The Theory of Handles and Relationships

In a sense, this is a theory of what it means to be a theory… — but that would actually make it appear rather insignificant. It is much more: It is also a description of relationships, and the role these play in our daily lives, and in our incessant search for love and the meaning of life in general.

This is a theory of cognition, and in particular of semantics. Handles are viewed as a subset of words (which are themselves subsets of language). Each handle is viewed as an especially significant sign of meaning, existence, or simply some sort of cognitive element in the mixed-up ether that makes up the universe of all ideas whatsoever.

Every person, human, being or life form is presumed to have the faculty to acquire and hold a number of such handles. The lower bound of this number range is 2. Everything is assumed to have a concept of at least 2 handles (for example: “myself” and “everything else”). The upper bound is far more variable — for the sake of argument, let me arbitrarily assume that the number for humans is on the order of 2000 (in part simply because the range 2-2000 is easy to remember). The range will vary not only across species, but also across all individuals within e.g. “human beings”. More is not better or worse than less — it is simply different.

Note that the vocabulary of words (and therefore of concepts in general) is assumed to be greater than the number of handles. The subset of handles is assumed to be something like a catalog of concepts used to orient thinking, speculation, interests, etc. Hence, for example: We might guess that for physicists such as Newton, Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler… that they might have all used a handle such as “motion” (whether or not they used the same language — that does not deserve to be the focus of our attention at this moment). This simply means that “motion” is simply one of the handles they might have used, much in the same way that a painter might carry a palette of colors as they paint a picture of the way they see the world.

The relationship between handles and relationships is by and large undefined — mostly because we have not examined these phenomena sufficiently to understand that such a relationship exists. This theory simply hypothesizes that there are some ways that handles and relationships are related… in a “wishful thinking” sort of way. It may be that well-defined mathematical formulas and algorithms are shared among the corresponding handles, or perhaps it may be that people in a relationship share a “way of thinking” about things that is related… — such as that Bob Dylan and John Lennon both might tend to think about things as songs, or that both William Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas tend to think in narrative manners, or that Vincent Van Gogh and Michelangelo might have thought in visual terms.

Since the precise manner in which handles and relationships are related, the “open” nature of the theory also depicts the individual as free to choose the manner in which to “construct” handles. It is hypothesized that the more relationships correspond in some (as yet unknown) manner, the closer, the deeper, the more significant the relationship is between two (or more) people. Perhaps different kinds of relationships also have different kinds of regularities among the manners in which handles correspond — such that friends might tend to have similar handle configurations, and that lovers might be more prone to complementary handles.

All such speculations are entirely unknown and remain yet-to-be examined.