The statement of The Strange and Beautiful is essentially that all things that aren't true, or don't exist, somehow do exist. Generally we assume non-existent things must somehow be waiting in the wings for us to apply them in our conception, even while they aren't existent in actuality. Taking the waiting in the wings metaphor to mean the things that do exist are like the actors on stage in a play, we'd take the alternates to them to be those actors off-stage, in the wings. Applying this metaphor to present wings, insisting non-existent things must exist somehow, we might say the playhouse has no separate facilities to serve as wings to exit to, so an actor leaving the scene would merely recede to a place on stage where he now functions in a new role—perhaps an onlooking extra. This metaphor gives us an explanation of the widest, most present sense of the principle of plenitude—that all that could be, in fact, is. This isn't simply the fullest, most perfect, or eventual actuality of all things, but complete, and complete with contradictory, actuality. We will retain for this the phrase present wings.
This view is our best effort to externalize our internally produced reality, a necessary act if we are to explain that production. Since internal production knows no bounds and the externally discovered is fully bounded, our internal possibilities, including contrary, counterfactual things, must all be discoverable. This discovery explains certain perplexities, such as the nature of knowledge, cause-effect and the mind-body problem, for these perplexities all involve seeing our personal view from the outside. In knowledge we hold that we hold something discoverable as true; in cause-effect, discovered things are produced; in mind-body, the person causes effect in a discovered body. So while it is a curious effort to externalize the internal, the perplexities themselves arise from doing exactly that, and so carrying on in the course set for us by our very perplexity, we externalize ourselves in entirety, seeing all our choices as already chosen from one perspective or another.
In Context as Community we regarded the observation of the diverse truths in individual things being multiple things—while truth seems to preclude exactly this multiplicity—as explained by the differing contexts, or communities, in which we see ourselves under the varying verdicts of truth. In particular, imposed external facts can be seen to be of our own design by recognizing the communities in which we place ourselves. So, as a Texan among US residents, I'm a southerner, but as a US resident among residents of the Americas, I'm a northerner. As a biologically persisting being, I need to eat, but as a political protester, I'm free not to. In those things we have no choice over, our lack of choice is found in our choice not to choose, by setting ourselves against some chosen reference.
As the simplest example of the introduction of fixed truth by community, we can imagine, we as lone individuals reading from and writing on paper can choose any scribble we wish to denote whatever we wish. There is no contradicting our choice, it being fully a free convention of our own. However, if we recognize a community of two individuals reading and writing together, it now becomes an external determination of fact as to what means what, else we really aren't participating in that community.
In this simple determination of fact is a kernel of what we mean by knowledge. Knowledge is related to some other phenomena sharing this kernel. Aside from knowing something, we can believe it, take it provisionally or treat it as true, suspending our disbelief. In all of these is 1) holding something—this, a pure internal choice. To distinguish knowledge we require also that 2) what we hold is true—held in common with a context or community—and that 3) we hold that we hold it. If the second requirement places us in a context determining the truth of the thing held, then the third requirement—the truth that “we hold this truth”—must place us in a context outside ourselves if it is to determine our very internal production. Our first requirement presents no problem—there really is no question that we choose. Our second requirement too can be reduced to choice where we accept our communities as chosen. Our third requirement presents a problem. If we look more closely at this problem, we can see how present wings can be seen to solve it.
It is in holding what we hold that we quickly lose our certainty of knowledge. That we hold something determined is undoubted in retrospect. And, true, in actively inspecting what we hold, we again hold something. The problem here is that we hold now an inspection, not the thing inspected—that inspected thing has been externalized. Once we look to find the facts of the matter on that, we are no longer certain, for what is found is not chosen. Our one source of certainty—what we willfully do, hold or choose—is gone. By example, when we finish running, we never say, “if I'd known I was running I'd have ...”. However, we might ask, mysteriously, “but do I really know I was running?” This skeptical view doesn't abolish knowledge, for knowledge as a thing certainly exists in this counterfactual usage, “if I'd known that ...”. It exists, if not in some particular instance, as a counterfactual hypothesis. To doubt the meaningfulness of knowledge, one must doubt the meaningfulness of counterfactuals, and this is what present wings make meaningful. In present wings is that community wide enough to determine the fact of whether “we hold this truth”.
Let us consider what we know about knowledge. We hold some thing. That thing is indeed fixed and true with respect to the communities that share in holding it. That we hold ourselves to hold exactly that truth is fixed and true of some one of our alternates discoverable in the many wings of our imposed reality. We have explained, by finding ourselves in external reality, how each of our requirements of knowledge are met in externally true reality.
The community determining the verdicts of present wings—all verdicts, like or contrary—is the community of all communities. In each perspective on our currently found distinction is a community, and by varying the community, we see those alternate truths. How many dimensions of space are there? To a visual artist with work of art on hand there are at least four: how far to the right, how far in front, how high from the floor and what color of what intensity. To a conceptual artist there is no orthogonal numerical dimensionality at all, the meaning of the work not being spacial at all. How can we find winter when its summer? By considering Australia if we're in Japan. To the two faces in the classic figure-ground image, a vase may not be present, but it certainly can be considered.
In this plenitude is to be found the answer both to why only this particular effect from this particular cause, and also how one can be dependent on the other. That we have the strange particulars of conjunctions of causes with effects is seen not to be strange at all, again, simply because any two given things can be taken together to be cause and effect, one of the other. With all possibilities waiting in the wings, our only task then is finding the right wing. The relation of one resulting from the other is exactly that concurrence of communities fixed by one cause. That is, fix what you will to be your cause, and those true verdicts of the communities that share in the distinction of that cause will be the effects of that thing as cause. Our very requirement of externalizing our own choice explains the discovery of one thing as produced by another.
We don't really need the theory of present wings to explain the mind body problem if we are already willing to see externally found reality and internally produced reality as equivalent. In this sense our body is simply that boundary of our self in choice. We choose to look, but in looking is necessarily the function of looking. Our eyes as function and organ are the same, seen at once as chosen, and again as found. If we inspect our very choice of looking, we will need explanation of that act, and so something—in this case eyes—will be what we find. But still, this has that uneasy lack of the explanatory, and it is in this uneasiness that we introduce present wings. So we look to explicate this relationship, externalizing for ready explanation our choice.
Why does that unchosen thing, the arm, move there and not somewhere else when I, that distinct person, choose to move it? When we have the existence of any possible alternative discoverable in reality, in fact it does move there, or somewhere else. We can see examples of the most unbelievable alternates in our everyday lives. Our arm does move somewhere other than where we choose when we reach out to someone in instinct but refrain through self-discipline. Our arm does move where we did not choose to move it when we find surprise in its movement but explain the motion as reflex.
How can we have power over something fully externally determined? Power requires resistance, and in a world where every possibility is present, that the individual is able to distinguish one possibility over another would require no power at all. That is, if freedom of chosen distinction were significantly greater than the freedom of external observation, it certainly would seem odd that there is a strange preestablished harmony between the two. But every alternate can be found, and that you have some particular, true, configuration now may reflect more a bias of outcome of the community in which you distinguish yourself. Why are you not a bird among a community of birds? This is not a problem for the mind-body relationship, but a happy circumstance, for if you whimsically shape-shifted, you certainly wouldn't ask about the strange impositions of external reality—they not imposing on you at all. As we wind down this path of what-if to the less and less fixed of truth, we see how qualia such as color are clear to we as lone distinguishers, but become matters of fact, doubt and scientific inquiry into issues such as the physics of electromagnetism when shared with a community.
Yet in all this explanation of the unexplainable, we must bear also the honest truth, that in externalizing the self we have left the self doing the externalizing, so we will not find absolutely every possibility, but some instance of particular fact. In the case of present wings, we might say one inexorable fact is a principle of conservation. From every shift from one to another alternative perspective on reality will again be found everything as from the previous alternative. So we as shape-shifters will find some delimitation of ourselves—that which is not us, not chosen, but fixed and discovered as we find our own bodies and physical needs such as rest or nourishment. But as we distinguish this limiting process of externalization, surely we can see in it the meaning of doing yet discovering.