Tag Archives: belief

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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 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 7. Custom and Evolutionary Naturalism. pp.195-217

The first step in the development of consciousness is for the subject to perceive a separate world.

In the animistic world, names for things are of the same essence as the things they name.

The totem recedes from a present object to a past image, where it becomes as symbol or metaphor.

The changed objectivity of the world changes ones relation to it. In the shift from reason to animism or paralogic, the relations intrinsic in an object become relations external to them. Perception is conceived in terms of its impact on the observer. The internal relations that generate mind and world are interpreted as external relations between objects, or between them and the human mind or the mind of god.

… the individuation of custom to law is the beginning of a reasoned sense of personal responsibility or obligation.

Mind assimilates the object world by fitting it to a complex tapestry of beliefs, magical and rational. The adaptation of magical or paralogical mechanisms, such as metaphor, is as intricate and interlocking as the behavioural adaptations of animals. Every organism seeks coherence with the environment at successive stages of its growth. The animal survives in a world of object nature; primitive cognition adapts to a psychic nature of its own invention.

… 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 thought. While these three levels of adaptation, the drive-based or instinctual, the Para logical and the rational, occur in three different environments – biological nature, psychic nature and the conventions of reason – all three intervene in everyday life. Drive and paralogic are preliminary phases that prefigure conscious concepts and conduct. Every action and thought traverses and conveys the residue of these phases.

Values good and bad arise from beliefs, true or false, that are supported by arguments, logical or irrational. Values are corrupted by false beliefs and corrected by reason, but goodness is ultimately a matter of positive values, however they may be instilled, not the reasons that justify them. … Rhetoric can alter beliefs that instil new values or distort old ones. Rhetoric has its effect, I would claim, less by verbal persuasion than through a kind of hypnotic identification that is parasitic on innate empathy.

The reversion to the mentality of the mob that is fulminated by paralogical or metaphoric thinking and faith based argument is attractive to many because it satisfies preconceptions regardless of whether or not they are true.

For a custom to be an ethic, the valuation invested in the action must shift from the societal or institutional mentality of tradition or religious belief to character and conscious decision. The custom has to be understood and willingly accepted. Personal values in addition to those of community, whether tribal, religious or legal, and the awareness of good and bad or right and wrong are essential for actions to be truly moral. … Moral enlightenment requires the individual to say ‘yes’ to the needs of a wider humanity, but it also requires the individual to say ‘no’ to the oppressive din of a brutal or insensitive majority.

The transition from instinctual nature, to a psychic universe of the supernatural, to a rational world of social interaction, involves a progressive detachment or a retreat from an immediacy of contact, as levels in though-development create a succession of social environments. Yet all three worlds – nature, magic and reason – are serially engaged in every act of cognition.

We learn form phylogenetic or ontogenetic growth patterns that behaviours are not laid down as nested complexes that reappear in pathological states; rather the behaviour is a signpost of the process that deposits it. Thus the paralogic that leads the native to believe a man is a tiger, or a schizophrenic to believe he is Christ, recurs in ordinary cognition in conventional metaphor, in novel concepts and artistic creation.

Ontogenesis is a translation of the genome by way of epigenetic patterns into morphology and behaviour. Learning is parasitic on this process and is itself a form of growth. The individuation of species in evolution is played out in the morphogenesis (epigenesis) of organisms, and this pattern continues in the microgenetic individuation of an act of cognition.

The postulate of a physical ground, a chemical mediator, a rule or directive that operates on epigenetic process, leaves the process itself untouched. This process is the growth or morphogenesis of organic form, and its replication in the derivation of an act of cognition (microgenesis).

The knowledge of the structure of a molecule of H2O does not convey the property of liquidity. Quantum theory does not predict DNA, nor the reverse. Neuron theory or cell synapse models do not predict the field effects of neuronal networks or populations. Even within a purely biological series, the systems approach entails a discontinuity across levels. This difficulty is never so pronounced as in the transition from a non-cognitive to a cognitive series. In fact the approach offers a correlation of levels, not a translation, reduction or emergence of one level to another, nor an identity across levels, nor an account of the progression over the (physical or mental) hierarchy.

The facility with which the qualitative is eliminated in the rush to explanatory reduction is astonishing, in the light of what is left unexplained. We might keep in mind Hartsthorn’s remark that “our ignorance is not to be turned into negative knowledge of the things ignored.” The explanatory power of the reductive agenda is illusory.

Conduct is as tightly and reciprocally conditioned by the cultural landscape as morphology is by the physical one.

Moral conduct is a path of growth not a destination.

The missing link in the transition from adaptation to moral conduct, from evolution to cognition, can be found in a psychology of intrapsychic processes.

An organism’s evolutionary history translates to patterns that deposit its social history, as human memory and language (memes) replace instinct and genes as the vehicles that transmit the past into the present.

The reconciliation of social pressure with individual freedom is a “work in progress”, not a settled fact. The surge to novelty, the adaptive nature of action, the positive dispositions that guide its formation, are a search for creative solutions to the changing world of each new perception.

All entities from the simple to the complex, individuate a universe of timeless possibility into durations of inner and outer dependencies. The more complex the whole, the more distributed its value. We are , with all entities, contrasts with the other, individuality and adaptation, nature and community.

There is a tendency to think of desire as an energetic impulse when, in fact, it is the affective tonality of concepts. Concepts are not affect-free assemblages of words but categories of ideas and feelings.

The fit or coherence of individual and community is, from an objective standpoint, an extra-personal version of the coherence (authenticity) of concepts with the contextual structure of the human mind. Neither coherence nor adaptation alone is sufficient. One can begin with an assumption and develop a whole system of thought that is coherent yet false. Both coherence (authenticity) and conformance (adaptation) are necessary.

Verbal concepts or propositions are, intuitively, more obvious products of the mind than perceptions, which for most people appear to be mind-independent. But how can the objectivity of concepts or propositions be decided if the objectivity of perceptions is in doubt? The objectivity of propositions and perceptions has to be inferred in some sense form their adaptive success, which is ascertained in the complementarity of the conceptual structure of the mind in respect to physical and mental objects.

According to process theory, belief, concept and fact are successive phases. The belief is the context behind the proposition., which actualises a portion of the context from which it is derived. Facts are perceptual actualities, propositions are linguistic ones. A proposition is a linguistic object. The correspondence of a proposition to a fact or object is, more precisely, the coherence of linguistic and perceptual objects in the mind of an observer.

The coherence is across actualities in the linguistic and perceptual streams of an act of cognition, i.e. parallel outflows of a common belief system. In the contextual background of a linguistic or perceptual act, the process through which the act is realised will be a vital part of the act itself.

 

 

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PAL Chapter 6. From Drive to Desire. pp.173-192

To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy, and when thus seen they will be seen to be … as events are in history, in a moving, growing, never finished process. ~ John Dewey (1925)

Process and form refer to the dynamic and static aspects of every entity, including the mind/brain state. The dynamic and static, the phasic and tonic, are unified in the relation of quality and quantity, or becoming and being.

Brain morphology is not a collection of anatomical parts that discharge functions or house them, but the specious stability of frozen process. The wave-like spread of configurations laying down the mind-brain state is, myriad patterns of configurations over distributed areas that sweep from archaic to recent formations laying down behaviour or cognition. Behaviour is four dimensional structure as process actualises into form.

(emphasis mine)

The shift from an extrinsic series to a simultaneous arising, from an exogenous to an endogenous development, and the nesting of this pattern in multi-tiered lamination of phase-transitions, forms the essential ‘structure’ of an act of cognition, i.e. the mind/brain state.

In microgenetic theory, cognition is wholly endogenous, the role of experience (social, environmental) being to “fine tune” the specification. Innate dispositions are carved by learning to knowledge, which is derived to concepts of greater specificity. Concepts are formulated with greater precision. The specification by constraints on the cognitive process corresponds to the specification of anatomical and functional connectivity, in maturation, by elimination or inhibition. Learning influences anatomy and physiology by enhancing or impeding endogenous trends, not by an addition to an existing repertoire.

For microgenesis, affect and idea are dependent phenomena. Feeling (quality, becoming) creates and is enfolded by representation or category (quantity, being).

Values that reflect self-interest arise out of drives that ensure survival. Every drop of self interest can be traced to an unconscious pool of self-preservation. Every occasion of genuine empathy can be traced to – but not reduced to – innate constructs relating to patterns of infant care, social hierarchy and deference to others.

All entities have the aim of becoming what they are, and all organisms seek what they need to survive, but it is a long way to go from subjective aim and incipient purposefulness to full fledged human intention.

As mind issues from, and creates, the manifold of the world, the self distributes an array of psychic contents.

Value is realised in the action-stream as self-realisation, but the will can also be channelled in to the perception-stream as an outward derivation of feeling into objects. Generally, manifestation is the action of will, which is primarily egoistic, while perception is the vehicle by which the other is realised.

(emphasis mine)

Desire actualises at successive points in the realisation of acts, percepts and their linguistic derivations. Object development carries a desire outward, as worth, into other objects, whereas act development realises desire in wither selfish or unselfish pursuits.

When an aim becomes an idea, the seeking of it becomes an intention. Intention is a bridge from self to object or idea.

 

Instinctual Drive (lower mammals) >> Object existence

Instinctual Drive (higher mammals) >> Proto-desire >> Object Value

Instinctual Drive (humans) >> Self >> Desire >> Object Worth

The value in a physical entity, or a perceptual object in the world, arises spontaneously with feeling, as existence, expanding desire to object worth. In this expansion, the innate inheritance is continuous with instilled values. The branching of acquired values accentuates a growth trend obscured by the uniqueness of the human mode of valuation and its obvious cultural determinants. We are the source of feeling and object value because we are entities of value-creation. We create objects of value but we are also products of the value-stream that carries value outward, first into the self, then its desires, finally into its objects. The value of objects is forecast in the worth we give to private images, such as dreams and thoughts.

A psychological distance and a relation of contrast are necessary across segments in the mind/brain for desire to be directed to a target of worth. The self is the source of desire. Its concepts, especially in choice, are the repository of agency, its objects, the principle locus of value.

Yet there are moments when the self is consumed with passion or its objects overflow with value, when love or hate usurp the subjective pole, when objects disappear as the self is overcome with feeling, or objects become so wonderful or detestable that, for the moment at least, nothing else matters.

With a splitting of concepts at the inner or subjective pole, ideas may become so remote from their emotional root that they are valued purely for their rationality. The analysis of conceptual feeling is carried to such an extreme that barely a trickle of personal feeling invades the endpoints of conceptualisation. The idea is a mental object comparable to an object in perception. Such ideas, like objects, seem to have a life of their own, independent of feeling, though the intensity of belief and passion of argument betray a covert subjectivity latent in the idea. With an excessive discrimination of self or world, feeling withers in its objects, which are emptied of affect to become mechanical, even worthless.

The person who argues too passionately for a belief he takes to be rational reveals that his concepts are not logical instruments which persuade by their truth, but derivatives of unconscious presuppositions imbued with feeling.

There are also times when the unconscious pool of magical thought surfaces to a pre-analytic endpoint, and the whole of perception is blanketed with an intense emotion. Then, a certain balance of inner and outer prevails and everything shines with a deep radiance, … At such times we sense the life of feeling in a world of creation and we wonder if we have given this feeling to the world or if the world, including ourselves, is animated by a single feeling that flows from nature through all of us.

Valuations in the self lay down force lines or habits that determine consecutive states. When beliefs and values are habitual or unquestioned, the thoughts and actions of an individual have a limited scope. … receptiveness and openness to novelty are bridges to interest and precursors of valuation. Custom may be the lord of ethics, but it can also be an antidote to desire, just as spontaneous or authentic moral feeling can be dulled by a sense of duty.

The physicist Richard Feynman (1998) wrote, “what looks still to our crude eyes is a wild and dynamic dance.” He was referring to non-cognitive entities, but the dance also occurs in perceptual objects in the mind of the observer, for the apparent stability and independence of the object conceals the minds activity within it.

An object of marginal interest becomes the target of a consuming desire as unconscious phases in the perception are activated. The unconscious source that first inclines the focus of interest in the direction of the object is the basis of a growth in its value. Worth is not a judgement in the sense of a conscious decision, as something is judged to be true or false, but an unconscious feeling that urges the subject to a conscious explanation. When someone is desirable, we give reasons why this occurs … but these reasons alone do not suffice to make [them] desirable, for they could be applied to another person for whom one has no particular interest.

 

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SEM pp.147-170

p.147

“…philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of logic, … logic only finding reasons for the vision afterwards.” ~ William James (1909)

Feeling is a vestige of quality in an age of computation. … There is a trust in feeling that is denied to logic and argument. … The problem is we still have no answer to the question, what is a feeling Do feelings have an interior life apart from their expression?

p.149

… the complexity of the emotional life is bound up with the intellectual level. The emotions undergo a development in phylo-ontogeny much like thoughts and are elaborated inwardly in relation to mental content. There is an affective element in every act and object, not attached to the act and object from outside but part of their structure and their description.

p.151

Every object has an affective content and every affect has an intensity. An object has a stronger affective charge if it is a personal object. An idea can also be a personal object. The more personal the object, the greater the investment of the self, or the more proximate to the self the idea. The self is the repository of the strongest affective charge and those objects to which it gives rise share in this intensity. The intensity of love or grief is a sign of the degree to which the self participates in the beloved object. Like all emotions, love and grief are selfish in that the object sounds the depths of the self concept and draws from it’s intensity.

p.152

Intensity is a clue to the stage in the affect microgeny. Strong affects attend unresolved objects. … The reciprocity between intensity and generality on the one hand, specificity and restraint on the other, and the loss of intensity in the derivation to an object take us closer to the question of what a feeling is.

p.153

Drive is part of the concept prefiguring the objects whereas feeling is part of the image that is anticipated in drive, transforming with the image into the affective content of external objects. It is towards these objects that images are directed.

The will as a core affect and the self as a core concept are given together as a single inherited form.

p.157

Intention is not something that is applied to an affect, an affect is not bought in to relation with an object. The affect changes as it approaches the object. Intention is generated as the object materialises. The intentional is only a phase in percept formation when there is sufficient resolution for the discernment of an object.

p.158

Even if an object is interpreted as a “projected” representation, it’s animation by feeling reinforces the belief that it has an independent life beyond the imagination of the perceiver. Affect confers vitality to mannequinised objects in a derealised world. It is the difference between mind as a living organism and mind as a machine.

p.159

The object of an empathic state incorporates elements of the self concept. The self values the object as part of it’s own nature, a piece, as it were, of the self in the world. In this way, empathy is a type of loving.

p.161

Indecision is a sign of precognition. … Objects emanating from the self appear as instigators of an affect that in reality is bestowed upon them. … We can empathise with a mind inferred in an object that is alive by virtue of the affective tonality invested in it. … Feeling is a bridge to the world of objects, an antidote to solipsism, the isolation that sets in when we apprehend the imaginary nature of objects; that is, when objects become like thoughts.

p.163

Clearly there are powerful illusions at work, beyond affect, in living life as-if things are the way they seem.

p.165

A fundamental problem for dualism is the plasticity of mind and brain and their coupled growth and decay over time. How are learning and forgetfulness explained if mind is autonomous? … If the minds that brains actualise are self contained and immutable, why are brains complex beyond that required for the realisation of minds if the complexity of mind is not a function of the brain?

p.166

Whether consciousness is a product of brain … or identical with brain activity … is almost irrelevant without an effect of consciousness on brain or other mental states.

p.167

In philosophical discussions almost anything can count as a mental state: a feeling, a proposition, a belief. But are these mental states or are they ways of characterising the content of a mental state, and if so, in what sense are they part of the content?

p.168

In microgenetic theory, belief is a type of assent to the satisfaction of a deep concept by it’s surface realisation, a conforming of a subconscious concept to the conscious content into which it fractionates. Belief is not a basis of action but a measure by which this satisfaction can be gauged. A subject is informed in a belief as to the nature of the underlying concepts that are, in fact, generating the behaviour.

p.170

To microgenetic thinking, a representation is a momentary prominence of a segment in the unfolding. Idea, image and object, representations at successive points in perception, are only potential accentuations. In the course of the unfolding, part of the content of an idea becomes explicit in the object. The content of the idea is realised “epigenetically” over stages. A representation is a prominence of the segment enclosing it’s to-be-realised content. There is no stable content waiting to be called up. … The stability of the representation is a function of the probability of it’s recurrence. In microgenisis the distinction between processes and representations is like that in a river between currents and eddies. The representation is a rest in the flow. Process is not the output of representations; operations do not act on representational states. Representation and process are the static and dynamic expressions of the same dynamic event.

(YES!) now we are getting to the crux of the matter as far as I understand it!