I believe the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus addresses this question. In a very important sense, philosophy and brain analysis pulls the rug out from under its own feet. Wittgenstein provides lots of interesting ideas but famously concludes with: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
My informal chain of reasoning is as follows:
How could this paradoxical “thing before things” is be described in human language at all?
Rather, it must be pointed to.
Presumably some pointers would be more effective than others, but then what is the metric that determines which ones are more effective?
That must also be a “thing before things.”
If we cannot reify the “thing before things” or the metric for it, we may still have hope of reifying it, since we can reify enough things around it until we have an extremely reliable pointer.
In my opinion, what this means in practice is that the best pointer to the question is basically every philosophical and religious response of humanity to Truth combined into a single whole. This is essentially a holistic combination of all pointers along with a metric for going towards better pointers.
In any case, I am pretty sure the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus answers this question well, so maybe look there?
Ah, cool, this sounds like maybe the right kind of thing. Your step 4 particularly jumps out at me: it highlights the self-reference in the answer, which makes it sound plausible as a path to an answer.
I believe the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus addresses this question. In a very important sense, philosophy and brain analysis pulls the rug out from under its own feet. Wittgenstein provides lots of interesting ideas but famously concludes with: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
My informal chain of reasoning is as follows:
How could this paradoxical “thing before things” is be described in human language at all?
Rather, it must be pointed to.
Presumably some pointers would be more effective than others, but then what is the metric that determines which ones are more effective?
That must also be a “thing before things.”
If we cannot reify the “thing before things” or the metric for it, we may still have hope of reifying it, since we can reify enough things around it until we have an extremely reliable pointer.
In my opinion, what this means in practice is that the best pointer to the question is basically every philosophical and religious response of humanity to Truth combined into a single whole. This is essentially a holistic combination of all pointers along with a metric for going towards better pointers.
In any case, I am pretty sure the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus answers this question well, so maybe look there?
Ah, cool, this sounds like maybe the right kind of thing. Your step 4 particularly jumps out at me: it highlights the self-reference in the answer, which makes it sound plausible as a path to an answer.
Thank you!