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In Search of a Question

The basic question which metaphysics seeks to answer, I think can be phrased as "What does it mean to exist?" (This phrasing actually has several shortcomings, but I will let it stand for the moment.) Existence is here, palpable; to demand that it be explained as a logical system seems Quixotic.

I come to this essay with a personal history; all my life I have been fascinated by this metaphysical question. Examining different possible answers and extrapolating their consequences can keep me occupied for days at a time. I am going to assert at the beginning, then, that the question is not empty or meaningless; My goal is to figure out what it is in the question that holds this ability to captivate me, and whether seeking for an answer can be useful.

Let's look at how the question could have arisen. I will be taking as read here Jaynes' model of consciousness (or at least my understanding of that model). It seems natural to me that as the process of narration becomes more sophisticated, it will begin to seem like the narration is the same thing as the external world. Before the development of consciousness, the identity of a word with its referent would have been absolute. So we carry that notion of identity over into conscious thinking; but now there is the added complexity of a narrated internal space where words can wander around disassociated from any object. (This describes the process of imagination; and while I am sure imagination existed prior to consciousness, I think verbal imagination could only happen within the context of consciousness.)

Particularly interesting here are the metaphysics of Parmenides, the Pythagoreans, and Plato (the allegory of the Cave). These three all seem to say that the external world is subordinate to language -- Plato says that the most clearly, but I think it comes through in the others as well.

All this implies to me that the way to turn metaphysics into a useful pursuit is to turn it on its head -- rather than assuming the primacy of language and attempting to justify the notion of an external world, I can know in a pre-linguistic way that the world is here, and attempt to figure out what kind of understanding of it I (my narrating self) can have with language. Rather than asking, "What does it mean to exist?" a more interesting and nuanced question is, "What do I mean when I say something exists?"