Mathematics + One

Following on from the success of yesterday's post which achieved much, another post intimately related in theme to the preceding will follow. Again we are in the realm of the mysterious and esoteric, this time in the infinite form of the square root of two, probably(according to Wikipedia) the first known irrational number.
The discovery of the irrational numbers is usually attributed to the Pythagorean, Hippasus of Metapontum, who produced a proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2, or two. According to one legend, Pythagoras believed in the absoluteness of numbers, and could not accept the existence of irrational numbers. He could not disprove their existence through logic, but his beliefs would not accept their existence and so he sentenced Hippasus to death by drowning. Other legends report that Hippasus was drowned by fanatical Pythagoreans or merely expelled from their circle.
The irrational defence of the falsely imagined rational. Anyway, quite a large number of the opening numbers of the square root of two follow:

1.4142135623730950488016887242096980785696718753769480731766797379907324784621 07038850387534327641572735013846230912297024924836055850737212644121497099935831 41322266592750559275579995050115278206057147010955997160597027453459686201472851 74186408891986095523292304843087143214508397626036279952514079896872533965463318 08829640620615258352395054745750287759961729835575220337531857011354374603408498 84716038689997069900481503054402779031645424782306849293691862158057846311159666 87130130156185689872372352885092648612494977154218334204285686060146824720771435 85487415565706967765372022648544701585880162075847492265722600208558446652145839 88939443709265918003113882464681570826301005948587040031864803421948972782906410 45072636881313739855256117322040245091227700226941127573627280495738108967504018 36986836845072579936472906076299694138047565482372899718032680247442062926912485 90521810044598421505911202494413417285314781058036033710773091828693147101711116 83916581726889419758716582152128229518488472089694633862891562882765952635140542

If this has whetted your appetite, all of the first million of the square root of two's digits can be enjoyed at your lesure here, and remember this is but a prologue to an infinity of digits which one could literally spend one's lifetime reading. And who could argue that it would be a wasted life?
Incidentally, now might be the time for a confession. This is supposed to be mathematics at its height, and yet I find these numbers to be, if not dull, a little monotonous in their effect. Which isn't to suggest the fault is any but mine own.

Mathematical Consideration

You've probably all been wondering at the paucity of mathematics related posts on this site. The truth is it's not a subject in which I have any real aptitude, and perhaps by extension, interest. However, I feel I should redress the balance a little, and with that in mind I've chosen to post the first thousand digits of the mystical phenomenon that is Pi. I'd like to point out the fourteenth and nineteenth lines of the sequence, which are particularly fine. Enjoy.

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510
58209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679
82148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128
48111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196
44288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091
45648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273
72458700660631558817488152092096282925409171536436
78925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094
33057270365759591953092186117381932611793105118548
07446237996274956735188575272489122793818301194912
98336733624406566430860213949463952247371907021798
60943702770539217176293176752384674818467669405132
00056812714526356082778577134275778960917363717872
14684409012249534301465495853710507922796892589235
42019956112129021960864034418159813629774771309960
51870721134999999837297804995105973173281609631859
50244594553469083026425223082533446850352619311881
71010003137838752886587533208381420617177669147303
59825349042875546873115956286388235378759375195778
18577805321712268066130019278766111959092164201989 . . .

Western Esteem

It's come to my attention that affluent governments of the West are offering enticements to governments of the destitute East so as to provide vast numbers of humans educated in the English language so as to post comments on Westerners' blogs so as to keep said Westerners' sense of self-affirmation at a desirable level. Too many of these Western citizens are engaged in blogging, but there are not sufficient others to comment on these blogs and so massage the relevant sense of self-worth of said bloggers. It is hoped that Easterners, for a certain financial incentive, can help fill the relevant self-esteem void by scouring the blogosphere, as it is known, and posting comments on blogs. The scheme is being labelled The Circus Gambit, in a clear reference to the famous maxim of social control, Bread and Circuses.
To economise on both the financial and temporal aspects, Eastern students are being equipped with an arsenal of phrases that can be inserted, generally with the aim of bolstering the blogger's self esteem, but occasionally with less adulatory phrases for purposes of realism to allay suspicion. A selection of these below:

Yes, that is what I feel I've always wanted to say, but didn't know how.
You're clearly very intelligent. I'll check back often.
That's exactly how it is!
You've made me look on the world in a new and more refined light.
Are you sure that's not racist?
I was thinking of killing myself, but reading your blog has filled me with optimism.
Apart from a somewhat idiosyncratic usage of grammar I daresay you've written a miniature masterpiece, almost infinite in its subtleties of exposition.
How lovely!
That is bordering on the psychotic.
It is as though I have found the voice that mirrors my innermost essence. Thank you.
Judging by your words, you have a way with them.
You have helped me understand the joys of abstraction.
This is a glimpse into a rarefied intellectual world in whose existence I had not dared to believe.
Is it by intent that the internal structure of your finely wrought sentences mysteriously echo the contrapuntal harmonies of the great music of the Baroque period?
Your spelling is shit.


I have obviously contented myself with limiting the scope of the above to the English language, and, for reasons of not caring enough to do otherwise, inferred that Westerners are synonymous with use of the English language.

Mirror Mirror

Mirror, mirror on the wall, what is the most useless concept of them all?

That would be the idea of free-will, or/and lack of.

The Prosaic and Philosophy

There might be something to be said for viewing vast swathes of the enquiry into truth known as philosophy as occuring as a monologue within the mind of an individual seated within a rather shabby room and engaged in the smoking of a regular intake of hashish.

It occurs to this individual that he would like a cup of tea. However, instead of this leading to what one might imagine to be the straightforward, uncomplicated process of getting up to turn on the kettle and the other prosaic processes leading to the desired conclusion of having and drinking the desired cup of tea, certain trains of thought are set in motion within his intoxicated and perhaps somewhat paranoid mind. Key thoughts might include:

Are the asking of this question and the physical activities it may lead to independent acts of a free-thinking and willing individual or is all this determined by processes of which I and the very concept I are mere elements?
To what extent can I consider the thought of the kettle to coincide with the actual kettle in itself?
If my experience of this external reality is received through the senses, and my senses place me at an inevitable distance from what I perceive, to what extent can I in turn speak of a kettle in itself existing in a universe within which I also exist?
Do I dare undertake the conjectured tea-making processes, thus embarking on one particular life, and sending to oblivion all the infinity of other lives that I could have embarked upon were I to choose a different course of action.

The above thoughts are simply some key points from which the vastness of the resulting philosophical enquiries could ensue. In this ever expanding monologue, for the sake of clarity within the individual's mind, various tributaries of these lines of enquiry could be labelled under headings such as "Heidegger says" or "Kant claims" or some such. This helping him to keep track of the endless arguments and counter-arguments in the various discussions, such as to what extent it is reasonable to have thoughts about a kettle and tea within the broader context of one's language having a foundation in truth, as opposed to a kind of linguistic hallucination of convenience.

Ideally, having solved all the self-created problems, our hashish consuming individual would then with an easy mind make himself a cup of tea. The chances of such a happy, & dare one say it, sane conclusion are however almost infinitely remote.

Another Powerful Idea

A book called Western Civilisation and its Menopause. All that remains is to flesh out what this might mean, and to write it. Possibly to include digressions such as the paralleling of the workings of the alimentary canal with the great painters of the Northern Renaissance, with special focus on Roger van der Weyden. Again, on what basis I will justify such analogising is as yet unclear, but a bit irrelevant as the idea is a great one.

An Inversion of Truth

One doesn't like to boast but I may have just given birth to a conception that may lift literature from the quagmire that threatens to drown it in its sprawling tentacles of negation. My idea literally turns the idea of the novel on its head. When one picks up this projected novel, or book, all will seem as normal. However, when one opens this tome to see what lies inside one discovers that the writing is upside down. To read it, one will have to either turn oneself or else the book in the desired direction, depending on preference and perhaps utilitarian spatial considerations whereby the turning of oneself upside down is or isn't feasible.

As one reads the work and its intrinsic subject matter, one will be in a constant state of bemused astonishment that one is reading an upside down book. This will naturally lead to all sorts of implications regarding reality, perception and the like, though I can't pretend to as yet have any idea what these implications might be. This will keep the critics busy for centuries.

Letterary Word Game Solution

The above, which is to say below, piece has unsurprisingly proven a tad too difficult to all comers. I did receive a deluge of private requests for "more clues", but I feel I could not do this without falsifying the integrity of the contest. The correct order of words of the admittedly esoteric piece should have been rendered:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills.

Congratulations to E. Emerick, Stoke who essayed the following by private mail:

I as wandered a cloud lonely
High vales o'er hills floats on that and.

Bad luck, E, but a worthy effort. The poem was by the poet William Wordsworth who used the given words in the earlier order.

Letterary Word Game

Re-arrange the following words to form the opening lines of a famous poem involving daffodils by a well known Romantic poet:

Cloud a as lonely wandered I
Hills and Vales o'er high on floats That

For those in need of help- there is a code-breaking system, which could be described as implementing the art of inversion, or turning things around, that might prove useful in finding the correct solution.

The Back Up- Elberry Take Note

Perhaps the apex of civilisation has been reached with the remarkable product displayed here. A little sorrowfully, one must admit it's downhill from here on in.

Pelevin on Myth and Progress

From the prologue to his Helmet of Horror book, far from his best, by the way.

"According to one definition, a myth is a traditional story, usually explaining some natural or social phenomenon. According to another, it is a widely held but false belief or idea.
If the mind is like a computer, perhaps myths are its shell programs: sets of rules that we follow in our world processing, mental matrices we project onto complex events to endow them with meaning...
Our programs were written when the human race was young – at a stage so remote and obscure that we don’t understand the programming language any more.
The road away from myth is called 'progress'...
Progress is a propulsion technique where we have to constantly push ourselves away from the point we occupied a moment ago.However the funny thing is that the concept of progress has been around for so long that now it has all the qualities of a myth. It is a traditional story that pretends to explain all natural and social phenomena. It is also a belief that is widespread and false."

The great iconoclast of intellectual systems, Krishnamurti, would I'm sure agree, with the emphasis on progress applied to the individual and his search for truth. The thinking mind trying to get to an ideal place which lies somewhere in the future, itself being the problem. Video here where he, perhaps contrary to some expectations, critiques phenomena like transcendental meditation along the lines of "nonsensical meditation". Who is trying to transcend who and why?

Pelevin & Cactus Collection

"The next few weeks were a confusing period of time for the cactus collectors of Moscow. It seemed that a big new player entered their tight little universe. He was operating on a scale unheard of in the past, and disappeared without a trace after exhausting the entire Moscow stock of a particular cactus known mostly for its beautiful flower and complete absence of thorns..."

Victor Pelevin reminisces on his days of investment in the hallucinogenic cactus, mescaline here. A couple of more extracts:

ONE OF THE TERMS THAT CAME INTO MODERN English from the Russian in the wake of "gulag" and "pogrom" was "samizdat." It is usually defined as a system of clandestine publication of anti-Soviet texts in the countries of the former Eastern bloc. This definition somewhat implies that "samizdat" meant Solzhenitsyn. In fact, "samizdat" meant Castaneda. The explanation is simple: When you live in a gulag from the day of your birth, reading a book about gulag in your free time feels a bit too patriotic. You want something different.

Castaneda's most beautiful trick was based on the popular belief in the existence of fiction and nonfiction. This belief takes it for granted that there is a qualitative difference between two books if the first one tells a success story that never happened to a fictitious character, and the second one tells a success story that will never happen to you. In a way, this difference does exist. But it is not a difference between two books, it is a difference between two settings of the reader's mind. Here lies the real magic that makes the four Gospels either a dull specimen of ancient postmodernism or the Truth that proves itself as it unfolds in front of your eyes. Never mind the text. What matters is the legend, or, to be precise, your willingness to kindle this legend with life.

And from an interview with Pelevin, some thoughts linked to the Solzhenitsyn point:

The first Bulgakov book I read was The Master and Margarita. As for the lessons I drew, I’m afraid there were none, though it overturned all ideas I had about books before...However, the effect of this book was really fantastic. There’s an expression “out of this world.” This book was totally out of the Soviet world. The evil magic of any totalitarian regime is based on its presumed capability to embrace and explain all the phenomena, their entire totality, because explanation is control. Hence the term totalitarian. So if there’s a book that takes you out of this totality of things explained and understood, it liberates you because it breaks the continuity of explanation and thus dispels the charms. It allows you to look in a different direction for a moment, but this moment is enough to understand that everything you saw before was a hallucination (though what you see in this different direction might well be another hallucination). The Master and Margarita was exactly this kind of book and it is very hard to explain its subtle effect to anybody who didn’t live in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn’s books were very anti-Soviet, but they didn’t liberate you, they only made you more enslaved as they explained to which degree you were a slave. The Master and Margarita didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things.

And finally a short quote I love from the same interview:

Phenomenologically any politician is a TV program, and this doesn’t change from one government to another.

The Miraculous and Reality

The common idea of a miraculous event, if it could be said to take place, is that this is a contravention of the laws of nature by a higher power. Which is to say that the laws remain intact; it's just that they have been momentarily superseded. This is an incorrect vision. Somewhere in the New Testament is the line, "If Satan's kingdom is divided, how then shall Satan's kingdom stand?" The corollary being that God's kingdom or Reality as it is, unimpaired by delusion, is not divided against itself. However, the miracle which contravenes nature's laws would be an example of this kingdom divided against itself; a God who breaks the laws of his own composition. Instead, the correct view should be that if a miracle occurs, then it is our notion of nature's laws that are in error: a notion of reality which is simply the mirror of a limited and self-limiting intellect which seeks to enclose life within a system of self-imagined boundaries and laws. Perhaps this setting of limits is the will to power in action of the intellect where it seeks to be master of reality rather than its servant.
Until very recent historical time the notion of the crystal ball or some such device in which one oculd see what is happening elsewhere on this globe would probably be either dismissed as fantasy or, if accepted, viewed as involving the contravention of nature's laws by an alliance with some external force. However, we now know there to be no such laws; the essence of television being where the hidden powers of reality are tapped into, thus enabling the sending of images, more or less instantaneously, through space.
Similarly, we could look at an instrument such as the telephone as an example of electronically enabled telepathy. Where people tend to make the error is to imagine that because technology is involved, this explains the phenomenon away, but this is lazy, superficial thinking. Technology is not in any sense sufficient unto itself; it is simply tuning into the intrinsic intelligent pathways and magic realism of life.
So to recap, in the possible event of what is considered miraculous we should not interpret this as the contravention of nature's laws from without, but as illustrating a more profound reality than that conceived of by a static intellect.

Best Enemies Money Can Buy

Video interview with Anthony Sutton here. Some information on Sutton here, a historian who wrote books such as Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, The Best Enemy Money Can Buy and America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones.
The quality of resolution is low but certainly not the quality of information.

Heart of Darkness

I doubt I have any gift for critiquing books, but I'd like to recommend King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild about the reign of sadism and economic rape of the Belgian Congo, under the very conscious leadership of King Leopold II; a monster to hold his head high amongst later and more famous examples of the diabolic type. An excellent book which will send me back to re-read Conrad's Heart of Darkness, who himself figures in Hochschild's work.

The Polytheistic Religion of Nationalism

Nationalism is a polytheistic faith in invisible entities whose wills are purported to be performed by the numerous priests and high-priests of this faith in the various fields of politics, the military, education, etc. The deities worshipped are often mutually antagonistic, and the greatest of these gods, ie those with the greatest number of believers, or perhaps most virile or fundamentalist believers, desire the murder and annihilation of other gods whose followers can then, if they are sufficiently worthy, become converts to the greater god, whose greatness has been proven by his defeat, in the persons of his followers, of the other god's followers. If not worthy, they can become slaves to the nationalist god to whom they are now subject.

The gods of nationalism often desire offerings in the way of human sacrifice, and to this end wars are fought. The gods are also often placated by the lesser offerings such as subjection of sacrificial victims to torture and imprisonment.

Within this field of metaphysical deities and the human structures that serve them are some dangerous souls who believe that the gods of nationalism do not actually exist at all, but that they are purely mental fabrications used by the priests and high-priests of these supposed religions to justify their own egotistical interests and will to power. These atheists warn that nationalism is often a tool of manipulation of the masses by ruling elites, and the typically blood-thirsty deities they claim to serve are simply their own wills projected onto an imaginary divine entity which cloaks the true nature of their actions in a foggy, mystical aura.
The atheist would prefer a statement such as "America/The Soviet Union(tick where appropriate) has attacked Afghanistan" be rendered as "The fuckers that run America/Soviet Union have attacked Afghanistan."

Admittedly, we have entered a more complex issue here where The Soviet Union saw the apparent spiritual union of various nationalist deities into one far greater deity, but this evolutionary progression suffered an unexpected dissolution and the old deities reconvened into their separate selves. Victor Pelevin has an interesting and unusual hypothesis in his book, Babylon, regarding this where he says: "The USSR which they'd begun to renovate and improve...improved so much that it ceased to exist(if a state is capable of entering nirvana, that's what must have happened in this case)."

There are those who wish for a single all ruling god over all the Earth, and these monotheists are known as Globalists. These globalists, needless to say, intend to be be the high-priests of this all-powerful divine entity, should their aims be realised. It would be anathema to this priestly class' notion of reality but possibly they are to be the unwitting vehicle of Pelevin's idea where the One World State will be realised only to dissolve itself through an enlightenment experience where the individual ego sense of this deity is transcended, and an enlightened anarchy ensues. This mirroring St Francis' notion of organised Christianity's desired end being its own dissolution; religion being the means to a higher end in terms of individual life and consciousness rather than an end in itself- a dangerous notion which nearly cost him an unpleasant death at the hands of the Inquisition, a body far more organised than religious. Though perhaps these committers of satanic acts were very religious; they just weren't quite being truthful about the nature of the religion they believed in...a tree shall be known by its fruit and all that. The idea that people clearly immersed in evil might lie seems a strangely undervalued notion.

Epiphany

Another brief extract of the mentioned work:

He stared into the waters beneath the bridge that he stood on that enabled people and traffic to pass over the afore-mentioned water that flowed underneath the relevant structure. "Life is like a river," he thought. "Just when you think you have understood it, it falls apart."

Literature- An Ascension

There follows a fragment of the seventeenth chapter of a projected novel to which I plan to devote my creative energies in some future time with the purpose of bringing literature to the next level. This follows on from some earlier invaluable additions to the canon of intellectual good works such as here and here.

The grey sky was a positive incarnation of the opaque dullness which seemed to stifle his soul of late, and from which he could not draw the will to alter these psychological/emotional, etc conditions so unpropitious to a healthy sense of well-being in the seat of his consciousness which, if we take the liberty of saying is located anywhere, was in his head.
"This sky is a metaphysical entity," he said to his co-pedestrian colleague.
"A metaphysical entity? I suppose it is. Spengler's Decline of the West comes to mind. You know, civilisations as organic entities which live and die, and from the compost heap of one civilisation's death arises another."
"Yes, that is interesting. Have you read Hegel?"
"You're referring to the unfolding of time as a historical process programmed by God to lead in an upward curve towards a great heavenly future. This, you will understand, is, for the sake of brevity, a somewhat barbarous rendering of Hegel."
"Yes, that is what I was intimating."
"Though to return to the sky as analogy or even metaphysical entity, and remember life can be multi-layered in its meanings, if this goodly firmament were to mirror Hegel's hypothesis then there should be a little more sun peering through the clouds, don't you think?"
"But naturally. And we should be approaching the sun rather than it behind our backs."
"Undoubtedly. Though remember a setting sun in one corner of the earth is a rising one in another."
"Most certainly. And I am sure our friend Spengler would approve."

The friends were suddenly confronted by two very large gentlemen with very short hair.
"Have you got our money, assholes?"
"You'll get your money."
"I know we will. You got till tomorrow night. And by the way, that Joyce book you lent me- Ulysees..."
"What about it?"
"It's shit."

Consumerism

the theory that an increasing consumption of goods is economically desirable; also : a preoccupation with and an inclination toward the buying of consumer goods

Consumerism is practical capitalism which is a system concerned with the flow of an imaginary substance called money, and the creation of complex systems condusive to the circulation of this imagined substance.
Many are fooled into thinking that consumerism is a utopian creed about the creation of heaven on earth arising from the creation of products beneficial to man and that money is the catalyst that enables circulation of these products to occur. This is erroneous: it is the products that exist so as to facilitate the circulation of money, not the other way round.
Though, as usual, the issue of consumerism is more complex than simply this reduction, as explored a little earlier here. Which isn't to say that the manipulation of matter by human intelligece is necessarily negative, but the exclusive materialism of pure consumerism must inevitably lead to the leakage of all meaning from civilisation. This nihilistic end-point of civilisation is the magnet towards which is drawn the current ethos & its societal structures. Dostoevsky viewed the various new isms as themselves negative spiritual entities injected into life by the dread spirit with the express intention of leading to the collapse of truth. He, as shown in The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, seemed to consider that at the top of the power pyramid that the human agents of this process were actually conscious of their role as opposed to the unwitting propagators of lfe-denying processes which they didn't understand.

Hesse on Dostoevsky

"I said Dostoevsky is not a poet, or he is only a poet in a secondary sense. I called him a prophet. It is difficult to say exactly what a prophet means. It seems to me something like this. A prophet is a sick man, like Dostoevsky, who was an epileptic. A prophet is the sort of sick man who has lost the sound sense of taking care of himself, the sense which is the saving of the efficient citizen. It would not do if there were many such, for the world would go to pieces. This sort of sick man, be he called Dostoevsky or Karamazov, has that strange, occult, godlike faculty, the possibility of which the Asiatic venerates in every maniac. He is a seer and an oracle. A people, a period, a country, a continent has fashioned out of its corpus an organ, a sensory instrument of infinite sensitiveness, a very rare and delicate organ. Other men, thanks to their happiness and health, can never be troubled with this endowment. This sensory instrument, this mantological faculty is not crudely comprehensible like some sort of telepathy or magic, although the gift can also show itself even in such confusing forms. Rather is it that the sick man of this sort interprets the movements of his own soul in terms of the universal and of mankind. Every man has visions, every man has fantasies, every man has dreams. And every vision every dream, every idea and thought of a man, on the road from the unconscious to the conscious, can have a thousand different meanings, of which every one can be right. But the appearances and visions of the seer and the prophet are not his own. The nightmare of visions which oppresses him does not warn him of a personal illness, of a personal death, but of the illness, the death of that corpus whose sensory organ he is, This corpus can be a family, a clan, a people, or it can be all mankind. In the soul of Dostoevsky a certain sickness and sensitiveness to suffering in the bosom of mankind which is otherwise called hysteria, found at once its means of expression and its barometer. Mankind is now on the point of realizing this. Already half Europe, at all events half Eastern Europe, is on the road to Chaos. In a state of drunken illusion she is reeling into the abyss and, as she reels, she sings a drunken hymn such as Dmitri Karamazov sang. The insulted citizen laughs that song to scorn, the saint and seer hear it with tears.

The rest of the essay, The Brothers Karamazov--The
Downfall of Europe here.

Nothing Much

Dictionary.com defines nothing, amongst several alternatives, as "something that is nonexistent." If something is, how can it be non-existent? This was very wisely discussed here, and it might therefore seem I'm simply blithely repeating myself for the sake of posting something so as to end the inerim of not posting anything.
But anyway, Merriam Webster Online Dictionary tells us that the word nothing is a pronoun, adverb, noun and adjective, and the thing referred to by this versatile word is "something that does not exist"; a strikingly similar definition to the earlier one. So we have a word that does exist referring to something that doesn't exist. If it doesn't exist, why does it need a word, might argue an economically minded intellectual; an iconoclastic Puritan of the mind. Though someone else might argue that words themselves don't exist; that they are illusions within consciousness, and so the word that refers to something that isn't also isn't; a double negative.

This point has sent me back to the online dictionary, and I see that illusion means "perception of something objectively existing in such a way as to cause misinterpretation of its actual nature." Which inevitably sends me in search of "objectively" to see how this illuminates the word reality controversy, and I find that objectively means "With objectivity," which is admittedly not much bloody use. Thankfully however, this "objectivity" is described as "Judgment based on observable phenomena and uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices."

A dog, to which the word dog refers, may be encountered in an act of perception, insofar as for the sake of sanity we decide to accept our senses as being innately intertwined with reality, and so this dog may be described as included within the field of observable phenomena. The symbol of the word dog may be similarly encountered like when viewing it within this very sentence. However, this is merely the visual symbolic representation of what is itself a symbol, which, by the relevant definition earlier can hardly be said to be of an observable phenomena, and so by strict grammatical rules of existence does not exist.
Which, I think, leaves us with a non-existent word referring to a non-existent something, or indeed the absence of a something with which to have a non-existence. Which in turn leaves us in a very difficult situation, none of these words existing objectively, though consolingly it could be said that there is no "difficult situation", since the entire entangling situation is an edifice built upon a language structure that does not, according to the rules of language, exist: an imaginary castle made of imaginary sand.

The Future Has Caught Up WIth Us

Brilliant succinct piece by Paul Craig Roberts, here.