Tag Archives: existence

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Excerpts from Latour’s essay “Will non-humans be saved? -

An argument in ecotheology.” pp 459-475, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2009.

 

What I mean by taking religion ‘seriously’ is to take it religiously.

To be an anthroplogist of the moderns requires the ability to speak in tongues, that is, to be sensitive to each of the original ways of speaking truthfully which have been developed and nurtured: scientific, yes, to be sure; legal, political, yes, yes, but also religious.

.. it remains extremely difficult to apply to religion the same principles that has been applied to the other contrasts, that is, to treat it on its own ground so as not to speak ‘of’ religion but instead to speak ‘in’ a religious tone, or, using the adverbial form, religiously. Speaking scientifically is not a problem … Speaking legally is taught very efficiently at law schools. … But enunciating something religiously is terribly difficult because of the ease with which it is explained or accounted for by other types of explanation, especially social explanations. The precise truth conditions (or felicity conditions) that allow someone to speak religiously (and not ‘about’ religion in another tone of voice) have almost vanished (the same is true, by the way, of political enunciation).

It would be interesting and possibly quite useful to discern what those precise felicity conditions are – and to consider some examples in context, then to attempt an application …

The range of attitudes, prescriptions, warnings, restrictions, summons, sermons, and threats that go with ecology seem to be strangely out of sync with the magnitude of the changes expected from all of us, the demands that appear to impinge upon every detail of our material existence. It is as if the rather apocalyptic injunction “your entire way of life must be modified or else you will disappear as a civilisation” has overwhelmed the narrow set of passions and calculations that go under the name of “ecological consciousnes”.

In addition to this lack of fit between the implied threats and the proposed solutions, there is something deeply troubling in many ecological demands suddenly to restrict ourselves and try to leave no more footprints on a planet we have nevertheless already modified through and through. It appears totally implausible to ask the heirs of the emancipatory tradition to convert suddenly to an attitude of abstinence, caution, and asceticism – especially when billions of other people still aspire to a minimum of decent existence and comfort.

These are all good points, that I would have extreme difficulty explaining to the “deep green” activists in my circles – I wonder what further extrapolations upon this theme will be required to move it into the realm of “things to consider”, of relevance and influence to those who practice  eco-activism in its many guises. The expressed memetic structure of the “ecological” consciousness is currently heavily biased by unconscious self-flagellatory  justifications and cynical rhetoric, and lacks insight (imo).

Not only does religion demand a level of radical transformation compared to which the ecological gospel looks like a timid appeal to buy new garbage cans, but it also has – and this will be even more important for the future – a very assured confidence in the ‘artificial’ remaking of earthly goods.

Whereas ecologocal consciousness has been unable to move us, the religious drive to renew the face of the earth just might.

It is painfully clear that this ever-shrinking religious ethos will do nothing for ecologising our world, … Yet perhaps we can postpone this seemingly inevitable Apocalypse: religion could become a powerful alternative to modernising and a powerful help for ecologising, provided that a connection can be established (or rather re-established) between religion and Creation, instead of religion and nature.

I think what is being suggested here, is that a deeply reverent attitude toward caring for and cultivating the living planet might arise as a kind of ethical framework invested with the passionate drive of devotional service – somehow … (which would be kinda cool!)

… science, or, rather, to use my technical terms, reference chains are what allow access to the far away, while religion, or, rather, presence, to use again my terminology, is what allows access to the near … This distinction … has the advantage of quickly dissolving a lot of the nonesense that accrues as soon as one opposes ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’.

It becomes clearer and clearer as anthropology moves on, spurred both by my own field (science studies) and by ecological crises and globalisation more generally, that nature has never been the unified material medium in which modernism has unfolded.

Remember that the key question is how to allow religion to encounter something other than ‘nature’. That this is possible (if not easy) becomes clearer when one begins to realise that what is called ‘nature’ – or what has been taken for the same thing, “the material world”, the world of ‘matter’ – is made of at least two entirely different layers of meaning: one consists of the ways in which reference chains need to be arrayed so as to work, by giving us knowledge of far-away entities and processes of all kinds; but the other is provided by a completely different type of mode, and that is the way in which the entities themselves manage to remain in existence.

[describing two primary modes of existence, Reference and Reproduction which when combined define Latour's notion of 'nature']

Neither neo-Darwinians nor creationists have digested the radical news that organisms themselves make up their own meanings.

… where do we get this prejudice that religion is defined by a transcendence that can save us from a world which otherwise would stifle us into immanence? (or according to its mirror image, the alternative secular narrative that the stark immanence of the natural world will save us from an escapist adherence to the transcendent world of beyond?) Here resides the root of all spite against non-humans and, by consequence, the complete implausibility of any form of ecological spirituality.

Good question, with an imperative to find it’s answer built in.

The hiatus of Reproduction, the risk taken by each individual organism in its own Umwelt to last a little longer, has to be defined on its own terms, with its own felicity conditions, without imposing upon it a narrative borrowed from somewhere else. … By asking for reproduction to stand alone as a mature mode of existence, is a plea not to “overcome the limits of a mechanistic or reductionistic view of the material world”, but, on the contrary, to stop adding to it dimensions that have always been superfluous to its pursuit of its own peculiar goals. … Let us at least secularise the world of reproduction.

If moderns are guilty of a sin, it is that of portraying one of their main achievements  namely the discovery that nothing was out of reach of reference chains, by morphing it into the lazy contemplation of a “natural world” made visible to rational minds without work, without instruments, without history. They failed to do justice to their own inventive genius and thus have kidnapped science … into a rather drab and entirely mythical drama of Light overcoming Darkness. Reference deserves greater respect than the hypocritical (I take the word etymologically) adherence to a “scientific worldview”. Through its complex, cascading reference chains, science can produce an objective grasp of everything, but no “scientific worldview” of anything – and especially not by covering up evolution.

… what if religion is allowed to weave its highly specific from of transcendence into the fabric of the other two modes of existence, Reproduction and Reference? … I am well aware that such an encounter has never taken place. … Can we help prepare the occasion for an encounter that has never taken place?

‘Creation’ could be the word to designate what we get when Reproduction and Reference are seized by the religious urge radically to transform that which is given into that which has to be fully renewed. … The term ‘creativity’ also designates Reproduction quite well – and it is also a fitting way to capture the immense productivity of science.

Like many of us mere mortals (I assume) I am still having some difficulty getting to the pith of Latour’s arguments. I like many of the points he raises. He is quite abstruse at times as well as seeming to have a tendency to circumnambulate the issues he is discussing , and part of me just wants him to summarise his thinking and lay out the essence of his position in a more direct manner (which probably reveals more about me than it does about his writing style I admit).

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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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GD. Goethean Experimental Observations for 12/06/2012

(noticing the phenomena of sounds arising from within);

Prelude: I have relocated to a big old house near the beach, with a forest across the road. To honour the occasion, we had a fire ceremony at the beach on the evening of the 12th June. After enjoying the beautiful starlit evening we returned to the house, after I have settled my son I settle into sitting meditation on the mat in front of the altar.

I sound the singing bowl, chant Aum and then sit with my double dorje in my hands, contemplating the energetic nexus that it represents, and creatively imagining the dynamic structure which it represents the underpinnings of.

 

I begin to feel the arising of kundalini shakti, gently undulating through my subtle energetic system and up my spine, out through the top of my head with a tingling sensation and into the familiar fountain-like pattern of return to the overflowing pool at the base chakra where the flow continues up the central channel and back out my head. After sitting like this for some time I feel the need to surrender into savasana (corpse pose) however I am also feeling chilled as it is mid winter so I take my body to bed and continue my meditation there.

At this point my body begins to tremble and shake, to vibrate from a deep-down-phenomenon of silent sound arising in the very core of every atom and cell. I note my heart rate increasing, and breathing deepening and lengthening. I am surrendered, all action taking place now is spontaneously arising of its own accord, I am remaining in lucid awareness and observing.

With the deepening of the breath I note an expansion of the abdomen, accompanied by deep creaking and groaning sounds, my chest and throat are also expanding to the sounds of cartilage creaking. My vertebrae are aligning and stretching apart. From a place deep within my skull a secretion of cool, sweet liquid begins to flow into my throat and upper nasal passages. This flow of (?) seems to precipitate an intensification of the phenomenon.

 

I begin to feel pressure stretching me from the inside like a balloon being filled, the air flowing into my lungs seems to penetrate every organ, membrane and cell of my physical body beyond their capacity to contain it in their present shape. I feel like I am being tickled from within, I am laughing intermittently and potent “chemical” tears are streaming from my eyes. My hands move to hover over my sacral and solar plexus chakras, the hands are moving in rapid circles counter rotational to each other, the chakras feel like ‘solid’ balls of whirling energy. The trembling in my body intensifies, my heart rate is still accelerating and my breathing seems to have stopped at a full in-breath. Part of my mind is cautioning me about the possibility of having a heart attack or brain anurism because of the unusual conditions. I consciously make the decision to surrender and trust the experience, even if it means I do in fact die as a result (!).

At this point an impossibly bright yet cool light erupts in both my heart and head (witnessed in the third eye) which expands out to include my whole body. Now all my physical bodily components seem to completely liquify, there is a sensation of dissolving and (hard to describe what) I imagine being like a chrysalis undergoing the metamorphic process. The level of inner sound which is accompanying this event is tremendous yet also very difficult to describe, something like a howling storm perhaps (I will try to find an approximation on mp3 somewhere). My inner eye is registering myriad complex fluidic geometric structures dynamically interacting and energised by seemingly liquid light throughout my field of awareness, all emanating from the core of my being. My physical body feels like it is a writhing mass of system interactions from the cellular level through to the level of organs, tissues and bones. This is a full spectrum immersive experience of something extraordinary!

The complex “body of light” which it appears to my inner eye that I have become is expanding to fill the room, expanding out across the forest, across the ocean and encompassing the whole planet, the expansion continues, waves of energetic intensification continue, I now contain the whole galaxy, and continue to expand and absorb greater and greater spheres of (?) perhaps awareness of consciousness – I am the universal essence in all its forms for a ‘moment’ – it is almost totally overwhelming. I am not breathing and my heart seems to be stuck on full throttle.

Sound begins to emit from my expansive throat, a deep moaning nameless sound. The observational part of my mind is still restless and registering cautions about the possibilities of damage to the physical vehicle. I decide that I need to ‘ground’ the experience and that I can Aum with it as a means of fully embodying that which is flowing through me (rather than becoming fully disembodied by its raw power). So I begin to Aum, low and deep into the lower chakra triad, and then a higher tone, into the heart, and higher again into the upper chakra triad. I slowly begin to reintegrate and re-inhabit my physical vehicle. The toning is re-establishing a breathing rhythm, my heart rate begins to decelerate somewhat.

I find myself glowing and buzzing, it is as if I have just been born, My body feels like a fresh new organism, weightless for a while, tingling and throbbing with light and sound – I seem to be in psychic contact with every mind I have ever contacted, all of you are right here with me, I hear your voices and feel you in me. We are all connected to this vast and fathomless energy source which is still flowing through me, as me (and everything and everyone). My subtle sensitivities appear to have been enhanced, yet so has my capacity to accept being in such a state.

At the time of writing, 5 days later, I am still in this ‘renewed’ state. Speaking with the Goethe track group (16/06/2012) helped me ground the experience a bit more, thank God for these eminently qualified comrades. Many of the images which have sprung unbidden to my mind over the last 20 years are now relating to each other in my mind in ways that they have not done before – so many symbols of a pre-cognised experience which only now is unfolding – the whole concept of time and space is so plastic. And underpinning the whole experiential context – the sound which arises from within – what a revelation.

Conclusion: No amount of theory can adequately describe a knowing which only direct experience can deliver.

The lucid contemplative reflections continue….

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PAL. Chapter 25. Reflections on immortality. pp.663-689

 

If I remain ceaselessly active to the end of my days, Nature is under an obligation to allot me another form of existence, when the present one is no longer capable of containing my spirit. I do not doubt the continuance of our existence. May it then be that He who is eternally living will not refuse us new forms of activity analogous to those in which we have been tested. Goethe.

Immortality implies perpetual duration. This persistence of mind, and body in mind, is the sense of life everlasting. An everlasting consciousness is conceived as a consciousness that endures, i.e. it endlessly consumes new presents ion an enlarging past, while an eternal consciousness is one for which the present embraces all eternity.

The perishing of each conscious moment is unnoticed when it is replaced; the interval, being timeless and not incremented, is non-conscious. Thus, we feel a seamless and continuous self across perishings. In life, this “bridge across moments” is extracted from the present state. Since we live in the present state, the next state, the one that will replace the present state, does not exist until the replacement occurs.

If the real is the presumed oneness of the absolute that underlies a multiplicity of individualities, it can only be achieved when the appearances of perception and the illusion of personal consciousness are extinguished.

Heaven and the soul that seeks it should not be fashioned on earthly knowledge. They are, if they exist, unimaginable.

The duration of the present – the now – is not fixed and immutable but elastic; it can be contracted in pathological conditions, and expanded in meditation or hypnotic age regression. Yogic meditation expands the now in a “pure consciousness” detached from the flow of objects. Mystics have written of such experiences. They speak of an individual consciousness becoming one with the mind of god, embracing a world process of becoming of all past, present and future times in a single all encompassing now.

The posterior boundary of the now is extensible because its floor is essentially bottomless.

The notion of an individual consciousness after death is not a mystical insight. Keyserling (1927) wrote that mysticism ends in an impersonal immortality.

Emptiness is the insubstantiality of the relational, the negation even of relationality, for the relation is not a nothing, it is still a discrimination, an affirmation. Pure relationality or flux is a conceptual film that is finally unpeeled as consciousness attains absolute emptiness.

Ironically, what does not achieve nirvana is the very thing that must be elevated in karma and liberated from samsara, namely consciousness.

All objects, ourselves included, are recurrences. Change is cyclical. The appearance of progression arises as a vector toward novelty in a replacement of forms.

A universe that arises in god’s mind, and perishes in the mind of an individual at death, begins with the consciousness of god independent of nature, and survives as an individual in god’s mind. It is as if the history of the material world and the individuality of our conscious natures were but one idea articulated into world process and the manifold of conscious states. Arising and perishing are thematic in existence, from particle to brain, from the birth of the universe to its eventual implosion. They frame the blink of the Brahma, the cycle of life and thought, the unsettled boundaries of every transition in the actualisation of the mind/brain. A phenomenal present, an act of cognition, a state of consciousness, all arise in the decay of it antecedents and all perish in the next arising. Apart from the infinite nature of god, there is no abiding, no persistence, only perishing, replacement and an illusion of stability.

There is a painful asymmetry in the fact that life and death come only from life, but only life, not death, gives new life.

Existence is the elaboration of value.

Existence, temporality and value are preserved throughout all changes in form.

Individuation is a mirror of dependency as separation is of fusion, or entropy of order.

What is ambiguity but a perspicacity that sees too well form every side?

What is real, or what exists, depends not on the level but on the process that runs through all levels, and how this process deposits the categories that constitute the “furniture of the world”.

Every object is a set of contrasts. … The oppositions are created by individuation and autonomy. I would describe it as a common process, in which the members are co-arisings. … Every entity, every phase in cognition, every act and object, posits the world of which it is not, as well as the world in which it appears.

Life is a larval stage of existence.

Brains are “organs of concentration” for separating a world soul into distinct personalities … But the subjective pole is as contingent on brain process as the objective pole. Personality is a limitation inphysical existence of the subjective participation in god prior to birth and after death. Life concentrates god’s spirit, death liberates it to full participation. If before life or after death we are ideas in god’s mind, in life these ideas undergo restriction and limitation.

Each act of thought creates the present in loss and recurrence. The old present dies so the next can be born. The self is an island of fragility pounded on all sides by flux, veering this way and that in necessity and acceptance. Finally, we may understand that freedom is an assertion, not in power and confidence but in utter helplessness and despair, and in the willingness to receive grace in the pit of gloom.

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PAL. Chapter 24. The Nature of Existence. pp.635-661.

 

The mind independent real is not the same as the feeling of realness, which is the affective residue that accompanies the outgoing stream of perception. This feeling in everyday objects derives from beliefs that help us to cope with the incapacity to tolerate unreality, once we have become aware that some events seem to be more real than others.

Since time is generated within a state, the “interval” between contiguous states is timeless for that person, though other minds might exist in the interstices of those states. The microgenetic theory of subjective time is consistent with the possibility of parallel worlds, a topic of lively debate in current physics.

States are not concatenated in chains, as in cognitivist theory or the casual sequence of arisings and perishings in Buddhist metaphysics. Rather, like the “pulse of consciousness” described by William James, states arise in overlapping volleys in the decay of their antecedents. We are neither aware of the process over which mind/brain states develop nor of the “gaps” between them. What we are aware of is the virtual duration elaborated by a comparison of phases within a single transition. It is a paradoxical feature of microgenetic theory, as in process metaphysics, that temporal epochs are created out of non-temporal phases that are “collated” after their traversal.

The intuition that the foundations of all knowledge rests on momentary intrinsic relations, bounded by physical unobservables, exposes the surreal quality of conscious experience. Those who are sensitive to this experience will have the impression that what is taken for real is like the thin, fragile elastic of a balloon, balancing constraints on its inner and outer surface.

… reality is not what is real, it is what is true – veridical – and the only way we have of turning the real into the true is to put the real into the form of a statement and then test whether or not the statement is truthful. How we test such truths is a complex matter, but they often involve negation, which achieves a relative truth by the elimination (sculpting) of a falsehood.

Thought and perception are modelled to nature by sensation and consensus, in either case, by adaptation. But the nature that is realised in thought and perception is not the nature that underlies that realisation. Whatever is conceived by the individual, or confirmed by others, distils to the activity of a single brain. … Just describing a process severs its relations and turns it into thing. But there are deeper problems in access to the physical brain than the inability to capture its dynamic nature.

… independent of their truth, scientific facts are riddled with, indeed are actualisations of, the values and beliefs of the observer. It is an important question whether facts are values, but the more general question is whether we should apply to physical nature those qualities of thought by which nature herself is known, or whether thought is external to nature and does not infect the observation and interpretation of physical data.

The rock bottom fact about fact is that nay fact is an objectified perception in a single brain. The relation of mind and brain is prior to an understanding of the relation of perceptual objects to physical entities, and the ultimate “fact” about the mind/brain state is that our knowledge of this state rests on experiential data. … The brain is merely a portion of nature that mediates our knowledge of the remainder. Facts are values through which we infer a reality common to all perceptions, or a reality on the other side of perception that is conveyed through the senses and verified by thought.

There is no compelling reason to believe that reality – even if it is ultimately non-experiential and unknowable – differs fundamentally from the thought life in which it makes its appearance.

In our time, this difficulty – the gap from mind to brain, from the ideal to the Real – has been avoided by reducing mind to brain or ignoring mind completely. The consequence of an extraction of mind from nature is that the psychic qualities of nature are not realised in the mind, that mind is not determined to be, as it is, a mirror of a psychic nature.

(emphasis mine)

Sensations, however, like the entities they point to, are extrinsic and non-experiential. In spite of the best efforts of science, they cannot be given a description that excludes the conceptual. … We have no idea what sensation is like. It is a speculation on the origins of a perception, a kind of fable on the connections of a mind with its body and the world.

Sensation is the proximate inference about nature. We feel (see, hear) perceptions, not sensations, so a sensation is an explanation of where perception comes from. … what we perceive is a though-up nature – one that is assembled or constructed, or one that actualises out of potential – but in both the outcome adapts to an inferential world of sense. The choice between a world of endogenous objects or one that is constituted by their sensory ingredients. In the former, the brain generates images that adapt to a noumenal world, in the latter, sense data build up entities in physical passage.

Acts and objects are initiated prior to the consciousness of an intention, or a perception. It takes time to create the world and to effect a deliberate action in that world.

Affect and reminiscence are not psychic additions to archaic or advanced perceptions. They are ingredient in the perception, or rather, the perception is ingredient in cognition.

We assume that perceptions do not appear spontaneously but result from the physical impressions of sense-data. Similarly, the products or contents of conscious mind have a history that must be included as part of conscious experience. Not all inferences should be included in experience, , but direct experience is only a portion of what is experienced. The inferred is its major part. It has to be said that in this area the search for precision can be fatal to certainty. At least one can agree that if inference depends on experience, the fully non-experiential, for example, the nature of the noumenal reality, is beyond inference.

One might add that experience is for things that appear to be stable (objects) or changing (events), not for the change out of which things materialise. Transition gives rise to feeling, but it is the feeling, not the transition that is experienced. Lacking an awareness of genuine change, we have no experience of that which is essential and uniform in mind and nature. Moreover, if experience and the experiencing self are deposited by change, we do not have experience, we do not have a self. Experience is not a possession; selves and experience are creations of process. The experience of the self for that moment is, for the moment, what the self is. While experience and the thoughts or inferences that flow from it are all that we can know, experience, even so broadly defined, in respect to the non-experiential nature of change, does not include what is essential for its own manifestation.

(emphasis mine)

The feeling of community within which individuality develops can be regained by regression to an earlier phase in thought. The mark of this feeling – compassion – is concealed beneath the pretence of autonomy. Alienation is of course the price of too forceful an individualism.

The characteristics of the organic are unity of feeling, dependence of the parts on the whole and self-replication, but with respect to these properties there is no sharp transition from inorganic to organic life.

(emphasis mine)

The organic is characterised by needs to which elements are subordinate. Needs involve the direction of energy. The physical-chemical bonds that establish the energy of the base constituents of inorganic matter have no prevailing direction. The energetic cycles of organism have a direction. … the direction does not aim at an object, it merely deposits the object toward which it seems to be pointing.

It happens that the global often evades description while the local is self-evident.

(emphasis mine)

… one can say the universe is a whole to parts that only seem to be particulars because the whole is incomprehensible and the whole part relation is imperceptible.

It seems that what gives an object an organic unity is less in the synchronic relations that appear to keep it together, than the diachronic relations through which organic systems grow.

… the notion of entities as epochal packets of energy aligns the inorganic with the glimmerings of organism. The importation of change into matter enlivens the inorganic with creative energy and is the transition to living matter.

Physical nature is continuous with organism as the non-cognitive world is continuous with mind. Indeed mind is its final realisation. Reality is mind in the process of becoming aware of itself, the product of world organism that enfolds all forms, all changes, of greater or lesser degree of development.

What is ultimately real is what exists. Change, time and realtionality are the measure of existence.

The entity does not actualise out of nothing or non-existence. The universe is a continuous process of becoming. Were becoming to cease, the universe would not exist. But between the arising and perishing of a becoming, “between” potentiality and actuality, the process is not yet temporal, thus not yet an existent. The ordinary concept of reality as a collection of instantaneous events – the “solid” particles of the older physics – is inconsistent with the interpretation of existents as epochs. The epoch encloses phases that, being non-temporal, do not exist until they are traversed. For an entity to exist is for it to have a minimal duration, i.e. for becoming to actualise into being. A physical instant is an imaginary section through this becoming.

What it comes to is that the world is either a self-realisation and we live in a kind of cognitive bubble chamber, or the mind is a fiction and the world, including the brain, is vast, unobservable spectacle in the void.

To maintain that one can assume an objective perspective is coherent only if nature is mind, so the perspective does not sacrifice psychology to achieve objectivity.

Problems with materialism beyond the derivative and uncertain sources of perceptions and the construction of entities in an “empty” hypothetical space, includes the “time” taken by – and the how of – the transmission and combination of the senses to a unified object. To invoke a mechanism for the unification of experience – the reintegration of that which science had fragmented – illustrates the improvisation of present-day thinking in psychology. Such postulates ignore other aspects of perception, e.g. object recognition, familiarity, constancies, conceptuality and category membership. In sense-data theory, the overwhelming contribution of mind to perceptual objects is secondary and post-perceptual. In microgenesis, this contribution is preliminary or pre-perceptual.

The notion of the real is meaningless without mind. The relation of appearance to reality is that of mind to physical nature. Appearance is unreal only in relation to objects perceived as more real, or entities inferred as ultimately real. However, real and unreal apply to perceptual images or objects, not physical entities. This may not be the case with fact or truth, for we do not speak of objects or entities as being timelessly real, as we do of truth. Yet in spite of all the arguments concerning “timeless truths” , at least since the famous sea battle of Aristotle, it is difficult to understand how such terms take on meaning in the absence of mind.

… the real is not a limit on existence.

We can agree that the unknown is a swamp of superstition and false belief that is that is slowly drained by science. But can we also agree that the unknowable may well be a reservoir of mystery at the limits of scientific explanation?

The microgenetic theory of mind applied to actualisation in the physical world entails a manifold of nature unified at the onset of an epoch that gives rise to novel particulars. Diversity does not combine to unity but, like speciation in evolution, is the outcome of of an individuation of the whole.

Followed deeply enough, a psychic nature, or a subjective universe, is a metaphysics of evolutionary psychology.

Historically, the view of an individual as a vehicle through which the forms of nature actualise preceded the idea that experience is what the self experiences. If we strip away the superstition that overlays animism, and its ornamentations in magical thinking and everyday life, and accept the bare primitive intuition of mind in nature as a kind of unmediated truth, we are left with a sophisticated theory of reality that asks what features of psychic life are present in the world and how those features are elaborated in the human mind.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

The truth is in the relation not in the relata.

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

An object is a combination of category and process.

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

 

Instinctual Drive (lower mammals) >> Object existence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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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.

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PAL Chapter 2 – Self, Subject and Subjectivity pp.73-97

Of the many dualisms that bedevil philosophy, none are so fundamental and pervasive as that of subject and object.

The history of philosophy is a conversation on how the self and its objects are partitioned.

An object that is conceived as a presentation in consciousness is penetrated by subjectivity, indeed it is part os a fully cognised world. But is objects are presentations or images, how does it come about that they are felt to exist in a world outside and independent of the observer? A world that is an extension of the self does not feel like a self creation. Indeed, the self feels very much like a creation of the world in which it matures. So, if the world is a mental image or an elaboration of the self, what explains the illusion of externality? The force of this illusion is precisely what process theory has to explain, and overcome.

A perception of space without action in that space does not give a functional world. Time awareness is also a subjective experience. Time arises in the now as a relation of past to present that hinges on the revival of past events. A duration lacks felt extension without the availability of remembered objects.

We percieve space as an emptiness between things, each thing in space having its own separate history. External space is the home we build to live in, experiential time is the change and stability that give life to that home. The spatio-temporal world of experience has to be ‘re-built’ in every perceptual act. The process is effortless. The activity of mind in generating the world is unfelt, invisible. We only feel that the world is self-generated on such occasions as vertigo, dream or hallucination when the attachment or thread of mind that connects the self to its objects becomes noticeable.

The spatial and temporal fields are conceived in science as quantifiable, measurable, and infinitely divisible.

(only to the planks scale which is not an infinite quanta)

However, subjectivity does not require mind or consciousness, except that mind as intuition is required to conceive the subjectivity of its own experience.

The separation of subject and object creates an inner and outer pole, actually, in the human mid/brain, a centre and a circumference, with an arising at the inner pole and a perishing at the outer one, and a qualitative difference between the initial arising and the final perishing phases.

… in non-cognitive nature there is no inner and outer, only categorical parts embraced by ever enlarging wholes.

The appearance of subject announces a world, but the appearance of the owrld is necessary to individuate the subject.

The initial separation into subject and object is the ground of further oppositions, yet the whole is found, not in their later synthesis, which is a coming-together of parts, but in uncovering the oppositions to disclose a more profound unity.

Freedom obtains in the opposition to objects, thus the attempt to control them, but only a self that feels itself in the object is genuinely free. Agency is first in thought, before it is in the world.

Agency does not determine the object, rather, the object development determines the feeling of agency.

The feeling of will going toward an object is the inner experience of self-realisation. As the self needs an object for the feeling of agency, so too the quality of intentional feeling depends on the degree of object realisation.

The creative spirit moves freely form one pole to another, from a lonely solitude at the oeaks of conscious individuality to an absorption at the inward recesses of the unconscious where inspiration has its home. A settling-in at the inner or outer pole points to an habitual recurrence. A focus at either phase is a sign of unhealthy completeness. A tension, a longing for the unrealised polarity, is a sign of creative imbalance. We are neither oceans nor islands. An excess of autonomy is the sickness of our times. It isolates the feeling of being from that of becoming, separates the public self from its own internal processes, as well as from that of others, while an excess at the inward pole threatens oblivion and loss of contact.

Reflection differs from perception as a voluntary action differs form one that is automatic. To reflect is to step back from the act of perceiving. … The shift from perception to reflection is a shift from reproductive to productive thinking, the productivity relating to the potential for conceptual branching prior to a fixation in objects.

Forgetting the self is having the self as process rather than as memory, with individuality not lost but nested in the whole. The birth of the self is attended by conflict and apartness, but only a self can love, reflect, enjoy, endure. What is left of personhood without a self?

(emphasis mine)

The identity which is blocked by an analytic attitude of the intellect, of reason, reflection or self-consciousness, is the holistic unity of man and nature in an all-embracing divinity. We have all had such moments when, in the compresence of self, subject and subjectivity, the self, infused with feeling, dissolves from the cares of life and an interest in discrete objects to a conscious awareness of the All in All, the momentary and the universal, the where and when of self in nature, a oneness in which the self is neither lost nor known but fells by intuition that it is the living centre of all creation.

The self is essential to knowing the goal and acquiring the means to its satisfaction, but it is also an obstruction, like a skill that has outlived its usefulness but cannot be forgotten.

The self that stops with the interior and takes its own ideas as the limits of its activity lacks an awareness that it is an engine for the totality of the world.

The aim for the entity is the completion of what it is, the full realisation of the becoming that constitutes the process of its creation. This process deposits in the being of a momentary existence. Being is the aim of becoming, the becoming of what one is. A non-cognitive entity in nature, or an act of cognition.

(italics mine)

(Page 85 has so much good stuff I want to quote it all, however, I respect the limits of this exercise…)

Subjectivity, as the becoming of substance, does not arise form substance but is replaced by another wave of becoming.

… the possibility of creating a world somewhere between sheer imagination and full objectivity reminds us of possibilities in self-realisation that are ordinarily concealed beneath the dead surface of its representations.

The result of perceiving the world as an extension of self, instead of a populated vastness with which the self makes contact, is that the self acts for the other as it would for its own needs. … Self-realisation is a criterion of value in the world, for its own sake or for the sake of conscious beings (Chakravati, 1966). The world has the nature of a self, an idea that is realised in human thought and action. Without insight, the urge to self-realisation achieves a token insularity in its drive to autonomy. True self expression is the realisation through the individual of the will of nature as it moves outwards in the actualisation of human ideals.

…realism has [the] obligation to explain how subjectivity appears in the physical universe.

The retreat over time from a perception to a dream is really an uncovering of the original process in which buried primary process cognition is shaped to reality, as unconscious memories become conscious perceptions. … there is experimental evidence that primary process thought is not bypassed in the growth of rational thinking, but it is entrained (early) in every act of cognition (Deglin and Kinsbourne, 1996).

Whatever is thought, perceived, felt, apprehended, whether vague or clear, its conscious appearance and unconscious antecedents are identical with brain process, though is has to be conceded that some phenomena, such as the span of the present, may be non-reducible.

There is no escape from some form of idealism or monism. The self cannot go beyond the world it elaborates to a ‘real’ world outside its perceptions, nor delve beneath them to the incipient phases in the unconscious. However, there is an asymmetry of the self and its objects in relation to their physical or noumenal precursors.

…we presume that an object points outward to a real entity in the material world, while the self points inward, to an origin in physiology, archetypes or the absolute. The depth of self-origination leads to the intuition of a world in which all selves are potentialities. In sum, an object has subjective and objective phases. The objective phase points to an external entity that is conceived as synchronic with its appearance. The self, lacking an outer reference, has only a subjective phase and points diachronically to the limits of unconscious mind.

We can give no account of ‘real’ nature beyond human experience, for the mind is engaged in every observation or measurement, direct or mediated. If we seek to understand nature beyond its realisation in mind, or brain process, it is not the perception but its ancestry that is the locus of scientific interest. Perhaps for this reason Novalis wrote that “nature is living antiquity” an epigram that captures and endorses the impossibility of personal access to, much less intersubjective agreement upon, the thing-in-itself, though from a theoretical standpoint we scarcely do this with the objects of ordinary science.

The claim that events in perception refer to non-cognitive entities, i.e. that the object in perception is, or is an exact replica of, the thing-in-itself, has the consequence of a reduction from an object to the entity it refers to.

What, then, is the basis of the dichotomy of mind and brain (nature) if the brain is conceived as a complex node in a nature that is ultimately unknowable? This is a comparison of immediate data in consciousness with in hypothesis about the real entities the data point to, namely a comparison of the purely phenomenal with the non-experiential,

It is inarguable that any attempt to reduce the mind to physical nature must begin with the brain events that underly behaviour, and only secondarily with the entities in nature to which those events refer.. For mind to truly ‘know’ nature, it would first have to know the brain, which is the most immediate instance of physical nature to which mind relates.

What begins inside as a conceptual feeling of intense, immediate and felt experience dissipates as it travels outwards to de-conceptualise objects in which feelings and beliefs have to be inferred. What begins with a disposition charged with personal belief and value terminates in a concrete actuality to which values and beliefs seem to be applied.

An account that preserves the subjectivity by deepening yet relaxing its definition, i.e. by not equating subjectivity with consciousness, leads to an idealism that is a species of naturalism (process monism) not merely a solipsistic dream.

Admittedly, this way of thinking rests on a series of inferences. It begins with the argument that subjective experience is the legitimate starting point for metaphysics, while rejecting solipsism on a pragmatic basis. The inference that patterns of breakdown in cognition illustrate patterns in its realisation gives licence to the claim that patterns in mind correspond to those in brain process. This permits an extension of the theory to processual life in lower organisms and, finally, to the ultimate basis of all processes in the becoming-to-being that generates existence and feeling in physical matter.

A subjective naturalism must seek to explain the transmutation of will into intention and desire. Thought and reason seem to transcend natural process to establish aims by which action is guided. This is the decisive issue.