An interesting and compelling thread. There seems to be an issue here that strikes me as crucial; but it is not precisely the squirrel, or the story. Rather, it is the human propensity to incorrectly presume that the representations we use, in language and mathematics, are sufficient to encompass actual events.

This »cannot be true.

Whatever it may be that motivates our application of representational cognition (a great gift (and terrible curse), invisibly pre-determines the outcomes in such cognition… not according to facts or truth… but according to our purposes and the skillfullness with which we apply the features of the structured elements that may be usefully referred to as “collective representations”.

One problem with this is that the tests for ‘validity’ are circular: it is precisely the presence of representations (in language, concept and thought) that are ‘the validity test’ of the language and concepts we select (read: excerpt) for attention or declaration.

But there are many other problems here.

One is that our hypothetical considerations of an event in which we were not directly involved are lacking most of the crucial sensing, emotion, reaction and … nonordinary understanding that necessarily apply in »actual experience.

Nonetheless, something in our minds — habits and orientations — is disinclined to admit this. Thus we produce theories and analyses according not to the actual situation, in which we were not involved, but a kind of bizarre, post-hoc ‘courtroom’ simulation. While this may seem compelling, once someone begins on this path, they effectively decide to go to war, and their capacity for actual insight most usually declines accordingly.

Actual situations are not like hypotheses or analyses. All analyses are false, however useful or predictive they may appear within »the appropriate scope of the concepts employed. This is also true for math, and even for physics. Incompleteness wins the day in every case for a simple reason: no one knows what anything »is. In fact it is impossible to know, since all targets of reference have »infinite qualities. What humans specialize in is the reduction of those infinities to ‘reliable’ approximations. Useful, true. But incomplete (necessarily).

Very few people are aware of the staggering limitations and pitfalls of representational cognition. It works well in the artificial frameworks and overlays that it arises from and within, but more than 99% of whatever might be meant by the word ‘reality’ … must be evicted for it to ‘succeed’ in this fashion. And we promptly forget or ignore this… nearly all the time.

For common humans, the representational overlay (once established in childhood) actually takes over the waking mind, and produces in consciousness something resembling a ‘world that is dead inside’, because our representations have the ever-increasing tendency to evict from awareness or consideration anything that doesn’t fit within them.

And that is nearly everything. Over time, as the processes involved develop, throughout the history of human cognition and much more rapidly in the near-present… we become deluded about fundamental features of the universe, the world, organisms, and their actual nature and relationships.

I would ask that we consider these matters deeply, because something has gone terribly wrong with not only our minds and purposes… but our behavior (especially as a species). This will not be resolved within our collective representations.

Actual experience, as described here, is »not like the thinking that ensues before, during and after experience». Words and conceptualizations cannot convey the depth or complexity of felt senses, concerns, emotions and responses. To presume they can is absurd, yet this is what we are all, generally, trained to do. Whether or not this squirrel ‘survived’ and what it may or may not have suffered, has little to do with our ideas.

Fundamentally, the matter is entirely transcendental to »any form of representation. If we could begin there, progress seems not merely plausible, but likely. If not?

Then we will be ruled by the representations and the habitual imperatives for which we apply them… and this process will become more entrenched and delusional over time.