Tag Archives: categories

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SZ. To Infinity and Beyond: Tuning and Triuning the Paradox. pp.433-482.

p.434-435. It is the category of organism as indivisible then, which when implicitly misapplied causes this dichotomy of not quite right conclusions we perceive as a paradox. The intrinsic precision of the actuality cannot be reached by the imprecision of the extrinsic boundaries of the category, and so we oscillate between the two closest approximations:

Paradoxes, then, are errors of intrinsic incompatibility in a compartmentalised, categorical and dualistic logically descriptive system. … From a different vantage point, then – e.g. from a more detailed system of categories -we will see that the paradoxes can, and often do indeed disappear. … by explicitly modelling the pivotal detail inaccessible by the categorical framework rendering and generating the paradox.

The category, then, serves a transcendent and transitive (trans-biased) representational function of power over the territory beneath the category – this territory being namely emergent “meaning” and sub-representation. Language or syntax in this sense is thus transcendent to and emergent from semantics or embodied meaning. Yet syntax, in turn, symbiotically modulates semantics from above, serving as a medium or lens through which embodied meaning can be manipulated and further elevated.

So, the way we communicate concepts effects the way the concepts are represented, and those representations in language then also condition the manner in which the communication takes place, as well as the conceptual structure itself?

 

p.439. This is the simplest “answer” to the paradox, which was honed in the nondual traditions themselves. Opposites, such as the opposing conclusions or categories of the paradox, are simply acknowledged as intrinsic elements of each other. Like yin in yang, and vice versa, they are “identical opposites”. Nondual traditions embrace the paradox because they know that the problem is not one merely of representation (illusion or Maya), in a dualistic and oppositional set of categories. The problem sometimes happens then, that in the embrace of the paradox, they can often tend to hold onto it as essential to reality or nondual philosophy itself. The paradox must be remembered as a dualistic function of illusion and perspective, and it must be conceived free from dualistic attachment in order to retain the possibility of seeing it as one, from a different categorical perspective.

p.441. Can reason itself, through the acategorical imperative, reach into the categorical fissures of common-sense – the paradoxes – and find their common-ground in some kind of deeper level of fluidity and emergence – some nondual form of rationality that resolves paradoxes naturally?

p.447. The Infinite has no internal conceptual relation or multiplicity which can be abstracted free from the derivative relation of the aspect infinite or its modal interfaces, which are its conceptual modalities – its senses. Abstraction into relation is this interface.

p.460 … polarity is the most general function of the world of conceptual relation, which of necessity includes the world of logic. In his [Zeno's] paradoxes of motion, we will see plurality expressed through the infinite divisibility of change, and through the same underlying form the simultaneously infinite division of time is demonstrated to be the equivalent of the indivisibility of eternity manifesting in the Zenonian instant. Motion, then, is not so much denied, as demonstrated to be indivisible, continuous and ultimately ONE eternal and instantaneous Unity – the Parmenedian Being-now. And this is naturally in conjunction with our PNDR “infinite division equals indivisibility”, and its Ariadnian resonance into the chord of “infinite determinism equals indeterminism” and its eternal-NOW.

p.463 If we “pulverise” the category of “thing” upon the exoteric ambiguity hidden within it, we can divide it into two categories; individuals and dividuals (e.g. a-tomoi and holons) Zeno’s argument merely demonstrates, and purposefully so, the impossibility of the absolute individual (a-tom), with respect to the concept of size, and thus indirectly for the implicit holonic logic of sets, with its implicit unity in the ONE-ALL.

p.469. Verelst demonstrates that all of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion (PM) – including even the stadium paradox – can be subsumed under the timeless and instantaneous form of the general paradox of plurality (PP), rendered into mathematical rigor, above, and explained in her paper in the formal language of domain theory.

It is the uncountable infinite of the ignored PP which already exists as the actual infinite underlying all of the PM. And further, it is divisible movement that takes on the time-ordered, stepwise function of the potentially infinite, never able to reach the immanent pole of the actually existing omni-axis within which motion acts.

p.476. As we have seen throughout mathematics and the conceptual embriogenesis itself, immanence breaks the trans-bias to effect a transcendence into new operations and identities. Likewise Zeno’s naked paradox radicalizes immanence to break the transcendent bias of dualistic representation – i.e. diction – shocking us, generation after generation into various and sundry attempts to refute him. All the while, in this very interface – in this refutational dance with Zeno himself – we move closer and closer to operationalizing and vindicating the polarity and truth hiding in the naked core of his ubiquitous paradox.

It strikes me here, that with enough of a stretch of the mind, the resolution of these paradoxes will occur spontaneously. It makes me think of the sages saying that when we realize the real, the actual, in its simplicity, we will tilt our heads back and laugh at the sky! I believe we will begin giggling soon…..

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PAL. Chapter 22. The Illusory and the Real. pp.579-602

 

The thought-objects of perception which are presupposed in the common thought of civilised beings, are almost wholly hypothetical. The material universe is largely a concept of the imagination which rests on a slender basis of direct sense-perception. – Whitehead (1932)

All experience has an illusory quality, from a vision of the starry firmament to mathematical objects at the smallest scale. Yet the illusory or phenomenal nature of experience, which is at the heart of many great philosophical systems, escapes the minds of most ordinary people, who live their lives as if the self and world are fully real and material.

Illusion is an endogenous image that carries with it features of a terminal cognition. It appears to be an alteration in an external object because the image is close to full objectification.

Hallucination and illusion are incomplete perceptions, while a perception is a fully exteriorised hallucination, guided by sensory constraints. Admittedly this is an exceptional view of the world. It is not surprising that those who see the world in this way, i.e. as an extension of the mind, are tempted to look for another, more dependable image of the real, such as that of physics or the absolute, or a noumenal world beyond experience.

Illusions are not limited to those we perceive and study, but are found in all aspects of daily life. They include such fictions as object stability in a world of flux, time as linear rather than recurrent, change as an external relation between objects rather than intrinsic to the object formation and being as thing-like rather than a category that enfolds a becoming. On these foundations, the whole edifice of mind develops, and with it, the gap from self to world, the emergence of the present moment and, around it, past and future, and the feeling of intention and desire.

… it takes only a little insight in a spell of vertigo, when the world spins around one’s head, to remind us of the subjectivity of all so-called veridical perceptions.

The partition of experience into subject and object is an important fiction but not the most fundamental. That of substance is deeper, more pervasive and responsible for the illusion of subject and object. The subjective phase of thought lays down the self and its will, the objective phase lays down concrete actualities. The progression to definiteness is an aim to stability. The shift in quality in a progressive individuation is the basis for the division of experience into self and object.

If substance is primary, change is unreal, if relations are primary, substance is illusory. … The distinction of substance and process, or being and becoming, dissolves when substance is conceived as being-as-the-category-of-becoming, and becoming is conceived as process over a temporal extensibility that is framed by a category, and category is conceived as a duration of relations, the awareness of which is obscured for the sake of stability. … The mind chunks experience (Miller, 1956) into things, selves, ideas, propositions, the perceptual and logical solids that articulate and anchor the “all is in flux”.

(emphasis mine)

Reality is different than existence. The concept of reality presumes a match from mind to world. The concept of existence is independent of verification. The non-existent cannot be real, while a thing must first exist in order to be real, so that reality presumes existence.

The truth is in the relation not in the relata.

An acknowledgement of the ambiguity or uncertainty of truth is the first step in their honest pursuit. In fact, ambiguity may inhere in the truth if the dialectic employed in its discovery extends into the truth that is discovered.

The interdependence of all things, and the dependencies within all things, remind us that we are sets of constitutive relations embedded in still larger sets. There is an implication of such observations for moral philosophy, in that the artificiality, tentativeness and transience of autonomy speak against egoism and isolation, and provides a meta-physics that reinforces an ethics of generosity, shared experience and the primacy of community.

(emphasis mine)

… the gradient from doubt to conviction, or from an awareness of a falsehood to certainty in an error is determined not by a relation to fact but by the experiential quality of the object. Coherence, not correspondence is the psychological determinant of belief.

The distinction of the real and the unreal rests on a confusion of categories. It may be a confusion we have to live with, but at least it should be acknowledged.

… real things are hardly what they seem, not because they are misperceived, or because they are shadows or phantoms, but because what we observe, and what we infer behind our observations, are entities modelled on our experience with inner states that are opposed to external events, when the external is not the real world but the final segment of the mind/brain state that objectifies as “reality”.

The duration of the present, the unity of the self, the subject/predicate relation in language, and so on, create illusions that can only be exposed by the most ruthless and uncompromising skepticism.

The real is a covert process of creation that we mirror as spectators or participants. It is not that objects are unreal but that the real in objects is missed and, with it, the groundlessness, i.e. emptiness in the Buddhist sense, of all claims, all entities and all objects of desire.

The distinction of the illusory and the real depends on whether the intrinsic relationality of an object is part of its description. The consequences of a failure to address the dual aspect of objects and of accepting the phenomenal as real, whether in the abrupt sacrifice of a life for the sake of an important belief of the gradual pursuit of a trivial one, is life as if appearances matter. That is not to say that the appearances do not matter, for an object can matter whether or not it is real.

An object is a combination of category and process.

The real lies in the knowledge that all objects consist of a simultaneous being and becoming.

We live with being and becoming, the insubstantiality of process and appearance, the intangibility of relations and categories, yet we must also live as if the categories are necessary and real.

… if all things develop out of value, any attack on intrinsic value is a perversion. Thus the enlightened soul does not seek to import or extend value into the world, but rather, apprehends and strives to enhance a world that is literally shimmering with value in all its objects.

(emphasis mine)

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PAL.Chapter 21. The Moral Dimensions of Aesthetic Experience. pp.554-577

 

Mind is the sole self-intelligible thing, and therefore it is entitled to be considered the fountain of existence. - C.S. Peirce

An ordinary object is an encounter, an artwork is an experience. … Ordinary objects can become works of art when perceived from a certain point of view. The difference is one of emphasis, not kind. How this difference is understood depends on a theory of perception.

The belief in an inner and outer world and the springs of behaviour that stem from such a belief are implicit, covert, and deeply ingrained in the psyche.

Are the neocortical zones the standard model loci of initial processing, or do they mediate endpoints of perception as postulated in microgenetic theory?

For microgenetic theory, the quarrel is with the standard model of perception, not action, for perception is interpreted in the same way as production, as an expressive activity that goes out to the world. … The point is that objects take on aesthetic value not by an addition of psychic qualities, but by an accentuation of those qualities as segments prior to their objectification.

From a temporal standpoint, the object includes, as part of what it is, all the phases traversed in its perception, including the subject. That is, the object “out there” has a microtemporal structure that includes earlier phases that lay down the subject. We speak of subject and object, but to be more precise, they are subjective and objective segments in the same act of cognition.

People are quicker to note differences than similarities. However, instead of demarcating and analysing, one finds if one looks more closely that what appear to be distinct nodes in a category, or separate domains of function, are gradations with indistinct borders that are constantly changing and merging.

Value is the bridge form aesthetics to ethics. Central to the continuum is the concept that value is allocated at different segments and in different proportions to the transition form self to object, from drive and intrapersonal desire as one polarity, to attention, then realness and extrapersonal worth at the other. In the compromise of other-centered self-denial and drive-based egoism, the subjectivity of conceptual feeling, in art or ethics, confronts the objectivity of custom and/or approval.

A perception is an adaptive model of the world. The stability of this model is due to its recurrence.

The object is more alive when the life of the artist or observer is engaged.

The timeless objects of aesthetic contemplation become actual through the observers emotions and ideas, while the living things that have our moral attention incite a timeless obligation to protect and trust.

The saint embodies in his acts the ideal of goodness, genius embodies in its works the ideal of beauty. In art, self-realisation trumps obligation, in ethics, in the saintly or compassionate person, they are aligned.

Language tends to fractionate feeling and dispel it over time, art concentrates feeling with greater immediacy. Unlike art, which has been increasingly liberated from mimicry, even tradition and communicability, language cannot escape realism without becoming incoherent or ejaculato.

The attribution of mentality to an artwork or natural object, i.e. the presence in the object of the creative power of a genius or a god, is a species of animistic thought, but it is the first step in a transition from aesthetic to moral concepts.

In that beauty is contemplative and goodness is instrumental, the relation of beauty to morality is like that of perceptual commitment to conceptual obligation. In this respect, there is a comparison of philosophy to life, or theory to behaviour, which is the relation of thought to action, choice to decision, need to satisfaction.

Universality is sameness over difference, in space, time or context. However there are no exact repeatables. Each entity individuates a relational whole, so supra-ordinate or categorical universals are as fictitious as isolated particulars. The idea of an absolute repeatable is motivated by a desire to introduce conceptual stability into a world of change.

The enduring self in relation to the succession of acts is a relation of a category to instance, perhaps it is even the nucleus of the idea of universal and particular.

The concept of a generic category opposed to a particular instance arises as a whole/part relation in time consciousness. The temporal incrementation of spatial wholes, or the elaboration of succession out of simultaneity, is the creation of time order out of non-temporal wholes.

… consistent with the microgenetic account of the sculpting that occurs in every act of cognition. The process of specification leaves the category behind as the part individuates.

The relation of the good to good and bad acts, like that of perfection to genius or corruption, is also a relation of the ‘timeless’ to the temporal.

A population is not involuntarily subjugated by rulers that arise within its ranks. Its beliefs and values create the conditions in which the corruption and oppression flourish.

Ultimately, ethics and aesthetics fuse in a life of self-realisation. What is at stake is authenticity of character.

Microgenetic theory is the basis of an account of ethical conduct and aesthetic feeling in the recurrent specification of acts and objects out of the self, i.e. as self-realisations of character and personality. … The starting point is the description of the mind/brain as a process of self-realisation.

From a process standpoint, art and conduct move from subjective wholes to objective parts. In both, the subject feels the centrality of personal value and motivation. However, the subjective is revived in recreating an artwork, which is vetted fro its power to induce this revival in others and the depth of feeling evoked. Conduct is also vetted by those who revive the act in the imagination according to their valuations, but unlike an artwork, conduct is not revived concretely, only a judgement of its context and consequences. This leads to external judgements in conduct, internal ones in art.

 

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Chapter 12. The Ideal. pp.335-358

 

The notion of completion comes from the possibility of realising the ideal. If one could, in principle, see an artwork of perfect beauty or an act of perfect goodness, one could say, “There, that is a manifestation of the ideal.”

On possible source of the ideal is the evolutionary thrust of will. But positing the will as the engine of the world and the urge to actuality does not explain a striving to betterment that is linked to renewal and rebirth.

The ideal is not achievable because the final event that either shatters the perfection of the ideal, attempts to fulfill another ideal, or abandons the path of idealisation. Process does not end in ideal categories, it begins with them and ends with involution, the cessation of prior nature and the assumption of novel form.

With the ideal, it comes down to a desire for that which is the opposite of the most critical features of life, that is, for absolute spirituality or divinity and an unchanging, imperishable, timeless unity. These characteristics of the ideal are all linked to the idea of perfection, while the idea of perfection or the existence of perfection is linked to that of deity (Hartsthorne, 1962). If perfection goes out the window, as it should, the ideal, which is an aim without a paradigm, goes with it.

Life proliferates into every conceivable niche, until mind itself becomes the adaptive ground of change. There is evolutionary pressure towards increasing intelligence, and this may be a sufficient explanation for the evolution of more complex organisms, but random variation leaves out the lawfulness or regularity of the process through which advance occurs.

Metaphysical though attempts to resolve human conception with physical nature. Yet all categories, whether historical or spontaneous, by virtue of being categories, i.e. having generic properties without a specific content, are subjective, immutable and timeless. It is the nature of a category that it is described in such a way. So long as the category does not individuate it retains properties of the ideal.

This tendency to betterment is the natural bias of process. It could account for the evolution of forms that create environments for novel adaptations. But the tendency need not be reified to a goal.

The presence of the earlier in the later, even in the most basic entities, where what comes before is part of what comes after, can be construed as a kind of memory. Similarly, but more clearly the basis of memory, unconscious configurations in the mental state are conveyed into conscious conception.

The becoming of a thing, its life force, is a change over some duration. However, until a cycle of change terminates to reproduce a moment in the existence of the thing, the thing does not yet exist and is non-temporal. The completion of the becoming gives the thing its being.

As the font of the actual, the category is asked to do the impossible, namely, deliver a temporal existent out of a timeless non-existent, or shift from being to becoming, or create something out of nothing. But this is a transition from simultaneity to succession, the transition laying down the time series.

The many events in consciousness appear to change at different rates, and this is a problem for an association of time with change. However the change that matters is the laying down of the temporal order of mind/brain states, in which the multiplicity of events in consciousness are all partitions of the one event of the conscious state.

The ideal satisfies less an objective standard than an artistic potential.

A mark of genius is that even when the ideal is fully probed we feel the mystery of untapped possibility in wonder or profundity,

As the purely objective runs up against the totality of mind, the purely subjective in encumbered with facts in need of explanation. Yet a focus on objects is not the same as an objective focus. Subjectivity is ubiquitous. We live in mentality. Objects are the final reach of the subjective.

Categories can be interpreted in terms of prototypes, cores or ‘essences’ or, what might amount to the same thing, the average of the properties of related particulars. The prototype is a sample in the category that prioritises representative features.

… the core features of a category are what survive after the unique ones are canceled by overlapping perspectives. The core features that are common to all members constitute the essence of the category. The category expands ‘upwards’ or ‘downwards’, and can arise spontaneously.

The core self is also beneath introspective access. Once an ‘I’ individuates, the background is lost. The ‘I’ takes on direction, orientation, a disposition or bias to action, belief and value. The direction is the momentary person that issues from the core. The core is part of the archetypal world, the ‘I’, the world of prototypes.

(emphasis mine)

Only rarely in life or in art does one feel that an act, all at once or over time, satisfies its intuitive wholeness.

The essential character of the self is not immune to extreme circumstance, stress, hypnosis, brain damage, and so on. The self does not survive a loss of its objects. The self, merely to exist, must specify a world. The world collapses if the self fails to individuate. Conversely, for the world to exist requires a self at its foundation. Put simply, the world disappears if it is split off from the self, and the self dissolves if it is cut off from the world.

Mind is self-conscious nature, or nature in an act of self-perception.

From the standpoint of nature, the multiplicity of selves creates an infinitude of perspectives that can observe and contemplate the world-soul out of which they originate. Each perspective becomes an eternal past that leaves nature continuously enlarged. Objects perish, as we do, in nature’s drive to novelty, but they remain through us a part of natures mind.

In any event there is no concrete individual, no substance or intrinsic essence that persists in spite of change, there is only change and the stabilities that are its manifestations, for change itself, or transition, is imperceptible.

Unreality is not reality mistakenly characterised, for this would assume the possibility of a knowledge and correct characterisation of the real, when it is the categories that are real, whether they are mistakenly characterised or not. A reality correctly characterised is still a mode of categorisation, though one can quibble as to which mode is “more real” than others. Cognition does not merely impose its categories on nature, but expresses the pattern of a nature that is intrinsically categorical.

Basically the real is a feeling and a judgment… The former depends on coherence, the latter on correspondence, but the ultimately real is categorical irrespective of what it corresponds to.

Is a particular more or less real than its antecedents? An object does not exist without the concepts behind it and its supportive physiology. The concept is as real as the object, yet both are mental phenomena. An object is a collection of replications in duration. To which replication of the object do we assign reality? In a given replication, the object is delimited out of memory. Perception is the objectified tip of reminiscence.

(emphasis mine)

To put existence before reality is to avoid a definition of what it means to be real, other than the circularity of to exist is to be real, and to be real is to exist.

The real in feeling and judgment has a personal and impersonal interpretation, but existence cuts across the subject/object boundary.

We think of existence as a pattern of becoming that fills the temporal extent or duration of an entity.

Even if we could demonstrate the neural correlates of an act of cognition, all we would have is the correlates, not the cognition.

One can say, thinking is going on, feeling is going on, perceiving is going on, and then ask, how do ‘I’, how does the self, arise at the foundation of thinking, and how do concepts or objects arise at its terminus.

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PAL.Chapter 11. What is a good act? pp.301-334

Morality lies in the capacity to choose and the responsibility that comes with decision, but choice depends on values embedded in character. Desire and conflict are manifestations of such valuations, while the final moral act is an adaptation of the psychic to a social world of duty and commitment.

… the tendency in moral philosophy has been to slice off psychology, eliminate the psychic precursors of action and focus on conduct, its context and justification. Psychology is individual covert, inferential, messy and complex, while action for the most part is clear and explicit.

Certainly, for a moral subjectivism, the antecedents of an action are fundamental.

The goal of a moral philosophy is a human psychology that incorporates a personal judgement of one’s acts and aspirations, ideally, a self-realisation of the better portion of one’s character.

Intentions are primary to resolve or disambiguate values and choices.

Choice is central to moral action, but there are desires without (explicit) choices, choices without acts, and acts without choice, though there is an implicit choice in every thought and act.

There is a qualitative difference in form between thinking a thing and saying or doing it.

Each moment, action resolves a mix of personal values, past experience, present conditions and future expectations, even if the person is revealed to be someone he himself does not admire.

It has to be conceded that “free will” comes at a price; once confronted with indecision, one is already in trouble, the more so if choices have equal weight. The greater the menu of options, the multitude of perspectives, the detachment, the less a person is likely to commit to a single path of action. The openness obligated by reason becomes a sanctuary for moral retreat. Reason confronts options exposed in the suspension of action and a withdrawal from objects.

We can begin by putting reason aside, for it does not help us to act. Knowledge is essential in providing conceptual alternatives, but it must be implanted in values for the right act to arise. … An emotional push is necessary for choice.

… the failure to search for error, a too hasty leap to the truth, or an easy acceptance of dogma – scientific, philosophical or religious – are marks of intellectual dishonesty and an attack on truth itself.

To act with an internalised social conscience is to be morally scrupulous. Darkness should remind us of light, the Buddhists say, and in the same sense the knowledge of life’s gifts ought to be tinged with a melancholy for their loss, for oneself and for others.

… detachment is less the assumption of another perspective than the capacity to entertain multiple perspectives, as in a dialectic, in which personal interest is neutralised by deference to alternative points of view. Ambiguity is the antidote to dogma and error. This entails a categorical perspective that does not capitulate to rival attitudes but surrounds them.

… conscious knowledge of right and wrong is not so much a prescription for action as a justification for actions motivated by the values through which knowledge was installed by the experience. … The idea that the knowledge of right and wrong can tell one what to do is sheer causistry.

Goodness may derive from a sense of duty or responsibility, but most people think it ought to flow naturally from character. … Goodness as obligation uncouples feeling from action when the impulse to self-interest is overcome.

Duty as motivation exacts a response by way of values; but duty as mere obligation is coercive and thus intrapsychically inert.

With the primacy of action, agency, thought and desire are subordinate to conduct. What them becomes of moral theory if the feeling of passivity to a thought, say in obsession, or that of agency in voluntary action, turn out to be phenomenal by-products of act- and object -realisation, not measures of actual control?

(good question!)

Even in the best of people, the examined life cannot fail to discover traces of moral corruption. We must account for our acts, and injuries to others, but it is the inner life that calls us to judgement.

The problem for subjectivism is to import greater significance to the psychic precursors of action, and to bring action back into the mind of the subject where it arises, rather than displace it into the world where it has its effects.

I think the ought of duty or obligation will continue to be a confound for a naturalist theory of value unless the necessity in virtue can be shown to be grounded in the is of natural process. Duties must be conceived as psychological constructs, values in ones character, not motives or brakes on conduct.

Goodness of character is to rightness of conduct as potential to actual, not universal to particular.

In mathematics, the numerical concept of ‘one’ has a formal identity across applications … This is not true for a real entity, which does not remain unaltered when it is separated from its context in order to compare it to similar entities in other minds or the same mind at different times. Every actuality actualises a unique qualitative ground.

The right becomes the good when conduct recedes from the objective surface of the mind to its sources in subjectivity.

Authenticity points to the unconscious moral tendencies of the individual that actualise valuations in the self-concept. Morality applies to the resolution of character and choice, the reconciliation of an authentic yet unconscious self with the decision and freedom to choose that are necessary to informed moral conduct.

What gives a person pleasure or makes one happy is not necessarily good in a moral or aesthetic sense. The dissociation of pleasure, desirability and the good is such as to vitiate theories of pleasure, happiness and desirability on the basis of goodness.

Desire is a conceptual feeling that arises in the “drive-representations” that lay down the self and its conceptual feelings or value categories. Desirability is desire that moves value outward from self to object. Desire specifies value in the desirability of the object. Desirability is the desire for an object of worth, since not all objects of worth are desired. Desirability straddles the subject/object transition. Because of its greater proximity to the object, desirability relates more to preference or taste that to desire, which is closer to drive-based affects.

The passage of what is desired, to what is desirable, to what ought to be desired corresponds to a shift from the subjectivity of desire to an intermediate phase of desirability, and then to an objective valuation of the act or object. The ought begins in the extraction of desire form drive, and continues in a progression toward the object, in desirability, which is “half way” from desire to worth, then concludes with its full objectification in the valuation of external objects.

The objectivity of object value, the feeling of obligation as (usually) external and the subjectivity of desire are interpreted as reversible and interactive, whereas subjectivity objectifies in a unidirectional becoming.

… the self is anything but rational, reason being an endpoint in the passage from meanings to words. For most people, rationality is a rare achievement. … The residual value in abstract and “affect-free” concepts must then be looked for in the value underlying the so-called pure reason.

Naturalism does not equate the good with hedonism, which is antithetical to morals, nor does it appeal to social ecology, or the behavior of sub-human primates, or the imperatives of “selfish genes”. Self-preservation does not translate to pleasure-seeking as the expense of others. The self goes out into the world and fills it with value; it does not accrue value for its own needs.

(emphasis mine)

Loyalty is an affective bias; goodness is impartial. A preference based on kinship, affection, tribe, ethnicity, is rational from the standpoint of self-interest but counter to moral logic.

Truth has empirical and logical grounds, these grounds are thought to be the basis of conviction, but the certainty of truth, i.e a belief that the truth is true, requires the subjectivity of belief to impact on the presumes objectivity of fact.

Beauty differs from truth and goodness in that it may arouse neural configurations that respond to balance, averaging or whole/part relations. This may explain the immediacy of the perception of the beautiful.

As to the association of the ideal good with reason, the good is reinforce by logic but not dependent on it. … In logic, thought retreats from the particular to the idea behind it, or the re4altions between ideas. Logic cannot instruct us how to act in a given circumstance. Logic does not usually tell us what we do not already know. … It is better at refutation than assertion.

The relation of the individual to society might correspond to the part/whole relation in beauty, but individual good is often achieved as the cost of much suffering, while the good of the many demands the sacrifice of the few. At least in this way, the part/whole relation of beauty differs from the one/many relation in society.

The universal is immanent in every particular.

(emphasis mine)

The aha experience, the sudden apprehension of a profound truth, the awareness of time and space in the perception of nature, the apprehension of deep order, symmetry and perfection that gives the experience of the sublime, for truth or for beauty, do not occur with the recognition of the good. Nor is there the same degree of cynicism. Because the good is a secondary construction, a good act raises questions of intent that do not occur for truth and beauty.

Goodness is conceived as the whole of its relations. If objects are relational there is no demarcation of object an property. The bundle of properties that constitutes an act of goodness is a complex of relations. The idea of the good as an object with properties rests on the distinction of substance and quality, or subject and predicate, for the property has to be a property of some object.

The good is not a natural, physiological (culture-independent) category like beauty or colour, or a consensual fact-based category like truth.

… the perception of colour, though subjective, is independent of personality, whereas goodness is directly related to character.

Any property is a category of sub-types, but this is especially so with goodness where the property has both a subjective and an objective aspect.

Even the most obvious property of goodness needs to be contextually decontaminated. An unselfish parent can ruin a child, generosity can degrade the feeling of self-worth, etc. As with truth or beauty, the good is illustrated and taught by examples, but the category of the good rests more precariously than truth and beauty on its concrete illustrations.

The presence of covert emotion in reason, or the ability to rationalise feeling, implies that reason itself has an affective tone. The ideal develops out of the conceptual feeling as an experience of the pre-object category. Put differently, ideals are created out of categories as rational aims that can supplant the affective aims of desire. When an ideal becomes the goal of a desire, the affective element dissolves in an object into which it can discharge, while the rational element reatins the meaning in a concept that is unspecified as to content and intention.

It is not a simple matter to desire a generality, a universality or an ideal that is not accented by some instance of possibility.

… the desire for the category is more like a yearning or a longing, which is a waiting for the object to clarify, while a desire directed to an object embodies the wish to have it: it excludes similar objects and suffers the fear of its loss. Just as we generalise an ideal from the particular in the good objects of desire, we seek an ideal love or in life the particular in the category.

The good is not a natural category, like beauty, nor a logical one like truth, which enfold instances of their expression, but an artifice derived from its examples. … Goodness is a conventional category abstracted from its examples not prior to them.

As an ideal self, the good is a subjective possibility that aims at self-realisation. That is, the categories that specify the particulars of conduct can themselves be idealised at subjective or objective polarity. … On this view, one’s moral duty is not to conform one’s conduct to the ideal good, but to realise in all acts the ideal self.

(emphasis mine)

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PAL Chapter 5. A World of Value. pp.147-168

 

…value is drawn into the object as it individuates. … Worth deposits with the object as an expressive feature of the conceptual and affective life. The human mind/brain generates worth through the distribution of affect tonality into the object-field.

The world does not begin outside the skull. If there is a boundary, it is with brain process, not physical entities screened by perceptual images. … Self and object are part of the being of the subject. Value and feeling are the becoming of the object. Being is the momentary category of self and object. Becoming is the process of self-and object-creation on which the category of being depends.

A concept transforms to an object. The self within a subject actualises objects in a world. This world is a realisation of conceptual feeling, the object being the final phase in the objectification of a cycle of process.

All objects in perception, and the derivation that carries them there, constitute the one enormous object that is the world. … The loci of the self, objects and mental contents can be compared to “strange attractors” in a chaos model, which lure feelings to a particular segment of intra or extra psychic space. A given segment attracts affective interest. There is similarity with a hypothesis of “dominant focus” proposed by Kinsbourne (1998). The distribution of feeling in mind and world, or where the value-stream settles in a given state, determines the relative intensity of value-interest for that state, and thus, the nature of self and world for that moment.

An object such as a self or a tree, like the object, brain, is a perception. The inferred entity of a tree, like the entity, brain, is part of physical nature. The mental stream of object rides the same process as the physical stream of entities. The intrinsic value of the former is inaccessible to observation. Feeling is only felt in the subject. Yet, the conceptual feeling in the mind/brain of an observer may “build upon” the physical feeling of the entity corresponding with the object that is perceived.

To ask what is the origin of value in a non-cognitive entity not conceived as a projection of the human mind is to presume a ‘life’ within the entity, and a history independent of human cognition.

Whether an object is a process of modelling, an assembly of elements, a direct perception, a projection, or, as in microgenetic theory, a set of contrasts that sculpt endogenous form, an excitation emanating from a physical entity other than the perceivers brain e.g. a physical rock or another person can only import intrinsic value into its perception by the inheritance in that perception of the physical feelings of entities aroused in an act of cognition. The intrinsic value of entities is not conveyed from the entity by a physical impression e.g. light or sound, but arises, if it does, in the arising of the entity out of the same ground as brain process.

(this speaks to the uncut paper Bonnitta ^)

The search for the self that is so much an expression of the anxiety of our times owes partly to the machine culture in which we live, the problem of identity and, consequently, of authenticity that so dominates life, art and science. But it also derives from the conflict of duty and freedom, especially the realisation that behaviour is adaptive, constrained and delimited by obligations, responsibilities and lack of opportunity.

The self generates values and extends them into the other. Those values generate self and other, which the other, to be regenerated, must reinforce.

(I find much of his treatment of love in this chapter to be somewhat autistic and even a little corrosive for my sensibilities.)

… love is conceptual feeling at depth of personality that engages the self in an exceptional degree of wholeness. The beliefs, experiential memories and values that constitute the self – its dispositions, configurations or neuronal biases – determine the nature of self- and object-worth and account for the equilibrium of commitment and sacrifice that is achieved in the feelings that are exchanged between lovers.

The other is a piece of the self, a satisfaction of its wants, a fragment of its emptiness, split off and embodied in another person. To gove birth and to love a child is a literal expression of this division of feeling, a process replicated covertly in the love of one adult for another.

… art as much as love is a product of the subjects imagination.

Love and art are self-realisations into personal objects or concepts. They differ from other realisations in that an intensity of feeling accompanies an image of great personal value. … The beauty of the beloved is as much an aesthetic creation of the lover as the artwork is a loving creation of the artist.

Self is fully invested in the image of the beloved or the artwork. In love as in art, the outcome – artistic or romantic feeling – is authentic when it reveals the “whole person” at a depth and fullness of personality.

Art is concrete representation of feeling in the imagination, as romantic love “makes real” the felt intensities of loving. In the generation of a loved object or artwork, the content is subordinate to the process. Loving keeps the lover alive, as the artist lives for his art.

The person who is perceived by a lover, like an art object perceived by an aesthete, is a construct in the imagination.

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PAL Chapter . What is an Object? pp.47-69

In the human spirit, as in the universe, nothing is higher or lower; everything has equal rights to a common center which manifests it’s hidden existence precisely through this harmonic relationship between every part and itself. ~ Goethe

There problems of space and time, identity and change, or object and process are critical to any philosophy that refuses to ignore it’s metaphysical roots.

Before identity, the temporal boundary distinguishes an object from an event.

One can say that the distinction of object and event, especially with respect to a solitary object, depends on it’s rapidity of change, or the degree to which the object is transformed.

The point is that identity is conceptual or categorical. It involves an event-recurrence within a category. An object individuates a concept within an event-category. The smaller the category, the closer we get to the identity of individuals.

Though we speak of objects for convenience, there are no objects, only events, and there is no exact description of an event. How could there be an absolute sameness across moments if the object or event at a given moment cannot be fully specified?

If there is no ineluctable quantum of value that determines for all observers what an object or event is, or what the constitutive properties of an event are, given the viewer-centred nature of constitutive properties, the causal role of those properties will depend on their valuation.

Objects can either be absorbed into events or they can be conceived as persisting with properties that change as the event transpires. In the latter instance, the change in the event is usually interpreted as an attribute or ‘predicate’ attached to the object.

…process thinking entails an event ontology. For microgenetic theory, an object is always an event. It is not a slice in time but has a temporal history, minimally the change that actualises the object, it’s momentary becoming-into-being. The event is the development of the object in a succession of phases over a duration of existence. An object is a theoretical construct in an extended duration that includes a no-longer-existing-past.

In process theory, change results from novelty in recurrence, with stability achieved in perceptual epochs. In positivism or logical atomism, change tends to occur in the properties, the object itself remaining unchanged. Put differently, the epochs of process theory are irreducible changes through which objects and properties are generated, whereas the atoms of positivism are irreducible solids in which properties are ingredient, or to which they are attached.

An ostensibly stable object such as a rock or a tree, not to mention a particle or a person, is as much an event as a hurricane. (!!)

[Quoting Hart (1949)] Once we realise that the discharging and transition of energies are the only perceptible and apperceptive constituents of reality, physical as well as mental and social, the meanings of ideas and propositions stopped being attributes which we could add to, or subtract from the objects, arbitrarily. Experience became the sole arbiter.

If experience is the world received in the senses, that world is not experienced at all, while if experience is the world of perception, it is a derivation, a model or mirror of the world of sense.

The object does not rest on – but consists of – it’s infrastructure; what the individual brings to the perception is an inherent part of the perception, not something the individual adds to or takes away from an object.

…the philosophy of experience has to be based in the actual nature of experiential objects. This actual nature is not the bare object but the full process of it’s actualisation.

External relations are either independent of objects or part of them. If they are independent, how do they bring the objects into relation? If they are part of them, where does the object end and the relation begin?

The view advanced here is not situated in the contemporary philosophical discourse over internal and external relations, which equates relations with properties and assumes terms that have or do not have these properties. To identify a relation with a property petrifies it in language. Once this step is taken, and given the assumption that terms are not themselves bundles of relations, the conclusion is inevitable that relations are external to terms. The position take here on the other hand, arises in the context of a general monist theory (microgenesis) on the relation of thought to reality. On this view, natural relations within objects, or within the mind/brain, and by implication within non-cognitive entities, are internal to the totality of nature or cognition, in which every particular is a momentary contrast.

The relations that constitute events are not themselves actualities, but rather potentialities or possibilities. Were the dynamic of a relation to actualise, it would freeze as an object and lose it’s relational quality.

For psychic relations to extend into the world, as they do, is for the world to be an extension of the mind. The inner connectedness of the world is not it’s ostensible relatedness in the world, but it’s formative trajectory in the mind/brain. Moreover, if the individual mind exemplifies becoming in nature, this trajectory would correspond to the aim to closure of entities in physical becoming. The physical whole or existence of an entity, or other objects in the world, cannot be reconstructed from it’s spacial context, for this represents the endpoint of a parallel stream. Rather, the coherence of the whole in relation to the parts is in the temporal diachronic of the becoming of one actualisation. An actualisation is how parts individuate. Relations of individuation determine how parts come into existence. Once we apprehend an object (a thought, etc.) it’s relationality is finished.

We perceive parts, not the genuine wholes from which they arise, nor the process through which they actualise. A genuine whole is not a container of parts but a potential to give rise to them. Genuine relations are also imperceptible. The imperceptibility of genuine wholes and their transformation into parts, combined with the emphatic sense of object solidity, makes holistic and relational thinking unpalatable to many people.

Causal efficacy is imagined to be the primary locus of exchange of energy in the world, and is the principle theory of how mental objects and physical entities behave.

…real or genuine change occurs in the actualisation of events into a timeless now, while illusory or apparent change is ‘projected’ onto objects in conscious perception, a distinction that is paradoxical, since it implies that perceptible change is illusory while genuine change is imperceptible.

An object is a momentary cluster of relations that constitutes a portion of a field. The persistence of the object or it’s continuance over time owes to the immediate recurrence of a similar cluster.

…the stability of the object depends on the novelty of it’s successive replacements.

If abstractions are achieved at the cost of some part of the truth, what is lost in an abstract category is the value that belongs to those virtual instances the category encloses.

To abandon the idea that some properties are more basic than others, or that some are essential and others accidental, is to consider all properties mid-dependent. This avoids the idea of a substance with properties and relations, some cognitive, others physical, and the corollary assumption that secondary qualities are psychic additions.

Microgenetic theory implies that the fundamental relation is a shift from whole to part. The diversity of multiplicity of the world and the mind is the individuation of clusters through a series of whole-part shifts in personal or extra-personal space and time. In other words, a single process, a kind of travelling wave, lays down diversity, instead of a multiplicity that is unified in a pulse of consciousness or diverse processes acting on a manifold of parts.

An event is a span over momentary clusters of intrinsic relations determined by interest.

The shaping effect of interest or value on what properties are relevant to the event is due to the affectual tones that accompany the object in it’s transition from potential to actual. The value stream is intrinsic to this transition, at the mental pole as desire, at the object pole as worth and at an intermediate phase as interest.

…interest is derived to worth, which takes on ethical valence (good,bad), then prescriptive emphasis (ought).

Thoughts and feelings grow into the objects of experience.

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

We live on the edge of a world that is continuously becoming actual. The cluster of relations that constitutes an occasion of experience leaves in it’s wake a forward going dynamic anticipating an advance in a category that is infinitely divisible. That is why we never quite grasp events other than as classes or properties or categories of object appearances.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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PAL Foreword,Preface, Introduction pp.0-46

Foreword;

This new book by Jason Brown, who over the last several decades has woven the somewhat unlikely strands of process metaphysics and clinical neurology into a magnificent theoretical tapestry, represents an attempt to include moral thinking within the framework of the theory. The importance of this move should not be overlooked.

How should our beliefs shape our behaviour?

It is a “unified field theory”, rooted in the abstract metaphysics of process philosophy on the one hand, and the messy reality of the neurology clinic on the other, potentially transforming how we look at phenomena as apparently disparate as the nature of time, the origins of dreams ans hallucinations, the way a speech act unfolds, and (now with the present volume) how we make value judgements.

For whom, then, has this book been written? Clinicians are likely to be baffled by the metaphysics; philosophers, by the clinical material; Psychologists and neuropsychologists, by the lack of empirical tests and statistical analysis. Almost all of us will find our resources of knowledge challenged, if not simply inadequate, at one point or another in the reading of Jason Brown’s work. Many faint hearted readers are likely to say, “Well this book seems to have been written for someone else, not for me!”

Brown cannot be rightly accused of oversimplifying or pandering to the needs of a mass audience looking for simple solutions to complex problems. On the contrary, the theoretical edifice here is enormously complex, indeed incomprehensible for those with intellectual blinders firmly in place. There are no slogans here that can be used to stop arguments, but rather a series of insights that constrain our thinking in a different and more productive way than previously. This is of course sometimes a painful process.

Author’s Preface;

Only when a philosophy is at full bloom do we appreciate the intuition that generated it. The early stages of a philosophy is one of groping, confusion, inarticulateness, and enthusiasm. ~ George Adams, 1930.

The clinical and neurological data are the material of the philosophy, while the philosophy is the ground on which the seeds of the psychology can be planted. In my view, a philosophy not based on phenomenal experience is stranded in speculative argumentation, while a psychology not grounded in philosophy or biology will be mired in trivia or romantic fiction. Yet I would agree with the comment of William James that a scientific understanding of the mind/brain will necessarily be metaphysical.

Introduction;

To each she appears in a unique form. She hides amid a thousand names and terms and is always the same. ~ Goethe, On Nature.

Is speciation in the process of evolution analogous to a specification in an act of cognition? Is the process through which species are formed related in some way to the struggle and adaptation that every entity goes through in order to become what it is at any given moment? The realisation of an organism, or any object, is an intrinsic microtemporal process that is largely imperceptible. Does this process correspond with the putative extrinsic relations involved in the reproduction of organisms viewed from the standpoint of populations and evolutionary time? If so, we could say that the evolutionary process of survival and diversification is the outer, large scale, or macroscopic expression of an inner, small scale microscopic process of self-realisation.

The transformation of potential to actual is like that of a not-yet-existent ground to a developing figure in which the ground is the antecedent whole or potential for realisation and the figure is what is actually being realised out of the whole. Once the whole is realised, the being becomes and existent. This process is uniform in nature. The same pattern that creates a brain, brings a particle into existence. (emphasis mine) We should not be surprised that what is most profound in nature is what is most universal, and thus imperceptible owing to it’s uniformity.

One could say that the complexity fills the duration as it expends. This implies that the increasing complexity that eventuates in the human brain is not an explanation of value or consciousness, but is a product of the process leading to it. This process is a kind of growth. This is also true for the transformation of societies, in which change occurs less by revolution or coercion than by slow assimilation, This is also a form of growth, taking place through an increase in the intrinsic complexity of society, viewed as an organism rather than a collection or compilation of entities.

The relation of a duration to it’s contents is not that of a container to the things it contains, but rather that of a virtual whole to virtual parts. In a particle, the whole and part are envelope and wave form; in the mind, they are the mental state and it’s phase transitions. A self, an idea, an object, are recurring sets of covert, sequential phases that unfold over a cycle of existence.

…a becoming creates time (change) as serial parts individuate out of simultaneous wholes. … The relation of category and process, or whole and part to being and becoming is the “deep structure” of the process of evolution.

An entity becomes what it is and so defines itself as it occurs, whether a society in relation to all humanity, or an atom against the void. Every motion is an orientation, every orientation a discrimination, every discrimination a valuation. Existence is the initial value.

Facts or values arise in a context of self-realisation. (emphasis mine)

States of affairs begin as intuitions, then personal beliefs permeated by values, and grow into experiential or scientific facts. The intense value of a fact to one who experiences or discovers it may be of only mild value to someone else. The fact is still a value though it is shorn of personal feelings. Gradually, the affective tonality of a fact becomes so distilled that it seems value free. Scientific facts are like this. Science ignores value in the pursuit of present fact, but in so doing, it also ignores the past that forms much of present desire. We intuit the affective valance in the personal history of novel facts before they wither in habit and consensus , in the passionate intensity of those who argue for their truth. The ferocity of argumentation over seemingly neutral facts is often surprising in those we assume to be detached and reasonable, such as scientists and philosophers.

… The categorical primes that underlie cognition are infused from the very outset with drive energy. Idea and feeling, concept and process, are dual aspects at each phase.

For some, the self is a social construct. Is value a magnet or an impulse? Are customs and obligations determinants of behaviour, sources of instilled values, or bases for moral judgement? Conduct in accordance with the law can arise as personal value, an obligation that is apprehended as partly external, or one that is fully coercive.

This world enriches the self through experience and learning, not by filling a naïve brain with ‘information’, but by fractionating innate categories into sub-sets of knowledge, belief and value.

If one can set aside the traditional assumption that perception occurs through the passive reception and construction of sensory data that are generated outside the perceiver and become ingredient in the mind, many aspects of the theory expounded here will begin to make sense.

The main point here, and the starting point for almost everything that follows, is that fully objective experiences are also subjective, in that they too emanate from the subject’s own beliefs and values. … Subjectivity applies not only to pains, after-images and other qualia, but to all perceptual experience.

The theory expounded in this book is a blend of idealism and naturalism that attempts to resolve the objectivity of ethical strictures in a monist theory of process.

… the existence of the other is, ultimately, an hypothesis about the origins of a perception, just as a perception or a concept is a hypothesis about the entities it models or represents. It is my belief that the problem of subjectivism, far from being obstacles to a theory of subject-object relations, are the key to understanding the nature of value, compassion, and the ‘place’ of the other in the matrix of the self.

With it’s awareness of a no-longer-existing past and a not-yet-existing future, the mind seems fully distinct from physical nature.

Subjectivism, or the “view from inside”, claims we can only know our own ideas. This is not consistent with the hypothesis that each mind realises a portion of the wholeness of universal mind or, put differently, actualises some portion of natural process. In a monist theory of process, a mind is conceived as a duration within a wider category of feeling. Every entity, including a mind, is a local manifestation of the ground of nature or physical reality.

The outcome of this inquiry has been fro me, and I hope it will be for the reader as well, a deeper appreciation of the place of the other in the ‘structure’ of the self’s own valuations.

From an external or objective standpoint, then, moral conduct tends to be judged in terms of what is reasonable or fair, or what conforms to social norms, not in terms of a paradigm of saintly or altruistic behaviour, or what might be considered perfection. … Even charity and hospitality are values that are usually not obligatory, at least not in the West.

For the state, the ideal requires a willingness to transcend national interests for the sake of a globel or transnational perspective, according to which the state pursues the common good, not just that of it’s own citizens.

The higher morality of the individual is centred in the community, not the self, but it is not the community that engages the ideal, it is the individual, or group of like-minded individuals. We can say that the claims of the other should be prior to the claims of the self, as the claims of humanity as a whole should be prior to those of the state, but it is the subjective character of the individual to which all claims of morality must be submitted for judgement.

Time is a critical dimension in moral decision and judgement. This appears in the opposition between automatic or impulsive action and action that is reasoned and deliberate. One occurs in the immediate present, the other involves future considerations. … The more immediate the action, the more it is judged as a sign of character: for example, spontaneous altruism is a mark of virtue precisely because there was apparently not time to make a rational calculation of future benefit.

… we consider the good person to be someone who acts in a good way instinctively, while we consider a good leader or state to be one that acts with caution and deliberation. … Here, the essential point is the importation of time into moral theory.

 

 

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SEM pp.39-60

p.39

What is the thing that really matters in respect of categories? What is the deep (original) nature of a category? One can say as a beginning, that categorising is the holding of items that are unique or disparate (successive) in a duration that is a simultaneity. The category is a kind of momentary whole, a temporal, not a spacial … whole, containing an array of elements not in space but in time.

The argument now becomes clear: mind first appears in a duration that arises out of pure succession, a duration that encloses a collection of virtual instants in the same way that a category binds together and assortment of virtual, (ie. abstract) objects.

The abstract ‘instants’ enclosed by a duration compare with the abstract ‘objects’ in a category.

p.40

Both categories and durations provide stable groupings that segment a continuous stream of transformation. … Duration is dynamic recurrence imposed on physical process. … The deeper question is whether in the realisation of a duration series, the seriation creating the time lacking in the separate durations is an expression of a world process in which elements create time out of infinity.

(this is tickling my brain!)

 All objects are historical. Every object has a momentary history and the history of every object is a memory. The history is the memory beyond the memory that is the object itself. The past of an object is a theory on where the object came from. (!!) … The idea that objects and events are mind dependent takes us closer to understanding the relation between structure and process, as between history and present. If change is the only reality, events are not situated at a point in objective time but are momentary durations in consciousness.

p.42

Cognition is linked to evolution and development as a type of exuberant and recurrent momentary growth. … Evolution delivers the organism into the present in the ontogeny of inherited form. Microgenesis delivers the present over the configuration this form generates. Cognition does not leave growth behind as an extrinsic or secondary effect. Organic process is growth even in decay. (emphasis mine)

The personality is enlarged in every experience. The past builds up and defines the present. The self is in continuous renewal. … Growth is the reconfiguration [that] the present takes on. … Growth is an effect of change, process an effect of growth. The change is the process, the changed is the growth, but are each moment the same transformation. … A theory of cognition is also a theory of novelty, memory and evolution of organic form.

p.43

Anatomical structure records phylo-ontogeny as growth over time. … Memory is the static element in process, it is to cognition what anatomy is to growth. … In microgenesis there is a transform from context to item, or from field to central figure.

p.44

Growth trends in phylo-ontogeny establish constraints on the unfolding of configurations in cognition. … Th process is reiterated at successive levels so that specificity is achieved through parcellation or fractionation and not by the addition of new structure. … Structure and process are different ways of looking at the same phenomenon. … Process does not influence or flow from structure. Structure is process slowed down. Microgenesis extends process as structure into maturation. Without the process that microgeny affords, structure is uncommitted and essentailly formless.

p.46

Perception is the process through which objects unfold. … Sensation is a physical constraint on the potential diversity of images…

p.48

An idea does not emanate from the play of introspection but is a deviation – a type of conceptual branching – at deeper form building semantic layers. … Creativity is a flight from deliberation in the service of a concept rising from below. … Novel configurations in cognition and development are constantly being generated in this way, either to persist and gradually transform the organism or disappear, submerged in the weight of the habit and the flow. … A regression form surface to depth also occurs in creative thinking when the self withdraws form endstage mentation to it’s anticipatory spatial and semantic constructs. This recapture of creative form may be an uncommon experience for those who live resolutely in a world of objects. In contrast, the creative individual reclaims the sources of those objects in constructs lying deep beneath the surface.

p.53

The formative direction and thus the dynamic structure of a mental state is from sub-surface mentation through private events to the perceptual surround.

p.56

A sensation is a physical series that shapes but is extrinsic to the brain state. We are not aware of sensations, only their presumed effects on perceptions. A sensation is an inference about the origins of a perception.

p.60

As a new wave rolls on to the shore before the first has ended , so the content of an ensuing moment – the immediate future – begins it’s development as the present moment unfolds. Conversely, the present moment, the now of this instant, is past history even as it appears, for the moment that follows is already underway. The continuity of mind does not depend on a linkage of nows but a succession of present moments articulated out of the core.

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SEM pp.16-39

 

p.16

This is not because our knowledge [..of specifics..] is incomplete, but because we lack a general theory within which this knowledge has a place. There is always a context around a local theory, which is the area of it’s weakness. The more local the theory – and scientific theories tend to be extremely local – the less the theory explains.

In a very real sense, everything needs to be explained before anything can be understood.

Theories do not spring from data but arises as an insight about the context in which the data appear. Data, facts and observations limit the scope in which theory can develop but are more neutral in relation to the development of the theory than is commonly recognised. Theories help to organise experience; they are not waiting to be discovered when all the facts are known, but are engaged in a process of discovery as covert motivations. A theory is not an outcome but an intuition about the concepts that are quietly guiding the research.

p.17

In sum there is a tacit bias in any observation or experiment rooted ultimately in collective assumptions on the nature of mind and externality. The concepts driving the research are more important than the concepts that the research seems to be generating. Fundamental ideas implicit in the research shape it in ways that are often not apparent. This is especially important in the study of psychological function.

p.18

[If we begin with matter as primary...] In some manner the ‘projection’ of an object into the world entails a contrast between self and object that is so compelling we have difficulty maintaining the thought that the objective world is not quite as it appears.

p.19

On the other hand if we begin with with mind as primary and seek to explain objects from inner states and private experience, the discontinuity between inner and outer evaporates: mind is everywhere, a universe. An object is an extension of the mind of the perceiver. Mind reaches out to articulate a world that is limitless lilke a dream and the real world is a reality beyond mental representation. The world that is scrutinised in perception is simply part of the extrapersonal extent of mind.

p.20

Regardless of where we begin, with objects, brain activity or cognition, we need a theory of mind sensitive to physical constraints but centered in the subjective fo thie is ultimately what the theory has to explain. Without inner states there is no need for a theory; indeed, there is no mind to theorise with!

(this whole section is reminiscent of the teachings of the Buddha in the Lankavatara Sutra)

p.22

The feeling of reality for dream does not arise form the approximation to an object, but to an inability to affirm the unreality of the dream image through alternative perceptual systems.

p.23

The shift from dream to wakefulness is not an alternation between two parallel states but a process of emergence.

One challenge that is set to a theory of the world as mental representations is to explain this paradox, the firmness of belief in a world of real objects and actions that effect those objects, and the conviction that mind is independent of the objects of it’s own making.

Evolution delivers a mind that is designed to replicate the world we live in.

p.25

We would not say that the structure of a building is in the face it presents to a viewer. That is it’s appearance, it’s form; it’s structure consists in the pattern and composition of it’s elements. Structure means internal structure, not just surface form. Internal structure however is more than the concatenation of parts; it includes the functional relations between the parts.

Structures are not static arrangements but dynamic patterns. … A structure changes with a change instate. … Structure is defined by active processes. … Process is not the output of structure; process niether drives structure nor is instantiated through structure. … Process applies to internal activity and differs from function which is a superordinate term for the action of a system as a whole. … Function accounts for the design of a system but structure is independent of a functional description. … One can say that function constrains growth and outlines process but is not an intrinsic part of structure.

p.26

Structure … is the illusion of stability in a system in continuous transformation. … In a process model structural units are like mental snapshots, moments in the life of process artificially frozen in time. … Structure in mind/brain is a conceptual anchor in the unending flow of process.

p.27

The structure of the brain, like that of mind and world, is not a rigid framework but a fluid arrangement of dynamic processes.

p.30

The pattern of a developmental growth process guided by intrinsic laws generating a variety of forms that struggle to prevail in a slice of the external world, a world in which the selection of organisms occurs through an active, competitive pruning of those less well adapted for the conditions of life, constitutes the basic framework of evolutionary theory. The question is, can this framework also serve as a model for the process of cognition?

p.31

But consider how a structure is known. The structure is represented as an object in a perception. During the perception the structure is recorded and described. The perception is a segment in the life of the viewer. It is also a moment in the history of the object being viewed. The time during which the structure is taken in has a certain duration. In this duration, the life of the object is stabilised and captured as a whole.

p.32

…the insight that structure is an artificial stasis in the reality of incessant change is at the heart of an understanding of mental structure.

Change is not extrinsic to structure but permeates the concept of what a structure is. In fact the presence of change a the core of a structure, the stability of which is illusory, teaches us the the present (the slice through process to obtain structure) is contingent on a past through which it is actively elaborated. The present rides on the crest of a past that is resurgent, an ever expanding past, always, in pursuit of a present that cannot be demarcated, a present that dissolves away the instant it appears. (emphasis mine)

p.36

Growth is the memory of the body. Memory is the growth of the mind.

Habit is recurrence in the context of memory. … novelty is the overcoming of memory in the capacity for change. … The difference between repetition as mechanical and repetition with memory is the presence of mind to record the repetition.

p.37

…novelty lies in the conception of the whole, not in the elements derived from this conception. Since the whole is simultaneous, what elements are to be compared? From what prior state is the whole derived? Novelty in change, in the transition across moments, has to be sought in the conceptual growth leading to the whole, not in the change “across time” of it’s constituent features. This type of novelty is creativity, not the novelty that inheres in change.

…the percept ia a concept exteriorising as an existent.

p.38

Both natural categories, such as colours, and those that are culture relative, such a s tools, are organising principles of the mind that are engaged prior to object awareness.

p.39

In this fuzzy region between tow categories, another category is beginning to form. This region is fertile soil for the growth of new concepts.