Tag Archives: rational

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SZ. Pt.2 Interface Mathematics. pp203-259

p.205 Modern meta-mathematics and hence mathematical physics are “non-modelable” and in effect, pre-rational. They do not function in harmony with the perceptual foundations of the human mind, and hence cannot be modelled effectively in the imagination – and as a subset of self-similar reality, the mind should naturally be able to echo itself into a reflexive understanding of its own unified or nondual substrate as dependently arising in both external (objective) and internal (subjective) reality.

p.206 Mathematics is merely a tool for abstracting and interfacing the quanitiative/multiplicative aspects of the finite and infinite at the most abstract and general level of relation. This depth of generality in the embriogenesis of the concept gives mathematics its power and extreme applicability fro modelling relations in virtually all fields of conceptual, exploratory or empirical endeavour.

p.207 It is real relation itself, in this interface of mathematics with reality, that endows mathematics with its power of modelling relation. This is, in effect, a power of self-similarity between reality and its real echoes into its representational interfaces, and the same self-similarity is at work in the interface between knowledge itself (episteme) and reality (the ontic) interpenetrating and harmonising throughout Nondual Rationalism as a whole.

pp.209-211 This natural, intuitive or implicit logic – founded upon the human perception of sets as bounded collections – is encoded, if abstractly and incompletely, in the “part-whole axiom” of classical mathematics which states simply that “every set is greater than its proper subset”. … It is only when the self-identity of abstract categories comes into play that these natural faculties have no ground or traction in difference and begin to slip, leading to paradox.

Is a set a collection or a container? If it is a collection, or a “collection of objects”, as is commonly claimed, then the “empty set” (as I will show in more depth below) is inconceivable, unimaginable and illogical, and merely implies the absence of a set; a non-set. If a set is a container, on the other hand, which is needed to make sense of the non-collection of the empty-set, denoted, for example, by the notation {}, then an – such as that used extensively by Cantor and modern axiomatic set theory – is infinitely illogical and inconceivable because a container cannot sensibly be “infinite in size”; a boundary, by definition, cannot be boundless. An infinite container, then, would likewise be a non-container.

All sets as categories are now conceived in freedom from natural holarchy, causing a naïve disruption of the connections of percept taken for granted and forgotten in the movement into concept. These lost connections in naïve set theory are the bonds symbolically or axiomatically replaced in the newer axiomatic versions of set theory, and, as we will see, in the study of mereology, literally the logic or study of parts.

p.212 Neither the universal set nor the null set, are “proper” sets, in the implicit holonic logic of sets as bounded-collections, or part-wholes; they break away from the relative world of form into the absolute realm of the formless. They possess the absolute and unbounded aspects of affirmation and negation, respectively.

p.219 The Nondual-Rational and Empirical Embriogenesis of Mathematics.

p.223 The Polarity of the Finite and Infinite.

The finite and infinite are the polar aspects of boundedness and unboundedness fro the relative and absolute scopes, respectively. And in terms of pure-relation, they are the quantitative aspects of our polarity of scope – the polarity and “contra-diction” at the very foundation of quantitative reasoning itself, because our primitive notions of number correspond precisely to boundary, … The absolute scope, then, deals in the generally ineffable aspects of unity and infinity, and the relative scope deals in the polarities and multiplicities of the finite.

p.228-229 Mathematician Dr. Reviel Netz “… the defining property of infinity today is that a set’s cardinality [its number of elements] is equal to the cardinality of some real subset of that set.

The new definition of the infinite, like that of the finite, is essentially a codification, incorporation and encapsulation of the Galilean part-whole paradox, rather than its resolution. We have rightly accepted the paradoxical nature of the infinite, in its identity to the finite, but in simultaneously discarding its opposition we have yet to understand its nature. We have yet to tune and triune the paradox into a truly nondual identity of opposites, and thus into a triune interface of inter-expression.

The paradox has not been solved by this definition, but has now simply become the definition, subsumed under the identity of the concept or category of the set.

p.230 Indeed the human mind can reason about and, we will see, understand the infinite but this understanding simply hasn’t made its way into philosophy yet.

p.235 Cantor’s project then, like Zeno’s, is not incorrect, but simply incomplete, being subsumed now by the identity of the category.

p.236 In short, only for mathematicians, and essentially only in the language of mathematics, has the paradox been solved. For the bulk of us still wrestling with the angel of understanding, we remain stuck in a head-lock with the same old troubling paradoxes – still confused by “self-nesting” violations of the implicit holonic logic of sets and the relations between the infinite and finite – as between God and man.

p.237 Mankind as a whole seeks not merely abstract, mathematical and syntactic answers, but also to grasp imaginable and visualisablesemantic answers; answers that make sense to the human mind at all levels, from percept to integrated concept.

p.238 Merely accepting the paradox into the hermetically sealed axiomatic layer of tacit assumptions – with no explanation of its core polarity whatsoever – gives the common impression that the problem has been solved.

p.239 Principle 6: The Pearl Principle of Axiomatic Encapsulation.

The tendency to encapsulate irreconcilable paradox into principle; dilemma into dictum; enigma into equation; nonsense into nomenclature; or ambiguity into axiom – in order to reduce the irritation and stress from repeated and constant contact with the unknown.

How do we take the knowledge that this is our tendency and continue to work toward ever deeper clarity without falling into using it? especially the nomenclature clause!

Addressing this, Joel and Glisten talked about it in this recording

Call with spinbitz, Mon Apr 02 2012, 08:08:40

p.242 So, with the preliminary distinction between the absolute and relative scopes, and the infinite and finite aspects of unity, the leap of intuition from bounded and relative notions of unity in the multiplicity of everyday objects, to the Infinite and univocal “ONE is ALL” in the nondual, becomes more fully explicated and much more easily replicated or communicated at the cognitive and logical level.

p.243 Infinite unity includes ALL, period, so there can only be ONE. This simplest of ideas is easily forgotten and the words blurred into new meanings and confusions.

Infinite Unity, being unbounded and absolute, cannot participate in relational, and hence mathematical operations. Without boundaries, it cant relate. It is ineffable. It cannot be added to, subtracted from, divided by or multiplied, because by definition it unfolds and enfolds ALL in existence; there can be nothing to add to everything and nowhere else to subtract it to. There is nothing else to relate Infinite Unity to and no outside perspective, operation/operator or implicit hidden set, from which to withdraw or transfer any arbitrary qualities. The “ONE” is not a number, it is “inquantate”, because Infinity itself, the boundless ALL, is not a definable or “boundable” magnitude.

p.245-246 Anywhere on the immanent-teanscendent axis that we place the solidus boundary of the one, we still have infinity on both sides, and thus – no matter what the scale of the volumetric solidus/viniculum – it is always exactly in the middle, yet the infinity has not been quantitatively decreased by half even if you discard one half for the other.

This division of unity into polarity …is therefore not properly mathematical or quantitative, but pre-mathematical and pre-quantitative or meta-paradigmatic; at the vision-logic level of meta-mathematical cognition (e.g. the VLE). It is merely a percept integrated conceptual exfoliation of a possible intrinsic relation, or a way of conceiving the polarity between The Infinite and finite unities. It is this vision-logic, nondual-rational, or trans-rational polarity within which the mind can cycle. It is also, essentially, the meta-mathematical abstract rendering of the union between God and man; the absolute ineffable Infinite Unity and the relative, effable finite unity as the solidus-viniculum between infinite immanence and transcendence.

p.249 Buckminster Fuller’s most famous and misunderstood maxim, arguably, is “unity is plural and at minimum two”. When properly unpacked into the imagination, this enigmatic phrase reveals an important yet deceptive;ly simple duality which opens the way to grasping the fundamental difference (and polar integration) between infinity and number. This concept is also essential to Operational Mathematics because it is the essence of finite volumetric extension and relation and hence is key to sensorial modelability. “A system, says Bucky, is a ‘conceivable entity’ dividing Universe into two parts: the inside and the outside of the system”.

p.252-253 To be clear, there is indeed Emptiness or infinity within all numbers, forms and boundaries, and this Emptiness and infinity is the source of number and form itself, but this Emptiness or infinity is never ultimately reached or encapsulated in the symbol-system itself. It is always critically sub-representational,

… the distinction between infinity and number continues our visual polarity between the formlessness of Emptiness and the boundedness of form. The abstraction is given an experiential and sensorial grounding in the causal-logic of extension and, as we will see, this allows it to retain a connection with the causality which, through billions of years of evolution, has informed the innate and powerful imagination of mankind, in its holarchic navigation between agency and communion.

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SZ: The Univocity Framework. pp.154-200.

The Univocity Framework. pp.154-200

Pp.156-157. In true rationalism, unshadowed by the reactionary misinterpretations and pre-rational tendencies (e.g. the transcendent-bias, or the “forces of representation”), of post-modernity, the one foundational principle (or axiom) is that there can be no foundational principles, i.e. the axioms, principles, truths and laws themselves, are emergent, relative, fallible and generally epistemic (e.g. Sheldrake’s “habits of nature”), rather than absolute, eternal and handed down from a transcendent God to be implanted in a fallen Nature (Eve).

Without the use of polarity, the conceptual “opposable thumb”, the mind finds it virtually impossible to grasp ideas or concepts: it cant relate.

p.160. Nondual rationalism recognises, among other things, a transcendent-bias in operation behind traditional representational forces. As we have discussed, it is this transcendent-bias that generates the medieval and pre-rational metaphysics of foundationalism and the regressive or negative infinity that appears when the foundation crumbles into the analytic abyss.

p.163. … the attributes are merely two ways of conceiving/perceiving the one substance … each modification (or holon) of which necessitates an inside and an outside. This “sub-representational” polarity is the root of the ontic parallelism of the attributes.

The point of this parallelism is to prohibit what Wilber calls a “quadrant absolutism”, and the effedt, when understood in this way, is what the mind, of the Within (Thought), cant be reduced to matter, or to the Without (Extension), and vice versa, in either its singular or plural forms.

… it seems rather clear that a system can have specific operational properties and qualities without the author mentioning them by a specific name, especially given that the name might not be known to the author, and the pervasive principle might be in use quite subconsciously.

p.165. The appearance of separation itself is merely one of the epistemic scope; absolute vs. relative, and it is the principle of Univocity which mediates as a triune interface between the polarity of scopes.

p.166. To eff the ineffable we relative beings must use relation, otherwise we cant relate.

The ONE is the absolute taken by itself, from the absolute scope, and the ALL is the absolute taken from the “pure relational” (or quantitative) view; the relative scope.

To put it simply, the ONE and the ALL, or Unity and Infinity, are the same thing, namely aspects of the absolute, but seen from different epistemic scopes. It is the function of univocity to mediate between the two scopes; absolute and relative.

P.167. In short, a nondual and univocal monism is an infinite pluralism via the identity of opposites of the One-All or Unity-Multiplicity. Univocity is the monism=pluralism identity of opposites in Nondual Rationalism.

Univocity recognises however, that identity and distinction are only meaningful and real as relatives, i.e. at the relative scope. This means that even in infinite difference and immanence, there must be a common emergent “ground” of causal intercompatibility and inter-expressivity (not of absolute similarity or generality, however) in order for particular distinctions to relate and really differ.

p.170. The forces of Univocity are the modifications and relations on the relative plane of immanence, the cultivating third which allows opposition to emerge and which allows its poles to really inter-relate and inter-oppose.

p.171. An essence, in the traditional sense, is basically a platonic form, or an eternal and perfect template and category for the instantiation of always imperfect manifestations. The encyclopaedia entry on the subject defines an essence basically with a finite number of properties which completely defines its instances.

p.172. … this is an explicitly invalid operation in the Univocity Framework and Deluze’s univocal and essentially non-dual reading of Spinoza. As we should by now expect, that is bought about by transcendent-bias.

… polarity means that essence cannot be separated from existence in order to precede it in the first place, … there is no longer the dialism between the perfect realm of essences and the imperfect realm of real manifestation.

Spinoza’s essence is an inseparable aspect of modal existence which appears suprisingly modern in its approach. It is a mere tendency of modal existence to “persist in its own being.” Today this could be called “homeostasis”, or even a strange attractor” from complexity science.

p.173. With Spinoza’s reciprocity of existence and essence in his univocal and infinite difference, this template kind of one way connection, of essence manifesting and directing individual existence is broken.

The point of the univocal reinterpretation of essence, is to re-integrate the essence/existence distinction and correct the historical errors of alignment bought about by the exoteric and lowest-common-denominator forces of Representation.

p.176. Univocity itself, however can be seen as a vertical polarity, in that it is the application of the concept of polarity, or relativity, to itself, in order to reach its opposite in the absolute or “axis of Tao” which enfolds and unfolds all difference and polarity.

p.178. Through the identity of opposites in the ontic and epistemic we can see also that ontology is epistemic and epistemology is ontic. In other words, speculation about the nature of reality is necessarily representational, and representation is necessarily real. Or even simpler, the map of the territory is a feature of the territory itself.

p.183. In the Univocity Framework … all opposites, are seen necessarily as identically opposite anthropocentrisms.

pp.184-185. Spinoza’s Substance, as an “escape” of the foundational, modal regress of the relative scope, therefore represents a final coming to rest in the a priori unity of deep infinity, i.e. the Immanent/Transcendent axis itself, and the absolute scope.

Because matter, in this view, has the active property of infinite depth of detail, no finitely detailed law, equation, generalisation or set of initial conditions (i.e. no principle of the same) can absolutely predict or determine the outcome of any sufficiently complex event, such as those in thermodynamics. And thus “time” and process will necessarily deviate (if sometimes imperceptible) from the physical laws, whether the equations are run forward or in reverse. Indeed, this is the general category into which entropy falls and it is this constant deviation from the equations of thermodynamics (run forward or reverse) that is the general direction of the “arrow” of time.

[ - Joel, could you elaborate on the concept of entropy and its relation to the process of the unfolding and enfolding of the manifest?]

p.189. Neither absolute pole – the eternal or the NOW – is reachable through any transitive, linear or finite (relative) means, such as multiplication or division into ever larger or smaller intervals of time, represented to the mind as either memory or anticipation. … At the absolute scope there is only the single irreducible and unreachable, yet ever present and inescapable, “nowing” in infinite difference and irreducible multiplicity for all eternity.

p.191. In Nondual Rationalism, the principle of univocity is our primary interface or cultivating third between the fundamental polarity of scopes: the absolute vs. the relative.

p.195. The axis of univocity represents this primary ontic relation between the absolute and relative scopes, and what it ultimately means is that the absolute and relative are one, but only “seen’ or addressed differently via different conceptual scopes due to the polar nature of human comprehension itself.

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SZ initial impressions.

SZ 1. p.71 JM quotes Stewart regarding Leibniz

“Leibniz would censor himself of thoughts that the world was not ready
to receive.”

I love the idea of treading the fuzzy boundary between non-dual
rationalism and empiricism – I wonder how many thoughts WE will generate
that “the world is not ready to receive”?

p.78
Transcending and including (recognising and accounting for) this transcendent-bias, to get to the non-duality and neutrality, the open ground of rationalism, this must be seen as a true polarity, and the qualitative differences between the values that seem so absolute through the active frame of reference of the transcendent numerator, must be seen, in a sense, as relative to the active frame of reference of the inherited interpretation. In other words, the difference in quality between immanent and transcendent positions are a function of the active frame of reference and order of operations of division. The numerator’s frame of reference is active as the determinant of value, and the denominator’s is passive as the context for its meaning.
p.84.
Mathematical ratios, and hence rational numbers, have no intrinsically negative values. Try as we might, but they can’t be reached by either multiplication or division.ii* And hence the “negative infinity” of the Rationals (to entertain the transcendent-bias further) is in the immanent direction, and on the positive side of the integer-axis, ever toward the “unlimit” of zero.iii The rational zero as infinity, then, will remain undefined until the transcendent bias is lifted and we can explicitly and operationally see the infinite axis, and indeed the infinite interminable pole “terminating” at the immanent zero, the inward pole of the positive infinity of the Rationals.
p.86
Fundamental Principle of Nondual Rationalism:
Infinite divisibility equals indivisibility.
Infinite divisibility necessitates that there can be no fundamental or absolute division because there will always be a deeper level of divisibility, and hence, with infinite divisibility the absolute is fundamentally indivisible. This, we will see, is a nondual codification of the truths underlying Zeno ’s general paradox, which itself was not so much refuted by the modern mathematics of the continuum, but vindicated by it. Cantor showed that Zeno’s paradox is a natural feature of the mathematical continuum. Infinite divisions are infinitely small , and any possible gap between two divisions is filled with an infinity more , thus leaving no gaps in the continuum.
p.90
Spinoza’s whole system was founded on immanence in transcendence (yin in yang), with the univocal unity of Substance, whose essence is expressed through its attributes, as the equals-sign between the indivisibility of mind and the infinite divisibility of matter.
pp.93-94
The idea and Cartesian goal of absolute certainty is itself, however, an absolutization of the transcendent or emergent possibilities of the mind, at the expense of the dependency of representational mind itself on the unknowns and unknowables of immanence, and its immediate environment. We simply do not know that the immanence in bodies is incapable (nondually or non-reductionistically) of manifesting the emergence of higher levels of intelligence and representation in human and into our categories of mind and matter. We have no empirical knowledge that a nondual dependent arising, or “symbiogenesis of subject and object” is impossible, and therefore we have no recourse or reason to absolutize the concepts of Mind and Matter into an irreconcilable pair of categories.
p.96
This identity of opposites between the immanent and transcendent is a crucial key to Nondual Rationalism, and it can be seen as a corollary—a correlating and strengthening strand—to the original Ariadne’s thread, the Principle of Nondual Rationalism.
p.99
… the interface of the finite (relative) and infinite (absolute) gives rise to the indefinite.
pp.100-101
The last century of ontology and epistemology, coupled with the discoveries of quantum and complexity science, has rendered moot the lingering, peculiarly medieval, fear of the infinite regress and thrown it into positive relief. Instead of viewing the problem from the negative point of view of looking backward or inward to find an origin in space, scale or time, and fretting when these hypothetical beginnings can’t be found, the problem is turned on its head. If there are no origins to begin with—in other words, if, contrary to our tacit predispositions, the universe is eternal and infinite (as conceived in Buddhist nondual schools of cosmology), in both depth and span, then the search for an origin is itself a false problem engendered by the false premise that such an ultimate beginning or ultimate foundation necessarily exists. The problem of the regress itself is seen to be merely a projection of a regressive, point of view on the infinite or the unbounded nature of reality.

I can sense a gradual revelation of the context in which the categories of contents of consciousness arise, the compass being set here for deep exploration of HOW it is that the universe arises rather than “from where” is enough for this sailor to weather the storm of comparative philosophy that this treatise promises to be.

 

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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 11. What is a good act? pp.301-334

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

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

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

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

Intentions are primary to resolve or disambiguate values and choices.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(good question!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

The universal is immanent in every particular.

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every decision in life is a rationalisation of feeling.

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PAL Chapter 7. Custom and Evolutionary Naturalism. pp.195-217

The first step in the development of consciousness is for the subject to perceive a separate world.

In the animistic world, names for things are of the same essence as the things they name.

The totem recedes from a present object to a past image, where it becomes as symbol or metaphor.

The changed objectivity of the world changes ones relation to it. In the shift from reason to animism or paralogic, the relations intrinsic in an object become relations external to them. Perception is conceived in terms of its impact on the observer. The internal relations that generate mind and world are interpreted as external relations between objects, or between them and the human mind or the mind of god.

… the individuation of custom to law is the beginning of a reasoned sense of personal responsibility or obligation.

Mind assimilates the object world by fitting it to a complex tapestry of beliefs, magical and rational. The adaptation of magical or paralogical mechanisms, such as metaphor, is as intricate and interlocking as the behavioural adaptations of animals. Every organism seeks coherence with the environment at successive stages of its growth. The animal survives in a world of object nature; primitive cognition adapts to a psychic nature of its own invention.

… biological adaptation to the natural environment passes to psychic adaptation to a supernatural environment, finally to rational adaptation to a social environment. The one is nature as it is, the other mind invested in nature, the last, culture, a pure creation of thought. While these three levels of adaptation, the drive-based or instinctual, the Para logical and the rational, occur in three different environments – biological nature, psychic nature and the conventions of reason – all three intervene in everyday life. Drive and paralogic are preliminary phases that prefigure conscious concepts and conduct. Every action and thought traverses and conveys the residue of these phases.

Values good and bad arise from beliefs, true or false, that are supported by arguments, logical or irrational. Values are corrupted by false beliefs and corrected by reason, but goodness is ultimately a matter of positive values, however they may be instilled, not the reasons that justify them. … Rhetoric can alter beliefs that instil new values or distort old ones. Rhetoric has its effect, I would claim, less by verbal persuasion than through a kind of hypnotic identification that is parasitic on innate empathy.

The reversion to the mentality of the mob that is fulminated by paralogical or metaphoric thinking and faith based argument is attractive to many because it satisfies preconceptions regardless of whether or not they are true.

For a custom to be an ethic, the valuation invested in the action must shift from the societal or institutional mentality of tradition or religious belief to character and conscious decision. The custom has to be understood and willingly accepted. Personal values in addition to those of community, whether tribal, religious or legal, and the awareness of good and bad or right and wrong are essential for actions to be truly moral. … Moral enlightenment requires the individual to say ‘yes’ to the needs of a wider humanity, but it also requires the individual to say ‘no’ to the oppressive din of a brutal or insensitive majority.

The transition from instinctual nature, to a psychic universe of the supernatural, to a rational world of social interaction, involves a progressive detachment or a retreat from an immediacy of contact, as levels in though-development create a succession of social environments. Yet all three worlds – nature, magic and reason – are serially engaged in every act of cognition.

We learn form phylogenetic or ontogenetic growth patterns that behaviours are not laid down as nested complexes that reappear in pathological states; rather the behaviour is a signpost of the process that deposits it. Thus the paralogic that leads the native to believe a man is a tiger, or a schizophrenic to believe he is Christ, recurs in ordinary cognition in conventional metaphor, in novel concepts and artistic creation.

Ontogenesis is a translation of the genome by way of epigenetic patterns into morphology and behaviour. Learning is parasitic on this process and is itself a form of growth. The individuation of species in evolution is played out in the morphogenesis (epigenesis) of organisms, and this pattern continues in the microgenetic individuation of an act of cognition.

The postulate of a physical ground, a chemical mediator, a rule or directive that operates on epigenetic process, leaves the process itself untouched. This process is the growth or morphogenesis of organic form, and its replication in the derivation of an act of cognition (microgenesis).

The knowledge of the structure of a molecule of H2O does not convey the property of liquidity. Quantum theory does not predict DNA, nor the reverse. Neuron theory or cell synapse models do not predict the field effects of neuronal networks or populations. Even within a purely biological series, the systems approach entails a discontinuity across levels. This difficulty is never so pronounced as in the transition from a non-cognitive to a cognitive series. In fact the approach offers a correlation of levels, not a translation, reduction or emergence of one level to another, nor an identity across levels, nor an account of the progression over the (physical or mental) hierarchy.

The facility with which the qualitative is eliminated in the rush to explanatory reduction is astonishing, in the light of what is left unexplained. We might keep in mind Hartsthorn’s remark that “our ignorance is not to be turned into negative knowledge of the things ignored.” The explanatory power of the reductive agenda is illusory.

Conduct is as tightly and reciprocally conditioned by the cultural landscape as morphology is by the physical one.

Moral conduct is a path of growth not a destination.

The missing link in the transition from adaptation to moral conduct, from evolution to cognition, can be found in a psychology of intrapsychic processes.

An organism’s evolutionary history translates to patterns that deposit its social history, as human memory and language (memes) replace instinct and genes as the vehicles that transmit the past into the present.

The reconciliation of social pressure with individual freedom is a “work in progress”, not a settled fact. The surge to novelty, the adaptive nature of action, the positive dispositions that guide its formation, are a search for creative solutions to the changing world of each new perception.

All entities from the simple to the complex, individuate a universe of timeless possibility into durations of inner and outer dependencies. The more complex the whole, the more distributed its value. We are , with all entities, contrasts with the other, individuality and adaptation, nature and community.

There is a tendency to think of desire as an energetic impulse when, in fact, it is the affective tonality of concepts. Concepts are not affect-free assemblages of words but categories of ideas and feelings.

The fit or coherence of individual and community is, from an objective standpoint, an extra-personal version of the coherence (authenticity) of concepts with the contextual structure of the human mind. Neither coherence nor adaptation alone is sufficient. One can begin with an assumption and develop a whole system of thought that is coherent yet false. Both coherence (authenticity) and conformance (adaptation) are necessary.

Verbal concepts or propositions are, intuitively, more obvious products of the mind than perceptions, which for most people appear to be mind-independent. But how can the objectivity of concepts or propositions be decided if the objectivity of perceptions is in doubt? The objectivity of propositions and perceptions has to be inferred in some sense form their adaptive success, which is ascertained in the complementarity of the conceptual structure of the mind in respect to physical and mental objects.

According to process theory, belief, concept and fact are successive phases. The belief is the context behind the proposition., which actualises a portion of the context from which it is derived. Facts are perceptual actualities, propositions are linguistic ones. A proposition is a linguistic object. The correspondence of a proposition to a fact or object is, more precisely, the coherence of linguistic and perceptual objects in the mind of an observer.

The coherence is across actualities in the linguistic and perceptual streams of an act of cognition, i.e. parallel outflows of a common belief system. In the contextual background of a linguistic or perceptual act, the process through which the act is realised will be a vital part of the act itself.