Tag Archives: worth

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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 14. Taste and Manners. pp.383-406.

 

The relation of custom to law on the objective side,. Or the relation of an implicit agreement to the publicity of obligation and enforcement, can be examined in other activities that differ from moral feeling, and yet provide arguments for a psychological theory of value in relation to intrinsic process: specifically, taste and manners. … We will see that a refined taste is closer to aesthetic perception, while manners are closer to moral conduct. … Manners are moral actions that are ingrained in tradition, taste is a perceptual appreciation of the quality that owes to a tradition of knowledge and judgment.

Genius does not necessarily revise taste but instills its own works in that which taste condones, or expands ion order to appreciate. The step from taste to innovation is like that from prodigy to genius. One is the perfection of the available, the other, a capacity to extend it.

A democracy of opinion is the shipwreck of taste, for it leads to defining the good as an average of preferences, not a model towards which they should advance. … the judgment relies on pre-processing phases in the original perception. The discrimination of the good and the beautiful that we associate with taste, or its correlates in the field of manners, such as courtesy, tact , and discretion, are implicit judgments of what is better or preferable within a category.

Preference is a felt bias to an object. Taste certifies or justifies the bias. Aesthetic feeling penetrates the object, and preference is a sign of this feeling, whether or not it is supported by justifications.

Generally an aesthetic object can only approach a standard set by another object in the same category. The standard is the ideal for its time, its style, its language etc. In morals, the standard is not extracted from the object or action, but to a varying extent, is exemplified by it. The ideal of ethics is unrealisable. There will always be a gap between the actual and the ideal, between the unknowable motives that drive an action, the feelings that accompany it and conduct in relation to virtuous character or an ideal of moral probity.

Valuation generates desire, which creates worth in ordinary objects. Worth trickles out of desire into the value of an ordinary object. … The emphasis upon feeling in preference accounts for its greater subjectivity, the emphasis on conceptuality accounts for the grater objectivity of taste.

The more emphatic the conceptuality, the more detached the emotional response.

In the fact that taste, not preference, can be disputed, the worth of the object is similar to the value of moral objects, since values can also be controverted. Worth becomes an object of choice in aesthetics when a perceptual judgment is required, and an object of choice in ethics when what is required is a judgment leading to or justifying an action.

An evaluation entails a comparison, but not precisely between objects, rather, within their common infrastructure. The infrastructure then actualises the objects to evoke the sensibility of the comparison. The judgment then, is not an addition to the object but a revival of content bypassed in the immediate perception. … Taste is a derivative of the initial perception that objectifies value in relation to knowledge articulated by learning in a specific domain of experience.

In aesthetic discernment, there is also an intentionality that informs an objectified judgment of what is better or more beautiful, or what should be desired, which is then endorsed by taste.

The determination that a certain individual is exceptional, or deserves unusual respect or deference, or merits reward for unusual skill, beauty etc., is compatible with taste in the comparison of the instance to the class, but it does not satisfy the criteria that would extend taste to ethics.

Taste and manners are not motivated by judgments, which are outcomes, but by their conceptual and affective precursors. Judgments are constraints on the refinement of other peoples sense of taste, but for the subject they are expressive features, not higher order assessments

What matters is not the surface product – the preference, the taste – but the context, knowledge and intention behind it.

A naturalist theory of the good holds that the object of the good is part of the act directed to it, i.e. the good act is continuous with, and ingredient in, the agent.

Taste can become a judgment that bridges into law or obligation. … The “political correctness” of a work of art can be imposed by force upon the artist, by threat or insinuation, or it can affect the artist more subtly in the attitudes of the artistic and intellectual community.

Art and life are in constant flux, and aesthetic (and moral) values are called into question when the lack of a precedent is an intimidating factor that prevents the taking of a strong aesthetic stance.

Good taste, good manners and good conduct are variations on a theme of goodness from the aesthetic to the moral. The value that promulgates taste is cultivated, in morals it is imbibed. The authoritative in taste – what is ‘great’ in art or literature – is comparable to the dictates of custom – what is right in conduct – in that a person is taught how to perceive or act.

In seeking links from taste to aesthetics from manners to morals, or from taste to manners, a subtle difference in emphasis can decide the category of a given act of cognition. This may be a bias to action or perception, to context and generality on the one hand, selectivity on the other. One may incline to privacy or publicity, to aesthetic or moral values, to the creative or receptive, to the perfection of the timeless or the corruption of the temporal, to the inorganic or to the living. Thus custom drives conduct in many aspects of moral and non-moral life.

Unlike the refinement of taste, as a sub-class of aesthetics, or an elegance of manners, as a sub-class of ethics, goodness and beauty are often closer to simplicity. … The consensus of taste is the validation of individual preference by those who “know what is best”. This is not the other-centeredness of goodness. It is a reliance on the opinion of a select group of others, not a concern for their welfare.

Manners are incidental to moral choices because they are benign expressions of character, and irrelevant to the particulars of a given choice. The fact that manners so readily dissociate from character suggests that, as far as virtue is concerned, they are not ingredients but accoutrements. … Ideally, they should be fluid tributaries that flow from the depths of character, little morals that become fixed in rules of gracious conduct.

Sincerity is a measure of the authenticity of moral conduct, while in taste, we accept that it is more indicative of personality and not a sign of character.

In shame, dishonour, humiliation, ridicule, the conscious self suffers an injury in relation to its ideal. The offense is internalised as a powerful refutation of a positive self-valuation. The damage to self-esteem is a ‘negative; value that must be ‘excised’ for the self to heal. The extent of damage to the self concept depends on the importance or value of the other in the life of the injured party.

… as taste represents aesthetic categories in relation to preferences as affective habits, so manners represent categories of ethical conduct fixed in routines. And as taste extends the bounds of aesthetics to all object classes, including scientific objects, so do manners extend the bounds of ethical conduct into rituals of little moral interest.

The points below are vital to bear in mind as they apply specifically to the situation in which so many of our peers find themselves – this is the version of manifest reality with which we currently have to contend.

The origination of a novel approach outside a field is often easier to accept than a transformation within one.

The masses, lay or professional, favour those who amuse them, moving from one amusement to another seeking novelty as a surrogate for depth. … It is not an exaggeration to say that barely 1% of those in any field are responsible for transmitting the higher art of the discipline to the next generation or extending it into novel areas. … Most careers exploit the known, some extend it, still fewer transform it. The question is whether, for creativity, the critical mass of ordinary work is a hindrance or a necessity. One also wonders about the need for a coterie of connoisseurs, even in an age of mediocrity, to vet a work of originality, should it appear.

It is often remarked that in an age of the global village, it would be exceptional if genius was overlooked, since everyone has access to just about everything. But a tidal wave of trivia swamps the solitary voice.

The mediocre is not innocuous, it distorts the capacity of the public – even the professionals – to appraise quality.

The ideals of the great are not hostage to the whims of the public, but seek an audience of peers, if only a few in a generation.

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PAL. Chapter 9. Autonomy and Compassion. pp.243-274

A coherent theory of value and its impact on moral conduct con only develop on the intrinsic relationality of all objects in the observers mind.

A person in my visual field is an image correlated with brain activity, and an inference based on belief. That is not to say the person does not deserve to be treated as an independent, parallel instance of consciousness. Subjectivism does not imply the non-existence of an external world, only the lack of direct or immediate knowledge of that world. How could the richness of the world be conjured up in my experience were the world itself not its inspiration? This argument, by the way, is as close to a ‘proof’ of an external world as one can get.

We are brains encased in helmets that generate a virtual reality which, by the sole fact of our survival, must conform to what is out there. (!!)

Bonnie’s comments in blue (per permission from GD):

This is where I think JB trips himself up. He makes what I call the Kantian “correspondence theory” fallacy — which has its current form in the correspondence theory of cognition, which basically states that whatever happens in cognition, is somehow completely independent of the objective world, but also somehow there is a one-to-one correspondence to the world. Kant imagined that there were transcendentalia (like the rules of math and logics) that could trans-literate through this type of correspondence, a scientific version of “the world out there” without ever really being able to know the a prior “out there.” 

Here is a little sidebar history to compare and contrast the view(s) that are operating in western philosophy:

On the left we have Humean Idealism, where the world exists out there, forever unknowable. This is carried forward in the philosophy of perspectivalism, where the world exists as a construction of a human collectivity (we-space) – this is the epistemic fallacy that Critical Realism levies against Integral Theory- as Bhaskar notes, wrongly equating “the real world” with “the known world” and gives rise to the many-worlds version when the human collectives exist at different altitudes (different we-spaces, world-spaces, developmental-levels, etc…)

Along comes Kant and ushers in the modern era of scientific rationality based on transcendentalia in the human rational mind:

There is still a gap between the epistemic, known world, and the a prior, real world “out there” – but Kant allows for transcendentalia (and the proper uses of them) to transliterate or modulate scientific versions or maps that correspond to the real world out there (which itself remains unknowable). We learn to manipulate signifiers like mathematical equations, and through experiment and feedback, these signifiers have causal connection to outcomes — but we really do not know why/how the other side of the black box is working, and have no ability to touch the real.

In the above passage of JB, he seems to substitute the transcendentalia with the mocrogenetic wave that somehow “goes out to touch the real” — so this is an improvement, but there is still a gap. There is still a subtle suggestion of the “substance pluralism” problem – how do two substances interface?

Bohm comes along and says, there is only one substance — and its not a substance, its a process — the holomovement — and looks like this:

So the “transcendentally real” is now a different order — more densely enfolded order — of the explicit, object world. This gives rise to the notion that information precedes existence — the higher enfolded orders are higher orders in the informational field. This is better, but Bohm requires an infinite regression of ever-more higher orders of enfoldment– so there has to be structure, before process … which can be problematic, and is somewhat in-elegant, as it speaks to substance monism a la Leibnitz (instead of a process monism).

Given that JB is interested in neuro-cognition, and not metaphysics, he has to settle for his version of the story. But if you extend his process thinking based on process monism (single process, many substances(structures) – then you can come up with a kind of view that sees both cognitive and actual occasions as processes that infold reality — so the real is not an enfolded order, but open, vast, empty of structure or information, and that as it processes (enfolds on itself– like my piece of paper) it creates structures (processural centers) that then go on to generate sub-processes that interfere with other processes, and transforming the whole — into both cognitive and actual occasions.

So this is a process monism version.

 

 

 

 

There is only the substrate “consciousness” which has neither subjective nor objective quality (because those are structurations in the process field). The horizontal levels show different types of structuration, black microgenies are cognitive types, red mocrogenies are actual occasions of various types (structured as R1, R2, R3) — the R series representing the stratification of reality (as Bhaskar says) on an intrinsic (i.e. onto-genetic) scale. When cognitive ocassions interfere with actual ocassions, the processes that inteface become “world” with a subjective and objective pole at different interface points, creating different types of phenomena available  for creating structures at higher levels of order (more and more densely enfolded-

And since each of the interfaces presupposes both an onto-genetic (prior) content, enfolded within each process proceeding from each living center (and attenuating back to source), then the enfoldments get increasingly more dense — and create something that is experienced as a prior (a- priori) layering of information in an implicit field — yet process monism has the advantage of not positing any metaphysical structures …

These illustrations of course, are not meant to be representations of anything “real” in and of themselves, but just useful to give meaning to the languaging of alternative ways of thinking about “reality.”

The real is imputed from the relation to appearance, and appearance is related to some term in addition to the subject.

If feeling is not real, reality is beyond our grasp, since feeling is the experience of process, process is reality and feeling as process is common ground with the process-life of all existence.

All the exists for the observer, and all that can be described with assurance, is given in the present.

We are images or ideas in a whole that is greater than all of us. The superficial (perpetual) bonds we share at the surface of the mental life are ripples in the same pond.

But the way back to the other, for solipsism and egoism, lies in a surrender of autonomy to adaptation, community and wholeness.

The self-realisation of the will can be directed toward any object, an idea, a meal, an illness, but when the will is directed toward another person, given that the other is part of the self, the self is most fully realised.

… genuine compassion is a true feeling of community that arises with a reclamation of other in the relinquishing and renewal of self.

The instinctual basis of genuine compassion suggests an origin antecedent to conscious empathy. This runs deep in the psychic life, even to the subtle pattern in organic nature, a quiet orchestration in which elements in a field are subordinate to the whole, bee hives, termitaries. We see this tacit choreography at work in a flight of birds, a school of fish, even in a grove of palms.

Asked who am I, the person should reply with sincerity, a human being like you. That is the primary identification to which all others – family, origins, religion, state, etc. – are or should be subordinate.

Only when such awareness is palpably entrenched in the psyche, or when we revive the positive in an ‘enlightened’ animism, will a dedication to the greater good of humanity arise out of the sense of being one with living nature.

In susceptible individuals, the perception of suffering elicits personal unhappiness as an empathic residue. In sum the exportation of subjective feeling into an objective state of suffering accentuates a subjective residue of value that leaves behind a trail of affect in the form of pity or compassion. The identification with the other can be attributed to an early phase in the individuation of the affect stream that accompanies a primitive (animistic) mentality.

The inference of pain or suffering, or the compassion for it in others, exports feeling for an into the other in a transit trough the mind of the observer. In compassion, the other’s pain is in fact ones own.

With the assumption of another perspective, or with empathic fusion, especially as an intuition of the commonality of separate individuals, values flow into objects as fluid extensions of the self. One could say that self and other do not achieve full separation and autonomy. An object of compassion is not a piece of flotsam in a sea of indifferent humanity, it is an object of value and signification.

Only in the act of loving does the self love, only in the act of caring is the self compassionate.

Object value or worth does not obligate compassion, but it does underlie whatever compassion is felt. In cases where one recognises a person as worthy but has no interest in his fate, or when a person considers life to be sacred and gives value to the life of others but still does not show compassion when life is endangered, autonomy has proceeded so far that action and feeling are no longer informed by innate empathy. But if one does feel compassion, this feeling can only arise for a person or object felt to have value. All objects have intrinsic value, though some are assigned more worth than others. From the subjective standpoint, compassion arises when the outgoing stream of object-feeling evokes emotions in the self that are congruent with those of the other even before it objectifies.

To feel pity and do nothing is only slightly better than to feel nothing at all. The former is a moral indulgence that is only mildly offensive, while indifference is a severe pathology of character.

Above all, the sense of shared vulnerability evokes an image of a continuum from one mind to another, thus, the primordial unity of subject-object, self and other.

From the standpoint of an individual cognition, empathy and the sense of community are fragmentary glimpses into an unconscious core that makes its way into conscious life. So also, one could say, is the madness of crowds, mob violence and submission to authority.

The identification or fusion of compassion relinquishes the autonomy that has been achieved through a long evolutionary and maturational struggle. The explosion of parts out of wholes in the analytic trend of though gives way to a lapsing of parts back into primordial wholes. The person dissolves in the other and reclaims a wholeness of engagement prior to partition.

To be compassionate, and authentically so, is for self-realisation to actively engage the realisation of the other, to merge self and other as best one can in this world. The mark of the superior soul is the resolution of self and other in conduct sensitive to the potential out of which we all, each moment, arise, undivided by arbitrary boundaries created in the inevitable loss of potential and the continuous vanishing of concrete actualities.

In any symbiosis, the distinction between constituents, and the rivalry of autonomies, is as much delineated as blurred by mutual need, is the slave … less close to selfhood than the master … ?

One is defined by service, the other by need. To the extent the master grows dependent on the slave, he abandons positive selfhood. To the extent the slave resists – or accepts – the conditions of service, to that extent does he find positive selfhood. In humans, selfhood is denied only to those oblivious to circumstance.

Dependency is the need that underlies compassion from the standpoint of the other. Deference to power of wisdom is essential. Those in need must accept the aid (and implicit dominance) of others. The subject who feels compassion may not be aware of this dominance, but that is not true for the person who accepts assistance from another. … Fear and necessity are the handmaids of empathy.

The urge to fight or dominate is not conducive to compassion, which requires a shared sense of vulnerability.

… just as compassion requires that we assume the perspective of the other, so aesthetic perception requires that we assume the perspective of the artist or the artwork.

… it is the self’s own constructs that infuse subjectivity in the work.

Empathy is the revisiting of parts in antecedent wholes, the regression of objects to concepts, individuals to social organisms, a withdrawal to what is deep and abiding from what is transient and accidental.

A critical difference between desire and worth is that desire feels processual and subjective, worth feels objective and substantial.

When the oneness with others is regained, there is no guarantee that individuation will return the parties to their original equilibrium.

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

 

Instinctual Drive (lower mammals) >> Object existence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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PAL Chapter 4 – Value in mind and nature. pp.127-143

Kill thy activities and still thy faculties if thou wouldst realise this birth in thee. ~ Meister Eckart.

For process theory, the dynamic in a mental content lies in its immediate prehistory, not its causal surface. The change from one state of mind or world to the next ia a novel becoming or near-replication of the immediately preceding state. Images, thoughts, feelings, objects in perception, do not cause something to occur; they appear, disappear ans are replaced by a subsequent state. The present state may be conceived as the effect of its antecedent, but it is a novel actualisation constrained by the state it replaces. In human mentation, the contents of awareness are actualities or finalities that perish, not solids with causal force. The process of actualisation, not what actualises, is the focus of change in mind and world.

In the actualisation process, mind and world are not parallel endpoints. The self is an intermediate phase in the object, which is an objectification of subjective phases in the mind/brain state.

Idealist philosophies regard the contents of the mind and the objects of perception as the phenomenal derivatives of a covert underlying reality. Concepts and objects, however, are not veils concealing formative process; they are the process that deposits them. Whether an object is conceived as real or phenomenal, there is still a development, a microgenesis or phase transition concealed within its surface form. The pattern of the phase-transition within an object is its reality, whether the unconscious process of the mind or the microphysical process of non-cognitive nature. Fundamental to this line of thought is that common process underlies the multiplicity of forms in nature and the diversity of contents sin human cognition.

More than consciousness, value brings the objectivity of the physical world into relation with human emotion and conceptuality.

To say that human valuation is continuous with value in simple physical entities is to claim that value is grounded in the cosmology of process metaphysics, even if the precursors of value in rocks or particles are far removed from their final manifestation in the human mind. In other words, there is no “bottom up” continuum from the intrinsic value of physical entities to the subjective valuations of human cognition.

The concept of intrinsic value traces to an ancient debate in metaphysics centring on the opposition of the qualitative and quantitative modes of analysis. The tensions in these modes of thought is expressed in cognition in the distinction of the qualitative feel of the inner experience and the quantitative science of objects. The feeling of a qualitative something in the mind that is lacking in physical objects is the basis of the dialectic between subject and object, or between inner experience and outer reality. … What a state is, is its objective existence. What a state feels like, is the dynamic within the state. This contrast at a more fundamental level is that of change and persistence, or the extremes of annihilation and eternalism that delimit the Buddhist middle way.

(P.131 has an important paragraph that is too long to share and not reducible to summary in a coherent manner :( )

… the existence of an entity is its intrinsic value.

Intrinsic value as existence transforms to value as feeling, or from existence as a packet of energy to life as a vector of feeling. At the stage of intrinsic value (existence), the dynamic is a non-directional becoming of process within the being of entity. The temporality of the process within the entity, and the spatiality of the category that constitutes the entity, are different perspectives on the becoming and being that are the entity.

… the duration establishes the entity as an existent, while the process over which the duration extends is a kind of vector. In elementary entities, this is an aim to actuality. In the human mind it is, in addition, a direction from self to world.

In brief, value is the being of an entity, or the being (substantiality) of an object, over the becoming of a momentary category of phases. … This way of thinking allows us to unify the temporality of change with the timelessness of category. Quantity arises in the existence of an entity as its duration actualises. Quality arises in the process through which the entity actualises. Similarly, objectivity, as an external perspective on an object, derives from the solidification of its category. Subjectivity , as the internal ‘perspective’ of the object or entity, derives from the change through which the category is laid down. Yet all entities are fundamentally the same, so the distinction turns on the emphasis of either the categorical (substantial) or transitive (processual) aspect of the same entity.

I would locate the subjective at the point where process is no longer isotropic, i.e. when directionality is crucial to a particular existent. At that point, one could say, energy shifts to feeling as the reversibility of intrinsic process becomes untenable.

The presence of feeling imports realness to the phase sequence.

Feeling as realness is the vitality of lower forms that exist in a mode of sensory experience as it makes contact with the environment. Feeling reaches into the sensory organs and promotes movement in a reflex arc. … As feeling transforms to instinct, the circularity of the sensor-motor contact of organism with environment [...] shifts to a unified act-object. The closed circuit of reflex shifts to a simultaneous construct that is the core of a mental representation. For example, when the frog’s tongue captures a fly, perception and action occur as a unit.

Gradually, the response bias of instinct gives way to the potential of drive. The enhancement of antecedent phases of possibility at the expense of the rigid interlocking sensori-motor dependencies of instinct helps to individuate organism and enlarge its affective repertoire. With the drives – aggression, fear, appetite – there are many routes to satisfaction, the fractionation of drive is the threshold of individuality. The subjectivity of the actualising organism is more emphatic as its objective segment, the perceptual world, is articulated by feelings in objects of interest. Inner and outer worlds are the subjective and objective phases of a single perception. … The next stage transforms this pattern to a mature human cognition.

This occurs through an accentuation at a phase previously bypassed in the immediacy of object actualisation where conceptual primitives invested with drive energy allocate feeling to the merging object-concepts that give rise to perceptual objects. In this phase of conceptual feeling, the affective tonality of object-concepts replaces the object-bound drives with the concept-bound desires. The feeling in a concept replaces the feeling in or for an object.

Feeling is like a river that recurs from a source in the mind to a destination in the world, one moment surging up at a proximal phase, another, cascading downstream, yet all the while, an interior dynamic of a larger object, the mind/brain state, that is constantly pouring out objects.

An account of human perception is critical to the so-called observer error in physics, but is also necessary to bring novel insights to physical theory.

Dividing the length of an electron by the speed of light, Whitrow (1972) defined a chronon as the shortest interval of time, 10 to the minus 24 seconds.

(emphasis mine – interesting factoid ^)

The objective segment of a perception is the world we perceive. The subjective segment is the route through which it gets there and the self that perceives it. The self and experiential memories are laid down in the wake of the object as “deep structures” in its actualisation. The mind/brain state is a wave of process that stretches from the core of the mind to the rim of the world.

The ground of existence is augmented in the feeling of realness, which is then allocated to the proximal or distal polarity of the mind/brain state so as to enhance intrinsic value and realness to desire or worth. Desire is an accentuation of the subjective polarity, worth of the objective polarity. Yet, intrinsic value is the basis on which realness and desire develop as the first stages in the conceptual valuation of the object.

Interest is the qualitative shift in value from realness to worth. The conceptual feeling that is channelled into the object heightens its affective content. The object stands out, signifys something beyond itself. An object of desire that has interest or worth can also be a concept or an idea distinct from the desire for it by the self.

The relative emphasis on a proximal-subjective or distal-objective segment in the mental state determines whether valuation will be felt in the perceiver as desire, or in the object as worth.

To sum up; a perception is a transition over phases leading from self to world. A single transition, an act of cognition, is a mind/brain state. An object includes all of the phases in its development. Basic entities also exist as duration. Intrinsic value is the existence of a physical entity over its phases. The intrinsic value of an entity, or a mind/brain state, is its non-cognitive existence. This is the foundation of its initial subjective valuation as realness. Physical entities exist before they are felt as real. They cannot have the feeling of realness without being existents, even if those existents are hallucinatory or virtual. Realness is the accentuation of existence in organism. The object not only exists, but fells real. As intrinsic value grounds realness, so realness grounds a more developed valuation. … The transition os from intrinsic value (existence) of inorganic entities, as the envelope of their waveform, through the realness of organic life, in which process becomes directional, to the conceptual feeling of human cognition, in which desire and worth precipitate as the affective content of abject-concepts at their subjective and objective polarities.

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PAL Chapter . 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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Sample Journal Entry – Jason Brown

p. xlix

I think the real is pattern in nature that goes unnoticed because it is uniform, while the unreal– the categorical or conceptual– is everything else that is noticed, in mind, and in the objects of perception. The real is not the feeling of realness, which is the affective residue that accompanies the outgoing stream of perception.

What is ultimately real is what exists. A hallucination exists. It corresponds to a brain process. A perceptual object also corresponds to a brain process. The feeling of realness does not necessarily depend on how real the object is or in the correspondence to something in the external world.

p. li

Every act of cognition, every mental state, is a valuation made real. A valuation results from the constraints on drive that shape the desires into the affective tonalities of objects of interest. Realness penetrates intrinsic value and is heightened by interest to worth, which is object-centered valuation. When feeling remains intrapsychic, valuation is centered in the subject as desire.  Every object has an affective quality.

 

p. liv

I did not begin my work as a religious man, nor would I call myself religious today, but when seized with the realization that everything in the mind reflects this pattern, and observing that all things in nature are similarly infused, … all appearing to be outcomes of the same process and driven by the same creative force, how could one fail to be inspired by the unity, the grandeur and the sublimity of it all.