The mind of man makes sense of life by looking at it through frames.
Frames
Within limits, something can be acheived, things can be differentiated: right and wrong can be laid down, success and failure can be determined.
By constructing a frame whose boundaries are birth and death, we can within those limits, live a life that appears meaningful. But something uncomfortable happens when you choose to look outside of the frame - for before birth, we are not. And after we dissolve.
Frames are the very essence of rational knowledge.
What “is” is only distinguished from what “is not”.
Motion can only be described as defined by the frame separated from stillness, so that when we remove it we find ourselves in a world where all is in motion - and the concept of motion becomes meaningless.
This is why logicians say that there can not be a class of all classes, a set of all sets (Godels Incompleteness Theorem), or a frame of all frames. For a frame with no edges would cease being a frame. It would be as unseeable as the color of one’s own eyeball lens.
Communication
Within human society, communication of any sort is only possible through the use of frames.
We identify ourselves through narrowing frames of reference.
I am a Human > Caucasian > American > Male > etc..
Until eventually, we arrive at a suitable identifier.
When the frames become too large, they lose meaning (mammal, organic, existent), and same when they become too small (cells, molecules, atoms). Nonetheless, no matter how big or small you go, every one of these identifying terms is simply the name of a frame. A specific way to separate this from that.
There seems to be no way of saying or thinking what you are except in terms of frames. It’s like an Irishman’s definition of a net — A bunch of holes tied together with string.
Reduction
The human mind has always wanted to know what is actually inside of the frames, what composes them. And the answer has only ever been finding smaller and smaller frames.
Modern philosophy has tried to get around this by separating what something is from what it does. This is called the “operational definition”.
Through this we get things like running, jumping, hopping, or stumbling. But even these are just the names of frames - the classification of movements.
The issue is that language and thought themselves have no terms except frames. It is so ingrained that to ask the question “What?” is really to ask “What Frame?“.
There is no way to describe anything apart from it’s class - it’s distinction from all other things - it’s boundaries.
Abstraction
Modern thinkers have been stuck up against a scientific wall.
Scientists have been stuck on quantum physics for so long - they have finally found a frame so small that they cannot see beyond it. However, we know that there is still reality beneath it, we just can’t build a frame small enough. This is where superpositions and quantum uncertainty come from - things happening beneath the limit of our smallest frame.
The other way too, is an imaginary frame. We call it the “observable universe”, out there, because we know there is more beyond it. We just can’t construct a bigger frame, as the things outside it are moving away faster than their light can reach us.
Obsessed too, over the mysteries of black holes - another region outside of our ability to frame, thinking that if only we could see inside, the answers would be revealed. The answer simply must be in there, because they sure aren’t anywhere out here.
So we are stuck. We know only that our frames are limited, not the reality we want to fit inside them. The frames are holes, like trying to catch air with a net.
Once you can understand that there is nothing inside of frames except more frames, you can understand that physical reality is more of a vast, complex abstraction than anything else.
Maya
The idea of reducing the whole into it’s parts, so that the parts can explain the whole is the foundation of how we think.
And it works so long as we can distract ourselves well enough until we die. To be given such a simple explanation of things is akin to keeping a baby in a pen. He is safe, but there comes a time when he will want to climb out. Western orthodoxy strictly forbids this, both religiously and scientifically. The rules are the rules, and must be obeyed. For if we don’t have them, we have nothing.
To know the universe in nothing except it’s frames is what Indian philosophy calls maya.
The idea is that all such knowledge is merely an illusion. The very word maya is related to terms like matrix and material - ma in sanskrit meaning to measure.
Measurement of course being the primary tool to build a frame.
To see only measurements is not seeing the measured.