Tag Archives: cognition

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Magellanism

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

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

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

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

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Language Patterns.

John writes;
My aim is to create questions that may locate your perceptions in your perceptual space and then through proper naming, develop qualities and attributes that may be of use to you in your experiment.
I am quoting from your last paragraph and offer the following questions, staying as close to your language as possible. Please relax and enjoy…

“My aim is to now become much more aware of the factors surrounding the phenomena;”

J. And when my aim is to become much more aware of factors surrounding the phenomena, is there anything else about ‘much more aware’?
G. “much more aware” feels like pressure inflating a balloon – there is an increase in scope as well as intensity of perceived experience.

J. And when  ‘much more aware’ how much more aware is that’?
G. about as much as is possible to sustain whilst maintaining focus on the phenomena, sometimes more – I experience peak states of omni-awareness, however, these seem to lose the original phenomena, and indeed all phenomena “dissolves” in this state (which may extend beyond ‘awareness’ I conjecture).

J. Is ‘much more aware’ on the inside or the outside?
G. when “much more aware” there is no “inside and outside” there is only that in which perception and phenomena arise, and in which experience is possible.

J. Does’ much more aware’ have a size or shape?
G. in my experience awareness is spherical, the “size” relative to the world of form and phenomena seems to vary  significantly according to what may be required in any given situation.

J. And where does ‘much more aware’ come from?
G. the state of being more aware is definitely facilitated by regular meditation practice. It is probably an act of cognition in alignment with intuition – which I experience as a free flow of information through the context in which both myself and that which I am aware of are arising.

J. And when ‘much more aware’ what happens to phenomena?
G. phenomena seem to come into clearer focus, and at the same time they tend to reveal their transparency – depending on the ‘degree’ of awareness bought to bear upon them, their physicality can dissolve altogether revealing only the patterns of energetic interactions which support their arising (which strictly speaking are still phenomena, albeit of the subtle variety, just not available to be apprehended by the purely “physical” perceptual apparatus).

J. And is there a relationship between ‘much more aware’ and Goethe’s Way of Science?
G. as far as I can tell, Goethe’s method calls for a deep intuitive awareness to be bought to bear upon the phenomena being studied. It seems to me, as I experiment with fine tuning this perceptual apparatus for the purpose, that it will require self-awareness and discipline to control the various functions of perception and cognition in order to attain the ‘view’ suggested by his methodology.

Thank you John for encouraging this clarifying dialogue.

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PAL. Chapter 20. Thought and Memory. pp.531-551.

It is merely assumed that perception provides the material for memory, and that memory – reciprocally – provides the material for feeling and thought. This approach has been justified by the presumed need to study memory apart from its relation to other aspects of cognition, which have their own sub-systems and separate lines of observation and experimentation. This trend towards increasing analysis, compartmentalisation and localisation – the triumph of the “splitters” over the “lumpers” – is the bugbear of modern day psychology.

… it is one thing to analyse a whole into its parts, and quite another to re-unite the parts once they have been separated.

Prospective memory is a recurrent thought about the future, and thus a dialectic of thought and memory on the axis of time. A thought of a prior experience that is accompanied by a feeling of pastness, repetition and familiarity is as much a memory as an idea, while memory becomes thought when it departs form reproduction and its content is not evidently perceptual.

We think that “real” experience is the basis of memory, whereas an imagined experience is a kind of thought, or a dream. Memory is grounded in experience, but actual or objective experience is not necessary for a memory, and with respect to experience, the distinction of memory, dream and thought is not sharply drawn.

The dream-time of the myth does not contradict the serial order of the conscious present. Rather, the myth informs or merges with the perception as part of the reality of present experience.

The historical past, whether or not it is remembered and whether or not one can say it actually occurred, leaves it mark on consequent events in the same way that the past leaves its unconscious effects on thought and behaviour. Indeed, invented or misconstrued events can be more vital to behaviour in the present than true facts. What exists in the personal past is, for the subject, as for historical consciousness, what is actively remembered, and this varies with the state of the person at the moment of acquisition and/or recall.

In everyday life, we know that the recall of an event is effected by feeling, novelty and familiarity, interest and semantic or conceptual relations. What is not generally recognised is that this is also true of what we perceive. Value and meaning are guides to perception.

… the self is as much a product of memory as what is remembered.

The theory of generative grammar proposed infinite creativity in language production, though most people are limited to one or two conversations, and tend to repeat themselves endlessly within the topics of their interest. The categorical nature of perception limits novelty to unfamiliar objects, i.e. those which seem outside the usual categories. The novelty of any object or thought is not felt acutely because it resembles in some respect the objects and thoughts we have previously experienced. The priority of the categorical over the particular gives the feeling of the habitual that pervades most aspects of life.

The greater the feeling of stasis on reproduction, the closer the object to perception and memory. The greater the feeling of change within a replication, the closer the object to thought. The novelty that pervades all material and mental process involves a departure of memory into thought. There is a precedence of becoming over being. The stability of category over process entails the relaxation of the activity of thought into the solidity of being. Now, replication or memory predominates.

A memory is felt more like an obligation. An intention is more like a desire.

Agency does not arise form the momentum to the present but is enhanced as the self goes out to objects. The shift in attitude depends on the subtle accentuation and degree of completedness at serial points in the actualisation process. The temporal direction of an intention is closely related to the prospective or retrospective character of memorial experience.

Agency enters intention to the extent that we desire what we remember, either to repeat a prior experience or, in prospective memory, to posses an object that recurs in thought. The relative freedom of intentionality from desire tends to align the former with the “reflective faculty”. This is partly its appeal to philosophy as the criterion of mentality, much as syntax for many linguists is the hallmark of language.

In the intentional state, one object – idea, memory – is selected as a focus of interest from all other possible foci. This interest is a sign of value. Unlike desire, in which feeling is centered in the self, or worth, in which feeling is centered in the object, interest occurs with weak desire in an object of modest worth as a state of feeling in which self and other have equal share.

The productivity of thought, as with all acts of cognition, begins with conscious or unconscious reproduction. In perceptual experience, sense-data constrain thought to model the world.

… prospective memory, which combines past, present and future – memory, thought and expectation – in a siungle cognition. The microgenetic account of this state holds that the revival of a familiar content in a present thought concerning a future event can be interpreted in terms of a sigle process of thought-development which, by way of intrinsic constraints in the phase-transition, tends towards the reproduction of prior contents, while the growth of the content over successive recurrences is a measure of the degree to which the constraints of habitual thinking are relaxed, so that revision or expansion of content can occur.

A chief irony is that reflection on past or future tends to detach the individual from the vividness of the present, while immediacy of experience is felt by those who are reflectively engaged in life as it passes.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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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 10. The Grounds of Rational Decision. pp.275-299

The psychology of value, the transition of drive to desire and its distribution to worth, the relation of desire to conduct, and the conceptual derivation of feeling are the determinants, however complex and elusive, of whether the object one desires is good or bad or whether the conduct that stems from desire is right or wrong.

There are two ways to achieve adaptive success, one by organic sculpting, in which constraints specify acts out of concepts, the other by compulsion or coercion, which is a more emphatic instance of sculpting in which constraints on the specification are imposed. The distinction of inner and outer is fuzzy. Belief, law and custom infiltrate the mind as personal values, reason depends on presuppositions and shared beliefs, and coercion sharpens the focus of the self-preservation drives.

Unconscious conflicts that arise into consciousness may be acknowledged as competing impulses within the individual that tend to be apprehended as contradictory voices. The conflict is portrayed as between an individual and a parent, or between a person and society, a trend that objectifies values as arguments between individuals or with the community, when the conflict is primarily among competing tendencies that are fully intrapsychic. Indeed, an option that is conscious has already become a kind of fact; one could say it is post-cognitive, past the point where it is active in shaping a decision.

Whether or not reason provides an “emphasis upon novelty” or is a novel emphasis, or whether novelty depends on reason rather than its precursors, there is a progression from value to fact, which, like the transition from concept to object, points to the origin of facts in value. Specifically the conceptual antecedents of facts are evoked as values that actualise in choice.

Whether or not a history is ingredient in an action, it provides a ‘folk’ explanation of its causal ancestry. … A microgenetic analysis seeks an account of the action in terms of its immediate conceptual antecedents. In contrast, a moral theory that is a folk theory of everyday life tends to treat conduct and its causes as “face value,” judging them in relation to character on one side, obligation on the other and choice midway between.

… rational thought and propositions are a terminal derivation of lexical and syntactic objects that objectify unconscious presuppositions, conceptual feelings and personal valuations.

The ‘objective’ laws of interaction among objects are internalised by psychology as operations on mental content that are the antecedents of those objects (acts). These operations then become the psychic laws, or the rules that guide discourse, mitigating or competing with emotion to decide the best course of action. But the laws of rational thought applied to facts are not equivalent to the process through which the facts materialise. Rules, laws, customs, are not in-themselves determinants.

The transition from one phase (of language, perception etc.) to the next is a whole-part or context-item shift. This transition entails the individuation of figural elements within background formations. These elements then serve as a background for an ensuing transform.

The formal rule-based theory of syntax that has governed explanation in psychology is not relevant to the process involved in generating a statement, or any cognition.

Reason can justify a failure to act as well as an action, it can weaken the will, divert the passions, dissapate resolve, and often, sadly, turn the heart from its true course. At the least, the more rational a person is, the better his reasons for an action. … reason can justify almost any action.

Reason is a mark of the linguistic coherence of a fully realised concept. The more rational the realisation, the more is articulates the richness of the underlying concept, even if it does not fully satisfy what the concept is aiming at. … A rational statement, a logical argument, is like a perceptual object, in that its goal is its own actualisation.

The agent’s argument may provoke an action in the listener, but didi it cause the agent to act? It may provide a template over which the action unfolds, but there can be a considerable delay subsequent to the rationale before the action occurs. Indeed, though we assume a causal linkage of argument to action, the argument could as well follow that action as precede it.

Reason may delay an ill considered response and allow a more thoughtful one to arise, but it may also derail a course of action that is necessary and desirable, and it may do this not by persuasion, but by exhausting the potential that would lead the concept into action.

Unlike animism, in which subject and object inhabit a common space, rational thought divides the other from the self and, as reason develops and matures, depletes nature of psychic feeling. … A separation of mind and world is essential for intentional feeling. The aim of a statement or a desire must be distinct from the self to convey purpose and direction.

The subject does not require an agentive relation with the objects specified in the intentional state to be a vector of feeling. Even if it is hidden in the statement, the feeling gives intentionality a direction to the aboutness that is the signal property of intentionality.

A covert metamorphosis occurs in which positive and life-enhancing values are , ideally, reinforced at the expense of maladaptive ones.

The perceived strength of an argument merely points to the poverty or insufficiency of alternative concepts in the speaker or the listener or, alternatively, is mitigated by the affective strength of, or emotional commitment to, a contradictory point of view.

The promotion of unselfish attitudes occurs through a process of value-enhancement, the efficacy of which depends on the existing value distribution. On has to be reasonable for reason to work. Reason comes to fill the interval that hesitation provides [neoteny]. This is also the ground of choice. The absence of choice entails direct action, whether for good or bad.

The specification of unconscious values into conscious particulars, in which the particulars are then evaluated by certain of the values that were assumed to guide their specification, is a shift from the process through which the particulars are realised to their logical relations in the mind and the world. There is no reason why this shift, which ruptures the continuity of non-moral and moral acts, should occur.

The psyche is disposable if concepts are logical solids verifiable across subjects and decomposable to atomic elements.

The truth of art, or that of a subjective theory of moral conduct lies in its aesthetic value, its authenticity, not its proof or validity.

In microgenetic theory, the sculpting of endogenous forms occurs at all phases in the derivation of the mental state. In a sculpting model, an implicit choice at every phase cancels competing options. The final actuality, the act, the thought, the object, individuates through a veto-like process that inhibits alternative routes of development over its entire trajectory. We are just conscious of the final ones, and those final ones usually involve conscious, rational thought. In deliberation or introspection, implicit selection in the process of sculpting at an early segment of cognition becomes explicit as choice.

No matter how detached an impartial, a rational statement is derived from unconscious, symbolic and magical thinking. Reasons are linked to personal beliefs and valuations.

In microgenetic theory, the initial construct is a combined act-object. This construct diverges into the separate but conjoined paths of act- and object-development, with language an offshoot of both branches. The process from unconscious depth to conscious surface is a qualitative sequence that reiterates like a fountain.

(emphasis mine)

As writing is a literary art, speech is a vocal one. Discourse or conversation can aim at beauty of expression in poetry, persuasion in rhetoric or clarity in logic. These are all manifestations of the language art. To say a statement id rational is comparable to saying an artwork is beautiful. The rational has features of art in harmony, balance and proportion. Reason formalises and refines language in the same way that an artwork may formalise a musical or spatial cognition. A rational argument, like a logical or mathematical proof, is a work of beauty that is to be admired, illustrative but not instigative.

A morality is rational when the reason for an action elicit a judgement of equity according to an external standard or ideal of fairness or law. The standard is a kind of social organism, external yet internalised, normatively, in the form of personal valuations, and enforced by their constraints on self-expression in addition to the strictures of law.

Philosophy reifies, even deifies reason, with emotion the beast within, while psychology and neuroscience reinforce this distinction, assigning reason to the neocortex and emotion to the older limbic system. The notion still persists that limbic emotion discharges upward to cortex for subjective feeling, and downward for emotional display.

In moral philosophy, the emotional grounds of a decision are usually conceived as secondary to its rational grounds. … Some form of reason and emotion inheres in all acts of cognition. Rational or irrational choices are made every moment without a bearing on ethics.

Reason does not tell us that one life is worth the same as another, nor that all people should have equal opportunity, nor that a human life is worth more than that of a sub-human primate or dolphin…

Doing ones best and hoping for the worst is subjectively immoral, hoping for the best and not doing what it takes is objectively immoral. One is hypocrisy, the other cowardice.

Every decision in life is a rationalisation of feeling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conflict is inevitable since every entity is a contrast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 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.