Tag Archives: desire

by

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

by

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.

by

PAL. Chapter 14. Taste and Manners. pp.383-406.

 

The relation of custom to law on the objective side,. Or the relation of an implicit agreement to the publicity of obligation and enforcement, can be examined in other activities that differ from moral feeling, and yet provide arguments for a psychological theory of value in relation to intrinsic process: specifically, taste and manners. … We will see that a refined taste is closer to aesthetic perception, while manners are closer to moral conduct. … Manners are moral actions that are ingrained in tradition, taste is a perceptual appreciation of the quality that owes to a tradition of knowledge and judgment.

Genius does not necessarily revise taste but instills its own works in that which taste condones, or expands ion order to appreciate. The step from taste to innovation is like that from prodigy to genius. One is the perfection of the available, the other, a capacity to extend it.

A democracy of opinion is the shipwreck of taste, for it leads to defining the good as an average of preferences, not a model towards which they should advance. … the judgment relies on pre-processing phases in the original perception. The discrimination of the good and the beautiful that we associate with taste, or its correlates in the field of manners, such as courtesy, tact , and discretion, are implicit judgments of what is better or preferable within a category.

Preference is a felt bias to an object. Taste certifies or justifies the bias. Aesthetic feeling penetrates the object, and preference is a sign of this feeling, whether or not it is supported by justifications.

Generally an aesthetic object can only approach a standard set by another object in the same category. The standard is the ideal for its time, its style, its language etc. In morals, the standard is not extracted from the object or action, but to a varying extent, is exemplified by it. The ideal of ethics is unrealisable. There will always be a gap between the actual and the ideal, between the unknowable motives that drive an action, the feelings that accompany it and conduct in relation to virtuous character or an ideal of moral probity.

Valuation generates desire, which creates worth in ordinary objects. Worth trickles out of desire into the value of an ordinary object. … The emphasis upon feeling in preference accounts for its greater subjectivity, the emphasis on conceptuality accounts for the grater objectivity of taste.

The more emphatic the conceptuality, the more detached the emotional response.

In the fact that taste, not preference, can be disputed, the worth of the object is similar to the value of moral objects, since values can also be controverted. Worth becomes an object of choice in aesthetics when a perceptual judgment is required, and an object of choice in ethics when what is required is a judgment leading to or justifying an action.

An evaluation entails a comparison, but not precisely between objects, rather, within their common infrastructure. The infrastructure then actualises the objects to evoke the sensibility of the comparison. The judgment then, is not an addition to the object but a revival of content bypassed in the immediate perception. … Taste is a derivative of the initial perception that objectifies value in relation to knowledge articulated by learning in a specific domain of experience.

In aesthetic discernment, there is also an intentionality that informs an objectified judgment of what is better or more beautiful, or what should be desired, which is then endorsed by taste.

The determination that a certain individual is exceptional, or deserves unusual respect or deference, or merits reward for unusual skill, beauty etc., is compatible with taste in the comparison of the instance to the class, but it does not satisfy the criteria that would extend taste to ethics.

Taste and manners are not motivated by judgments, which are outcomes, but by their conceptual and affective precursors. Judgments are constraints on the refinement of other peoples sense of taste, but for the subject they are expressive features, not higher order assessments

What matters is not the surface product – the preference, the taste – but the context, knowledge and intention behind it.

A naturalist theory of the good holds that the object of the good is part of the act directed to it, i.e. the good act is continuous with, and ingredient in, the agent.

Taste can become a judgment that bridges into law or obligation. … The “political correctness” of a work of art can be imposed by force upon the artist, by threat or insinuation, or it can affect the artist more subtly in the attitudes of the artistic and intellectual community.

Art and life are in constant flux, and aesthetic (and moral) values are called into question when the lack of a precedent is an intimidating factor that prevents the taking of a strong aesthetic stance.

Good taste, good manners and good conduct are variations on a theme of goodness from the aesthetic to the moral. The value that promulgates taste is cultivated, in morals it is imbibed. The authoritative in taste – what is ‘great’ in art or literature – is comparable to the dictates of custom – what is right in conduct – in that a person is taught how to perceive or act.

In seeking links from taste to aesthetics from manners to morals, or from taste to manners, a subtle difference in emphasis can decide the category of a given act of cognition. This may be a bias to action or perception, to context and generality on the one hand, selectivity on the other. One may incline to privacy or publicity, to aesthetic or moral values, to the creative or receptive, to the perfection of the timeless or the corruption of the temporal, to the inorganic or to the living. Thus custom drives conduct in many aspects of moral and non-moral life.

Unlike the refinement of taste, as a sub-class of aesthetics, or an elegance of manners, as a sub-class of ethics, goodness and beauty are often closer to simplicity. … The consensus of taste is the validation of individual preference by those who “know what is best”. This is not the other-centeredness of goodness. It is a reliance on the opinion of a select group of others, not a concern for their welfare.

Manners are incidental to moral choices because they are benign expressions of character, and irrelevant to the particulars of a given choice. The fact that manners so readily dissociate from character suggests that, as far as virtue is concerned, they are not ingredients but accoutrements. … Ideally, they should be fluid tributaries that flow from the depths of character, little morals that become fixed in rules of gracious conduct.

Sincerity is a measure of the authenticity of moral conduct, while in taste, we accept that it is more indicative of personality and not a sign of character.

In shame, dishonour, humiliation, ridicule, the conscious self suffers an injury in relation to its ideal. The offense is internalised as a powerful refutation of a positive self-valuation. The damage to self-esteem is a ‘negative; value that must be ‘excised’ for the self to heal. The extent of damage to the self concept depends on the importance or value of the other in the life of the injured party.

… as taste represents aesthetic categories in relation to preferences as affective habits, so manners represent categories of ethical conduct fixed in routines. And as taste extends the bounds of aesthetics to all object classes, including scientific objects, so do manners extend the bounds of ethical conduct into rituals of little moral interest.

The points below are vital to bear in mind as they apply specifically to the situation in which so many of our peers find themselves – this is the version of manifest reality with which we currently have to contend.

The origination of a novel approach outside a field is often easier to accept than a transformation within one.

The masses, lay or professional, favour those who amuse them, moving from one amusement to another seeking novelty as a surrogate for depth. … It is not an exaggeration to say that barely 1% of those in any field are responsible for transmitting the higher art of the discipline to the next generation or extending it into novel areas. … Most careers exploit the known, some extend it, still fewer transform it. The question is whether, for creativity, the critical mass of ordinary work is a hindrance or a necessity. One also wonders about the need for a coterie of connoisseurs, even in an age of mediocrity, to vet a work of originality, should it appear.

It is often remarked that in an age of the global village, it would be exceptional if genius was overlooked, since everyone has access to just about everything. But a tidal wave of trivia swamps the solitary voice.

The mediocre is not innocuous, it distorts the capacity of the public – even the professionals – to appraise quality.

The ideals of the great are not hostage to the whims of the public, but seek an audience of peers, if only a few in a generation.

by

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by

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)

by

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.

by

PAL. Chapter 9. Autonomy and Compassion. pp.243-274

A coherent theory of value and its impact on moral conduct con only develop on the intrinsic relationality of all objects in the observers mind.

A person in my visual field is an image correlated with brain activity, and an inference based on belief. That is not to say the person does not deserve to be treated as an independent, parallel instance of consciousness. Subjectivism does not imply the non-existence of an external world, only the lack of direct or immediate knowledge of that world. How could the richness of the world be conjured up in my experience were the world itself not its inspiration? This argument, by the way, is as close to a ‘proof’ of an external world as one can get.

We are brains encased in helmets that generate a virtual reality which, by the sole fact of our survival, must conform to what is out there. (!!)

Bonnie’s comments in blue (per permission from GD):

This is where I think JB trips himself up. He makes what I call the Kantian “correspondence theory” fallacy — which has its current form in the correspondence theory of cognition, which basically states that whatever happens in cognition, is somehow completely independent of the objective world, but also somehow there is a one-to-one correspondence to the world. Kant imagined that there were transcendentalia (like the rules of math and logics) that could trans-literate through this type of correspondence, a scientific version of “the world out there” without ever really being able to know the a prior “out there.” 

Here is a little sidebar history to compare and contrast the view(s) that are operating in western philosophy:

On the left we have Humean Idealism, where the world exists out there, forever unknowable. This is carried forward in the philosophy of perspectivalism, where the world exists as a construction of a human collectivity (we-space) – this is the epistemic fallacy that Critical Realism levies against Integral Theory- as Bhaskar notes, wrongly equating “the real world” with “the known world” and gives rise to the many-worlds version when the human collectives exist at different altitudes (different we-spaces, world-spaces, developmental-levels, etc…)

Along comes Kant and ushers in the modern era of scientific rationality based on transcendentalia in the human rational mind:

There is still a gap between the epistemic, known world, and the a prior, real world “out there” – but Kant allows for transcendentalia (and the proper uses of them) to transliterate or modulate scientific versions or maps that correspond to the real world out there (which itself remains unknowable). We learn to manipulate signifiers like mathematical equations, and through experiment and feedback, these signifiers have causal connection to outcomes — but we really do not know why/how the other side of the black box is working, and have no ability to touch the real.

In the above passage of JB, he seems to substitute the transcendentalia with the mocrogenetic wave that somehow “goes out to touch the real” — so this is an improvement, but there is still a gap. There is still a subtle suggestion of the “substance pluralism” problem – how do two substances interface?

Bohm comes along and says, there is only one substance — and its not a substance, its a process — the holomovement — and looks like this:

So the “transcendentally real” is now a different order — more densely enfolded order — of the explicit, object world. This gives rise to the notion that information precedes existence — the higher enfolded orders are higher orders in the informational field. This is better, but Bohm requires an infinite regression of ever-more higher orders of enfoldment– so there has to be structure, before process … which can be problematic, and is somewhat in-elegant, as it speaks to substance monism a la Leibnitz (instead of a process monism).

Given that JB is interested in neuro-cognition, and not metaphysics, he has to settle for his version of the story. But if you extend his process thinking based on process monism (single process, many substances(structures) – then you can come up with a kind of view that sees both cognitive and actual occasions as processes that infold reality — so the real is not an enfolded order, but open, vast, empty of structure or information, and that as it processes (enfolds on itself– like my piece of paper) it creates structures (processural centers) that then go on to generate sub-processes that interfere with other processes, and transforming the whole — into both cognitive and actual occasions.

So this is a process monism version.

 

 

 

 

There is only the substrate “consciousness” which has neither subjective nor objective quality (because those are structurations in the process field). The horizontal levels show different types of structuration, black microgenies are cognitive types, red mocrogenies are actual occasions of various types (structured as R1, R2, R3) — the R series representing the stratification of reality (as Bhaskar says) on an intrinsic (i.e. onto-genetic) scale. When cognitive ocassions interfere with actual ocassions, the processes that inteface become “world” with a subjective and objective pole at different interface points, creating different types of phenomena available  for creating structures at higher levels of order (more and more densely enfolded-

And since each of the interfaces presupposes both an onto-genetic (prior) content, enfolded within each process proceeding from each living center (and attenuating back to source), then the enfoldments get increasingly more dense — and create something that is experienced as a prior (a- priori) layering of information in an implicit field — yet process monism has the advantage of not positing any metaphysical structures …

These illustrations of course, are not meant to be representations of anything “real” in and of themselves, but just useful to give meaning to the languaging of alternative ways of thinking about “reality.”

The real is imputed from the relation to appearance, and appearance is related to some term in addition to the subject.

If feeling is not real, reality is beyond our grasp, since feeling is the experience of process, process is reality and feeling as process is common ground with the process-life of all existence.

All the exists for the observer, and all that can be described with assurance, is given in the present.

We are images or ideas in a whole that is greater than all of us. The superficial (perpetual) bonds we share at the surface of the mental life are ripples in the same pond.

But the way back to the other, for solipsism and egoism, lies in a surrender of autonomy to adaptation, community and wholeness.

The self-realisation of the will can be directed toward any object, an idea, a meal, an illness, but when the will is directed toward another person, given that the other is part of the self, the self is most fully realised.

… genuine compassion is a true feeling of community that arises with a reclamation of other in the relinquishing and renewal of self.

The instinctual basis of genuine compassion suggests an origin antecedent to conscious empathy. This runs deep in the psychic life, even to the subtle pattern in organic nature, a quiet orchestration in which elements in a field are subordinate to the whole, bee hives, termitaries. We see this tacit choreography at work in a flight of birds, a school of fish, even in a grove of palms.

Asked who am I, the person should reply with sincerity, a human being like you. That is the primary identification to which all others – family, origins, religion, state, etc. – are or should be subordinate.

Only when such awareness is palpably entrenched in the psyche, or when we revive the positive in an ‘enlightened’ animism, will a dedication to the greater good of humanity arise out of the sense of being one with living nature.

In susceptible individuals, the perception of suffering elicits personal unhappiness as an empathic residue. In sum the exportation of subjective feeling into an objective state of suffering accentuates a subjective residue of value that leaves behind a trail of affect in the form of pity or compassion. The identification with the other can be attributed to an early phase in the individuation of the affect stream that accompanies a primitive (animistic) mentality.

The inference of pain or suffering, or the compassion for it in others, exports feeling for an into the other in a transit trough the mind of the observer. In compassion, the other’s pain is in fact ones own.

With the assumption of another perspective, or with empathic fusion, especially as an intuition of the commonality of separate individuals, values flow into objects as fluid extensions of the self. One could say that self and other do not achieve full separation and autonomy. An object of compassion is not a piece of flotsam in a sea of indifferent humanity, it is an object of value and signification.

Only in the act of loving does the self love, only in the act of caring is the self compassionate.

Object value or worth does not obligate compassion, but it does underlie whatever compassion is felt. In cases where one recognises a person as worthy but has no interest in his fate, or when a person considers life to be sacred and gives value to the life of others but still does not show compassion when life is endangered, autonomy has proceeded so far that action and feeling are no longer informed by innate empathy. But if one does feel compassion, this feeling can only arise for a person or object felt to have value. All objects have intrinsic value, though some are assigned more worth than others. From the subjective standpoint, compassion arises when the outgoing stream of object-feeling evokes emotions in the self that are congruent with those of the other even before it objectifies.

To feel pity and do nothing is only slightly better than to feel nothing at all. The former is a moral indulgence that is only mildly offensive, while indifference is a severe pathology of character.

Above all, the sense of shared vulnerability evokes an image of a continuum from one mind to another, thus, the primordial unity of subject-object, self and other.

From the standpoint of an individual cognition, empathy and the sense of community are fragmentary glimpses into an unconscious core that makes its way into conscious life. So also, one could say, is the madness of crowds, mob violence and submission to authority.

The identification or fusion of compassion relinquishes the autonomy that has been achieved through a long evolutionary and maturational struggle. The explosion of parts out of wholes in the analytic trend of though gives way to a lapsing of parts back into primordial wholes. The person dissolves in the other and reclaims a wholeness of engagement prior to partition.

To be compassionate, and authentically so, is for self-realisation to actively engage the realisation of the other, to merge self and other as best one can in this world. The mark of the superior soul is the resolution of self and other in conduct sensitive to the potential out of which we all, each moment, arise, undivided by arbitrary boundaries created in the inevitable loss of potential and the continuous vanishing of concrete actualities.

In any symbiosis, the distinction between constituents, and the rivalry of autonomies, is as much delineated as blurred by mutual need, is the slave … less close to selfhood than the master … ?

One is defined by service, the other by need. To the extent the master grows dependent on the slave, he abandons positive selfhood. To the extent the slave resists – or accepts – the conditions of service, to that extent does he find positive selfhood. In humans, selfhood is denied only to those oblivious to circumstance.

Dependency is the need that underlies compassion from the standpoint of the other. Deference to power of wisdom is essential. Those in need must accept the aid (and implicit dominance) of others. The subject who feels compassion may not be aware of this dominance, but that is not true for the person who accepts assistance from another. … Fear and necessity are the handmaids of empathy.

The urge to fight or dominate is not conducive to compassion, which requires a shared sense of vulnerability.

… just as compassion requires that we assume the perspective of the other, so aesthetic perception requires that we assume the perspective of the artist or the artwork.

… it is the self’s own constructs that infuse subjectivity in the work.

Empathy is the revisiting of parts in antecedent wholes, the regression of objects to concepts, individuals to social organisms, a withdrawal to what is deep and abiding from what is transient and accidental.

A critical difference between desire and worth is that desire feels processual and subjective, worth feels objective and substantial.

When the oneness with others is regained, there is no guarantee that individuation will return the parties to their original equilibrium.

by

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.

 

 

by

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

 

Instinctual Drive (lower mammals) >> Object existence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

by

PAL Chapter 4 – Value in mind and nature. pp.127-143

Kill thy activities and still thy faculties if thou wouldst realise this birth in thee. ~ Meister Eckart.

For process theory, the dynamic in a mental content lies in its immediate prehistory, not its causal surface. The change from one state of mind or world to the next ia a novel becoming or near-replication of the immediately preceding state. Images, thoughts, feelings, objects in perception, do not cause something to occur; they appear, disappear ans are replaced by a subsequent state. The present state may be conceived as the effect of its antecedent, but it is a novel actualisation constrained by the state it replaces. In human mentation, the contents of awareness are actualities or finalities that perish, not solids with causal force. The process of actualisation, not what actualises, is the focus of change in mind and world.

In the actualisation process, mind and world are not parallel endpoints. The self is an intermediate phase in the object, which is an objectification of subjective phases in the mind/brain state.

Idealist philosophies regard the contents of the mind and the objects of perception as the phenomenal derivatives of a covert underlying reality. Concepts and objects, however, are not veils concealing formative process; they are the process that deposits them. Whether an object is conceived as real or phenomenal, there is still a development, a microgenesis or phase transition concealed within its surface form. The pattern of the phase-transition within an object is its reality, whether the unconscious process of the mind or the microphysical process of non-cognitive nature. Fundamental to this line of thought is that common process underlies the multiplicity of forms in nature and the diversity of contents sin human cognition.

More than consciousness, value brings the objectivity of the physical world into relation with human emotion and conceptuality.

To say that human valuation is continuous with value in simple physical entities is to claim that value is grounded in the cosmology of process metaphysics, even if the precursors of value in rocks or particles are far removed from their final manifestation in the human mind. In other words, there is no “bottom up” continuum from the intrinsic value of physical entities to the subjective valuations of human cognition.

The concept of intrinsic value traces to an ancient debate in metaphysics centring on the opposition of the qualitative and quantitative modes of analysis. The tensions in these modes of thought is expressed in cognition in the distinction of the qualitative feel of the inner experience and the quantitative science of objects. The feeling of a qualitative something in the mind that is lacking in physical objects is the basis of the dialectic between subject and object, or between inner experience and outer reality. … What a state is, is its objective existence. What a state feels like, is the dynamic within the state. This contrast at a more fundamental level is that of change and persistence, or the extremes of annihilation and eternalism that delimit the Buddhist middle way.

(P.131 has an important paragraph that is too long to share and not reducible to summary in a coherent manner :( )

… the existence of an entity is its intrinsic value.

Intrinsic value as existence transforms to value as feeling, or from existence as a packet of energy to life as a vector of feeling. At the stage of intrinsic value (existence), the dynamic is a non-directional becoming of process within the being of entity. The temporality of the process within the entity, and the spatiality of the category that constitutes the entity, are different perspectives on the becoming and being that are the entity.

… the duration establishes the entity as an existent, while the process over which the duration extends is a kind of vector. In elementary entities, this is an aim to actuality. In the human mind it is, in addition, a direction from self to world.

In brief, value is the being of an entity, or the being (substantiality) of an object, over the becoming of a momentary category of phases. … This way of thinking allows us to unify the temporality of change with the timelessness of category. Quantity arises in the existence of an entity as its duration actualises. Quality arises in the process through which the entity actualises. Similarly, objectivity, as an external perspective on an object, derives from the solidification of its category. Subjectivity , as the internal ‘perspective’ of the object or entity, derives from the change through which the category is laid down. Yet all entities are fundamentally the same, so the distinction turns on the emphasis of either the categorical (substantial) or transitive (processual) aspect of the same entity.

I would locate the subjective at the point where process is no longer isotropic, i.e. when directionality is crucial to a particular existent. At that point, one could say, energy shifts to feeling as the reversibility of intrinsic process becomes untenable.

The presence of feeling imports realness to the phase sequence.

Feeling as realness is the vitality of lower forms that exist in a mode of sensory experience as it makes contact with the environment. Feeling reaches into the sensory organs and promotes movement in a reflex arc. … As feeling transforms to instinct, the circularity of the sensor-motor contact of organism with environment [...] shifts to a unified act-object. The closed circuit of reflex shifts to a simultaneous construct that is the core of a mental representation. For example, when the frog’s tongue captures a fly, perception and action occur as a unit.

Gradually, the response bias of instinct gives way to the potential of drive. The enhancement of antecedent phases of possibility at the expense of the rigid interlocking sensori-motor dependencies of instinct helps to individuate organism and enlarge its affective repertoire. With the drives – aggression, fear, appetite – there are many routes to satisfaction, the fractionation of drive is the threshold of individuality. The subjectivity of the actualising organism is more emphatic as its objective segment, the perceptual world, is articulated by feelings in objects of interest. Inner and outer worlds are the subjective and objective phases of a single perception. … The next stage transforms this pattern to a mature human cognition.

This occurs through an accentuation at a phase previously bypassed in the immediacy of object actualisation where conceptual primitives invested with drive energy allocate feeling to the merging object-concepts that give rise to perceptual objects. In this phase of conceptual feeling, the affective tonality of object-concepts replaces the object-bound drives with the concept-bound desires. The feeling in a concept replaces the feeling in or for an object.

Feeling is like a river that recurs from a source in the mind to a destination in the world, one moment surging up at a proximal phase, another, cascading downstream, yet all the while, an interior dynamic of a larger object, the mind/brain state, that is constantly pouring out objects.

An account of human perception is critical to the so-called observer error in physics, but is also necessary to bring novel insights to physical theory.

Dividing the length of an electron by the speed of light, Whitrow (1972) defined a chronon as the shortest interval of time, 10 to the minus 24 seconds.

(emphasis mine – interesting factoid ^)

The objective segment of a perception is the world we perceive. The subjective segment is the route through which it gets there and the self that perceives it. The self and experiential memories are laid down in the wake of the object as “deep structures” in its actualisation. The mind/brain state is a wave of process that stretches from the core of the mind to the rim of the world.

The ground of existence is augmented in the feeling of realness, which is then allocated to the proximal or distal polarity of the mind/brain state so as to enhance intrinsic value and realness to desire or worth. Desire is an accentuation of the subjective polarity, worth of the objective polarity. Yet, intrinsic value is the basis on which realness and desire develop as the first stages in the conceptual valuation of the object.

Interest is the qualitative shift in value from realness to worth. The conceptual feeling that is channelled into the object heightens its affective content. The object stands out, signifys something beyond itself. An object of desire that has interest or worth can also be a concept or an idea distinct from the desire for it by the self.

The relative emphasis on a proximal-subjective or distal-objective segment in the mental state determines whether valuation will be felt in the perceiver as desire, or in the object as worth.

To sum up; a perception is a transition over phases leading from self to world. A single transition, an act of cognition, is a mind/brain state. An object includes all of the phases in its development. Basic entities also exist as duration. Intrinsic value is the existence of a physical entity over its phases. The intrinsic value of an entity, or a mind/brain state, is its non-cognitive existence. This is the foundation of its initial subjective valuation as realness. Physical entities exist before they are felt as real. They cannot have the feeling of realness without being existents, even if those existents are hallucinatory or virtual. Realness is the accentuation of existence in organism. The object not only exists, but fells real. As intrinsic value grounds realness, so realness grounds a more developed valuation. … The transition os from intrinsic value (existence) of inorganic entities, as the envelope of their waveform, through the realness of organic life, in which process becomes directional, to the conceptual feeling of human cognition, in which desire and worth precipitate as the affective content of abject-concepts at their subjective and objective polarities.