Tag Archives: time

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Magellanism

authentic artistic productions
the avant garde…
whisper unconscious koens
subliminal social suggestions
haunting the ready, the restless…
prepares ground
for punctuated emergence

what is this light ???
a cascading series
of erotic creative toggles
which vitalize the preparation
of this special autopoesis
the poetry of our collective dance
becomes obvious
in these special glimpses
of the great remembering

it’s more than the eros
of pursuing the excellent questions,
the loving play and design
of cognitive gifts and exercise…
it’s more than the sacred reverence
of our sanga in practice,
this emergent suchness,
exhibiting delicious blended elements
of both…
ah !!

at this intersection of our experience
a fresh, new, and alive we-ness emerges
mysterious, gorgeous, seductive presentations
the stuff of this new manifestation
the resonance of our fresh social moment
this precious group
this shared new luminance
new containers are formed
already brimming,
with our splendid light

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… the real is not a limit on existence.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

The truth is in the relation not in the relata.

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

An object is a combination of category and process.

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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PAL Chapter 3 – Affect and Idea. pp.101-121

 

… the common distinction of emotion and idea, [is] that emotions are the transformation of chemical or physical energy, while thought involves the transformation of information.

If emotion is the antithesis of conceptual thinking, feeling and concept must come together in some way to give context to feelings and impetus to ideas, though just how this might occur is uncertain.

Energetic theory of emotion has survived not only because it appeals to common sense, but because it is grounded on evolution. Energy in inorganic mater is the basis of emotion in higher organisms. My thesis here is that emotion begins as energy, eg. the wave-form of a basic entity, where it is ‘contained’ in basic packets or particles. At this stage, energy has a momentum but not a stable direction, certainly not an aim. The energy and its boundedness are the existence and nature of the entity. Put differently, the entity consist of a packet of temporal extensibility over the duration of its existence, a duration that is, at least conceptually, isotropic or time-reversible. In the evolution of organic life, energy tkes on an aim or direction over its duration and becomes anisotropic or time-irreversible. The phase transition has a before and after. With directionality, energy is transformed to feeling. The shift from bi-directional to uni-directional feeling, as with all natural advances in organic systems, occurs within the duration of the entity, i.e. within the temporal extension of each occurrence.

Once there is feeling, an ‘idea’ goes to satisfaction. This ‘idea’ is the category (duration) over which the feeling develops. As energy is the seed of emotion, duration is the seed of idea. Energy becomes feeling, duration becomes category. Or, put differently, becoming (process) is feeling, being (state) is idea. The category that encloses a feeling is also its aim, since the category does not exist until an epoch of feeling terminates. A complete cycle of feeling establishes the boundaries of the duration, and thus fulfils the aim or idea of the category that up until them has been virtual but, through the cycle of feeling, becomes actual just as it perishes.

(emphasis mine)

One can say that feeling is felt process in simpler organisms – it is the dynamic of their unreflective lives – while emotion is the experience of process in higher ones. A simple organism is its feeling, but complex (human, but perhaps lower) organisms have emotions. In emotion, we experience the life-animating process that actualises the person that we are.

The inner and outer world that are created in perception are created for those who, themselves, are created by feeling.

When feeling goes immediately in to action, the body receives all the feeling that might otherwise have been allocated to objects, and the self and its body are then more intensely alive.

The impression is strong that ideas are free of affect, and feelings are free of ideational content, with the awareness of an emotion being the result of a judgement. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

Thus we arrive at the conclusion that emotion or feeling is the process-experience of becoming, while the feeling or emotion that is experienced, the designation of that experience, or its fixation in an object or idea, is the object-experience of being. As being gives existence to becoming, so without becoming, being would not exist. Objects are created by feelings as enclosures, but feeling is what makes objects real existents.

Thought expresses feelings, minimally in what a person chooses to think about, so just thinking about something entails an affective (evaluative) quality.

A mood does not seem to have an object, rather, it affects all objects and it poses difficulty to a theory of affect as the inner dynamic of ideation. Yet we occasionally have ideas that are also pervasive, and it may be that what such ideas and moods have in common is their relation to pre-object categories, where neither the concept nor the feeling has individuated with sufficient clarity.

In ongoing perception, feeling intensifies when interest collapses on a single object, for example when we perceive an object with fear or love. It is not surprising that this also occurs in memory, which is attenuated perception. Feeling is heightened with absorption in the memory. In creative writing, one attempts to reclaim a certain mood and recapture the idea or inspiration of the work, not just any mood, but one which is specific to the generative idea. The mood corresponds to the idea even if the idea cannot be articulated. At such moments, one wants to be saturated with the idea, to get into the mood and stay there, to bring its latent content to awareness. … The creative mood with its inchoate idea suggests that ordinary moods like depression are also associated with an unconscious ideation.

Depending on the context, feeling grows or fades. These observations indicate that feeling and idea are part of the same complex, but their unity is fluid not quantal. The apparent liberation of affect from idea that occurs in the derivation of drive to conceptual feeling is equally a liberation of the idea from its affective tone. Affect and idea are not fixed for all subsequent revivals. Even in drive, a given idea (construct, category) is not inextricably woven with a given affect. The shifting relations between feelings and memory, or feeling and idea (object, event), depend on the current mood, the passage of time, depth and context and the momentary focus of attention.

Affect is a part of the process-life of the present. The past-quality of feeling is derived secondarily from reminiscence. Whatever there is of pastness in feeling comes from the memorial-quality of the idea. In contrast, a memory that is experienced as a present event would be an hallucination.

The emotional response to a past event, more than the memory of the event, depends on the current state of mind. This is also true for perception. … The affective tone of the moment colours the feeling of the event. The affective tonality of memory is determined by the current state, which includes the embedded memory.

This union of feeling and object (concept), closer to memory than perception, closer to archaic structures of the limbic formation than to the recency of neocortex, closer to the past than the present, allied to magical and creative thinking, abides just beneath the surface of everyday thought.

In human thought, feeling and idea – the dynamic and static of cognition – are indivisible. Ideas are deposited as categories out of the incessant throb of feeling, both within the organism and in its world. This is not the view of most philosophers, nor of psychoanalysts.

(emphasis mine)

… an object individuates in the course of self-realisation from an intrapersonal phase of dispositions, values and implicit beliefs through one of experiential memory, object-concepts and imagery, to a thing in the world.

The conceptual portion of an external object is its object-category, its affective portion is realness and worth.

Feeling marks a development within the realisation of the object of a dynamic that was not previously noted. This development is attributed to knowledge or experience, which is another way of saying there is a deeper exploration of the infrastructure of the perception, of an inner layer of memory and subjective feeling just beneath the outer rim of objects.

When we gaze at an object of interest, its value grows with an expansion of submerged residues in the underpinnings of the object. One line of expansion leads to growth in object- and lexical-concepts. These develop into objects and propositions that are relatively free of affect. The other line of expansion leads to a growth in experiential memory, which is relatively independent of lexical- and object-concepts. The former is governed by the regularities of rational thought, the latter by feeling and metaphoric thinking.

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PAL Chapter . What is an Object? pp.47-69

In the human spirit, as in the universe, nothing is higher or lower; everything has equal rights to a common center which manifests it’s hidden existence precisely through this harmonic relationship between every part and itself. ~ Goethe

There problems of space and time, identity and change, or object and process are critical to any philosophy that refuses to ignore it’s metaphysical roots.

Before identity, the temporal boundary distinguishes an object from an event.

One can say that the distinction of object and event, especially with respect to a solitary object, depends on it’s rapidity of change, or the degree to which the object is transformed.

The point is that identity is conceptual or categorical. It involves an event-recurrence within a category. An object individuates a concept within an event-category. The smaller the category, the closer we get to the identity of individuals.

Though we speak of objects for convenience, there are no objects, only events, and there is no exact description of an event. How could there be an absolute sameness across moments if the object or event at a given moment cannot be fully specified?

If there is no ineluctable quantum of value that determines for all observers what an object or event is, or what the constitutive properties of an event are, given the viewer-centred nature of constitutive properties, the causal role of those properties will depend on their valuation.

Objects can either be absorbed into events or they can be conceived as persisting with properties that change as the event transpires. In the latter instance, the change in the event is usually interpreted as an attribute or ‘predicate’ attached to the object.

…process thinking entails an event ontology. For microgenetic theory, an object is always an event. It is not a slice in time but has a temporal history, minimally the change that actualises the object, it’s momentary becoming-into-being. The event is the development of the object in a succession of phases over a duration of existence. An object is a theoretical construct in an extended duration that includes a no-longer-existing-past.

In process theory, change results from novelty in recurrence, with stability achieved in perceptual epochs. In positivism or logical atomism, change tends to occur in the properties, the object itself remaining unchanged. Put differently, the epochs of process theory are irreducible changes through which objects and properties are generated, whereas the atoms of positivism are irreducible solids in which properties are ingredient, or to which they are attached.

An ostensibly stable object such as a rock or a tree, not to mention a particle or a person, is as much an event as a hurricane. (!!)

[Quoting Hart (1949)] Once we realise that the discharging and transition of energies are the only perceptible and apperceptive constituents of reality, physical as well as mental and social, the meanings of ideas and propositions stopped being attributes which we could add to, or subtract from the objects, arbitrarily. Experience became the sole arbiter.

If experience is the world received in the senses, that world is not experienced at all, while if experience is the world of perception, it is a derivation, a model or mirror of the world of sense.

The object does not rest on – but consists of – it’s infrastructure; what the individual brings to the perception is an inherent part of the perception, not something the individual adds to or takes away from an object.

…the philosophy of experience has to be based in the actual nature of experiential objects. This actual nature is not the bare object but the full process of it’s actualisation.

External relations are either independent of objects or part of them. If they are independent, how do they bring the objects into relation? If they are part of them, where does the object end and the relation begin?

The view advanced here is not situated in the contemporary philosophical discourse over internal and external relations, which equates relations with properties and assumes terms that have or do not have these properties. To identify a relation with a property petrifies it in language. Once this step is taken, and given the assumption that terms are not themselves bundles of relations, the conclusion is inevitable that relations are external to terms. The position take here on the other hand, arises in the context of a general monist theory (microgenesis) on the relation of thought to reality. On this view, natural relations within objects, or within the mind/brain, and by implication within non-cognitive entities, are internal to the totality of nature or cognition, in which every particular is a momentary contrast.

The relations that constitute events are not themselves actualities, but rather potentialities or possibilities. Were the dynamic of a relation to actualise, it would freeze as an object and lose it’s relational quality.

For psychic relations to extend into the world, as they do, is for the world to be an extension of the mind. The inner connectedness of the world is not it’s ostensible relatedness in the world, but it’s formative trajectory in the mind/brain. Moreover, if the individual mind exemplifies becoming in nature, this trajectory would correspond to the aim to closure of entities in physical becoming. The physical whole or existence of an entity, or other objects in the world, cannot be reconstructed from it’s spacial context, for this represents the endpoint of a parallel stream. Rather, the coherence of the whole in relation to the parts is in the temporal diachronic of the becoming of one actualisation. An actualisation is how parts individuate. Relations of individuation determine how parts come into existence. Once we apprehend an object (a thought, etc.) it’s relationality is finished.

We perceive parts, not the genuine wholes from which they arise, nor the process through which they actualise. A genuine whole is not a container of parts but a potential to give rise to them. Genuine relations are also imperceptible. The imperceptibility of genuine wholes and their transformation into parts, combined with the emphatic sense of object solidity, makes holistic and relational thinking unpalatable to many people.

Causal efficacy is imagined to be the primary locus of exchange of energy in the world, and is the principle theory of how mental objects and physical entities behave.

…real or genuine change occurs in the actualisation of events into a timeless now, while illusory or apparent change is ‘projected’ onto objects in conscious perception, a distinction that is paradoxical, since it implies that perceptible change is illusory while genuine change is imperceptible.

An object is a momentary cluster of relations that constitutes a portion of a field. The persistence of the object or it’s continuance over time owes to the immediate recurrence of a similar cluster.

…the stability of the object depends on the novelty of it’s successive replacements.

If abstractions are achieved at the cost of some part of the truth, what is lost in an abstract category is the value that belongs to those virtual instances the category encloses.

To abandon the idea that some properties are more basic than others, or that some are essential and others accidental, is to consider all properties mid-dependent. This avoids the idea of a substance with properties and relations, some cognitive, others physical, and the corollary assumption that secondary qualities are psychic additions.

Microgenetic theory implies that the fundamental relation is a shift from whole to part. The diversity of multiplicity of the world and the mind is the individuation of clusters through a series of whole-part shifts in personal or extra-personal space and time. In other words, a single process, a kind of travelling wave, lays down diversity, instead of a multiplicity that is unified in a pulse of consciousness or diverse processes acting on a manifold of parts.

An event is a span over momentary clusters of intrinsic relations determined by interest.

The shaping effect of interest or value on what properties are relevant to the event is due to the affectual tones that accompany the object in it’s transition from potential to actual. The value stream is intrinsic to this transition, at the mental pole as desire, at the object pole as worth and at an intermediate phase as interest.

…interest is derived to worth, which takes on ethical valence (good,bad), then prescriptive emphasis (ought).

Thoughts and feelings grow into the objects of experience.

Events and participants, large or small, depend on foci of interest. The world is the totality of such events. What the world is at a given moment depends on whether a flea looks to left or right. It is the totality of all occurrences from all perspectives, or perhaps, from only One.

We live on the edge of a world that is continuously becoming actual. The cluster of relations that constitutes an occasion of experience leaves in it’s wake a forward going dynamic anticipating an advance in a category that is infinitely divisible. That is why we never quite grasp events other than as classes or properties or categories of object appearances.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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PAL Foreword,Preface, Introduction pp.0-46

Foreword;

This new book by Jason Brown, who over the last several decades has woven the somewhat unlikely strands of process metaphysics and clinical neurology into a magnificent theoretical tapestry, represents an attempt to include moral thinking within the framework of the theory. The importance of this move should not be overlooked.

How should our beliefs shape our behaviour?

It is a “unified field theory”, rooted in the abstract metaphysics of process philosophy on the one hand, and the messy reality of the neurology clinic on the other, potentially transforming how we look at phenomena as apparently disparate as the nature of time, the origins of dreams ans hallucinations, the way a speech act unfolds, and (now with the present volume) how we make value judgements.

For whom, then, has this book been written? Clinicians are likely to be baffled by the metaphysics; philosophers, by the clinical material; Psychologists and neuropsychologists, by the lack of empirical tests and statistical analysis. Almost all of us will find our resources of knowledge challenged, if not simply inadequate, at one point or another in the reading of Jason Brown’s work. Many faint hearted readers are likely to say, “Well this book seems to have been written for someone else, not for me!”

Brown cannot be rightly accused of oversimplifying or pandering to the needs of a mass audience looking for simple solutions to complex problems. On the contrary, the theoretical edifice here is enormously complex, indeed incomprehensible for those with intellectual blinders firmly in place. There are no slogans here that can be used to stop arguments, but rather a series of insights that constrain our thinking in a different and more productive way than previously. This is of course sometimes a painful process.

Author’s Preface;

Only when a philosophy is at full bloom do we appreciate the intuition that generated it. The early stages of a philosophy is one of groping, confusion, inarticulateness, and enthusiasm. ~ George Adams, 1930.

The clinical and neurological data are the material of the philosophy, while the philosophy is the ground on which the seeds of the psychology can be planted. In my view, a philosophy not based on phenomenal experience is stranded in speculative argumentation, while a psychology not grounded in philosophy or biology will be mired in trivia or romantic fiction. Yet I would agree with the comment of William James that a scientific understanding of the mind/brain will necessarily be metaphysical.

Introduction;

To each she appears in a unique form. She hides amid a thousand names and terms and is always the same. ~ Goethe, On Nature.

Is speciation in the process of evolution analogous to a specification in an act of cognition? Is the process through which species are formed related in some way to the struggle and adaptation that every entity goes through in order to become what it is at any given moment? The realisation of an organism, or any object, is an intrinsic microtemporal process that is largely imperceptible. Does this process correspond with the putative extrinsic relations involved in the reproduction of organisms viewed from the standpoint of populations and evolutionary time? If so, we could say that the evolutionary process of survival and diversification is the outer, large scale, or macroscopic expression of an inner, small scale microscopic process of self-realisation.

The transformation of potential to actual is like that of a not-yet-existent ground to a developing figure in which the ground is the antecedent whole or potential for realisation and the figure is what is actually being realised out of the whole. Once the whole is realised, the being becomes and existent. This process is uniform in nature. The same pattern that creates a brain, brings a particle into existence. (emphasis mine) We should not be surprised that what is most profound in nature is what is most universal, and thus imperceptible owing to it’s uniformity.

One could say that the complexity fills the duration as it expends. This implies that the increasing complexity that eventuates in the human brain is not an explanation of value or consciousness, but is a product of the process leading to it. This process is a kind of growth. This is also true for the transformation of societies, in which change occurs less by revolution or coercion than by slow assimilation, This is also a form of growth, taking place through an increase in the intrinsic complexity of society, viewed as an organism rather than a collection or compilation of entities.

The relation of a duration to it’s contents is not that of a container to the things it contains, but rather that of a virtual whole to virtual parts. In a particle, the whole and part are envelope and wave form; in the mind, they are the mental state and it’s phase transitions. A self, an idea, an object, are recurring sets of covert, sequential phases that unfold over a cycle of existence.

…a becoming creates time (change) as serial parts individuate out of simultaneous wholes. … The relation of category and process, or whole and part to being and becoming is the “deep structure” of the process of evolution.

An entity becomes what it is and so defines itself as it occurs, whether a society in relation to all humanity, or an atom against the void. Every motion is an orientation, every orientation a discrimination, every discrimination a valuation. Existence is the initial value.

Facts or values arise in a context of self-realisation. (emphasis mine)

States of affairs begin as intuitions, then personal beliefs permeated by values, and grow into experiential or scientific facts. The intense value of a fact to one who experiences or discovers it may be of only mild value to someone else. The fact is still a value though it is shorn of personal feelings. Gradually, the affective tonality of a fact becomes so distilled that it seems value free. Scientific facts are like this. Science ignores value in the pursuit of present fact, but in so doing, it also ignores the past that forms much of present desire. We intuit the affective valance in the personal history of novel facts before they wither in habit and consensus , in the passionate intensity of those who argue for their truth. The ferocity of argumentation over seemingly neutral facts is often surprising in those we assume to be detached and reasonable, such as scientists and philosophers.

… The categorical primes that underlie cognition are infused from the very outset with drive energy. Idea and feeling, concept and process, are dual aspects at each phase.

For some, the self is a social construct. Is value a magnet or an impulse? Are customs and obligations determinants of behaviour, sources of instilled values, or bases for moral judgement? Conduct in accordance with the law can arise as personal value, an obligation that is apprehended as partly external, or one that is fully coercive.

This world enriches the self through experience and learning, not by filling a naïve brain with ‘information’, but by fractionating innate categories into sub-sets of knowledge, belief and value.

If one can set aside the traditional assumption that perception occurs through the passive reception and construction of sensory data that are generated outside the perceiver and become ingredient in the mind, many aspects of the theory expounded here will begin to make sense.

The main point here, and the starting point for almost everything that follows, is that fully objective experiences are also subjective, in that they too emanate from the subject’s own beliefs and values. … Subjectivity applies not only to pains, after-images and other qualia, but to all perceptual experience.

The theory expounded in this book is a blend of idealism and naturalism that attempts to resolve the objectivity of ethical strictures in a monist theory of process.

… the existence of the other is, ultimately, an hypothesis about the origins of a perception, just as a perception or a concept is a hypothesis about the entities it models or represents. It is my belief that the problem of subjectivism, far from being obstacles to a theory of subject-object relations, are the key to understanding the nature of value, compassion, and the ‘place’ of the other in the matrix of the self.

With it’s awareness of a no-longer-existing past and a not-yet-existing future, the mind seems fully distinct from physical nature.

Subjectivism, or the “view from inside”, claims we can only know our own ideas. This is not consistent with the hypothesis that each mind realises a portion of the wholeness of universal mind or, put differently, actualises some portion of natural process. In a monist theory of process, a mind is conceived as a duration within a wider category of feeling. Every entity, including a mind, is a local manifestation of the ground of nature or physical reality.

The outcome of this inquiry has been fro me, and I hope it will be for the reader as well, a deeper appreciation of the place of the other in the ‘structure’ of the self’s own valuations.

From an external or objective standpoint, then, moral conduct tends to be judged in terms of what is reasonable or fair, or what conforms to social norms, not in terms of a paradigm of saintly or altruistic behaviour, or what might be considered perfection. … Even charity and hospitality are values that are usually not obligatory, at least not in the West.

For the state, the ideal requires a willingness to transcend national interests for the sake of a globel or transnational perspective, according to which the state pursues the common good, not just that of it’s own citizens.

The higher morality of the individual is centred in the community, not the self, but it is not the community that engages the ideal, it is the individual, or group of like-minded individuals. We can say that the claims of the other should be prior to the claims of the self, as the claims of humanity as a whole should be prior to those of the state, but it is the subjective character of the individual to which all claims of morality must be submitted for judgement.

Time is a critical dimension in moral decision and judgement. This appears in the opposition between automatic or impulsive action and action that is reasoned and deliberate. One occurs in the immediate present, the other involves future considerations. … The more immediate the action, the more it is judged as a sign of character: for example, spontaneous altruism is a mark of virtue precisely because there was apparently not time to make a rational calculation of future benefit.

… we consider the good person to be someone who acts in a good way instinctively, while we consider a good leader or state to be one that acts with caution and deliberation. … Here, the essential point is the importation of time into moral theory.

 

 

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SEM pp170-end

p.170

A theory on the function of consciousness obligates that consciousness has a function but does not require an ascription of agency to conscious behaviour. Agency arises in relation to an action or an act of introspection as part of the self concept. The deception of self as agent, like that of an object as an independent existence, is created in the microgeny of the mental state. Consciousness is a necessary part of the autonomy of the self, the deception of choice, and the experience of an an independent world.

p.171

Part of the pathology of psychosis is a felt intuition of consciousness-as-product. This is not the aberration of an illness but the discovery of a reality beneath the appearance of choice and free will. The psychotic individual receives his own actions. His objects have a personal thought content, his thoughts go out like objects. The boundary between mind and world decomposes. The psychotic feels his body is no longer a center around which the world is distributed, but a local peturbation with other bodies in a sea of mental space. Psychosis is a revelation of the true state of affairs of the mental life.

(emphasis mine)

p.174

Language, memory and imagery are ways of characterising action and perception at sequential moments. The axis of the continuum has a different phase-character at each microgenetic point. For example, long-term, short-term and iconic memory are characteristics of the perception at successive phases in the unfolding sequence. Configurations passing from depth to surface over action and perception deposit levels in mind that correspond with segments in the flow.

p.176

… the self is an intuition at a depth prior to memory that is remembered each moment into existence whereas images and objects are products in the process laying down the self. The memories of which the self is constructed do not rise up as contents for the self to observe. The memory of the self is like the image of a dream in a state of wakefulness. Once a memory separates from the self as an event that is recalled, the memory is no longer part of the self. Forgotten or unrevived memories are what the self is made of. The forgetting that occurs in the building up of the self is a clue to it’s role in the segmentation of the microgeny. It shows that levels are to be looked for not in memory, but on the other side of memory, in the process of forgetting.

p.177

An enduring self in a changing world is an outcome of accelerated fading at the perceptual surface and prolongation of traces at the depths.

p.180

The gaining of the self is partly a loss of the world. The self is reclaimed as the world decays. The reverse is also true; the world is won at the cost of the self. The self is depleted by the objects is creates and the closer one lives to those objects the further their source in the self. Thus one leaves the self for a locus in the world or abandons the world and withdraws to the self. The world is forgotten in the assertion of the self, while oneness with the world, and it’s timelessness, are achieved when the self is relinquished.

p.182

If the emergent step [of mind from brain] is only in the direction of the emergent state or property, the self is epiphenomenal. If the emergence is recurrent or relapsing and alters the preceding state, as two-way effect is conceivable. If the emergence is continuous, there would be continuous transformation of the preceding state. The question is whether a self that is an emergent property of the brain can reengage the brain to influence a subsequent mental state.

p.185

It is impossible to give a nonprobabilistic causal account of either the outcome or the determinants of a mental state since the change leading to or from the state, and it’s temporal surround, are always in the present. The prediction of future states in a component model is the recurrence of novel states in a microgenetic one.

p.186

Novelty, loss, the immediacy of the moment, the emergence of the now, the deliverance of contents with and into consciousness, the inability to know events other than those at the surface of the present state, growth and decay in relation to memory and duration, these are the principle themes of this work. Things, events, facts, all static references, reminiscence, mind and world, history and expectation, the self and it’s mythology, feelings, and values are momentary shapes in an ocean of eternal change.

(emphasis mine)

p.187

Mind is duration without extension, timeless and spaceless, uncoupled from the universe of physical spacetime. The uncoupling is the basis on which mind develops. The process of life in change cannot be formulated in terms of physical space because the space that we know is generated by the mind of the viewer. Life is not defined by time because the duration of a conscious moment does not exist in the passage of nature. The past of a thing is what it becomes, it’s history a line drawn backwards in mind to account for the process of becoming. … The facts of a history and the belief in history are separate phenomena.

p.188

The continuity of change in the microgeny of cognition and the absence of change in the duration of the present are the paradox of the incompatibility of pure duration and continuous novelty.

p.189

When I examine the world around me, it seem everything is simultaneous relative to my point of view. The point is my mental state and the view is what is represented in that state. The view is not a perspective but a world that the perspective takes in. All the events and objects in my perceptual field are happening – in a process of becoming – at the same time.

p.191

The relation of precedence is establishes across two presents. The preceding event is a past event in the subsequent present, a type of recent memory. But even the memory of the first event in the present of the second event is a part of the present of the second event and simultaneous with it. The precedence is an inference about the relation between a current and past event, but in any case an inference about an object that is no longer in the present. Hence the irony that simultaneity exists but cannot be documented while succession can be documented but does not exist. (!! This whole page is great read btw)

p.192

One can speak of a world with a mind in it or one can speak about a mind with a world in it but one cannot speak of both.

(why not?? could we not conceive of a mind with a world in it in which arises the phenomena of mind? Perhaps not from the perspective of JB…)

Psychosis is not the intrusion of unreality into a mind that is otherwise stable but a penetration into the illusion of the stability. Psychosis is the nightmare that is waiting when one awakens form the dream of reality.

(not the only possible outcome however, from personal experience and the work of esteemed others who have sufficiently prepared for such awakening – and indeed such preparation is possible and even preferable to the outcome envisioned in this text IMO)

p.193

The scope of microgenetic theory, however, pertains to not only what the theory seeks to explain but to concepts just on the other side of explanation.

p.194

…consider the possibility of a space beyond the space of perception and the plausibility of objects independent of perceptual space. … Is the universe like an object in perception? If so, consciousness would be the dream of a world that is the dream and consciousness of God.

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SEM pp.122-146

p.122

The question in free will is not whether an idea is given or pre-ordained or the degree to which behaviour is constrained by external conditions but whether an action that follows an idea is initiated or directed by it. The issue of freedom pertains to the interval between the idea and the act, not the prehistory of the idea.

p.123

Act and idea are driven by sub-surface content; the idea does not cause the action, it is only a forewarning. … This explains why indecision and complexity parallel the feeling of volition. The greater the indecision, the more effort required, and the richer the concept guiding the action.

p.124

On the microgenetic account, consciousness is deposited midway between the core and external objects, at a phase where the competing ideas are undergoing resolution. This does not mean that consciousness has a shaping role in the resolution process. The targeting down, the focussing of attention, or the finer selection of ideas and actions so prominent at the point the conscious self makes it’s appearance are expressions of the progressive specification taking place in the microgenetic sequence, not signs of conscious choice and agency.

p.125

The self is generated out of the core personality, out of memory and the cumulative experience of the individual, good and bad. … Whatever the individual does, is that individual, it cannot be otherwise; personality and self actualise in every cognition and every behaviour. The only criteria for whether behaviour is responsible is whether the action expresses the self fully and completely. The action then reveals what sort of self gave rise to an action of that type.

p.128

The now is experienced as a brief segment with an indefinite duration and unclear boundaries. … There is a deception of a linear or horizontal sequence concatenating moments into a chain of life – what Bergson called the spatialisation of time – when in fact there is a vertical series replacing itself like a fountain, going nowhere. (!!) … These two sides of the microgeny – the unfolding, and the unfolding in relation to the decay – account for the emergence of the self in the now of the present moment.

p.129

All of our subjective experience is elaborated in this capsule of the absolute now, but this is not the now that is experienced. What is experienced is the phenomenal now, which corresponds to the “specious present.” This now extends over a duration of somewhere between 1 and 15 seconds depending on ones account or estimate of the present. … Duration is not a longitudinal dimension. The idea that duration extends over a line of time, like the sum of a succession of moments, is a confusion of the spatial with the temporal.

p.131

The active search for a memory is the experience of an incomplete object formation, the image exhausting it’s own content and in the course of the search generating a self that seems to be doing the searching. If the process goes on to completion, the image becoming an object, the active relation to the image is replaced by a passive relation to the object.

p.133

Dream is preparatory in the formation of object space. Sice objects or selves do not travel from one space to another, the separate times and spaces of dream and wakefulness appear to relate to separate worlds. But these worlds are the extremities of a continuum. Space itself travels – is transformed – as one world is given up in the passage to the other, a transition occurs over intervening segments. Space is multi-layered and so, presumably, is time.

p.135

Since a level is an arbitrary section through a wave front, it does not enjoy a privileged status apart from it’s antecedent and subsequent phases. … Mind does not obtain in level specific activity but in a traversal over the full set of microgenetic levels. … As time is derived from the relation between events, it is effected by a change over the event sequence, for example “empty” vs filled durations…

p.137

Let us try to grasp the idea that the self represents an early, the surrounding world a late, phase in the same unfolding sequence. The unitary nature of the absolute now, then, is explained by the fact that self and world are experienced within the same perceptual moment. … The self is deposited slightly in advance of the world and this adds to the feeling of priority and the sense of agency of the self in relation to external objects.

p.142

…past and future are not symmetrical axes leading out from the present. … The self is acting in a state of becoming.

p.143

The imposition f cycles on an open ended progression leads eventually to the awareness of duration.

p.144

Time and space are separately woven into the mental state, time through iteration and the traversal of events in decay, space through the process of object formation. Time is in relation to memory, space to perception.

p.145

…are the attributes of the universe attributes of the mind beholding the universe or attributes proper to the universe itself? Are the physical laws governing the universe intuitions of laws governing the human mind? … One theory of the physical world entails that every point in the universe is as much the centre as every other point. … …the universe has a structure without an absolute centre. Is the mind like this also?

p.146

Mind is positioned in a single mental space, which is it’s own referent. Since the centre obtains as a relation between contents in the same mind, in effect there is no centre, only spatial relations between objects and temporal relations between stages in these objects in their individual momentary life histories.

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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.