Tag Archives: Jason Brown

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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PAL. Chapter 18. Efficacy and Illusions. Pp 486-508.

 

Choice is a fork in the road of value that gives direction to agency and intention. The feeling of agency is value flowing from the self into action.

Actions go out to the world from the self as occasions of will or desire. Objects and events come to the self as occasions of interest or accident.

… a deeper understanding of freedom, choice and efficacy entails a radical re-thinking of the perceptual process, no less than that of action, since the feeling of agency is largely perceptual.

Agency and choice come to the fore in action, especially in verbal imagery (inner speech), as an accentuation of penultimate phases in the language act. This experience is central to the feeling of conscious choice, intention and desire.

In perception and action, there is a progressive analysis of character (self) to choice (selection), decision (specification) and effectuation.

… the concept of god’s agency is derived from the feeling of human intention, as the perception (theory) of object causation is derived from the feeling of agent causation.

The transition from potential to actual is causal if it is divisible into intervening phases, but this does not apply if potential and actual are part of – as stem to leaf – the same entity. Potential perishes at the moment of actuality, not successively at each phase in the path to the actual, since potential at each phase is part of the actuality it leads to, i.e. part of the epoch of its actualisation. Potential and actual are successive phases in a single momentary existence.

The origin of agency in early cognition is also the beginning of a theory of subjective time.

The control of the object that is the seed of agency is less a projection of human thought onto nature than an elaboration of indeterminateness in natural process.

The argument that advanced forms exist in earlier ones in statu nascendi is also the critique of an evolutionary account of consciousness and value. Purposefulness achieves its aim when it terminates. The aim is not given beforehand.

Agency in organism is the basis of a theory of object-causation. Intentionality in organism, as nature individuates still further into human thought.

The distinction of cause and effect in object-causation is parallel to the distinction of self and world in agent-causation. In the former, such problems as the demarcation of the cause, its transition to the effect or the attribution of contingency to accidental causation resist analysis by the methods of the very theory they subtend. Since they cannot be explained by the doctrine of external relations, they vitiate the theory. A theory that cannot explain its core assumptions is vacuous, not merely incomplete. A persistent incoherence is close to an unacknowledged refutation. Similar problems bedevil agent-causation, but here, contingency translates to free will and the connection of cause to effect is even more obscure.

The experience of direct knowledge of our inner states is in striking contrast to the indirect knowledge of ignorance that we have of the series of co-temporal states of the world and other minds. The immediacy of awareness for our won thoughts does not occur for the internal states of other objects or the thoughts of others, unless one accepts the possibility of mental telepathy. (emphasis mine) The conscious anticipation of a coming state and the feeling of agency and intention contribute to the continuity from one state to the next.

The other side of a lack of direct knowledge of processes linking the succession of states in the world is the inference of lawfulness in physical passage, whether due to probabilities, causal necessity or divine guidance. Since ordinary objects do not contain selves that can intercede in the flow of world events, they are inferred to be the outcomes of a causal series that, in principle, traces back to the beginnings of the universe. … For example, we tend to postulate hidden causes (motivations, conflicts, etc.) to explain the actions of others, which they believe are freely chosen.

While the presence of choice in nature is consistent with some interpretations of process metaphysics, the feeling of choice in nature is sensed primarily in the “primitive” thought of animism and dream cognition. The uncertainty in quantum theory is ordinarily interpreted not in terms of choice but of probabilities which collapse, retroactively, into causal effects. If mental causation (agency) is impressed on the order of natural events as object causation, free will might extend into the world as choice, either as contingency or in the belief that god intervenes in the stream (cycle) of change. In any event, our concepts of objective change have their sources in physical experience.

In sum, freedom in non-cognitive nature, as well as in the brain state, is grounded in contingency or probability or creative advance, yet the concept of object causation is inherited from human agency, just as the concept of probability is inherited form human choice. The potential, the novelty and the possibility are so forceful an experience with an image in the mind survive in the contingency of external objects. The feeling of volition that is lost as the object exteriorises is replaced by the feeling of a causal force that is extrinsic to the observer. The will exteriorises with the object as its causal power. The free will that imposes certainty on indecision becomes the power of causation tha imposes necessity on contingency.

I think the causal theory of nature is a strong extension of the feeling of agent causation to external objects, while contingency in nature is a weak extension to objects of the feeling of choice, possibility and personal freedom. There is a complementary relation between, on the one hand, the rigid laws of macrophysics and the uncertainties at the quantum level with, on the other, the certainty of agent-causation and the freedom – creativity, uncertainty etc. – of personal action. … The “laws” of the mind that give the objects of perception (and science) become the physical laws that govern mind independent entities as well as mind.

(emphasis mine)

The sense of self as persistent over time is the result of a positive illusion of a prolongation of its arising and a negative illusion of a lack of incessant perishing. The replication of the arising over the perishing of each moment swamps the perishing and accentuated event recurrence, transforming events into objects, while the obscuration of the perishings by the new arisings accounts for the hardening of objects into substances that appear permanent. The stability of the self mirrors the illusion of a dynamic will, as stability and flux achieve a compromise of permanence and relationality, or inflexibility and change. The will cuts across the perceptual boundary of mind and world.

An object cannot be what it becomes until it becomes what it is, but it cannot become what it is until it is already that object (category). Creativity is the realisation of what in some sense one already knows, as contingency is the realisation of what is not known until it is realised. The juxtaposition of the agency of self-realisation with the contingency of perception extends the novelty of basic entities to the freedom of the will, and extends the freedom of the will to possibility in the world.

To say, I am the other, is literally true.

Reality is given by a conspiracy of the senses, as scientific objectivity is given by a consensus of opinion, not by the intrinsic properties of what is perceived.

(emphasis mine)

Action, especially altruistic action is neutralised by objectivity, as decision, however rational, is not decided by reason.

Self and act are one state.

Reality is the process of individuation, the transformation of wholes-to-parts, and the categories that turn such transformations into stable forms.

The belief in one world of private experience and another of public events is deeply entrenched. To think otherwise borders on mysticism, to feel otherwise is psychosis. The “gap” from mind to world is fundamental to the entire edifice of western thought. Yet the assumed confrontation of the self with objects that are, in fact, tributaries of the observers mind is an error only slightly less pernicious than the separation of mind from physical nature.

The creative would seem to be the “highest” expression of free will, as habit and repetition are its nadir. But the creative is not a product of the self, for the self is recreated with its contents. Process is creative at every phase.

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PAL. Chapter 17. Luck and the Pursuit of Happiness. Pp457-483.

 

In utilitarian ethics, happiness is an impersonal measure of the quantity of the pleasure in the greatest number of people, though personal happiness is pleasure in the free exercise of personality. … Virtue is a quality, happiness is a state.

An obligation that has not been assimilated as a personal value is not a genuine desire. To the extent it is not internalised, it is felt as coercive and according to the degree of resistance, it is an obstacle to happiness.

Virtuous actions that strive for the greatest good may elicit resistance or punitive action, nor do they necessarily lead to happiness or satisfaction, which probably depends less on one’s accomplishments in the world, or for others, than on the intimate rewards and pleasures of daily life.

… individual agency is diluted in the “group mind”.

The calculus of the utilitarian is closer to the morality of states than an ethics of character.

One can ordain a homogeneity of goods, but not of desires.

The more impersonal the perspective, the more axiomatic the rule, the more artificial the methodology … , and the more the morality becomes a meta psychological attitude distinct from its affective base.

A detached perspective reduces self-interest and should increase the moral value of an action, but it is engagement, not detachment, that aligns moral feeling with right conduct. Self-denial and detachment are an insufficient foundation for happiness and no warrant for moral conduct.

The move from intrinsic to extrinsic relations is the shift from personal value, which is qualitative, to impersonal fact as a quantity.

Those who do not struggle to survive are more prone to depression and more likely to kill themselves. In this regard, even illness and disability are not barriers to happiness.

Happiness consists in the ability and opportunity to seek that which one desires. It is the enjoyment of a subjective aim, an alignment with the forward-going process of life, a finding that contrasts sharply with the Buddhist concept of desire as the source of suffering and the extinction of desire as the source of happiness.

Even if one accepts that fairness or generosity is a pre-requisite for moral conduct, the appeal to common sense rather than argumentation exposes gaps in the analysis that are fatal to the principle. A philosophy that avoids psychology by positing givens just when psychological explanation is required may constitute an edifice that is logically consistent all the way down, until it arrives at its own foundations.

We cannot derive a feeling from a rational argument.

A person can have immense pleasure on hearing a new piece of music for which he has not yet developed a desire. Even solitude is a source of inestimable pleasure. Such observations raise questions for any theory of pleasure that depends on the value of its objects.

A moral duty or rule as a guide to conduct is inadequate, and inorganic, in that it attempts, by fiat rather than by example, to induce people to share in what is a spontaneous impulse of innate empathy.

Feelings are tributaries of drive that transition will into action in combination with object-concepts.

An action cannot be severed from the private states of those involved, but engages character intrinsically at all phases, not as a subjective quality added to an objective fact. Specifically, the principle of greater happiness cannot implant an obligation in an agent irrespective of his private states when the effect of his conduct is assessed by an appeal to the private states of others.

The concept of luck, contingency and probability relate to objects in the world, not psychic events. The concepts of agency, certainty and choice relate to processes in the mind, not events in the world. Fate is an overarching concept that removes agency in a way that luck does not.

The fact that the present, as it becomes past, can be revised from a future perspective undermines the stability of an outcome-centered moral theory. We use our best judgement with the knowledge at hand, but a good act can be reinterpreted as a bad one, and the reverse, as conditions change. Luck is also like this.

The genetics of constitution and the accidents of parenting are a bit like karmic transmission, though displaced later in maturation, where one is a product of an ancestral complex, yet posses some degree of freedom for self-betterment or the capacity for degeneration. That intrinsic constitutive luck is essential to character would seem inarguable, since the installation of exocentric values depends so heavily on experience in childhood and on the moral instruction and example of parents.

For the individual, self-justification is primary, moral or rational. Ideally, he should be his own judge and jury, though an appraisal by others is essential for punishment, as well as to modulate the self-serving effects of denial, forgetting and rationalisation.