Take a thought experiment with me in imagining your mind alone, floating in nothingness, never having sensed anything because nothing was there to be sensed, and maybe also because you had no senses just a mind alone. What would you do? How would you “begin”? Could you?

But in the experiment above, we asked the question of, “How would you begin, or could you?” The answer to that question might lie in considering the one thing that you would have to work with, and that is ABILITY. What ability? The ability to incept an idea, and either cut it in two, or to craft a second, and then to engage in the process of ordering them relationally.

When we try to consider how a disembodied IPS afloat in a vacuum of order might begin to structure something, we begin only with an ability alone, profound already though that ability be. In this scenario, there would be no external order or standardization yet from which to draw conceptually. Order might actually become one of the earliest of ideas of which an imaginarily marooned IPS must generate in our fantasy. Or might some awareness of “self” have to come first?

When we consider the sense of self itself, we find that neither is it a simple idea that can stand alone. Some conceptual necessity diminutive of “self” might be the idea of boundaries, where as inside is the self and outside is not the self. In thinking of what might be involved in such a “beginning” we can count more than one necessary component. But could any of the three concepts involved exist without the other two? A boundary carries with it the relational realization of inside and outside. Could one realize a boundary without too imagining an in and out? Could one understand and inside without understanding a boundary and an outside all together? We submit not so.

Even as a simple thought exercise, it is of value to us to consider how difficult it would be to birth these three concepts necessary to underpin a sense of self. Three realizations at once would be a profound, never to be repeated revelation stirring the very foundations of brand new reality! But once they were resolved, how much more easily might an IPS proceed to conceive new concepts from there. And why this ease? For only one reason. Because we already have an engine for order, but now we have exiting elements upon which it can divide, multiply, remix and match.

But would one even “begin” with formulating an idea of self where there were no other “selves” with which to compare? Might the “beginning” rather be simply the idea of quiet nothingness, and from there the concept of somethingness may rise up?

With no time, how could we ask the question of when the ability to order even this primitive idea set may stir, not to mention what prodding from within the existent but inactive IPS might motivate that stirring. Might the beginning of this stirring, or the prod itself be the beginning of time?

When we try to think of a ordering causation, a first step toward order, our minds must start with what we know, as we have no other starting place than that. But we quickly realize that it could not have been even that simple. Inherent in our premise we are setting the implications here that no, the concept of inside, outside, and boundaries did not pre exist the ability to order. The idea of nothingness and of somethingness as well, likewise did not exist.

In this vacuum, we wish to dissolve even the potential of relationships themselves and make them something that must be developed somehow. An ordering causation should, in this experiment, pre exist even that. An IPS is the only answer that we can see for that.

Until now we have been speaking of the ability to take organized realization out of pre existing accretive formations, and from the above musings, we might discover that concepts alone might ideologically exist without external source other than an ability to cognate. That much alone is not difficult to imagine. Where difficulty emerges is in the question of how order might start without the ability of an IPS.

But in this imagination, we are describing a developmental process that starts with an ability that itself is not simple. This conundrum mimics what we find in the natural realms when we take something that looks to be the simplest, most disassembled element and begin looking more closely at it. The difference is that, in our imaginative exercise, we have included a cognitive IPS. Otherwise, what discriminator would there be to allow the inception of organization, even on this fantastic premise, starved as it is of pre exiting elements of which to relate.

The term discriminator is a curious one in this context, and it might work as a stand in for the term conceptualizing IPS, at least for the time being, so let us test it and see what traffic it can bear. We know that a discriminator would be one necessitator of order causation, but this causitor would also need some prod, some motivator, or energy. Let us suppose that these two elements are the most naked basis for the primal genesis of order, and from there also to more easily burgeon and grow. ENERGY and A DISCTIMINATOR.  And let us further suppose that the first concept to arise was the stirring incrimination,  just one empty moment to compare to the next and to the last.