Ancient Egypt still exists, although I haven't defined exactly what that means. I won't have to. The point is where it exists: in the matrix, by which I mean our shared language, a public project.
In hitting the keys, as of a piano, I somewhat expect "Ancient Egypt" to prove evocative: of hieroglyphics, of sphinxes, of pyramids... of mummies. That's all encoded in the music, as it were. On the other hand, you might be new to English and not have all those associations, which is fine. Ancient Egypt still exists.
The USA still exists, of course it does.
I seem to traffic in some nonsense wherein the word-meaning trajectories of all these words have undergone some tortuous twisted changes, or are about to.
How could I deviate from the standard predictable mush and expect to be understood? One doesn't just proclaim the non-existence of what's clearly real, and expect to make a dent, does one?
But then let's remember, debates about existence are already prevalent in what we call "academic circles" (more or less arcane) and even when they're not, we take them for granted. That people would debate whether "God exists" is not questioned. Clearly these debates occur.
"God" has a word-meaning trajectory in the matrix, and a spin, like the Higgs boson of zero spin.
Ancient Egypt still exists.
In literature, we cordon off some sandbox areas wherein authors are allowed to experiment. If we like their results, we cast some limelight in their direction, send sparks of fame and glory, maybe igniting something. Others will copy, if able, wherever success is to be found.
James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon... David Foster Wallace... Octavia Butler... am I planning to list all the writers that have twisted the language around? ... Buckminster Fuller... No, I'm not into making long lists. Leave that to computers.
My typical notation is [e0, e1, e2... eN], like in a math book, where "e" is for "element" and we have left-to-right indexing, entirely conventional however quasi-universal.
It's just that when nation-states join the mush between our ears, trapped in some deep-learning mesh of the neuronal maze, as popularized brain science would have it, then it's easier to see how they evoke a performance, our shared theater (the T in PATH: Philosophy Anthropology... History). They live in dreams, in iconography and prompt our gestures, our salutes.
The almost 200 nations (196?) are a part of that model UN people still carry around internally, along with childhood memories of classroom globes, and jigsaw puzzle nations no one agrees on any longer, when it comes to the details.
Pointing to Ukraine is hardly a trivial exercise these days, except in one's personal workspace, where you get your own globe, and set of magic markers.
Believe what you like in your rubber room reality. It's your model. Feel free to actively infer with it.
