Tag Archives: structure

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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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SEM pp.80-98

p.80

There are many descriptions of levels of awareness but few accounts of the specificity os awareness to a perceptual channel. … The awareness or lack of awareness is not a general reaction but specific to the perceptual system.

p.81

The demonstration that the loss of the visual world [through cortical blindness] is accompanied by a loss of the memory of that world has implications for a theory of perception. One implication is that an object is not received and put together by the brain, then transferred to a memory store for recognition, but rather, if the ‘store’ suffers with the object, the object must be ‘remembered’ into perception.

p.82

An external world is necessary for introspection. Dream is what happens to introspection when the external world is lost. The awareness of a mental space distinct from a public space occurs only if there is a public space for a comparison.

p.84

…images and objects are moments in a continuum leading from self to world. The continuum lays down levels in mid that are either mind-like or world-like, but the levels are stages in mind as self and world are constructed. The awareness of a content is elaborated by the same process through which the content is elaborated, since a disturbance of the content gives a disturbance of the awareness of the content. … the awareness is in the presentation.

But there cannot be multiple awarenesses for every potential content or every stage in every perceptual system. Awareness is a unitary phenomenon, not a piecemeal construction. The unity of awareness, lost in the analysis of the content, can be recovered in the sources of the content in the self.

p.85

In the experience of awareness, the content is only half the awareness, the other half is the self, the agent of the awareness, shifting and focussing like a lens with a zoom that is directed towards inner or outer contents. But the self that is scanning the contents of awareness is developing into the contents it is scrutinising, and this is the basis for the unity of awareness, that the awareness of content is derived with the content out of an underlying self concept that stands behind and distributes into the awareness content.

The Self in Awareness.

The object is preceded by the image and the image develops out of memory and the experiential store of the personality. The self is a stage in the unfolding prior to the image, arising early in the activation as a configuration in subconscious memory. The configuration of the self embraces all the potential images that the self can generate. The different aspects or expressions of the self are not isolated components but ideas the self pours out. The unity of the self derives from this position at a depth beneath analytic consciousness. Self, image and object are stages in a process of creative becoming. … The self is not the subject but the ground of the introspection. It is not the I in “I think” but the “I think”, and not just the “I think” but the whole context of the mental state in which the ‘I think” is embedded. … The thinking up of the I and the perception of the world flow from the self. The I is an element, an idea of what the self is. The I is like an object, which is an element in our idea of the world. The I is an invented self that does not correspond with the deep self that is generating the whole scenario in which the I of the introspection appears.

(I can see what he is getting at here, there are other approaches to this which shed more light upon the matter – however from an idealist and even potentially solipsist viewpoint, what he says makes sense, even if it does not totally convey the whole point to a mind with other resources to draw on.)

p.87

The depth and scope of knowledge directly available to the self seem to narrow as the theoretical issues clarify. The only direct, primary, unmediated knowledge is the content of consciousness in the absolute now. … The real object cannot be penetrated through the representation, which is the limiting point in the mind’s knowledge of the world. The inability to know the physical object is part of the desolation of the privacy of knowledge, but what is sacrificed in the loss of the object is compensated in the expansion of mind to include the object representation.

p.88

…what enters awareness, creates awareness. … Without the content there is no awareness, even for the loss of the content.

p.89

The solipsistic conclusion is not that the world does not exist, nor that the mind alone exists, but that one cannot access any event beyond it’s momentary mental representation. This is not the only way of thinking about this problem. There is another perspective that has to do with the enlargement of mind to include the world of perception. The limited knowledge of mind and world within a fleeting mental representation and the privacy of all knowledge of self and world are offset by the realisation that the observer participates in the objects he perceives. The world is literally part of the self, the objects in it extensions of the life of the observer.

Logic is not a means of discovery but an outcome. Logic is one form of knowledge. Logic seems to be an operation in introspection, yet like introspection it is a product of the process through which [mental] contents are generated. … world and language are shaped by the same generative process. … Because it is an outcome and not a creative activity, and because it leads to nothing new, logic is dead cognition.

p.90

Reality is a matter of conviction. It is always contingent. The world is as real as it seems.

p.92

The word is the full set of changing configurations, not the outcome of the configuring process. Without these stages [life experience, word category, and word or object] there is no meaning. The meaning is the entire configuration behind the word as well as the word itself.

The way a word is used is no more a part of it’s meaning than than the function of an organ is a part of it’s structure.

p.93

At best the description is a portion of the deep structure of the word that is accessed into consciousness, thus a part of it’s preliminary meaning content. When this content is derived into consciousness, however, it loses it’s original character, leaving behind, so to say, the real meaning that was the initial goal of the description.

p.94

It is a matter of faith that there a real objects “out there” that give meaning to our perceptions, but what is the real self “in there” that gives meaning to it’s representation?

p.95

Soul and world are creation myths that attain the status of inferences according to their degree of plausibility. If the world seems more plausible than the soul, that is just a cultural oddity of our present outward bias. … If soul and world are the history of the inner and outer segments of the brain state, the impulse to causal thinking entails that even souls and worlds have an origin and destiny. The need for a causal theory on the ultimate source and fate of the soul and the world is the basis for the idea of a God from whom all things are derived and to whom all thins return.

The existence of the object is inferred directly from the representation, the animation (mind) of the object is inferred from change in the representation over time.

p.97

We live in the brief segment of introspection positioned between a core that is unfathomable and a surface extending into a world that is endless.

p.98

… sanity is not subverted by the knowledge that the objects upon which it depends are unreal. Knowledge is dangerous when it penetrates into feeling – when the idea becomes painful – for it is the nature of the felling accompanying the knowledge that determines whether the knowing is an intuition or a pathology.

The continual laying down of the present gives the deception of a present surging into a future that is waiting just beyond reach. Since the individual lives within the unfolding, the vertical series is interpreted as a longitudinal flow, the carrier of the self through time, with no experience of the replacement of one state by another. In this way, the linkage of states propagates the self into the next moment.

 

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SEM, Days 3 & 4, pages 40-62

Another 2 day post…seems to be the rhythm of this…

p. 40-41

All objects are historical.  Every object has a momentary history and the history of every object is a memory….

The idea that objects and events are mind-dependent takes us closer to understanding the relationship between structure and process as between history and the present.  Events, rates and points in time are creations of the mind.  Whiteheads remark “the process is itself the actuality” points to the primacy of change, not phenomenal entitles into which it is broken. . . the elimination of the difference through an act of intuition collapses the process to a single transformation and expose the underlying unity of historic, life-span, and momentary structure.

Growth is the reconfiguration of the present takes on.

Comment:  The notion that change or growth is the evanescent movement of information across the field of awareness resonates with my own observations of experience. This notion that structure is the phenomenological fixity of the deeper process just seems fitting. There are those who believe that reality is punctuated and that there are quantized experience delivered to perception (this seems very alive and certain Buddhist traditions). From the perspective of Advaita, these streams seem more continuous and process like. Certainly structures can be frozen from this process but those distinctions seem brittle and artificial from my own personal experience.  Perhaps it has to do with training and attention and predilection.

p. 42

 Change is configurational, not chaotic.  A rock…is “a raging mass of activity” But the activity is organized into a rock, at least in our perception.  The activity of the rock is patterned.  Mind is also an object with a pattern.  A mind is distinct from other minds because of this pattern….

Comment:  I  get him up until the point that he drives distinctions from pattern with respect to mind. The lines between patterns seem  largely arbitrary and the question, much like mathematical fractals, is where one chooses to put one’s attention to demarcate the pattern. This is where Wilber’s conception of holons as being woven into higher and the lower orders of being, and being mostly indistinguishable from their own embeddedness (in the sense that they are not thing like) is valuable.  With all of that said to talk meaningfully about the world requires that one talk about patterns as though they were discrete. I begin to balk when he suggests that minds are distinct from other minds.  (Again a healthy dose of the inter-subjective would be salutary.) While there is grounds for this notion of privacy that he goes on about, I have a deep suspicion of the lines he seems to be drawing here.  We have a sense of privacy, but it seems to break down rather quickly on examination.

 Memory is the static element in process

Comment:  Yikes!  Isn’t the creation of a still point in the middle of process a bit of a cheat?  I noticed in myself the memory is in constant flux flowing change. Perhaps I am not getting at all what he means by memory here.

p. 44

Structure and process are different ways of looking at the same phenomena.  Structure disappears when process takes the fore….but structure and process are not equivalent depending on the point of view.  Process does not influence or flow from structure.  Structure is a process slowed down.  Structure is uncommitted and essentially formless. [Emphasis added.]

Comment:  I love the notion of structure as “uncommitted”.

Chapter 4: Mental States and Perceptual Experience

p. 51-52

 The surface of mind, the terminus of the mental state, is filled with developing objects, not just the images of private space anticipating those objects, but the rich abundance of forms that makeup the perceptible world.  This world, the surface of mind as the skin is the surface of the body, changes instantly according to what is perceived….But acts and objects and the memories and mental images that preceded them are not part of an outer and an inner world, but points a continuum of transformation; they are not projected into the world, but built up and articulated in the world as part of the representational space of mind.

Comment:  Very, very nice.  This notion of mind as a surface is evocative.  The entanglement of objective and subjective (as space) is useful as are the notions of private space anticipating the objective (though I still am finding this notion of private problematic).  It is interesting asking about some of these distinctions. I like that he points to the outer and inner world being points on continuii of transformation – it seems to soften some of the linguistic boundaries he is otherwise erecting.   

p. 53

A mental state is not a piece of a mind or a slice that can be demarcated by a structure that is active over time [that develops in layers and stages]….The content of a stage that is transformed is not lost in the progression to a later stage but embedded in the final representation.

p. 54

On this view, consciousness and its objects are the expanding rim of an outward flowing mind. Like a river pouring into its tributaries, mind is constantly resurrected, the nature of the state of each movement reflecting the degree to which the revival is successful.  Each of the potential minds submerged with the surface has a share of the self….The compete series of traversed and realized configurations constitutes a dynamic vertical envelope within which life is played out. Successive waves flowing from the core guarantee that each state falls in the same self.  The continuity of mind, the perception of self over time and over gaps in awareness, owes to the generation of surface content out of the core.”

Comment: Interesting reversal in the metaphor of rivers and tributaries – wondering how intentional that was and what it might mean.  There is lots to be said about the numbers of potential minds – again this evokes and calls to the reader to contemplate the particularity of this mind that exists now.  His notions of core seem promising and I am looking forward to his deeper exploration.

p. 59

 the unity of experience is guaranteed by the commonality of the core across different surface contents….Conscious content is a product that serially exhausts a single deep concept embracing multiple surface representations.

Comment:  This core as an exhaustive adhesion of multiple surface representations strikes me as apt.  I am curious about this in connection with gaps in awareness and consciousness he mentions elsewhere and how the core itself moves in process (it cannot be immune, can it?).  I recognize that this core is beneath such gaps and doesn’t shift so much, but it also seems inaccessible in any phenomenological sense in his formulation.  My own sense is that it can be “seen” quite clearly in meditative states that aren’t all that deep.

p. 60

The focus, therefore, is not on a rapid exchange across objects in consciousness but on the slow drift from one subsurface frame to another. Since the transition from one court to the next persists through sleep… the integrity of the mental life is maintained…. Conversely, the present moment, the now instant, it is past history even as it appears, for the moment that follows is already underway…. Deep levels undergo slow transformation– gradual movement from one conceptual frame to another– a change of scared by the evanescent shifts at the surface. Attention is like a moving stream, the unseen depths of which run slowly.  Waking objects are brief snapshots that dance over the glacial drifts of the core.

 Comment:  Yes..yes…yes…so skillfully put.

Chapter 5: Consciousness and the Self

p. 62

Self-awareness or introspection is not awareness of the self that is self-aware of objects; the condition of being conscious one is perceiving an object…. The self is conscious in the context of a perception…. Consciousness takes as its object and external percept or an internal image. Introspection (awareness of images) and extereoception (awareness of objects) are different aspects the same process.

Comment:  This makes perfect sense. The notion that consciousness exists in connection with content seems obvious to one who has spent any appreciable time in meditative practices. The notions that awareness is fundamentally the same dynamic whether the object is self (images) or other is again, pretty straightforward.  I do marvel at how succinct and clear he is in describing these things.

p. 66

The achievement of an ostensibly real-world distinct from mind accompanies the possibility of a self looking on and distant from the world. One domain entails the other. The world exists in confrontation with mind; mind exists when there is a world itself is conscious of. The world itself here as separate physical and mental modes of existence but their boundary is a gradual transition.  The self arises in this transition as the object develops from mental space to a location in externality. The self arises out of phase and the forming object prior to the resolution of clear mental images, since the self is more than anyone image type. In the expansion of mind outward the self looks on as emerging configurations transformed through a fringe of dependent objects to those that are fully categorized.’

Comment:  This makes perfect sense.  One of the interesting pieces in reading Brown is understanding his descriptions from the point of Adviata.  Much of what Brown points to are observations that seem quite obvious from a deep meditative practice and one peels back the operations of mind and witnesses the arising of thought from void to objectivity.

p. 68

It also generates a feeling of capacity in relation to the developing objects that complements the action development, ensuring that objects will be apprehended as external and independent. The feeling of possibility can be examined over a continuum of object development. Objects draw away from the self as actions go out to meet them. The deception of an object as a goal is elaborated in parallel with the deception that actions make a difference.

The self is left behind in the outward migration of objects.

Comment:  These deceptions seem significant.  Much of what Brown is speaking of here (and throughout) seems to be focus on a kind of sensory illusion (imagination) of “reality” both internal and external as it engages in a sense of the gossamer self.

p. 69

“Pure” disorders of the self, so as in psychotic cases, are not confined to changes in the self-concept but still and perceptual fluctuations.”

p. 70

The self, preliminary object embracing all the objects and images into which it develops, struggles toward understanding. The drive we all share to articulate the self or to “no one self” reflects the precedence of meaning in the forming object. The self is meaning without content, shape without internal topography. The self arises in cognitive renewal were meanings latent in fully developed objects predominate. In perception, the self is a pre-figural conceptual gestalt. In language the self leads to a semantic representation prior to phonological realization.

Comment:   I love this notion of self as meaning without content and shape and without topography.  My own experience is that “self” is mostly a kind of space that entertains object in the world of form.   What I personally find in this examination, and seems contradictory to what Brown later posits, is that the self is at one level agentic.  In Brown’s own work, choices and assemblage is happening at early points of the limbic process (which seems to reside in a pre-self and pre-conscious “structure”).  My experience is that the Witness is not passive, but extremely active in pretty much precisely the ways Brown is pointing to in these deep processes of assemblage.  Whether I am hallucinating this or observing it is a good question – but there is a firm felt sense of this progression in my experience.

p.70

 Beneath the introspective self lies a world of the subconscious; beyond a world shared with others. Some conscious content is given up in the formation of the self of the self is drawn out and lost in the world of perception.

p. 72

The inner bond between self object and mode of consciousness is so lawful it can only mean that they are not separate functions but manifestations of a common process. Self as object (or image) are points in the unfolding of a single representation, consciousness the relation between them.

p. 74

The deception that objects exist independent of fonts, but the self acts on objects, even at the self is independent of its own mental content, is essential if the individual is struggle and survive. Objects have to matter; life depends on this. The self also has to matter. If the self lacks the conviction that it can will an action to pass, if actions are apprehended as enacted through rather than by itself, its existence is a dream, and there is no drive to overcome in life cannot be sustained.

Comment:  This living in the world in full recognition of the deceptions in play is an interesting game.  I personally find myself navigating this constantly – often without much success for precisely the reasons Brown articulates here.

__________________

Some Overall Comments:  I am finding Brown is speaking very, very clearly to an architecture of inner experience that comports deeply with my own felt and observed sense of things. These insights are not seismic shifts for me, but he is bringing a great deal of clarity to the land I traverse daily and advancing a set of conceptual frames that deepen and enrich the landscape.  I am also disappointed at my own responses – I want to dive into this material more deeply and feel that I am only skimming the surface of what is available.  I went back and fixed some stuff above…wishing to truly give this real thought beyond impressions and finding myself too pressed to do so.

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SEM pp.39-60

p.39

What is the thing that really matters in respect of categories? What is the deep (original) nature of a category? One can say as a beginning, that categorising is the holding of items that are unique or disparate (successive) in a duration that is a simultaneity. The category is a kind of momentary whole, a temporal, not a spacial … whole, containing an array of elements not in space but in time.

The argument now becomes clear: mind first appears in a duration that arises out of pure succession, a duration that encloses a collection of virtual instants in the same way that a category binds together and assortment of virtual, (ie. abstract) objects.

The abstract ‘instants’ enclosed by a duration compare with the abstract ‘objects’ in a category.

p.40

Both categories and durations provide stable groupings that segment a continuous stream of transformation. … Duration is dynamic recurrence imposed on physical process. … The deeper question is whether in the realisation of a duration series, the seriation creating the time lacking in the separate durations is an expression of a world process in which elements create time out of infinity.

(this is tickling my brain!)

 All objects are historical. Every object has a momentary history and the history of every object is a memory. The history is the memory beyond the memory that is the object itself. The past of an object is a theory on where the object came from. (!!) … The idea that objects and events are mind dependent takes us closer to understanding the relation between structure and process, as between history and present. If change is the only reality, events are not situated at a point in objective time but are momentary durations in consciousness.

p.42

Cognition is linked to evolution and development as a type of exuberant and recurrent momentary growth. … Evolution delivers the organism into the present in the ontogeny of inherited form. Microgenesis delivers the present over the configuration this form generates. Cognition does not leave growth behind as an extrinsic or secondary effect. Organic process is growth even in decay. (emphasis mine)

The personality is enlarged in every experience. The past builds up and defines the present. The self is in continuous renewal. … Growth is the reconfiguration [that] the present takes on. … Growth is an effect of change, process an effect of growth. The change is the process, the changed is the growth, but are each moment the same transformation. … A theory of cognition is also a theory of novelty, memory and evolution of organic form.

p.43

Anatomical structure records phylo-ontogeny as growth over time. … Memory is the static element in process, it is to cognition what anatomy is to growth. … In microgenesis there is a transform from context to item, or from field to central figure.

p.44

Growth trends in phylo-ontogeny establish constraints on the unfolding of configurations in cognition. … Th process is reiterated at successive levels so that specificity is achieved through parcellation or fractionation and not by the addition of new structure. … Structure and process are different ways of looking at the same phenomenon. … Process does not influence or flow from structure. Structure is process slowed down. Microgenesis extends process as structure into maturation. Without the process that microgeny affords, structure is uncommitted and essentailly formless.

p.46

Perception is the process through which objects unfold. … Sensation is a physical constraint on the potential diversity of images…

p.48

An idea does not emanate from the play of introspection but is a deviation – a type of conceptual branching – at deeper form building semantic layers. … Creativity is a flight from deliberation in the service of a concept rising from below. … Novel configurations in cognition and development are constantly being generated in this way, either to persist and gradually transform the organism or disappear, submerged in the weight of the habit and the flow. … A regression form surface to depth also occurs in creative thinking when the self withdraws form endstage mentation to it’s anticipatory spatial and semantic constructs. This recapture of creative form may be an uncommon experience for those who live resolutely in a world of objects. In contrast, the creative individual reclaims the sources of those objects in constructs lying deep beneath the surface.

p.53

The formative direction and thus the dynamic structure of a mental state is from sub-surface mentation through private events to the perceptual surround.

p.56

A sensation is a physical series that shapes but is extrinsic to the brain state. We are not aware of sensations, only their presumed effects on perceptions. A sensation is an inference about the origins of a perception.

p.60

As a new wave rolls on to the shore before the first has ended , so the content of an ensuing moment – the immediate future – begins it’s development as the present moment unfolds. Conversely, the present moment, the now of this instant, is past history even as it appears, for the moment that follows is already underway. The continuity of mind does not depend on a linkage of nows but a succession of present moments articulated out of the core.

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SEM pp.16-39

 

p.16

This is not because our knowledge [..of specifics..] is incomplete, but because we lack a general theory within which this knowledge has a place. There is always a context around a local theory, which is the area of it’s weakness. The more local the theory – and scientific theories tend to be extremely local – the less the theory explains.

In a very real sense, everything needs to be explained before anything can be understood.

Theories do not spring from data but arises as an insight about the context in which the data appear. Data, facts and observations limit the scope in which theory can develop but are more neutral in relation to the development of the theory than is commonly recognised. Theories help to organise experience; they are not waiting to be discovered when all the facts are known, but are engaged in a process of discovery as covert motivations. A theory is not an outcome but an intuition about the concepts that are quietly guiding the research.

p.17

In sum there is a tacit bias in any observation or experiment rooted ultimately in collective assumptions on the nature of mind and externality. The concepts driving the research are more important than the concepts that the research seems to be generating. Fundamental ideas implicit in the research shape it in ways that are often not apparent. This is especially important in the study of psychological function.

p.18

[If we begin with matter as primary...] In some manner the ‘projection’ of an object into the world entails a contrast between self and object that is so compelling we have difficulty maintaining the thought that the objective world is not quite as it appears.

p.19

On the other hand if we begin with with mind as primary and seek to explain objects from inner states and private experience, the discontinuity between inner and outer evaporates: mind is everywhere, a universe. An object is an extension of the mind of the perceiver. Mind reaches out to articulate a world that is limitless lilke a dream and the real world is a reality beyond mental representation. The world that is scrutinised in perception is simply part of the extrapersonal extent of mind.

p.20

Regardless of where we begin, with objects, brain activity or cognition, we need a theory of mind sensitive to physical constraints but centered in the subjective fo thie is ultimately what the theory has to explain. Without inner states there is no need for a theory; indeed, there is no mind to theorise with!

(this whole section is reminiscent of the teachings of the Buddha in the Lankavatara Sutra)

p.22

The feeling of reality for dream does not arise form the approximation to an object, but to an inability to affirm the unreality of the dream image through alternative perceptual systems.

p.23

The shift from dream to wakefulness is not an alternation between two parallel states but a process of emergence.

One challenge that is set to a theory of the world as mental representations is to explain this paradox, the firmness of belief in a world of real objects and actions that effect those objects, and the conviction that mind is independent of the objects of it’s own making.

Evolution delivers a mind that is designed to replicate the world we live in.

p.25

We would not say that the structure of a building is in the face it presents to a viewer. That is it’s appearance, it’s form; it’s structure consists in the pattern and composition of it’s elements. Structure means internal structure, not just surface form. Internal structure however is more than the concatenation of parts; it includes the functional relations between the parts.

Structures are not static arrangements but dynamic patterns. … A structure changes with a change instate. … Structure is defined by active processes. … Process is not the output of structure; process niether drives structure nor is instantiated through structure. … Process applies to internal activity and differs from function which is a superordinate term for the action of a system as a whole. … Function accounts for the design of a system but structure is independent of a functional description. … One can say that function constrains growth and outlines process but is not an intrinsic part of structure.

p.26

Structure … is the illusion of stability in a system in continuous transformation. … In a process model structural units are like mental snapshots, moments in the life of process artificially frozen in time. … Structure in mind/brain is a conceptual anchor in the unending flow of process.

p.27

The structure of the brain, like that of mind and world, is not a rigid framework but a fluid arrangement of dynamic processes.

p.30

The pattern of a developmental growth process guided by intrinsic laws generating a variety of forms that struggle to prevail in a slice of the external world, a world in which the selection of organisms occurs through an active, competitive pruning of those less well adapted for the conditions of life, constitutes the basic framework of evolutionary theory. The question is, can this framework also serve as a model for the process of cognition?

p.31

But consider how a structure is known. The structure is represented as an object in a perception. During the perception the structure is recorded and described. The perception is a segment in the life of the viewer. It is also a moment in the history of the object being viewed. The time during which the structure is taken in has a certain duration. In this duration, the life of the object is stabilised and captured as a whole.

p.32

…the insight that structure is an artificial stasis in the reality of incessant change is at the heart of an understanding of mental structure.

Change is not extrinsic to structure but permeates the concept of what a structure is. In fact the presence of change a the core of a structure, the stability of which is illusory, teaches us the the present (the slice through process to obtain structure) is contingent on a past through which it is actively elaborated. The present rides on the crest of a past that is resurgent, an ever expanding past, always, in pursuit of a present that cannot be demarcated, a present that dissolves away the instant it appears. (emphasis mine)

p.36

Growth is the memory of the body. Memory is the growth of the mind.

Habit is recurrence in the context of memory. … novelty is the overcoming of memory in the capacity for change. … The difference between repetition as mechanical and repetition with memory is the presence of mind to record the repetition.

p.37

…novelty lies in the conception of the whole, not in the elements derived from this conception. Since the whole is simultaneous, what elements are to be compared? From what prior state is the whole derived? Novelty in change, in the transition across moments, has to be sought in the conceptual growth leading to the whole, not in the change “across time” of it’s constituent features. This type of novelty is creativity, not the novelty that inheres in change.

…the percept ia a concept exteriorising as an existent.

p.38

Both natural categories, such as colours, and those that are culture relative, such a s tools, are organising principles of the mind that are engaged prior to object awareness.

p.39

In this fuzzy region between tow categories, another category is beginning to form. This region is fertile soil for the growth of new concepts.