known Physics but it talks about the Physics, influences it, ponders about it, builds theory about Physics itself. Huh... that is complicated....
An interesting one, while saving this blog before taking a break, the blogger software asked for 'Labels for this post'.... you guessed it I entered there 'meta-philosophy'.
So what is meta-philosophy? I think it is about philosophy about philosophy! Well that is philosophy about 'philosophy about philosophy'.
Like I said for the case meta-physics, if we think about this meta business more generally, that is to cover all the meta-meta... levels, that is a thought which would characterize the general meta-meta... recursion system then I would think that whenever we need to go below/above one more level of recursion we need to first decide what are the boundaries of each subject, so that we can safely decide what is meta with respect of a particular subject.
Now I think you should know that in the last paragraph I was doing meta-philosophy. Why, what are the subjects.? In the last discussion the subject was the 'Process of going from one level of subject to it's meta level'. You may again notice that the word 'subject', it can be considered as a place holder where any concrete subject may be substituted.
So we see that this met-meta.... business is all about abstraction, the levels of abstraction much like levels of 'meta' can be an infinite recursion, off course if we can figure out what is the next higher level of abstraction with respect of a particular subject then we can traverse one more level of recursion.
Human mind, I think is definitely limited in terms of levels of abstraction which it can perceive with out going insane. Mathematics is often but all about abstraction, but well off course the abstraction done while designing a Software system and the abstractions involved in various provinces of Mathematics are much different in complexity and depth. I always had a tough time with Maths. Through out my schooling I generally managed to avoid the dark areas of my understanding of Mathematics quite safely. I hated to do the drills, and often the notion what is given in our schooling is that Maths is all about drills, practice and nothing else.
I hated anything which I did not find physical significance for. Things which were abstract generally won't get absorbed in my mind. The encouragement of involving yourself in constant drill without caring a bit about understanding in schools proved to be detrimental to my metamathematical concepts. If I remember the subject I use to love was offcourse physics, since I could almost always find a physical significance immediately. I liked mechanics and dynamics a lot, for the same reason that what you read in the books can be readily verifiable by observing the motions of earthly objects. Maths often scored low on this characteristics and thus I kept on avoiding them. Calculus was good enough for me, since it was part of Physics, I can well say that I learned Calculus from my Physics books only.
Often people have difficulty understanding such concepts as Complex numbers, why any number power to the zero is one? Why negative multiplied by negative is positive. I guess all this is about understanding the abstraction, the meta-business. I always had difficulties understanding why the set theory was necessary, unfortunately in our school level of studies we don't see any real applications of set theory. Set theory is by and far an higher level of abstraction which is required to analyze such concrete sets as Real Numbers, Integers etc. It is a subject which allow out to draw out more generic characteristics of such concrete sets as N, I, Z etc. Thus set theory in a sense is a meta theory. And here I missed it again.
Well so back to where I started, the meta business, I wrote that I have no real instance of thought which I can say is 'Meta-Reality', I am having a feeling that this is a deep question. May be in a world like Matrix by Wachowski Brothers, it is valid to think abut 'Meta-reality'.
Ahaa.... I am going insane with all these recursive depths, or may be meta-insane.
Please leave comments about your encounters of manifestation of this meta systems.
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