Tag Archives: agency

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Magellanism

authentic artistic productions
the avant garde…
whisper unconscious koens
subliminal social suggestions
haunting the ready, the restless…
prepares ground
for punctuated emergence

what is this light ???
a cascading series
of erotic creative toggles
which vitalize the preparation
of this special autopoesis
the poetry of our collective dance
becomes obvious
in these special glimpses
of the great remembering

it’s more than the eros
of pursuing the excellent questions,
the loving play and design
of cognitive gifts and exercise…
it’s more than the sacred reverence
of our sanga in practice,
this emergent suchness,
exhibiting delicious blended elements
of both…
ah !!

at this intersection of our experience
a fresh, new, and alive we-ness emerges
mysterious, gorgeous, seductive presentations
the stuff of this new manifestation
the resonance of our fresh social moment
this precious group
this shared new luminance
new containers are formed
already brimming,
with our splendid light

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SZ. Pt.2 Interface Mathematics. pp203-259

p.205 Modern meta-mathematics and hence mathematical physics are “non-modelable” and in effect, pre-rational. They do not function in harmony with the perceptual foundations of the human mind, and hence cannot be modelled effectively in the imagination – and as a subset of self-similar reality, the mind should naturally be able to echo itself into a reflexive understanding of its own unified or nondual substrate as dependently arising in both external (objective) and internal (subjective) reality.

p.206 Mathematics is merely a tool for abstracting and interfacing the quanitiative/multiplicative aspects of the finite and infinite at the most abstract and general level of relation. This depth of generality in the embriogenesis of the concept gives mathematics its power and extreme applicability fro modelling relations in virtually all fields of conceptual, exploratory or empirical endeavour.

p.207 It is real relation itself, in this interface of mathematics with reality, that endows mathematics with its power of modelling relation. This is, in effect, a power of self-similarity between reality and its real echoes into its representational interfaces, and the same self-similarity is at work in the interface between knowledge itself (episteme) and reality (the ontic) interpenetrating and harmonising throughout Nondual Rationalism as a whole.

pp.209-211 This natural, intuitive or implicit logic – founded upon the human perception of sets as bounded collections – is encoded, if abstractly and incompletely, in the “part-whole axiom” of classical mathematics which states simply that “every set is greater than its proper subset”. … It is only when the self-identity of abstract categories comes into play that these natural faculties have no ground or traction in difference and begin to slip, leading to paradox.

Is a set a collection or a container? If it is a collection, or a “collection of objects”, as is commonly claimed, then the “empty set” (as I will show in more depth below) is inconceivable, unimaginable and illogical, and merely implies the absence of a set; a non-set. If a set is a container, on the other hand, which is needed to make sense of the non-collection of the empty-set, denoted, for example, by the notation {}, then an – such as that used extensively by Cantor and modern axiomatic set theory – is infinitely illogical and inconceivable because a container cannot sensibly be “infinite in size”; a boundary, by definition, cannot be boundless. An infinite container, then, would likewise be a non-container.

All sets as categories are now conceived in freedom from natural holarchy, causing a naïve disruption of the connections of percept taken for granted and forgotten in the movement into concept. These lost connections in naïve set theory are the bonds symbolically or axiomatically replaced in the newer axiomatic versions of set theory, and, as we will see, in the study of mereology, literally the logic or study of parts.

p.212 Neither the universal set nor the null set, are “proper” sets, in the implicit holonic logic of sets as bounded-collections, or part-wholes; they break away from the relative world of form into the absolute realm of the formless. They possess the absolute and unbounded aspects of affirmation and negation, respectively.

p.219 The Nondual-Rational and Empirical Embriogenesis of Mathematics.

p.223 The Polarity of the Finite and Infinite.

The finite and infinite are the polar aspects of boundedness and unboundedness fro the relative and absolute scopes, respectively. And in terms of pure-relation, they are the quantitative aspects of our polarity of scope – the polarity and “contra-diction” at the very foundation of quantitative reasoning itself, because our primitive notions of number correspond precisely to boundary, … The absolute scope, then, deals in the generally ineffable aspects of unity and infinity, and the relative scope deals in the polarities and multiplicities of the finite.

p.228-229 Mathematician Dr. Reviel Netz “… the defining property of infinity today is that a set’s cardinality [its number of elements] is equal to the cardinality of some real subset of that set.

The new definition of the infinite, like that of the finite, is essentially a codification, incorporation and encapsulation of the Galilean part-whole paradox, rather than its resolution. We have rightly accepted the paradoxical nature of the infinite, in its identity to the finite, but in simultaneously discarding its opposition we have yet to understand its nature. We have yet to tune and triune the paradox into a truly nondual identity of opposites, and thus into a triune interface of inter-expression.

The paradox has not been solved by this definition, but has now simply become the definition, subsumed under the identity of the concept or category of the set.

p.230 Indeed the human mind can reason about and, we will see, understand the infinite but this understanding simply hasn’t made its way into philosophy yet.

p.235 Cantor’s project then, like Zeno’s, is not incorrect, but simply incomplete, being subsumed now by the identity of the category.

p.236 In short, only for mathematicians, and essentially only in the language of mathematics, has the paradox been solved. For the bulk of us still wrestling with the angel of understanding, we remain stuck in a head-lock with the same old troubling paradoxes – still confused by “self-nesting” violations of the implicit holonic logic of sets and the relations between the infinite and finite – as between God and man.

p.237 Mankind as a whole seeks not merely abstract, mathematical and syntactic answers, but also to grasp imaginable and visualisablesemantic answers; answers that make sense to the human mind at all levels, from percept to integrated concept.

p.238 Merely accepting the paradox into the hermetically sealed axiomatic layer of tacit assumptions – with no explanation of its core polarity whatsoever – gives the common impression that the problem has been solved.

p.239 Principle 6: The Pearl Principle of Axiomatic Encapsulation.

The tendency to encapsulate irreconcilable paradox into principle; dilemma into dictum; enigma into equation; nonsense into nomenclature; or ambiguity into axiom – in order to reduce the irritation and stress from repeated and constant contact with the unknown.

How do we take the knowledge that this is our tendency and continue to work toward ever deeper clarity without falling into using it? especially the nomenclature clause!

Addressing this, Joel and Glisten talked about it in this recording

Call with spinbitz, Mon Apr 02 2012, 08:08:40

p.242 So, with the preliminary distinction between the absolute and relative scopes, and the infinite and finite aspects of unity, the leap of intuition from bounded and relative notions of unity in the multiplicity of everyday objects, to the Infinite and univocal “ONE is ALL” in the nondual, becomes more fully explicated and much more easily replicated or communicated at the cognitive and logical level.

p.243 Infinite unity includes ALL, period, so there can only be ONE. This simplest of ideas is easily forgotten and the words blurred into new meanings and confusions.

Infinite Unity, being unbounded and absolute, cannot participate in relational, and hence mathematical operations. Without boundaries, it cant relate. It is ineffable. It cannot be added to, subtracted from, divided by or multiplied, because by definition it unfolds and enfolds ALL in existence; there can be nothing to add to everything and nowhere else to subtract it to. There is nothing else to relate Infinite Unity to and no outside perspective, operation/operator or implicit hidden set, from which to withdraw or transfer any arbitrary qualities. The “ONE” is not a number, it is “inquantate”, because Infinity itself, the boundless ALL, is not a definable or “boundable” magnitude.

p.245-246 Anywhere on the immanent-teanscendent axis that we place the solidus boundary of the one, we still have infinity on both sides, and thus – no matter what the scale of the volumetric solidus/viniculum – it is always exactly in the middle, yet the infinity has not been quantitatively decreased by half even if you discard one half for the other.

This division of unity into polarity …is therefore not properly mathematical or quantitative, but pre-mathematical and pre-quantitative or meta-paradigmatic; at the vision-logic level of meta-mathematical cognition (e.g. the VLE). It is merely a percept integrated conceptual exfoliation of a possible intrinsic relation, or a way of conceiving the polarity between The Infinite and finite unities. It is this vision-logic, nondual-rational, or trans-rational polarity within which the mind can cycle. It is also, essentially, the meta-mathematical abstract rendering of the union between God and man; the absolute ineffable Infinite Unity and the relative, effable finite unity as the solidus-viniculum between infinite immanence and transcendence.

p.249 Buckminster Fuller’s most famous and misunderstood maxim, arguably, is “unity is plural and at minimum two”. When properly unpacked into the imagination, this enigmatic phrase reveals an important yet deceptive;ly simple duality which opens the way to grasping the fundamental difference (and polar integration) between infinity and number. This concept is also essential to Operational Mathematics because it is the essence of finite volumetric extension and relation and hence is key to sensorial modelability. “A system, says Bucky, is a ‘conceivable entity’ dividing Universe into two parts: the inside and the outside of the system”.

p.252-253 To be clear, there is indeed Emptiness or infinity within all numbers, forms and boundaries, and this Emptiness and infinity is the source of number and form itself, but this Emptiness or infinity is never ultimately reached or encapsulated in the symbol-system itself. It is always critically sub-representational,

… the distinction between infinity and number continues our visual polarity between the formlessness of Emptiness and the boundedness of form. The abstraction is given an experiential and sensorial grounding in the causal-logic of extension and, as we will see, this allows it to retain a connection with the causality which, through billions of years of evolution, has informed the innate and powerful imagination of mankind, in its holarchic navigation between agency and communion.

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PAL. Chapter 23. Wholeness and the creative Life. pp.603-634.

 

Most of what passes as knowledge in people who are reasonable is provisional. Even the most indisputable facts can be disputed on some grounds.

The average person is inclined to accept as true that which is consistent with his beliefs rather than waiting to determine whether the matter is rue or not before ha commits to believe it.

To say a belief is objective is not to say it is true. Only that it is shared by others in a group or community. To say a belief is subjective is not to say it is false, only that it is idiosyncratic and not shared by others. The more idiosyncratic the belief, the more fantastical or incomprehensible the content, the more the belief approaches a delusion – or creative discovery. The more widespread the belief, the greater the consensus, the more belief approaches fact or dogma.

The pursuit of truth must proceed with a suspension of belief and a profession of lack of knowledge. Perhaps this is easier to do in science, which deals with relatively impersonal facts, but not of course when those facts (values) are bound up with the vanity and ambition of the scientist, or when they threaten to undermine another belief system, e.g. evolution and divine creation. A spirit of doubt, uncertainty, openness, even mystery, is essential for discovery.

… it is quite hopeless to change the moral character of someone – much less an army, country, mob – bent on a malevolent undertaking. The greater the disparity in beliefs or values, the less hope of moral conversion. The psychological transformation that is required for such a conversion is not unlike a realignment of faith or a shift in a scientific paradigm.

Perhaps reason does not always prevail in the decisions of a life because a life lived according to reason, or its correlate in strict moral rules, may not be a life worth living. The path laid out by logic, … , may not be the most scenic or interesting. The highway of truth may be a less exciting voyage than the byway of fortune.

Many of the most perceptive of moralists and the most poetical of the philosophers have asked whether the human spirit seeking self-realisation is not tethered to choking by layers of obligation, manners, responsibilities, the oughts of decency and consideration. The fear id that the social and self censure of moral acts will de-nature the spontaneity of non-moral action, e.g. that a habit of self-denial may smother the creative spirit. The artist is particularly sensitive to this concern, for his conduct embraces work and life in a way that is foreign to the average person. The artist more than most must steer a path between the imaginative and the real, self-expression and constraint, the wishful delights, the shackles of convention, and the more unusual and brazen the personality, the more difficult the adjustment.

The ancient idea of a man as an animal tamed by imperial reason is a false description of the human psyche. We have learned from behavioural anthropology and the bloody history of the past century that the most primitive of communities is no less moral than the most advanced culture. Reason can justify good or bad intentions, while magical or syncretic thinking can promote peace and co-operation as much as barbarism. There is no evidence that ancestral societies, given the harsh conditions, are less moral than contemporary ones.

A thoughtful assessment of the architecture of the mind leads to the conclusion that the qualitative shift from unconscious to conscious thought is not a relation of the animal to the rational, but a successive analysis of a non-temporal core into temporal objects. When we descend into the dark night of the soul, we do not find brutal, immoral and murderous impulses, rather a different mode of thinking: paralogic, animism, symbolism, metaphor.

The implementation of an action by character in relation to available choices, and the growth or decline of character in the options that are chosen, are the inheritance of each new instance of self in the recurrence of a living moment. The ancestry of every act is successively realised in each momentary existence. What counts is Now. Past acts do not exist except as a ground for the occurrent state. Yet we do think of a life as a collection of acts, responses, initiatives, that must be taken as a whole.

The microphysics of birth and death that frame a life, a day, a moment, a particle, have their analogy in the resignation and renewal that punctuates the reflective life. Self- realisation is not an accomplishment but a process that must be reasserted and renewed.

Life is the one great idea an individual has that pours itself out onto the pages of daily living, except that the jackets to the book are the fatal limits to its continuation, save for the debt to writers past or readers future – our personal or literary ancestors and descendants – who are illusory bridges to the bound and unbound volumes of innumerable other life stories.

Creativity is volition in service of novelty in which the agent is given over to the involuntary act.

(emphasis mine)

The agent accedes control to the volition that runs through him, not as a voluntary impulse where he is acting as a conscious doer, but as a felt creation of which he is a product.

The ability to assume an attitude of passivity or receptiveness is the essential character of the creative personality. The air of authority or assurance that one sees now and then in creative people is merely an attempt to achieve mastery of the conditions of life so the individual can surrender to the creative impulse. This, incidently, is an important piece of any theory of responsibility. The feeling that an action is one’s own, that it belongs to the self, or emanates from the self, is the basis for responsibility. However, this may occur in the absence of a feeling of agency.

The traction of the past weighs heavily on the freshness of the moment. One wants to shed the familiar garments for the naked sonorities of innocence and awe, feel the power sleeping in the subtle ferocity of words, listen to ancient wisdom, silent, at the throne of magic, possibility.

The conscious mind does not invoke, it edits what unconscious mind has written, which is I believe the direction of thought itself, from obscurity to light.

Authenticity is not found in the assessment of acts “from outside” as a judgement, or in a feeling that action is fluid or that conflict is absent, even if the goal of self-realisation is to be whole in every act. The transition to the concrete is not merely for comfort in acting. The unbroken is sensed by an intuition that is given whole as an immediacy that does not lead to something beyond itself.

Conscience refers to the effort at authenticity in a given act, but the feeling of having lived with authenticity is an intuition that pertains to a lifespan coherence of conduct with character. Self-realisation applies to personality in art, to character in ethics. Character is personality with ego- and exo-centric values at stake.

Knowledge partitions the self into beliefs, values and desires. Each is defined by the distribution of personal and impersonal conceptual feelings.

Experience is shaped in a way that is irreducibly subjective. Intuition is a way of knowing the rightness of action in relation to that experience. Ultimately, intuition and authenticity concern the view from inside, i.e. what a thing or person is.

The standard for intuitive truth is not the correspondence of scientific relations but the coherence or rightness of intrinsic relations.

The greater the depth of intuition, the closer to character or personality, the more resistant to verification. If adequately realised, the contextual relations recur and enclose a succession of nested particulars.

Coherence simply requires a correlation of self-nature with conduct,not good or bad acts. A malicious person may act in a malicious way or perform a good act, but he is no more or less authentic for the choice than a good person who acts well or badly.

Sel-realisation is the completion of existence of all entities, not the satisfaction of a momentary self.

Thus the stability of the self-concept does not owe to an unchanging core that is accessible to conscious thought. It is not a matter of a self that satisfies its desires, but realises the full actuality of the person.

Life is enacted in struggle. In the ordinary life, one adapts as best he can. The life of the genius is the fulfilment of the potential of self through works of art or science in spite of the claims of others. But for the great soul the other is “represented” in the self, and self-realisation is equally a realisation of the other’s needs.

The entity specifies a field in opposition. It defines by way of contrast what it is not by becoming what it is. … The concept of the self as having a subjective and an objective nature entails a contrast or opposition in every act of cognition or self-realisation. However, in the second sense of contrast, every particular that individuates is felt to be opposed not only to what it might have been or to a field of antecedent potential, but to another particular with which it is coordinate or coextensive. … In sum, every object in a perceptual field is a contrast with every other object, especially those adjacent objects (or colours) that form its demarcations. And, every object in the field is opposed to the antecedent ground out of which it individuates.

Though we find duality in every aspect of mind, the dual as an explanatory principle is not itself explained. The contrast of thought and language, or mind and world, is an artificial duality. They are interdependent phases in succession, not co-ordinate oppositions.

Even if truth and falsehood can be construed in a binary manner within a system or language of logic, most things in the world merge into other things, yet we still focus on the extremes, not the transitions. This is a result of the substantialist bias in thought. … The relative deafness or blindness to continua and the predilection for pairs in opposition occurs because the mind is more comfortable with polarities or contrasts than with transitions. The category stabilises the object over a range of transitions, while the transitions themselves are invisible to thought.

One can say, the whole gives way to the parts, which then serve as irreducible wholes for further analysis. No matter how deeply the spectrum is analysed, the termini are categories for analysis and instances in a (prior) category out of which they individuate.

In all forms of perception, we are aware of the objects (categories) the mind produces, not the temporal process (change) through which they arise, nor of the transition form one momentary object or state of the world to the next.

Unity is a dynamic harmony, not a spatial homogeneity. In oneness there is no division, no specification. Once a line is drawn, unity may persist but oneness is broken. A commitment is a loss of possibility. Every act embodies its negation. Something is emptied by the enactment, and defined by the non-act on the far side of its boundaries. … There is no oneness in consciousness, for its essence is the relation of self to image or object, but there is a unity that begins with the duality of parts and wholes, of relata and plenitudes. Oneness is the sought after, the profound but never uncovered primordium from which unity and diversity emerge. This primordial oneness is glimpsed in the recognition of multiplicity or many-in-oneness that leads to an inference of origins in the intuition of an unmarked whole. Self-realisation is the experience of becoming into being as every entity, to exist, strives to become what it is.

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PAL. Chapter 19. Thought and Action. pp.509-530

 

The analogy is with the choice of a word … we have the experience of searching for the right word. … We may even have the initial letter or sound, and search of r the phonological content. The feeling of agency that occurs with the search is not a volition applied to the “retrieval” of the word from memory, but rather, the feeling of agency arises in the process of word specification. A search that is within an object or semantic category is not merely linguistic, but ideational. A conceptual search is also agentive, though it is marginally intentional, since the object of the search is imprecisely known. In both cases we struggle to find the right word, or capture the concept it vaguely subtends, or we mine the concept for its most befitting, alluring or poetic realisation.

When action is required, all the predictions go out the window. The action may or may not be reasonable, or justifiable in retrospect, but it is not determined or sanctioned by a pre-packaged logic or an unconscious rationale. The unconscious has a logic of its own that differs from the a of consciousness. The unconscious impulse is often in defiance of reason.

We would not expect the “same” person to act impulsively on one occasion and deliberately on another when the occasions are similar. To the extent that actions are consistent, they show that a change in character is glacial compared to that of circumstance.

The configuration that discharges in a spontaneous act undergoes individuation when the act is postphoned. The resting valence of the ego- and exo-centric dispositions may then fluctuate as one set gains the ascendancy. In principle, a delay permits further specification of the dominant value-set, perhaps more often muting expression than enhancing it, as contemplation or persuasion sorts out the most judicious, advantageous or moral course to follow.

The contrast of spontaneity and deliberation is that of automatism and freedom. This contrast is central to the relation of thought to action.

In certain cases, the very occurrence of deliberation, in replacing action with thought when action is required, is a species of immorality.

The value configuration undergoes a gradual evolution with age and experience, hopefully in the direction of a lessening of egoism. However, at any stage in life, unless the individual undergoes a personal crisis or a spiritual conversion, the equilibrium of self and other is unlikely to dramatically shift simply though learning.

When a decision is distributed over many people with differing views, or when one person holds beliefs and values that are incompatible, or if one set of values does not predominate, conflict or compromise is inevitable. The individual is paralysed by indecision, action is replaced by consensus, diplomacy becomes an end in itself. Strong character, purpose and determination at one extreme, blind faith, totalitarianism, mob action at the other, enjoy a certainty that is not shared by a democracy of opinion which, by its own edict, cannot satisfy every claim.

An impulse that is delayed and replaced by language and/or thought does not easily recapture the passion or dedication of the act that was postponed, unless the intervening phase serves, in a single-minded way, to shore up the initial impulse.

Conscious choice arises when a phase prior to the individuation of an action is retarded in its transit, so that the phase of selection, not the act that is selected, becomes a focus of reflection.

The postponement that takes unconscious commitment to conscious choice is consistent with the evolutionary principle that the “higher” (later) is not a cognitive or evolutionary add on, but a branching of “lower” (earlier) uncommitted stages.

Too many avenues of self-realisation dissipate the intensity of voluntary feeling, while a lack of options, if not coerced, or a habit of repetition, discharges (the self) directly in the act. An examination of the micro-structure of choice, (Brown, 1996) affirms that concepts are not conveyed, but survive into consciousness, as deliberation or indecision uncovers the covert struggle in their actualisation.

The values of self and other are co-temporal in their origination, and continuous in the process leading from self to object. When two egocentric desires or values clash independent of the needs of others, the choice is non-moral. When ego-and exo-centric values clash, the choice is moral. Since values derive from drives, which are adaptive, the origin of every value supposes a social factor.

Only when a person is oblivious to his own motivations can an act be considered an end in itself.

Each act of cognition, taken as a momentary state, specifies an aim. The aim – goal, end – becomes clear as it is realised. The conscious aim is not the construct that initiates the action. That some aims are ends and others are means stretches the causal theory of conduct over a concatenation of acts. From the standpoint of process theory, the distinction of ends and means is probably barren of import. The means/ends distinction requires a reconstruction over a series of acts of those that can be considered means and those that can be considered ends. In fact, the end of each act, conceived as a means to a subsequent act or a terminus of the current one, is in both instances the aim of its actualisation.

The lack of conflict, the naturalness of an action, not its rightness, is a mark of authenticity or coherence. … We perceive a spatial or synchronic coherence in the interlocking pattern of everyday objects. This coherence depends on the seeming immediacy of perceptual contact. Another, deeper coherence concerns the temporal or diachronic pattern through which the spatial elements are derived. Action is diachronic, though it becomes sychronic in the agents perception. Diachronic coherence is felt or intuited, not directly perceived.

The conceptual and the material, like the mental and the physical, are symbiotic concepts. The one supposes the other, to which it is a response. A fixation on facts as building blocks can suffocate an ambiguity that may be our best approximation to truth. Assertion and refutation seem to be the sole paths to knowledge, but what sort of truth survives? A negation, unlike a refutation, constrains; it does not reject but exposes the nugget of truth that remains after a mountain of error has been excavated. The limits of any theory are at stake when anything is described, for a description is a piece of the theory that supports it. For every category, there is another just beyond its contours. Every statement plumbs the depths of the presuppositions on which everything depends.

(emphasis mine)

We do not attribute the same degree of volition to immoral acts as moral ones, regardless of whether they are spontaneous or deliberate. This dissociation introduces mercy and compassion into the system of justice, but makes no sense at all from the standpoint of human psychology.

The self may have some independence from its causal inheritance, through contingency and the duration of the present, but intention still collapses into character.

Values enrich those [personality] constructs that incline the self to personal or social ends. They facilitate dispositions to configure concepts and their implementations in words and acts.

The option of choosing right from wrong and the intention that inheres in an act of choice are an origination myth on the unknown antecedents of acts. Like any myth, this one survives and is perpetuated because it satisfies human needs, agrees with common sense and is necessary for justice, but also because it discharges a society of the responsibility for creating its own saints and monsters.

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PAL. Chapter 18. Efficacy and Illusions. Pp 486-508.

 

Choice is a fork in the road of value that gives direction to agency and intention. The feeling of agency is value flowing from the self into action.

Actions go out to the world from the self as occasions of will or desire. Objects and events come to the self as occasions of interest or accident.

… a deeper understanding of freedom, choice and efficacy entails a radical re-thinking of the perceptual process, no less than that of action, since the feeling of agency is largely perceptual.

Agency and choice come to the fore in action, especially in verbal imagery (inner speech), as an accentuation of penultimate phases in the language act. This experience is central to the feeling of conscious choice, intention and desire.

In perception and action, there is a progressive analysis of character (self) to choice (selection), decision (specification) and effectuation.

… the concept of god’s agency is derived from the feeling of human intention, as the perception (theory) of object causation is derived from the feeling of agent causation.

The transition from potential to actual is causal if it is divisible into intervening phases, but this does not apply if potential and actual are part of – as stem to leaf – the same entity. Potential perishes at the moment of actuality, not successively at each phase in the path to the actual, since potential at each phase is part of the actuality it leads to, i.e. part of the epoch of its actualisation. Potential and actual are successive phases in a single momentary existence.

The origin of agency in early cognition is also the beginning of a theory of subjective time.

The control of the object that is the seed of agency is less a projection of human thought onto nature than an elaboration of indeterminateness in natural process.

The argument that advanced forms exist in earlier ones in statu nascendi is also the critique of an evolutionary account of consciousness and value. Purposefulness achieves its aim when it terminates. The aim is not given beforehand.

Agency in organism is the basis of a theory of object-causation. Intentionality in organism, as nature individuates still further into human thought.

The distinction of cause and effect in object-causation is parallel to the distinction of self and world in agent-causation. In the former, such problems as the demarcation of the cause, its transition to the effect or the attribution of contingency to accidental causation resist analysis by the methods of the very theory they subtend. Since they cannot be explained by the doctrine of external relations, they vitiate the theory. A theory that cannot explain its core assumptions is vacuous, not merely incomplete. A persistent incoherence is close to an unacknowledged refutation. Similar problems bedevil agent-causation, but here, contingency translates to free will and the connection of cause to effect is even more obscure.

The experience of direct knowledge of our inner states is in striking contrast to the indirect knowledge of ignorance that we have of the series of co-temporal states of the world and other minds. The immediacy of awareness for our won thoughts does not occur for the internal states of other objects or the thoughts of others, unless one accepts the possibility of mental telepathy. (emphasis mine) The conscious anticipation of a coming state and the feeling of agency and intention contribute to the continuity from one state to the next.

The other side of a lack of direct knowledge of processes linking the succession of states in the world is the inference of lawfulness in physical passage, whether due to probabilities, causal necessity or divine guidance. Since ordinary objects do not contain selves that can intercede in the flow of world events, they are inferred to be the outcomes of a causal series that, in principle, traces back to the beginnings of the universe. … For example, we tend to postulate hidden causes (motivations, conflicts, etc.) to explain the actions of others, which they believe are freely chosen.

While the presence of choice in nature is consistent with some interpretations of process metaphysics, the feeling of choice in nature is sensed primarily in the “primitive” thought of animism and dream cognition. The uncertainty in quantum theory is ordinarily interpreted not in terms of choice but of probabilities which collapse, retroactively, into causal effects. If mental causation (agency) is impressed on the order of natural events as object causation, free will might extend into the world as choice, either as contingency or in the belief that god intervenes in the stream (cycle) of change. In any event, our concepts of objective change have their sources in physical experience.

In sum, freedom in non-cognitive nature, as well as in the brain state, is grounded in contingency or probability or creative advance, yet the concept of object causation is inherited from human agency, just as the concept of probability is inherited form human choice. The potential, the novelty and the possibility are so forceful an experience with an image in the mind survive in the contingency of external objects. The feeling of volition that is lost as the object exteriorises is replaced by the feeling of a causal force that is extrinsic to the observer. The will exteriorises with the object as its causal power. The free will that imposes certainty on indecision becomes the power of causation tha imposes necessity on contingency.

I think the causal theory of nature is a strong extension of the feeling of agent causation to external objects, while contingency in nature is a weak extension to objects of the feeling of choice, possibility and personal freedom. There is a complementary relation between, on the one hand, the rigid laws of macrophysics and the uncertainties at the quantum level with, on the other, the certainty of agent-causation and the freedom – creativity, uncertainty etc. – of personal action. … The “laws” of the mind that give the objects of perception (and science) become the physical laws that govern mind independent entities as well as mind.

(emphasis mine)

The sense of self as persistent over time is the result of a positive illusion of a prolongation of its arising and a negative illusion of a lack of incessant perishing. The replication of the arising over the perishing of each moment swamps the perishing and accentuated event recurrence, transforming events into objects, while the obscuration of the perishings by the new arisings accounts for the hardening of objects into substances that appear permanent. The stability of the self mirrors the illusion of a dynamic will, as stability and flux achieve a compromise of permanence and relationality, or inflexibility and change. The will cuts across the perceptual boundary of mind and world.

An object cannot be what it becomes until it becomes what it is, but it cannot become what it is until it is already that object (category). Creativity is the realisation of what in some sense one already knows, as contingency is the realisation of what is not known until it is realised. The juxtaposition of the agency of self-realisation with the contingency of perception extends the novelty of basic entities to the freedom of the will, and extends the freedom of the will to possibility in the world.

To say, I am the other, is literally true.

Reality is given by a conspiracy of the senses, as scientific objectivity is given by a consensus of opinion, not by the intrinsic properties of what is perceived.

(emphasis mine)

Action, especially altruistic action is neutralised by objectivity, as decision, however rational, is not decided by reason.

Self and act are one state.

Reality is the process of individuation, the transformation of wholes-to-parts, and the categories that turn such transformations into stable forms.

The belief in one world of private experience and another of public events is deeply entrenched. To think otherwise borders on mysticism, to feel otherwise is psychosis. The “gap” from mind to world is fundamental to the entire edifice of western thought. Yet the assumed confrontation of the self with objects that are, in fact, tributaries of the observers mind is an error only slightly less pernicious than the separation of mind from physical nature.

The creative would seem to be the “highest” expression of free will, as habit and repetition are its nadir. But the creative is not a product of the self, for the self is recreated with its contents. Process is creative at every phase.

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PAL. Chapter 17. Luck and the Pursuit of Happiness. Pp457-483.

 

In utilitarian ethics, happiness is an impersonal measure of the quantity of the pleasure in the greatest number of people, though personal happiness is pleasure in the free exercise of personality. … Virtue is a quality, happiness is a state.

An obligation that has not been assimilated as a personal value is not a genuine desire. To the extent it is not internalised, it is felt as coercive and according to the degree of resistance, it is an obstacle to happiness.

Virtuous actions that strive for the greatest good may elicit resistance or punitive action, nor do they necessarily lead to happiness or satisfaction, which probably depends less on one’s accomplishments in the world, or for others, than on the intimate rewards and pleasures of daily life.

… individual agency is diluted in the “group mind”.

The calculus of the utilitarian is closer to the morality of states than an ethics of character.

One can ordain a homogeneity of goods, but not of desires.

The more impersonal the perspective, the more axiomatic the rule, the more artificial the methodology … , and the more the morality becomes a meta psychological attitude distinct from its affective base.

A detached perspective reduces self-interest and should increase the moral value of an action, but it is engagement, not detachment, that aligns moral feeling with right conduct. Self-denial and detachment are an insufficient foundation for happiness and no warrant for moral conduct.

The move from intrinsic to extrinsic relations is the shift from personal value, which is qualitative, to impersonal fact as a quantity.

Those who do not struggle to survive are more prone to depression and more likely to kill themselves. In this regard, even illness and disability are not barriers to happiness.

Happiness consists in the ability and opportunity to seek that which one desires. It is the enjoyment of a subjective aim, an alignment with the forward-going process of life, a finding that contrasts sharply with the Buddhist concept of desire as the source of suffering and the extinction of desire as the source of happiness.

Even if one accepts that fairness or generosity is a pre-requisite for moral conduct, the appeal to common sense rather than argumentation exposes gaps in the analysis that are fatal to the principle. A philosophy that avoids psychology by positing givens just when psychological explanation is required may constitute an edifice that is logically consistent all the way down, until it arrives at its own foundations.

We cannot derive a feeling from a rational argument.

A person can have immense pleasure on hearing a new piece of music for which he has not yet developed a desire. Even solitude is a source of inestimable pleasure. Such observations raise questions for any theory of pleasure that depends on the value of its objects.

A moral duty or rule as a guide to conduct is inadequate, and inorganic, in that it attempts, by fiat rather than by example, to induce people to share in what is a spontaneous impulse of innate empathy.

Feelings are tributaries of drive that transition will into action in combination with object-concepts.

An action cannot be severed from the private states of those involved, but engages character intrinsically at all phases, not as a subjective quality added to an objective fact. Specifically, the principle of greater happiness cannot implant an obligation in an agent irrespective of his private states when the effect of his conduct is assessed by an appeal to the private states of others.

The concept of luck, contingency and probability relate to objects in the world, not psychic events. The concepts of agency, certainty and choice relate to processes in the mind, not events in the world. Fate is an overarching concept that removes agency in a way that luck does not.

The fact that the present, as it becomes past, can be revised from a future perspective undermines the stability of an outcome-centered moral theory. We use our best judgement with the knowledge at hand, but a good act can be reinterpreted as a bad one, and the reverse, as conditions change. Luck is also like this.

The genetics of constitution and the accidents of parenting are a bit like karmic transmission, though displaced later in maturation, where one is a product of an ancestral complex, yet posses some degree of freedom for self-betterment or the capacity for degeneration. That intrinsic constitutive luck is essential to character would seem inarguable, since the installation of exocentric values depends so heavily on experience in childhood and on the moral instruction and example of parents.

For the individual, self-justification is primary, moral or rational. Ideally, he should be his own judge and jury, though an appraisal by others is essential for punishment, as well as to modulate the self-serving effects of denial, forgetting and rationalisation.

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PAL. Chapter 15. Moral Conflict. pp.407-430

 

From an external standpoint, an obligation is independent of what the subject wants to do, but for the subject, there is no felt obligation if it is concordant with his desire. When the ought and the want coincide, the ought drops out. The conflict between the ought and the want is part of the sense of obligation, which is the feeling that one should or must do something for the self or for another person that is contrary to one’s desires.

The ‘good’ thing to do may be consistent with character, but it may not be the ‘right’ thing to do. The good is centered in character, the right in conduct. The good is closer to intentions, the right to outcomes. If the immediate outcome is good, and its subsequent repercussions bad, the decision might have been good, i.e. based on good intentions, yet the action might have been wrongly chosen. In contrast, a decision based on value stems from character. It is what is considered the right and natural thing to do regardless of the outcome, regardless of whether it is “objectively right”, assuming that could be determined at the time of the action.

If the moral logic of a computer could be programmed in advance with a hierarchy of valuations, and could calculate the probability of the most favourable outcome rather than the antecedents of choice, motivation or personal repercussion, would this help the individual decide what to do? And does this mode of thought have anything in common with human cognition?

… from a biological point of view, the prospective direction of responsibility to a child, which is the forward direction of evolution, outweighs the retrospective direction to parents, who are irrelevant from an evolutionary, i.e. reproductive, standpoint.

If moral statements are neither true nor false, true statements do not lead to moral obligations. A statement of truth is itself al kind of action, a verbal act, and does not lead to another motor or verbal action. Action is not the outcome of truth, but a means to clarify uncertainty. It aids in the closure on indecision. In this respect, an action is itself a test of the truth of a statement, thus it is a kind of truth, or a search for truth. One could also say that the finality, irrevocability and definiteness of an action add a new truth to what previously existed.

There is much to be said for the notion that the most fundamental facts are errors that enjoy their truth from the limits of our capacity to refute them. Science attempts to test a belief for its truth, though a profound truth, as Niels Bohr once remarked, may not contrast with an error or a falsehood but with another profound truth.

Subjectivism is neither impersonal nor egocentric. Social adaptation sees to that. Impersonality is achieved, not by objectivity or rationality, but through empathy, self-denial and acts of “imaginative fusion”.

Morality is, finally, an obligation to one’s ideal self or the best of one’s character.

Logical arguments are an uncertain guide to the thought process, as are the choices that emerge from them. We tend not to sound a position too deeply or rationally, but rather take it on a ‘gut’ feeling and then seek arguments to support it. William James wrote that philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than reason, the reason coming afterwards as a justification.

… the masses absorb and tacitly condone the values responsible for their own shame or subjugation.

The obligations of convention have the force of moral duties precisely because they are internalised in character, even if they are independent of knowledge or agency at the time the action occurs. …

A person is ultimately responsible for his own character regardless of the choices available when he acts, and he should be held accountable for that character even if he denies responsibility.

Self-examination involves a scrutiny, so far as possible, of the unconscious values driving conduct. The goal of a moral education is to instil values that are life enhancing and humanitarian, that preserve individualism and at the same time enlarge the self-concept with other-directed concerns.

A desire is intentional. The self is antecedent to and directed toward an object. Desire is the feeling of a relation of need or want that is directed from the self toward an object or to the concept of the object. … An obligation differs from a desire in having the self for its object. The self feels an obligation, but it is the self that is obligated. The object of the obligation is not the action the self is obliged to perform, but is directed to the self.

Desire and obligation arise in the self, but their actualisation-bias has a different course. Desire corresponds to the agentive or voluntary feeling of an action, obligation to the passive or receptive feeling of a perception. … A loyalty is some combination of the two, namely an obligation that feels like a desire, in which the self has a commitment to the obligation. In loyalty, the self feels as much an agent as an object.

 

The compulsion of obligation is linked to an external, perceptual and impersonal object. The agency of loyalty is linked to an internal, active and personal act. This reflects a bias to perceptions that exteriorise and become independent, or a bias to actions that are self-realisations.

There is a continuous transition in the feeling of outer and inner in relation to the structure of agency, from enforced to compassion, from obligation to desire, from the duty to serve out of necessity to the wish to please out of love. The ought becomes the want as extrinsic constraints on egoism internalise as voluntary commitments.

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PAL. Chapter 13. From Intention to Obligation. pp.359-381.

 

There are many ways to trace the transition from self to world, or from the subjective to the objective pole of the mental life, such as from dispositions and implicit beliefs through concepts to objects, from dreamless sleep through dream to perception, from the first budding of a thought to a concrete action, from a personal value to an impersonal duty.

The continuum from personal responsibility to guilt over a broken promise, to moral outrage and a demand for punishment over an unfulfilled obligation, is as much an illustration of the transition from self to world as that from value and intention to conduct and coercion.

One can say that the transition from a disposition, to an intention or resolution, to a promise with an obligation involves an increasing objectification of the will. Specifically there is a progressive surrender of agency from an intrapsychic to an extrapersonal locus. One could also say that the exo-centric values depositing in an object carry with them a feeling of agency that is transferred from the self to the other. In this way, intention objectifies in the other as obligation.

Take the resolution of the arhat to achieve personal salvation versus the obligation of the bodhisattva to strive for the salvation of others. Both are dedicated, but in the latter this dedication is referred outward as a social responsibility. … the transition from self-betterment as a good in itself, to self-betterment as a means to the good of others, i.e. a subtle bias in object-concepts or means/end relations, seems less important than the fact that the ends and means are both expressions of character.

A biding promise may be carried out reluctantly, with little resolve, or be broken, while a resolution that approaches a vow can have considerable force. A moment of resolve can re-define a life.

There are situations in which the moral thing to do is withdraw a promise to a person who is later exposed as unworthy, or if the conditions that motivated the promise no longer apply; for example, an oath to defend one’s country in a war of conquest, a promise to give financial aid to a person who comes into a fortune etc.

The many ways of extracting promises from people, or placing them under an obligation, are the fabric of a society woven together by a trust that obligations will be respected. An abuse of trust is exploitation. … A contract is only as good as the good will of the parties that honour it.

The admonition, to thine own self be true, entails that we avoid making a promise that conflicts with the best of our values. Then the keeping of the promise will not do violence to one’s character. The same is true for the breaking of a promise that is impetuous or foolish.

In a sense, there are three selves in a promise, one representing personal advantage or egoist desires, which may or may not be concordant with the agreement, the other, empathy, compassion, loyalty or obligation, the exocentric values, where the needs of the other are represented, and a third that represents the ideal self, the ideal for that individual, which may or may not be of high ethical quality. The ideal self represents the individual’s idea of what sort of person he would like to be, a construct of aspiration in the dispositional matrix of the core self. The guilt over a bad promise kept, or a good one broken, is the friction of these discordant voices.

From an evolutionary perspective, punishment of social reprobates is comparable to the elimination of the unfit in animal populations. Society takes the place of the physical environment and eliminates organisms who exceed some conventionally accepted deviation from the norm. Ideally, a person who commits a crime should accept, even welcome just punishment, though in the highly individualistic, hedonic and egocentric societies of the west, it is rare that a person accepts responsibility for his actions, still more rare that he accepts the punishment that goes with the verdict.

Threats and rewards, as expectations, are the psychic equivalent of dangers and opportunities. A threat places egoist and other-centered values in a precarious balance, while reward is mainly bound up with self-centered ones.

Praise and punishment, success and failure, are equilibria of self and other that arise in psychological constructs central to character, identity and trust.

As time goes by, the objectivity of the constructual element in the promise may replace the subjectivity of loving.

Customs are implicit accords of values shared in a group over some portion of its history. … It is an implicit agreement by the subject to act in conformity with the culture to encourage closeness in feeling and conduct, and discourage separation and divisiveness.

A promise that is based on virtue, for example giving to charity, donating blood, food, clothing, helping the sick, can and should become so customary that an obligation is unnecessary. In contrast, an unusual custom that is inconsistent with egoist desires, e.g. revenge for a neighbour’s injury, an unjust bequest , may require a promise for its execution. For some , these are major distinctions. To me, they are the shadings of core values that differ in the degree to which obligations – for self and other – are instilled early or acquired late, the degree to which assents are unique or shared, an their extent of publicity, compulsion and enforcement.

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PAL. Chapter 8. Actualization and Causality. pp.219-241

We have disputes over zombies and humans, computers and brains, silicon chips and carbon molecules, which for many are debates over whether consciousness and qualia are to be given privileged status in the description of mental states.

Causal theory saps purpose from behaviour and displaces signification from individuals to actions in the world. Perspectival theory turns the self into an image for others. We are left with a nexus of causal relations or a phantom that eludes description. And we ask, still, what is an individual?

In process theory, the mind/brain state is a single complex object. Representations or symptoms are the fleeting actualities of process, not mental things that interact. Mental contents are finalities that ‘contain’ their momentary histories, not causal objects the project on future effects. The continuum from potential to actual within a single mind/brain state is the direction of its internal relatedness. Change involves relations constituting the object, not its interaction with other objects.

There is no chain of cause and effect, but a continuous wave-like transition. Mental events or contents in the mental state deposit and are replaced, they do not cause other events to occur. Objects are reinstated by change, in a transition from potential to actual that recurs. … The replaced state is the ground (?cause) over which the replacing state is deposited (?effect). Each state unfolds over the immediately preceding one.

… the feeling, meaning and recognition of an object are not attached to things out there in the world after they are perceived, in a second-pass process that follows perception, but are phases ingredient in the same process through which the perception occurs.

(emphasis mine)

… the approach undermines the realism, consensual validation and objectivity of a descriptive science of the mind.

Actualities are the concrete particulars that populate consciousness and the perceptual field. Everything we are aware of is already a particular, even those concepts that are vague and still-forming in our consciousness. A mood, a feeling, an inclination, are perhaps not yet particulars, but once the content is settled, even if it is unresolved, its actualisation is complete.

… actualities are not resultants or ingredients, but segments that objectify a continuum of becoming, which extends form a core of potential to the objects of reality. We describe actualities at the expense of their becoming, even as they perish in our description, and we describe potential as what is left over after what can be specified is exhausted, but potential, because it is devoid of content, is more difficult to grasp. Potential cannot be described in terms of the definiteness that is its aim, nor the indefiniteness that is its warrant, yet because there are limits on what issues from a potential, it is neither homogeneous nor undifferentiated.

Consider the problem of potentiality from the standpoint of the arousal of a word or object in the mind. There is great difficulty in describing the meaning of a word prior to the attainment of a phonological shape, or in describing and object-concept prior t its individuation as an image in the mind or an object in the world.

In my opinion, the final word or object is deposited through a qualitative transformation from depth to surface. In this transform, the anticipatory lexical- or object-concept is not identical to the final word or object. The pre-object fails to achieve the same degree of referential or denotational specificity. In arises out of syncretic, magical and metaphorical thought, and develops towards referential adequacy.

The process of fact-creation from felt-meaning is the source of value, …

The transition from potential to actual is continuous. Every phase except the final one, and perhaps even that, has potential for another transformation.

… imagination is the foundation out of which the perception of ‘reality’ develops. Within every perception there is a buried system of dreamwork, and magical and paralogical modes of thought.

Since the world sets limits on the actualisation process, the self is as much a creation of the world, i.e. the constraints of sensation, as the latter is a creation of the self, i.e. a perceptual realisation. To have a self is to have objects to perceive.

Character is the source of the conscious contents of our mind, but not their cause. The relation of character to action is that of potential to actual, not cause and effect. The action individuates through a qualitative sequence that is constrained by the elimination of maladaptive possibilities. Character does not cause or produce a behaviour, no more than the root of a flower causes the petals, but it is ingredient as an anticipatory phase in a dynamic structure. An action is a sign of character, not its product, as a thought is not the output of a thinker but a kind of signature of his feelings and intelligence.

The strength of the feeling of agency is a symptom of the depth of the thought, not a result of the effort applied by the subject to the thought-content, and should not be taken as psychological evidence for agent-causation.

In process theory, acts and agents are realised and revived. The antecedent does not cause the consequent, but is transformed in to it in a qualitative series of whole-part shifts. The seed becomes the flower, it does not cause it. The child does not cause an adult, but becomes one.

The feeling of “agent causation” that underwrites responsibility is a powerful but necessary deception, explicable in terms of the microstructure of the mind/brain state. The feeling of agency probably develops when a child reaches for something.

Conflict is inevitable since every entity is a contrast.

… conflict is not a matter of energy flow, or the interaction of ideas and feelings; rather, in the form of contrast, dialectic or individuation, it is a pervasive and intrinsic feature at all phases in the cognitive process, whether the evolutionary struggle of pre-human organisms or in the specification of phonological features and object form in language and perception.

However the source of the conflict is not in the actions of the other, but in the self’s own object concepts, the affective tonality of which is below the threshold of consciousness.

The action development is the implementation of will, and generates a feeling of agency that is essential to self-preservation and egoistic action. In sum, perception is linked to the realisation of the other, action is the mode of self-realisation. Of course, these are not sharply demarcated, rather they are biases established early in life and derived from evolutionary trends in animal cognition. Yet they determine the relative locus and emphasis of other and self-directed feeling, as the self-concept is articulated by value.

Ultimately, the unity of the world is binding of objects in consciousness, the coherence of concurrent lines of development, and the growth of the world out of the self in the momentary history of all individualities.

Authenticity is not an extrinsic judgement, as with right and wrong, where there is adherence to some convention, or deviance from a standard or rule. It is, for better or worse, self-realisation in conduct.

Agency is not an output of a self that stands behind an action and urges it forward; rather, the feeling of volition is created as a kind of byproduct of an act- and object-realisation.

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SEM pp.122-146

p.122

The question in free will is not whether an idea is given or pre-ordained or the degree to which behaviour is constrained by external conditions but whether an action that follows an idea is initiated or directed by it. The issue of freedom pertains to the interval between the idea and the act, not the prehistory of the idea.

p.123

Act and idea are driven by sub-surface content; the idea does not cause the action, it is only a forewarning. … This explains why indecision and complexity parallel the feeling of volition. The greater the indecision, the more effort required, and the richer the concept guiding the action.

p.124

On the microgenetic account, consciousness is deposited midway between the core and external objects, at a phase where the competing ideas are undergoing resolution. This does not mean that consciousness has a shaping role in the resolution process. The targeting down, the focussing of attention, or the finer selection of ideas and actions so prominent at the point the conscious self makes it’s appearance are expressions of the progressive specification taking place in the microgenetic sequence, not signs of conscious choice and agency.

p.125

The self is generated out of the core personality, out of memory and the cumulative experience of the individual, good and bad. … Whatever the individual does, is that individual, it cannot be otherwise; personality and self actualise in every cognition and every behaviour. The only criteria for whether behaviour is responsible is whether the action expresses the self fully and completely. The action then reveals what sort of self gave rise to an action of that type.

p.128

The now is experienced as a brief segment with an indefinite duration and unclear boundaries. … There is a deception of a linear or horizontal sequence concatenating moments into a chain of life – what Bergson called the spatialisation of time – when in fact there is a vertical series replacing itself like a fountain, going nowhere. (!!) … These two sides of the microgeny – the unfolding, and the unfolding in relation to the decay – account for the emergence of the self in the now of the present moment.

p.129

All of our subjective experience is elaborated in this capsule of the absolute now, but this is not the now that is experienced. What is experienced is the phenomenal now, which corresponds to the “specious present.” This now extends over a duration of somewhere between 1 and 15 seconds depending on ones account or estimate of the present. … Duration is not a longitudinal dimension. The idea that duration extends over a line of time, like the sum of a succession of moments, is a confusion of the spatial with the temporal.

p.131

The active search for a memory is the experience of an incomplete object formation, the image exhausting it’s own content and in the course of the search generating a self that seems to be doing the searching. If the process goes on to completion, the image becoming an object, the active relation to the image is replaced by a passive relation to the object.

p.133

Dream is preparatory in the formation of object space. Sice objects or selves do not travel from one space to another, the separate times and spaces of dream and wakefulness appear to relate to separate worlds. But these worlds are the extremities of a continuum. Space itself travels – is transformed – as one world is given up in the passage to the other, a transition occurs over intervening segments. Space is multi-layered and so, presumably, is time.

p.135

Since a level is an arbitrary section through a wave front, it does not enjoy a privileged status apart from it’s antecedent and subsequent phases. … Mind does not obtain in level specific activity but in a traversal over the full set of microgenetic levels. … As time is derived from the relation between events, it is effected by a change over the event sequence, for example “empty” vs filled durations…

p.137

Let us try to grasp the idea that the self represents an early, the surrounding world a late, phase in the same unfolding sequence. The unitary nature of the absolute now, then, is explained by the fact that self and world are experienced within the same perceptual moment. … The self is deposited slightly in advance of the world and this adds to the feeling of priority and the sense of agency of the self in relation to external objects.

p.142

…past and future are not symmetrical axes leading out from the present. … The self is acting in a state of becoming.

p.143

The imposition f cycles on an open ended progression leads eventually to the awareness of duration.

p.144

Time and space are separately woven into the mental state, time through iteration and the traversal of events in decay, space through the process of object formation. Time is in relation to memory, space to perception.

p.145

…are the attributes of the universe attributes of the mind beholding the universe or attributes proper to the universe itself? Are the physical laws governing the universe intuitions of laws governing the human mind? … One theory of the physical world entails that every point in the universe is as much the centre as every other point. … …the universe has a structure without an absolute centre. Is the mind like this also?

p.146

Mind is positioned in a single mental space, which is it’s own referent. Since the centre obtains as a relation between contents in the same mind, in effect there is no centre, only spatial relations between objects and temporal relations between stages in these objects in their individual momentary life histories.