Author Archives: robertallison

by

PAL: Ch.7 (pg. 197-216)

pg. 197

Religious concepts partake of and dilute magical thinking in the attribution of psychic power to a deity who exists “out of time. ” They accompany a transition from the non-causal dreamtime of myth and magical thinking to an objective world of serial time and causal relations. The agency within the local objects or totems of animism spreads to nature as a whole, setting in motion or guiding objects that have their own causal histories. Mind withdrawn from nature sequesters in deity. A monotheistic deity is a residue of animism liberated from objects and distributed throughout nature …

pg. 199

Tradition is the collective embodiment of the personal valuations of individuals extracted from conduct over many generations and distilled into the separate rules, customs and observances of the community. Law stabilizes, objectifies or codifies, and so validates a custom, and prescribes a more detailed inventory of punishments for its infraction. Eventually, the law individuates from the tradition in which it originated, supported by its own system of relations, context and coherence.

pg. 200

In sum, biological adaptation to the natural environment passes to psychic adaptation to a supernatural environment, finally to rational adaptation to a social environment. The one is nature as it is, the other mind invested in nature, the last, culture, a pure creation of though. While these three levels of adaptation, the drive-based or instinctual, the paralogical and the rational, occur in three different environments – biological nature, psychic nature, and the conventions of reason – all three intervene in everyday life.

pg. 202

The question arises whether a goodness that is exemplified by deity and motivated by religious mythology is superior to that which is sustained by magical thinking and enforced by superstitious fear. If conduct is beneficent, what is the relevance of the rationale that support it? Is an act of goodness for which there are rational grounds necessarily better than one that stems from the kindness of a simple man who acts without thinking, or the generosity of a native who acts on a magical belief?

pg. 214

Shelley wrote, “The One remains, the Many change and pass.” The pattern by which the wholeness of the one individuates to a multiplicity of part is the arising of particulars out of the totality of nature. This oneness dissipates in the surge to individuation, and is regained in the next cycle of activation. adaptation is the mediating process in the transition from wholes to parts, as from the totality of the inner self to the multiplicity of nature.”

by

PAL: Ch. 6 (Pg. 177-196)

pg. 177

In this respect, the emphasis in much of the neuro-biological literature on the relative contribution of specific brain regions, or right and left brain structures, tends to focus too much on which region or side of the brain correlates with a given behavior, at the expense of psychological and brain process. Problems with this approach have been discussed at length in other publications. In my view, the laterality of affect-development, as with so many other functional asymmetries, is an artifact of language dominance. It is also, in spite of the enormous energy devoted to the pursuit of such correlations, a trivial observation.

pg. 184

The exocentric value are more emphatic in percept-development, the egocentric values in act-development. Act development can lead to actions that assist as well as coerce, while object development can lead to victims as well as beneficiaries. Value is realized in the action-stream as self-realization, but the will can also be channeled into the perception stream as an outward derivation of feeling into object. Generally, action is the manifestation of will, which is primarily egoistic, while perception is the vehicle by which the other is realized.

pg. 185

Objects of desire – conceptual, intentional – have greater specificity and diversity than those of drive satisfaction. Desire is directed to a future object, and sustained over intervals of distraction. One could say that desire contemplates the object which drive seeks to acquire. The difference is that desire actualizes in an idea, not an object. The aim in both drive and desire is to posses the object, but desire is motivated not by the object, but the idea of the object or the idea of its possession. Desire objectifies in a thought or image – one thinks about one’s desires – while the thought or idea of the object tends to evaporate once it is concretely realized, at least for a time.

pg. 190

Thought tends to increasing analysis. The more analytic one’s objects, the less feeling in any one of them. Science analyzes objects to the limit, draining them of inherent feeling. The objects of those for whom interest settles at the outer reaches of perception have so individuated that the tributaries of feeling may be unfelt at the objective pole. This is equivalent to saying that feeling is attenuated by diffusion into tot many objects, reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s description of a good conversation as touching on everything and concentrating on nothing…. A proliferation of values in the self, no less than the world, can weaken the force of any one of them. A person driven by a single desire is saturated with a passionate intensity…. On the other hand, with too many values or beliefs none are deeply felt.

by

PAL: Ch. 5 / Ch. 6 (pg. 157-176)

pg. 156

The need for affirmation from others to affirm a love, or the reverse, in fear or hate, is no different than the need for physical entities to sculpt objects of less emotional valence. The specification of an object in perception results from a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic constraints on developing form. Similarly, a loved-object requires constraints on the affect-flow to sustain the feeling of love and object worth…. One way or another, the value instilled in an object must be validated if it is to be successfully revived, i.e. if the object is to remain desirable, beautiful, worth.

pg. 158

The self is a category of its own valuations, malleable, intangible, less stable than a diamond or a dog, but still an object with which we are fairly well acquainted, even if we have as little access to our own self as we have to the selves of others whom we profess to know quite well. Do we not often believe we know a person better than he knows himself? Would we grant to others what we deny to our own self? Kant thought it was impossible for the self to know itself as an object. The self of another is inferred from its actions, the personal self is intuited directly, reconstructed from intentions and patterns of past acts.

pg. 162

Selfless devotion is the signature of love, so an unselfish act is grasped as a sign of genuine feeling, but what do we look for in ourselves when we say we are in love? If we are uncertain of the love of another, can we be sure of our own affections? Should we examine our own conduct for acts of unselfishness, or do we more likely rely on the intensity of our feeling? In my far from scientific inquiry, I found that those who say they are in love and profess to be happy are no more or less reliable as to what love is than those who are searching for it and describe what the are looking for.

pg. 168

Though love, ideally, is unselfish, romantic love does have a quota of egoism. Possessiveness and jealousy cannot be dismissed as neurotic byproducts. They point to the need to protect that portion of the self-concept the beloved represents. We cannot extract one attribute of love, say, that it is unselfish and define love in terms of it. A particular constellation of concepts and feelings are unique to each lover. For this reason, romantic love does not generalize, say, to a love of humanity, for it is tied to specific needs and values in the self that cannot be appeased by anonymous others.

by

PAL: Ch. 4 / Ch. 5 (pg. 137-156)

pg. 138

The feeling of realness is not a criterion of reality. Unreal images can feel real, and vice versa. It is, rather, the feeling of vitality and movement in organism and in the world that determines the feeling of realness. The organism and its world count for something. Dewey wrote, feeling is “a name for the coming to existence of those ultimate difference in affairs which mark them off from one another and give them discreteness.”

pg. 141

Feeling that is midway between subject and object, that is, partly subjective, partly objective, is felt as interest, not having the full subjective intensity of desire, nor the full objective value of worth. Perry wrote, “That which is an object of interest is eo ipso invested with value.”

pg. 145

When interest accentuates the intrapshychic phase of the object formation, the valuation is felt as desire. The feeling is subject-centered. it belongs to the observer. The self wants (loves, desires) the object. The feeling of valuation is closer to the self-concept because the accentuation affects the object-concept as it individuates the self-concept. Often it is difficult to decide if the valuation is intra or extrapsychic. Is an object beautiful because I desire it or do I desire it because it is beautiful?

pg. 149

Teh self is a dynamic of beliefs and values, and a source of needs and interests that are not necessarily ingredients in a self-assessment. There is often a dissociation between what one desires and what one thinks one should desire, between the empirical and ideal self. Nor is it obvious that values can deposit, reflexively, in the very construct, the self, out of which they arise.

pg. 155

When we gaze at the world without attending to a specific object, intrinsic value is more or less equitably distributed in the visual array…. When we look at a particular object, say when a tree “catches” our attention, the value=stream is drawn into the object in the form of interest. An increase of interest, in the object, i.e. the transition from interest to worth, occurs at the expense of other objects in the field,

by

PAL: Ch. 3 / Ch. 4 (pg. 116-136)

pg. 117

It is impossible to say whether the feeling evoked by the memory helps to navigate the experiential context that the initial memory evokes, or whether the feeling elicits a richness of other feelings and the memories aroused by them. When we tap into the potential of an underlying concept to explore its context, we elicit those contents along with the unique emotional resonance that each memory calls up. Proust is the great example.

pg. 119

Even in drive, a given idea (construct, category) is not inextricably woven with a given affect. The shifting relations between feeling and memory, or feeling and idea (object, event), depend on the current moods, the passage of time, depth and context and the momentary focus of attention.

pg. 120

To be aware of a feeling is to have its ideational content in a state of object-awareness. Those who live resolutely in a world of objects, when the object, not its antecedent context, is the focus of interest, may have a shallow emotional life. Those who are vulnerable to the feelings within those objects, the feeling that is in the background out of which the objects individuate, have a more vivid and nuanced affective life.

pg. 125

When we recede from objects to a state of inner feeling, we recover the potential in the object that was given up in the constraints in perception, or in the drive to definiteness. We also recover the inner life of feelings–the psychic precursors of the object–that were lost when the object and its affect objectified.

pg. 128

Unlike consciousness, which apprehends objects but is not invested in them, and is evident in animals, value is generally conceded to be a uniquely human feeling that is projected onto external objects as a bridge from the subjectivity of the observer to the objectivity of the world.

by

PAL: Ch. 2 / Ch. 3 (pg. 96-115)

pg. 96

All mental “contents” undergo a translation from mind internal to mind external. Personal values and beliefs become impersonal customs or obligations (and the reverse)…. Various factors conspire to reinforce the boundary from self and world. However, the qualitative transition that is uncovered in pathological states is the strongest evidence for a continuum from self to world, or the realization of the world out of self. But this continuum can only be understood after careful philosophical reflection and it can only be felt during states of altered awareness.

pg. 97

the animistic sources of nature alive tap into a reality that is obscured once it develops to a rational cognition. The poet intuits this world and transports us to an ideal realm of “Spirit and the gods” at which moment the “real” world disappears before our eyes. Is the world of poetry a fantasy, or it is a higher truth to which philosophy can only aspire?

pg. 108

One can say that feeling is felt process in simpler organisms–it is the dynamic of their unreflective lives–while emotion is the experience of process in higher ones. A simple organism is its feelings, but complex (human, but perhaps lower) organisms have emotions. In emotion, we experience the life-animating process that actuallizes the person that we are.

pg. 111

The intentional realm is the vector from self to proposition, i.e. the transition through which the proposition actualizes. This process, the arc from will or self to object or proposition, is one of increasing objectification…. More precisely, the intentional is not the having an object or the not-having an object, but a feeling aligned with agency that is generated in the trajectory from self to object or idea.

by

PAL: Ch. 2 (pg. 75-95)

pg. 76

Subjectivity is the intrinsic relatedness, the is-ness or “inside” of a thing. IN higher cognition, the first awakening of an object splits the subjective into an inner and outer portion, with the “outside” an extension of the inside but still within it. The human mind is continuous with its objects in spite of the initial division.

pg. 77

The appearance of a subject announces a world, but the appearance of the world is necessary to individuate the subject. The objectivity of a world “outside” the mind, and the objects within the mind, results from a process of adaptation in which subjectivity in which subjectivity is coerced by sensation to an increasing multiplicity of forms. The partition of original wholeness leaves its mark in a life-long tension of autonomy with community, independence with need, individuation with immersion.

pg. 79

The conditions and limits of autonomy determine the boundaries of others and the world. A boundary takes shape once the world is perceived. Later, the self is bounded by internal objects that are felt to be a source (belief), a constraint (value) or an aim (concept) of thought. As the subjective comes to be populated with ideas, the inner realm replaces a world that is no longer one’s own. Eventually, autonomy shrinks to the narrow straits of the thinker.

pg. 82

The world detaches, so we can move about and act in it. The detachment of the world is necessary, inevitable. A world perceived as a cause of our states, not a product of them, gives the self free reign over its objects. Only in pathology is this process incomplete. Part of the feeling of freedom is that we do not believe that we are creators of the world. We could not be real agents if the objects we acted upon were felt to be the products of our imagination.

pg. 85

The partition of the subjective into subject and object is repeated over the continua in the nesting of constituents or sub-categories. The complexity results from a compounding of this process, it is not its explanation. The pattern of nesting in growth is a vehicle of analysis or specification. This pattern gives an increasing mental capacity in the evolution of organism. However, a higher cognition is not pre-destined, nor does it fulfill an aim to a specific target, but the process does tend to unfold in this direction. Specifically, the nature of becoming, and the pattern of growth over the “deep” time of evolution leads to “higher” states of existence, barring catastrophic alterations in nature herself.

pg. 94

If we seek to understand nature beyond its realization in mind, or brain process, it is not the perception but its ancestry that is the locus of scientific interest. Perhaps for this reason, Novalis wrote that “nature is living antiquity,” an epigram that captures and endorses the impossibility of personal access to, much less inter-subjective agreement on, the thing-in-itself, though from a theoretical standpoint we can scarcely do this with the objects of ordinary science,

by

PAL: Ch. 1 / Ch. 2 (pg. 55-75)

pg. 57

The object does not rest on – but consists of – its infrastructure; what the individual brings to the perception is an inherent part of the perception, not something the individual adds to or takes away from the an object. The space before my eyes, the field and the tree that stands within it, are a totality of mental spaces within which the tree is a focus of interest, while the entire visual scene, with the tree as its focus, indivduates through a microgenetic transitions of phases.

pg. 61

For an observer, internal relations objectify as  secondary or metapsychological judgements. To say that A is greater than B or that A loves B is not just to propose a relation between A and B. It is to declare that A and B are distinct, that they are externally related, the relation has a direction and that it can be formulated as a comparison or proposition…. A description of a relation is a meta-perceptual judgement. Locatives and prepositions, for example, describe relations among objects from the perspective of the observer, they are statements about perceptions, not perceptual relations. A description one step removed from the perception can never seize the actual event.

pg. 62

The relations that we do recognize, such as casual connection, though equally imperceptible, are inferred from the succession of diachronic events. We first identify a cause, thought it is far from clear how the actual transition comes about. We perceive a shift from past o present. We feel the momentum of the present toward the future. We infer causation backward from effects and forward from causes.

pg. 64

Both accounts hold that events are serially ordered our of unconscious simultaneity through a time-creating actualization or concrescence. We have some experience of this phenomenon in the serialization of dreams on awakening, when temporal order is realized out of a non-temporal unconscious.

pg. 70

Events and participants, large or small, depend on the foci of interest. The world is the totality of such events. What the world is at a given moment depends on whether a flea looks to the left or right. It is the totality of all occurrences from all perspectives or, perhaps, from only One.

by

PAL: Intro / Ch.1 (pg. 35-55)

pg. 38

It is really a question of how immersed a mind is in natural process. A dog is one with nature, more so than a human or a chimpanzee, less so than a fish; its present is part its physical passage, its brain is a source of behavior within a framework of world process. In human cognition, the enlarged duration of the present, the awareness of past and future, divides mind from nature, self from world.

pg. 40

What we really expect from ourselves, and each other, is social adaptation. Above all, one needs to fit in with family and community. Bad conduct is discouraged in various ways, and if very bad it is punished, but conduct at the altruistic pole is neither expected nor required.

pg.53

In contrast to this mode of thought, process thinking entails an event-ontology. For microgenetic theory, and object is always an event. It is not a slice in time but has a temporal history, minimally the change that actualizes the object, its momentary becoming-into-being. The event is the development of the object in a succession of phases over a duration of existence. An object is a theoretical construct in an extended duration that includes a no-longer-existing past.

pg. 54

How do we perceive stable objects if they are actualizations of change perceived in “pulses of consciousness”? The pulse creates an epoch, the epoch provides a category to stabilize the object, the object is the stable center of a segment of passage that is chunked into an event. The properties of the object are, like the object itself, classes or categories of features that stabilize change from one moment to the next.

 

 

by

PAL: Forward / Preface / Intro (pgs. 15-35)

At Bonnitta’s suggestion I am jumping into Process and the Authentic Life, even though I have yet to finish SEM. As time allows, I will continue my reading and posting from SEM as well.

pg. 15

Although the terminology varied and there were quarrels and quibbles about the exact boundaries between them, there emerged a general consensus that the most important philosophical questions can be reduced to these three:

1. What is the nature of being?

2. How do we know that what we believe to be true is indeed true?

3. How should our beliefs shape our behavior?

In rather obvious ways, of course, answers to any one of these questions usually have implications for the others. Primarily, however, it is the third question that is arguably the most important, and yet in most philosophical systems it is the object of the — and of the least satisfactory — discussion.

pg. 15

Indeed, it would be safe to say that as a society we have become highly cynical about morality, thought perhaps without being fully aware that cynicism is itself a specific philosophical stance, even a school with a particular history. We defend our values, if at all, not because they are better (it has become very unfashionable to make such claims), but because they are ours, or rather, I defend my values because they are mine.

pg. 19

All this in turn emerges from a distinctly counter-intuitive insight that has followed Brown’s work from its beginning in clinical neurology: that perception and action are not inverse functions (the input and output of cybernetic modeling), but rather parallel processes that emerge from within the psyche and go out into the world. In this book,, then, the process of valuation is shown to be yet another stream, or rather, an integral part of the same stream that produces perception and action.

pg. 19

Most of us like to think that our moral decisions, and in fact all our important decisions, are made by weighing the available alternatives in the given situation and choosing the on that seems best. And most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, would have to admit that this is seldom the case …. In this book, Jason Brown endeavors to show us why this is, and why it could scarcely be otherwise, give the construction of our brains and the way our minds have been formed and are being formed at every moment by the same dynamics which produce the growth and evolution of our brains.

pg. 25

Is speciation in the process of evolution analogous to specification in an act of cognition. Is the process through which species are formed relate in some way to the struggle and adaptation that every entity goes through in order to become what it is at any given moment.

pg. 35

The main point here, and the starting point for almost everything that follows, is that fully objective experiences are also subjective, in that they too emanate from the subject’s own beliefs and values. It is not that coercion represents a personal value, but that an event, coercive or not, is perceived and responded to in the context of character and personality.