duplicity breeds in the gap between absolutism and relationism

The Source of the Duplicity in the Globally Dominant Colonizer Culture

Peter D’Errico has written a clear and credible, if disturbing, account of the duplicity of the colonizer culture, that permeates U.S. ‘Federal Indian Law’ and its administration, entitled ‘American Indian Sovereignty: Now You See It, Now You Don’t’.

This following essay describes the source of this ‘duplicity’ which permeates the globally dominant Western ‘colonizer culture’, while tying it to a schism in the foundations of scientific understanding, the two divided parts of which will be named (a) absolutist-realism (AR) and (b) relationist-pragmatist-idealism (RPI).  Adherents to the former  understand the world in terms of ‘locally existing, material ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these things do’, equating this doer-deed worldview with ‘reality’, while the latter, while they accept the utility of thinking of the world in ‘absolutist’ terms of ‘things-in-themselves and ‘what things do’, see physical reality as being the continual transformation of the energy-charged spatial-plenum that is all inclusive, and whose dynamic forms are objects of sight and touch that we synthetically endow with absolute ‘things-in-themselves’ ‘being’.

To bring connective context to this split in worldview, ask yourself what the following may have in common;

1. The nature-nurture debate.

2. Pasteur’s deathbed concession to Antoine Béchamp; “le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’.

3. Colonizer practice of establishing puppet governments.

4. Mach’s Principle; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.

All of these topics concern the relationship of ‘visitor’ and ‘host’; i.e. ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’.   The first two are problematic because of an inherent ambiguity as to the relative contribution of the inhabitant and the habitat, given our AR worldview which is in terms of ‘what things do’ as if the habitat were not part of an active partnership.  That is, how much of our development is shaped from inside-outward genetically determined influence sourced from the inhabitant, and how much is shaped from outside-inward ‘epigenetically’ orchestrated influence from the habitat?   Similarly, how much of the proliferation of ‘pathogenic’ bacteria is due to the potency of the bacteria/inhabitant [le microbe] and how much is due to the ‘accommodating condition’ [fertility for proliferation] in the body-space of the host [le terrain].

In colonizing, the goal has been to make ‘le terrain’ more ‘accommodating’ for the feeding frenzy of the mother country and her ‘microbes’ and the puppet government is there to enhance the ‘accommodating’ of the host-space for the proliferation and productivity of outside exploiters of that space.

Ernst Mach’s ‘relationist’ view pointed out that the ambiguity here is synthetic and due to our tendency to the ‘mechanical’ or ‘AR’ worldview.  For example, if the atmosphere heats up and gets a case of ‘boils’ (hurricane season), we may talk about the hurricanes as if they are ‘things-in-themselves’ and of ‘their doing of deeds’ [the mechanical view] and we may talk about ‘conditions of the habitat’ that are influencing the development of these ‘convection cells’, but our intuition informs us that the ‘inhabitant dynamic’ and the ‘habitat dynamic’ are conjugate aspects of one dynamic, namely; ‘transformation’ of spatial relations in the energy-charged flow-space/medium.

The mechanical worldview is in no small part locked in place in our mind by our noun and verb language architecture which is ideal for the ‘doer-deed’ [AR] worldview.

As Mach said in his ‘historical-critical review’ of the history of development of our notion of ‘mechanics’;

“Purely mechanical phenomena do not exist.  The production of mutual accelerations in masses is, to all appearances, a purely dynamical phenomenon.  But with these dynamical results are always associated thermal, magnetic, electrical, and chemical phenomena, and the former are always modified in proportion as the latter are asserted.  On the other hand, thermal, magnetic, electrical and chemical conditions also can produce motions.  Purely mechanical phenomena, accordingly, are abstractions, made, either intentionally or from necessity, for facilitating our comprehension of things. … The view [wherein we] explain all physical phenomena by mechanical ideas, is in our judgment a prejudice. … The mechanical theory of nature, is, undoubtedly, in an historical view, both intelligible and pardonable; and it may also, for a time, have been of much value.  But, upon the whole, it is an artificial conception.” – Ernst Mach, ‘The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of its Development’.

Make no mistake, Mach is talking about the AR worldview which is in terms of local, independently-existing material objects/systems/organisms [‘things’] and ‘what they do’ [their actions/interactions].  The AR worldview credits all action to the doer-deed inhabitants of space/habitat and nothing to the outside-inward accommodating/orchestrating influence of space/habitat.  The ‘artificial conception’ that Mach is terming the doer-deed worldview, reduces the habitat to an absolute, fixed, empty and infinite [Euclidian] space, a passive operating theatre in which notional ‘things-in-themselves’ enjoy ‘absolute motion’ as well as ‘absolute being’ [an impossibility in a continually transforming space; i.e. a world in flux].

The fact that Mach sees the ‘inhabitants’ as inclusions in a ‘web-of-life’ habitat in the manner of convection cells in a fluid medium establishes Mach as a ‘relationist’.  The fact that he accepts the ‘absolutist’ view as a useful ‘artificial conception’ rather than ‘reality’ establishes him as a ‘pragmatist idealist’ [Poincaré’s terminology], hence an ‘RPI’, rather than an AR, along with Poincaré, Nietzsche, Bohm, Schrödinger and a small minority of other [see ‘Relational Theory’].

So, Mach and the relationists or RPIs understand ‘dynamics’ as deriving from two influences at the same time; i.e. from BOTH the outside-inward accommodating/orchestrating/nurturing influence of the host-body-space [the energy-charged ‘spatial-plenum’] or ‘habitat’ AND AT THE SAME TIME from the inside-outward asserting actions of the ‘inhabitants’.

There is no need to decide ‘how much of the production of the intruder or exploiter of the hostspace is due to the inside-outward asserting powers of the intruder, and how much is due to the outside-inward accommodating [or orchestrating] influence of the host-space/habitat because these two are, in physical reality, conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of ‘transformation’.

So, let’s back up and take look at ‘puppet government’ again in this light.  What Mach is implying is that the world dynamic is ‘transformation’ it is not ‘doer-deed’ [mechanical] but our Western culture’s habitual worldview is the doer-deed worldview (AR) so that we are obliged, by this worldview, to give all credit for ‘productive results’, to the deed-doer and none to the accommodating/orchestrating influence of the habitat.  In this way of thinking, the starving European farmer comes to the fertile virgin lands of the Americas and we credit ‘him’ with his ‘new-found productivity’ because that’s all that a mechanical model will allow.  This is the same as crediting ‘streptococcus pneumoniae’ as the powerful source of its own proliferation without taking account of the fact that such bacteria ‘go viral’ in host-space habitats where there is a deficiency of vitamin C; i.e. where ‘le terrain’ is fertile and accommodating for turning an ‘average performer’ into a ‘superior performer’.

The same situation is found with the hospital infection ‘clostridium difficile’ termed a ‘virulent and lethal superbug’ [anti-biotics resistant] which is meanwhile innocuous to the average person but can ‘go postal’ in bodies that have been on courses of anti-biotics that disturb the ‘biotic balance’ and leave a deficiency analogous to the vitamin C deficiency that makes the space far more fertile and accommodating to the proliferation and production of ‘c. difficile’.   Medical science attributes the proliferation of bacteria and viruses to the inside-outward assertive power of the bacteria and virus in the same manner that society attributes the superior production of the American farmer [the starving European farmer who came to America to homestead on richly fertile virgin soil in ideal growing climate] to the American farmer.

The mechanical model of the AR worldview will only allow an explanation of ‘production’ or ‘genesis’ or ‘development’ or ‘growth’ as the result of doer-deed actions.  There is no place in this mechanical model for explaining ‘production’ or ‘genesis’ or ‘development’ or ‘growth’ from the outside-inward influence of an accommodating host-space/habitat.

Intuitively, we know that an accommodating habitat can make those who it is accommodating ‘look like superior performers’ and make those who it is unaccommodating to ‘look like poor performers’.  Crony groups arrange this all the time, The boss’s son may be an idiot but as he ‘works his way up’, those around him [who would like to keep their jobs] will ‘prepare the ground for him’ so that he can’t NOT perform in a superlative fashion.

The duplicity comes in in these cases where we go with the pure mechanical doer-deed model of the AR worldview and ignore what our intuition is screaming out at us, that the system is rigged, the high productivity of the corporations from the mother country, rather than being due to the skills and proficiencies of these corporations, are due to the unnaturally enhanced ‘accommodating’ condition of the host-space facilitated by the installing of a ‘puppet government’.  ‘Everybody knows’ [as Leonard Cohen sings; ‘Everybody knows the deal is rotten, old black Joe is still picking cotton for our ribbons and bows, and everybody knows.’] that this sort of ‘rigging’ permeates our duplicitous society.

How does Mach’s relationist worldview as embodied in his ‘Mach’s principle’ actually set the record straight on the duplicitous use of the ambiguity as to whether the productive achievements of the inhabitants are more or less due to the proficiencies of the inhabitant or to the accommodating condition of the habitat?

Mach’s view is that the world dynamic is just one relational dynamic [i.e. ‘transformation’] so that when we ask questions such as ‘Who/what is most responsible for the growth of foodcrops, the proficiencies of the inhabitant-farmer or the fertility of the habitat?’, we are ‘in the wrong mental modeling space’ since there is no such thing as ‘growth’ in the Machian world view, there is only ‘transformation’.  That is, in a relational web or ecosystem, the dynamic of the web transcends the dynamic of the individual participants.  As one participant/inhabitant in the web shrinks, another grows in a manner that the web/habitat itself launders; i.e.

 “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.” – Mach’s principle

The earth’s biosphere is a space or habitat that is ‘in flux’.  It persists as a thin film that cloaks the sphere of the earth.  Dynamic forms are continually coming and going within this space.  If the forms are interdependent as in the Machean view, then it is impossible to have ‘things-in-themselves’ and therefore ‘growth’ is only ‘appearances’.  The tornado APPEARS to grow from a skinny spindly thing to a half-mile wide raging vortex, and the hurricane from a storm-cell a few tens of miles wide to a massive vortex like Igor (2010) with a diameter of 920 miles.

We speak of the ‘growth’ of the dynamic form as if it were an attribute of ‘the thing-in-itself’ but there is no ‘thing-in-itself’ here since the inhabitant/hurricane and habitat/atmospheric flow-space are nothing other than conjugate aspects of one dynamic, the dynamic of transforming space.  Mach’s point is that the objects of sight and touch are not really ‘things-in-themselves’; that is an ‘artificial conception’, a short-cut representation that we make use of so as to ‘economize on thought’.

Does a human child ‘grow’ in an absolute sense as our mechanical AR worldview claims?   Or is the growth of the child an ‘impression’ coming from the continuing transformation of space?  Bohm, with his RPI worldview would say that the child is a ripple-structure in the continually transforming energy-charged spatial-plenum.  Shrödinger would say that the child is a variation in the structure of space.

The claim here is that the ‘nature-nurture’ question ‘is the wrong question’.  It makes no sense to ask; ‘which is most responsible for the growth/development of a thing-in-itself’ if there are no ‘things-in-themselves’, the ‘things’ instead being objects of sight and touch that are participants in the ‘one-dynamic’ of a continual spatial-relational evolution, in the manner of convection cells within the flow.

This is the claim.

As Howard Zinn has described in ‘A People’s History of the United States’, the historical perspectives of ‘colonizers’ [which he calls ‘executioners’] and ‘colonized indigenous peoples’ [which he calls ‘victims’] involves an innate ambiguity with respect to the degree to which the colonized constructed a wonderful new world in the Americas or destroyed a wonderful established world.   As Mach would say, what we are looking at here is the transformation of the habitat that both colonizers and colonized share inclusion in.  The dynamic is only a ‘doer-deed’ dynamic in a reduced sense wherein we see the world in terms of an absolute space reference frame that is the operating theatre for absolute ‘things-in-themselves’ that move about and interact in that absolute space operating theatre.  This is not ‘reality’ but a world based on concretizing the objects of sight and touch as things-in-themselves,  ‘representations’ of the dynamic forms as arise in the flux of the transforming spatial-plenum.

If we suspend the notion of organisms as ‘things-in-themselves’ that undergo ‘growth’, we may be able to conceive of them as participants in evolution aka ‘spatial-transformation’, in which case issues such as the nature-nurture debate dissolve [without the notion of ‘thing-in-itself’, there is no reason to inquire as to whether the development/growth of the thing-in-itself derives chiefly from ‘in itself’ or from the environment that it is situationally included in.

The hardest part is to re-conceive of ourselves and children as NOT ‘growing up’ but instead being participants in the evolutionary transforming of the spatial-plenum, which is what is demanded according to Mach’s principle.

Summary of Part I

The duplicitousness of the colonizer culture derives from interplay between the formal application of the mechanical (AR) world view and our intuitive manipulation of it.  If we suspend the Machian view of the world dynamic in terms of relational spatial transformation and consider the world dynamic in terms of mechanics involving the interaction of ‘things-in-themselves’ as in an absolute space operating theatre, then doer-of-deeds aka the ‘producer-of-results’ is fully and solely responsible for the production of these results.  But, intuitively we know that the accommodating/disaccommodating condition of the host-space/habitat can amplify or attenuate the production of the asserting causal agent.  The establishing of a puppet government is a means of making the host-space more accommodating to certain deed-doers than to others, the associated superior performance and productivity still being attributed to the deed-doing agents since that is all the mechanical model will allow.

The Machian view of the world dynamic as relational and transformational transcends the mechanical view and suspends the synthetic representations of the objects of sight and touch as ‘things-in-themselves’.  Without things-in-themselves, ‘growth’ is seen as ‘appearances’ rather than as ‘physical reality’.  We can perhaps accept this in the case of a ‘hurricane’ but can we accept it in the case of ‘ourselves’ as ‘growing children’?

Clearly, our view of ‘self’ and ‘ego’ is tied into the synthetic legitimizing and making ‘credible’ the notion of a ‘thing-in-itself’ as we apply it to ‘ourselves’ and Mach does address it.

Part II: How science has cultivated the doer-deed world view for its ‘leading role’.

This split in worldview between the ‘absolutist-realist’ and the ‘relationist-pragmatist-idealist’  divided science in the early 20^th century, putting Ernst Mach and Max Planck into contentious dispute over the ‘reality of atoms’.  This same ‘divisiveness’ showed up as well in mathematics and the two sides were termed by Henri Poincaré; ‘Cantorian realists’ and ‘pragmatist idealists’.  While the absolutist ‘Cantorian realists’ believe that ‘infinity is real’, the relationist pragmatist-idealists believe that ‘infinity is idealization’ that is accepted on the pragmatic grounds that it is a useful modeling concept.

In this philosophical-political dispute, the ‘realists’ won simply because they gathered more influential scientists to the support of their viewpoint.  The views of the ‘relationist-pragmatist-idealists’ are still alive and well, but very much in minority.

As this part of the essay will show, the ‘relationist-pragmatist-idealist’ (RPI) worldview corresponds to the indigenous peoples traditional belief, while the absolutist-realist  (AR) worldview incorporates duplicity which crops up in many forms, one of which is the establishment of ‘puppet governments’, which the Indian Reorganization Act was engineered to do [see the D’Errico article], and which can be explored to expose the general nature of the ‘duplicity’.

The relationist view of Ernst Mach is captured in his ‘Mach’s principle;

“The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”

This is the relationship as between convection cells [inhabitants] and the flow in which they are emergent flow-features [the habitat as transforming medium].

The ‘absolutist view of those who disagreed with Mach; i.e. the majority, including Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Born etc. accepted the ‘reality’ of ‘local, independently-existing material, things-in-themselves; i.e. ‘bodies/systems/particles’.   While these ‘things-in-themselves’ could be affected by non-local, non-visible, non-material fields of influence in the AR view, they were not seen in the same way as in the RPI view as, … ‘ripples in the energy-charged spatial-plenum’ as Bohm [a relationist like Mach] put it, or, … ‘variations in the wave-structure of space’ as Shrödinger [also a relationist] put it.   The relationist view is that the non-local, non-visible, non-material energy-charged spatial plenum IS ‘physical reality’  [it is the 'One' dynamic and we are in it and therefore 'can't see it' but we can experience it as the transformation of the dynamic living space/habitat we are included in], while the world view in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ ‘representations’ is ‘idealization’ that, while useful, should not be confused for ‘physical reality’.

Mach’s principle presents ‘dynamics’ in general as ‘transformation’ of spatial-relations, in which case the inhabitants are in a conjugate relation with the habitat; i.e. habitat and inhabitant are conjugate aspects of one dynamic, as in ‘convection cells’ and ‘flowing-medium’.   This is understood as ‘physical reality’.

Now, accepting that this is true for the purpose of ‘further exploring it’, one can see that the inside-outward asserting outflux and the outside-inward accommodating influx are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of transformation [genesis and degeneration are flip sides of the one coin of transformation of spatial relations].

However, in the accepted absolutist-realist worldview, ‘genesis’ occurs on its own, and ‘degeneration’ occurs on its own.  What makes this split possible is the notion of a ‘thing-in-itself’.  The thing develops [due to inside-outward asserting genesis] and later ‘IN TIME’ degenerates [due to destructive processes acting from the outside-inward].  But in the relationist view, there are no ‘things-in-themselves’ and there is no time; i.e. the spatial-plenum is undergoing continual relational transformation.  Everything is in flux.

In the absolutist-realist view, the dynamics are ‘one-sided’; i.e. they are due to what ‘things-in-themselves’ do.  This is the familiar ‘doer-deed’ or ‘cause-effect’ model where space is seen as ‘passive’ [i.e. as an absolute fixed, empty and infinite (Euclidian) reference-frame]

In all of this mental modeling, the point of reference for how we understand the ‘inhabitant’ and its relationship with ‘habitat’ is bound to be how we see and understand our ‘self’.

Part III: Science and Psychology.

The indigenous peoples of the world have an ally in Ernst Mach.  Mach’s ‘relational’ world view [shared also by Nietzsche, Poincaré, Schrödinger and Bohm supports the understanding that the relational world is the world of ‘physical reality’, which is the world view of the indigenous people [e.g. ‘we are all strands in One relational web-of-life’].  As Mach points out, the world of ego-psyche is not the ‘real world’;

“That which is given to all in common we call the ‘physical’; that which is directly given only to one we call the ‘psychical’.  That which is given only to one can also be called the ‘ego’ [ich].” – Ernst Mach, ‘The Guiding Principles of My Scientific Theory of Knowledge’.

The ‘peoples’ of the world have developed a major split, via ‘cultural beliefs’ in which their world view can either be grounded in ‘physical reality’ [e.g. the indigenous peoples and scientists such as Mach et al] or grounded in ‘pyscho-logical perspective’.  This is the split that divides the ‘colonizing culture’ from the ‘indigenous culture’.   As a person living within a globally dominant colonizing culture, I work very hard to try to find a way of sharing an ‘exposé’ of ‘what is going on here’ since the dishonesty, if not madness, of the colonizing culture is in deep denial [grounding in the psychological can translate into ‘coming ungrounded’ in physical reality].

Science plays a foundational role in perpetuating the ‘reign’ of this dishonest, insane culture; not the science of Mach, Nietzsche, Poincaré, Schrödinger, Bohm and Rovelli, but ‘popular mainstream science’, the science that has been endorsed by Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Born, Hawking, Weinstein etc. etc.

[N.B. As mentioned in Part I of this essay, ‘everybody knows’ the deal is rotten, which means that not everybody ‘takes the culture literally/seriously', but it is nevertheless seriously administered through sovereigntist governance and justice systems.  For example, if government policies backed by police and military lead to the host-space/habitat becoming highly disaccommodating to some of the citizens to the point that their children are starving and they steal a loaf of bread, the government and justice systems, who take the AR worldview literally and seriously, blind themselves to the outside-inward accommodating/orchestrating influence of the habitat in the animative sourcing of dynamics.  Therefore, the inside-outward asserting behaviour of the citizen is all that shows up on the justice system’s radar screen.]

The former group is referred to as ‘relationists’ in Wikipedia, and Poincaré uses the term ‘pragmatist idealists’ to distinguish their philosophic-scientific thinking from the latter group which he calls ‘realists’ [‘Cantorian realists’].

The indigenous peoples are also ‘relationists’ while the duplicitous, globally dominant colonizer culture is ‘realist’.

The difference here is easy to describe, but harder to hold in mind.  The relationist assumes that physical reality [‘that which is given to all in common’] is the basic ‘ground’ of the universe and that the psychical portal to the world, ‘that which is directly given only to one’, is merely a perspective gleaned from packages of sensory perception.

For example, our perspective is that ‘the tornado is coming towards us’, but the perspective of another may be; ‘thank goodness the tornado is passing us by’.   We are speaking of the same physical phenomena but we each have our own unique perspective on it due to our unique situational inclusion within it.   The colonizers perspective in colonizing North America was that they moved Westward to build a wonderful new world in North America, the ‘just discovered land’ named after the Italian explorer, financier, navigator and cartographer Amerigo Vespuggi, while the indigenous peoples’ perspective was that the colonizers invaded and destroyed a wonderful established world on Turtle Island.

Physical reality, being ‘what is common to all’ [omni-perspectival, synoptic] understands dynamics as ‘transformation’ of spatial relations.   That is the view of ‘relationists’ such as Mach.  It corresponds with the view that ‘everything is in flux’ and that ‘physical reality is given only once’ [the universe is a continually transforming spatial-plenum].

The ‘relationists’ are ‘pragmatist idealists’ for one very simple reason; they accept the reduction of this transforming space into a view based on ‘representations’ of dynamic forms; i.e. in terms of notional local, independently-existing things-in-themselves [for example - the human perspective based view of the tornado as a thing-in-itself] as a convenient and useful IDEALIZATION that cannot, meanwhile, be confused for ‘physical reality’.  Hence the ‘relationists’ are also described as ‘pragmatist idealists’ since they agree with the pragmatism of using the ‘idealization’ of dynamic forms in the transforming space, as ‘things-in-themselves’, even though they are really only ‘things considered in themselves’.

On the other hand, the dominant thinking in science, and in the scientifically-thinking colonizing culture, is that these ‘things-in-themselves’ are, in fact, ‘real’, hence their outlook that corresponds to ‘relationism’ is ‘absolutism’ and instead of being ‘pragmatist idealists’, they are ‘realists’.  This was the source of the major split between Mach and the ‘relationists’ and Planck, Einstein and the ‘realists’, the latter including the majority of leading scientists, in the early 20^th century, that led to political debate amongst scientists and to the result that the ‘absolutist – realist’ belief system has been the political winner, the system that Mach calls ‘the Church of Physics’.

Could it have been any other way at that time [early 20^th century]?  For example, the relationists put the omni-perspective view into primacy over the single-perspective, absolutist [things-in-themselves-based] view, which leads directly to stateless and non-hierarchical [relational-web-based] social organizing modes, as in the indigenous peoples tradition.

That is, if Mach’s principle holds, the actions of the inhabitants, rather than simply achieving some result as in the AR worldview, are conditioning the dynamics of the host-space/habitat which are at the same time orchestrating inhabitant behaviours.  While governments and justice systems and corporate activities continue to follow, literally, the doer-deed model of dynamics which says nothing of back-reflections from the habitat-dynamic in association with inhabitant dynamics.  However, the intuition of the people at large is not ‘buying into’ this blindered AR worldview, and more and more comments such as the following by Frédéric Neyrat in ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’ are coming to the fore;

“In extending his living space in a manner that destroys the space of others, he destroys his own space. Not initially his inside space, his ‘self’, but his outside space, this real outside-of-self which nourishes his ‘inside-of-self’. The protection of this outside space now becomes the condition without which he is unable to pursue the growth of his own powers of being.”

The usefulness of both sovereigntist government and the corporation lies in their power, amplified by numbers, to do deeds, to cause results.   The back-reflecting of this power through the transformed dynamic of the habitat does not show up in the AR worldview.  The sort of turbulence that it is infusing in the world is the sort that impacts each individual inhabitant in different ways, depending on their situational inclusion in the world dynamic.  Such turbulence as may come from instability in the global economy, peak oil and changing climate, is spatial-relational and better handled according to local circumstance.  This point is intuitive and there is a globally networked ‘transition town’ initiative underway aimed at cultivating ‘resilience’ on the local community level by restoring relational value-webs.  In other words, acknowledging Mach’s principle leads to the restoration of the ‘web-of-life’ mode of organization and the realization that sovereigntist and hierarchical modes of organization are based on the ‘reality’ of the AR absolutist-realist model that is now being intuitively called into question, and which Mach calls ‘an artificial conception’.

The individual perspective absolutist-realist view which leads directly into discursive conflicts such as whether the colonizers constructed a wonderful new world in the Americas or whether they destroyed a wonderful established world is something that has been resolved by the principle of Lafontaine; “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure”.  The physical reality is that our world is continually transforming, in a spatial-relational sense.  This is an omni-perspectival view which transcends the individual-perspective, absolutist view that sees dynamics in terms of local, independently-existing material bodies/systems and their actions/interactions within a fixed reference-frame space.  The flawed logical inference that is a fundamental ‘enabler’ to the latter ‘absolutist’ view has been described by Nietzsche in terms of a ‘double error’ and by Poincaré as a ‘petitio principii’; i.e. both describe it as ‘circular reasoning’.  Nietzsche says;

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

Now, this allegation, that the ‘thing-in-itself — doer-deed world view of the absolutist-realists which dominates in the world today, hinges on a ‘flaw in logical inference’ has huge implications as to how we ‘see things’ as in the notion of ‘growth’ discussed earlier.

Is ‘growth’ real or is ‘growth’ ‘schaumkommen’ (appearances) as the relationists insist?

It is not hard to see that there is no condition of mutual exclusion between the body of the tornado-inhabitant and the space of the atmosphere-habitat, so that when the ‘inhabitant’ ‘grows’ it would, if it were a thing-in-itself, push the surrounding ‘habitat’ back to make room for its growth.   That is, the ‘inhabitant’, in the case of the tornado, is a dynamic form within the transforming medium.  The habitat and inhabitant are conjugate aspects of a common dynamic, the dynamic of transforming spatial-relations.  Yes, the tornado is an object of sight and touch, but objects of sight and touch can be ‘things we consider in themselves’ without having to be ‘things in themselves’.

Ok, that holds for the ‘growth of a tornado’, but what about the growth of a child?

According to the relationist-pragmatist-idealists, it holds generally since the world we live in is continually transforming in a spatial relational sense.  As Nietzsche puts it;

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ‘GROWTH’ in physical reality.  ‘Growth’ is an ‘impression’ that belongs to the psychical realm, the realm of ‘ego’.  When we speak of colonization as ‘European expansionism’, we come back to the contradictory perspectives as to whether the European colonizers constructed a new world in the Americas, or whether they destroyed an existing world.   This apparent contradiction arises only in the ‘pyschical’ or ‘psychological realm’.  In the realm of physical reality, ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of ‘transformation’ [of spatial-relations].

THERE IS NO ‘GROWTH’ THAT IS REAL.

We are back to Nietzsche’s point about “Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”

The notion of ‘growth’ implies that some ‘thing’ is growing, and this leads to the same circular reasoning, ‘double error’ and ‘petitio principii’ discussed above.

The act of measurement of growth defines the thing that is growing.  When we observe the zone of turbulence in the atmosphere called the hurricane, we measure [its] physical properties, [its] extension in x, y and z dimensions, and [its] barometric pressure at the centre.  This gives us the option of abandoning the notion that an increasing proportion of the fluid medium of the atmosphere , troubled by increasing solar irradiance in these hot summer months, is ‘coming to the boil’, … in favour of the notion that the boil-spot as ‘thing-in-itself’ is ‘growing’ [the mind re-jumpstarts the animative sourcing of the dynamic from the local centre of the notional 'thing-in-itself''].

An expanding circular area on the surface of a sphere is, at the same time, two circular areas in conjugate relation, the growth of the one is simultaneously reciprocally complemented by the shrinking of the other.  Neither ‘growth’ nor ‘shrinkage’ [negative growth] are ‘physically real’.  There is only transformation of spatial relations.

Just as construction/genesis and destruction/degeneration are conjugate aspects of one, physically real dynamic, ‘transformation’ of spatial relations, so it is with ‘growth’ and ‘shrinkage’.

We would say that people’s bodies are continually ‘growing’ and ‘shrinking’ [in dissipation with age and with decomposition in depth] but all the while, as Nietzsche says, the space of the biosphere persists.

The notion of ‘growth’ is key to the absolutist-realist world view.  The relationist-pragmatist-idealists do not deny the IMPRESSION of growth, nor do they deny its usefulness in discourse, but their basic world view insists that ‘growth’ is in the realm of the psychical or psychological, it is not in the realm of physical reality.  ‘Growth’ is ‘idealization’ that is convenient because, as Mach says, it ‘economizes on thought’.

“Science itself, … may be regarded as a minimization problem, consisting of the completest possible presenting of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought. –Ernst Mach [the emphasis is Mach’s].

The absolutist-realist world view based on ‘things-in-themselves’ and their ‘doer-deed’ dynamics is a case in point.   It requires far less ‘thought’ than the relationist-pragmatist-idealist world view in terms of continual transformation of spatial-relations, where everything is dependent on everything else and where Mach’s principle applies;

“The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”

 

As Poincaré and Mach have both said, the relationist view requires more than a simple ‘reference-framing’ of absolute space and absolute time, to give ‘representation’ to our sensory impressions and to our objects of sight and touch.  This is where mention of ‘four dimensional’ and ‘multidimensional’ and ‘non-euclidian’ spaces for representation come into play.  As Poincaré say, our three-dimensional representation of our sensory impression is only ‘a sort of convention of language’;

“Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space ; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible.

Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself, are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics ; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French. “ – Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis

What separates ‘relationist-pragmatist-idealists’ and ‘absolutist-realists’ is their different views on conventions.

The ‘absolutist-realist’ view is that representations in absolute space and absolute time, which yields ‘locally existing material things-in-themselves’ and presents their movements as ‘absolute movements’, are ‘reality’.  While the ‘relationist-pragmatist-idealist’ view is that such representations, while they fit well with the architecture of our language [which came first? ... the concept of the ‘thing-in-itself’ or the ‘doer-deed’ architecture of the noun-and-verb language architecture?], fall into the realm of the ‘psychical’ or ‘psychological’.

The measurements ‘MAKE’ the thing-in-itself.

In the relationist world view, nothing is unchanging; i.e. ‘no-THING’ is unchanging because the world is in flux, it is continually transforming.

How do we come up with the idea that there are things that aren’t changing?

If the whole world is in flux, the only way that one could have a thing in the world that is not changing, is to interpose absolute time and space reference frames and measure the sensory impression or form [the object of sight and touch] relative to these absolute frames rather than relative to a universe in flux that it is included in.

This technique has been built into the ground floor foundations of physics, as Poincaré notes;

 

“Origin of Mathematical Physics. Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.

First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.”

The ‘derivative’, dx/dt, is a measurement technique that reduces ‘change’ that derives from a non-local, non-visible and ‘non-material’ influence as in energy-charged-field dynamics that is more basic than material entities, … to an absolutized form of ‘change’ which is local, visible and material.  This ‘local, visible, material’ version of ‘change’ is in the realm of the psychical rather than in the realm of physical reality.  If we take video film footage of the rock of Gibraltar, the dx/dt measure of change between successive frames would affirm the rock’s unchanging stasis.  That is psychological.  The physical reality is that the rock is falling apart and in fact the whole continent it is included in is in the process of being recycled in the convecting currents of the earth’s lithosphere.  The flow is bigger than the ‘being’ of the rock and its dynamics.  As Emerson would say, the flow of nature not only inhabits the rock, it creates it.   The absolute space and absolute time references as implied by dx and dt are the synthetic definers of ‘absolute local movement’ and ‘absolute change’ [as contrasted with dynamics understood as the transformation of spatial relations].

Scientific measuring and representational techniques are tools for economies of thought.  They produce representations that get rid of the more complex relational origins of change and synthetically re-institute the sourcing of change in local, visible, material, independently-existing-things-in-themselves.

THEY SHIFT UNDERSTANDING FROM THE REALM OF PHYSICAL REALITY TO THE PSYCHICAL REALM.

As both Mach and Schrödinger state, ‘the world is only given once’.  This ‘physical reality’ can be understood ‘relationally’ but for convenience and ‘economy of thought’ we embark on understanding it through the notion of a plurality of local material beings and their ‘doing of deeds’.  As Schrödinger observes;

“The only possible alternative [to the illusion of ‘plurality’] is simple to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that, what seems to be a plurality, is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAYA); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt. Everest turned out to be the same peak, seen from different valleys.”

 

And as Nietzsche says in a similar vein;

“Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie. –Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

Conclusion;

There is no argument that there are these two very different ways of understanding the world; (a) the globally dominating colonizer world view that is ‘absolutist-realist’ that is supported by the political incumbents in science, and (b) the suppressed relationist-pragmatist-idealist world view of the indigenous peoples tradition that is supported by the political outcasts in science.  While the latter ‘accepts’ the views of the former as a useful idealization that results in ‘economies of thought’, it describes it as ‘idealization’ that is radically reduced from the physical reality it aims to describe.   Meanwhile, the former regard their world view as ‘reality’ and thus reject the notion of a ‘higher reality’ that their reality is a poorboy representation of.

As Mach says of Planck’s ‘absolutist realism’  in their disagreement over the ‘reality’ of the idealized ‘thing-it-itself’ based mechanical world dynamic;

“After exhorting the reader, with Christian charity, to respect his opponent, Planck brands me, in the well-known Biblical words, as a ‘false prophet.’  It appears that  physicists are already on their way to founding a church; they are already using a church’s traditional weapons.  To this I answer simply: ‘IF believe in the reality of atoms is so important to you, I cut myself off from the physicist’s mode of thinking, I do not wish to be a true physicist, I renounce all scientific respect— in short: I decline with thanks the communion of the faithful.  I prefer freedom of thought.” — Ernst Mach, ‘The Guiding Principles of My Scientific Theory of Knowledge’

As mentioned, the world view of the relationists corresponds to the world view of the indigenous peoples’ tradition.   The worldview of the absolutist-realists corresponds to the prevailing view of science which is ‘taken literally’ on the surface level [government, corporate action] and used duplicitously in actual practice [e.g. puppet governments].

In closing, it is worth repeating Mach’s comment that ‘the mechanical theory of nature’ is an ‘artificial conception’ based on ‘abstractions, made, either intentionally or from necessity, for facilitating our comprehension of things’.  Our habit of trying to apply it to explain all manner of physical phenomena is, as Mach suggests, a prejudice that we are overdue in our need to outgrow.

The ‘new physics’ has changed the worldview of many scientists who have been innovators in the field, in a significant way.  Schrödinger’s reference to the parallels between relationist physics and ancient Vedic philosophy which share the realization that the ‘real world is only given once’ while the world of ‘things-in-themselves’ representations is ‘appearances’, has been mentioned.  David Bohm spent his latter years trying to share the relationist views that came to him from his scientific researches in the interests of helping the shift out of the mechanical thinking trap.  F. David Peat wrote ‘Blackfoot Physics’ to show how the relationist understanding of the new physics is a layover to indigenous peoples’ traditional beliefs.  Benjamin Lee Whorf’s writings, in ‘Language, Thought and Reality’, aim to show how languages such as Hopi are architected to preserve ‘relationist’ impressions while English is better suited for conveying absolutist representations.

Meanwhile, the duplicity goes on because the ‘mechanical worldview’, which brought us ‘colonization’ continues to be the worldview and ‘belief system’ of popular choice.

* * *

Footnote: See also ‘Relationism, Absolutism and Language’

In nature, transforming space trumps time-based cause-effect constructivism

We are a culture [we of the globally dominating Western culture] that believes in ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ and ‘blame’ and ‘forgiveness’.  That is, we are a culture that assumes that human development and behaviour derives fully and solely from the interior of each human understood as a ‘thing-in-itself’, an ‘absurdity’ yet the cornerstone of our cultural belief system.

We believe that science and rationality, rather than being tools of convenience, are addressing ‘reality’, the real world of our experience, which is a major error, as philosophers such as Mach, Nietzsche and Poincaré have elaborated on, not that they have ever had the attention of the ‘social mainstream’.   We are stuck in a mental box that we seem unable to escape from, and Mach has put a name to it; it is called ‘three dimensional space’.

Three dimensional space is the space of material bodies and forces. It is the space of ‘doers of deeds’ and of ‘cause and effect’.  In this space that is characterized by ‘what things do’, given our observation of an ‘effect’, our inquiry will lead back to ‘its cause’.

“The space of sight and touch is three-dimensional ; that, no one ever yet doubted.” So says Mach in ‘The Science of Mechanics: A critical and historical account of its development’.   But as he goes on to point out, three dimensional space and observations grounded in sight and touch are too limited to capture our experience wherein we are witness to things vanishing from and entering into this space.

 For example, when temperatures are warm and the jet stream is strong, there are record numbers of tornadoes in the U.S. (e.g. 748 of them in the month of April in 2011).  The same applies to hurricanes.  Once we ‘spot them’, three dimensional space along with sight and touch are adequate for ‘dealing with them’; e.g. it is convenient to say that ‘Katrina’ wreaked destruction on New Orleans.   But we need more than ‘three dimensional space’ to address the space that ‘things’ are vanishing into and which ‘new things’ are coming from.  This would be the relational space or energy-charged fluid-dynamical ‘medium’ [spatial-plenum] in which Mach’s principle applies;

“The dynamics of the habitat [eg. fluid atmospheric medium]  are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants [eg. hurricanes] at the same time as the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”

Experience informs us that relational tensions can build in an energy-charged relational space so that the energy-charged space becomes the ‘source’ of emergence/development of new things and the shaper of behaviours of presently resident things.  This fluid-medium, relational space, is a space wherein the sourcing of dynamics is nonlocal, non-visible and non-material, and it exceeds the descriptive capabilities of three dimensional space and sight and touch based observations, the foundational stuff for mainstream science [‘the science of mechanics’ and cause-and-effect etc.], but not the foundational stuff of our experience; e.g. our ability to feel heat and pressure and to sense relational tensions that suggest to us, in our real world ‘experiential space’, that ‘something is brewing’ something not yet visible nor tangible, but about to emerge from non-local, non-visible, non-material webs of spatial-relations, the stuff that as Mach notes, we drop out for reasons of ‘economy-of-thought’, and go instead with notional ‘things-in-themselves’.  As Mach says;

 “The space of sight and touch is three-dimensional ‘ that no one every yet doubted.  If, now, it should be found that bodies vanish from this space, or new bodies get into it, the question might scientifically be discussed whether it would facilitate and promote our insight into things to conceive experiential space as part of a four-dimensional or multi-dimensional space.”

Evidently, we can’t attach FULL responsibility to Katrina for what she did to New Orleans, nor can we attach FULL responsibility to the 748 tornadoes in the month of April, 2011 for the damage they did, as we do when we inquire into things by way of three dimensional space and sight and touch based observations.  These ‘causal agents’ that we can see and touch that move this way and that and grow stronger and bigger, then weaker and smaller, are continually vanishing from, and emerging into this space, but as Mach points out, science has historically chosen three dimensional space and sight and touch based observations in which to formulate its laws and descriptions of physical phenomena.

The space of our experience goes well beyond the limits of what we can model in terms of three dimensional space and sight and touch based observations.

Our experience informs us that, by way of webs of spatial relations in which we are participating inhabitants, we can condition space that is at the same time conditioning the behaviours of the inhabitants that share inclusion in space.  Just as imbalances in thermal energy charging in the atmosphere gives rise to local storm-cells born to relieve it, so it occurs within the webs of social relations; e.g. the emergence of robin-hood cells born to relieve imbalances in control over access to space and its resources.

Should we expect Robin Hood to ‘take responsibility for his own actions’?

Only if our mental modeling is stuck in ‘three dimensional space and sight and touch based observations’.

Robin Hood might ask ‘us’ [the general public including the judge, prosecutor and police] to take ownership of our responsibility for ‘conditioning the dynamics of habitat that are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants’.

What happens to a society whose mental modeling is ‘stuck’ in the limited paradigm of three-dimensional space and sight and touch based observations?

We are experiencing what happens.  We, as a collective, are ignoring the obvious, that we, as inhabitants of a common relational space are conditioning the dynamics of our habitat that are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants which are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.   Robin Hood behaviours do not simply originate with ‘Robin Hood’ as it appears in a three-dimensional space, sight and touch based mental modeling paradigm.  In the ‘real’ space of our experience, relational tensions are infused by inhabitants cultivating over-abundance for themselves that is reciprocal to impoverishment of others.  In the same sort of manner as imbalances in electrical charging, rebalancing actions are triggered from needle-points and sharp edges where the imbalances are most acutely felt.  Our sight and touch based observations allow us to pinpoint the coordinates of, and identify the needled point that launches the blitzkrieg attack, and since our scientific ‘economy of thought’ imputes local sourcing to dynamics, the identified launching point is understood to be the causal agent; i.e. Robin Hood is understood to be the causal agent, end of story.

The causal model of mainstream science, based as it is on three-dimensional space and sight and touch based observations, compels us to think in terms of ‘taking responsibility for our own actions, as if we are ‘things-in-ourselves’ with our own locally originating, internal process driven behaviours.  This, in turn, has us thinking in terms of ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ and ‘blame’ and ‘forgiveness’.

This model is innately too simple to capture the dynamics of the space of our experience, a relational space wherein “the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat”, a Machean space that, were we to use mathematical descriptors to try to characterize it, requires more than ‘three dimensions’.

Where does this ‘denial’ of the relational nature of space leave us?

Through our relations with one another and the common living space, we cultivate tensions through excess and imbalance that in turn animate or shape the behaviours of inhabitants differently, depending on their situational inclusion within the relational space.  But since we are sticking to the three dimensional, sight and touch based observational mental model, we attribute the source of individual behaviours to the individuals as ‘things-in-themselves’, thus the ‘lightning bolt behaviour’ or ‘Robin Hood behaviour’ that we observe ‘coming from’ particular individuals, who may be situationally exposed to the extremes of imbalance, we impute as arising fully and solely  from their internal processes, and we expect them to ‘take [full and sole] responsibility’ for the sourcing of their behavioural dynamics.

Where they refuse to do so, we end up ‘blaming them’ anyhow, in accordance with the three-dimensional sight and touch based observational mental model.

Evidently, our failure to acknowledge the relational nature of the space of our experience, and our continued addressing of emergent ‘disturbances’ in our society on the basis of the innately inadequate three-dimensional mental model has been exacerbating rather than alleviating the incidence of social dysfunction.  We are in a zone that David Bohm terms ‘incoherence’ since the model we are using to resolve our problems is the model that is causing them.

So, since the only tool in our tool-box that can explain ‘what is going on’ is ‘cause-and-effect’, just as if it were a hammer so that everything looks like a nail, we play the game of assigning blame as best we can.

The blame targets for our chronic social dysfunction include, but are not limited to;

 1. Politicians and/or ‘politics’ [manipulating people to move in the same direction].

 2. The rich and powerful [formerly, the ‘bourgeoisie’]

 3. The capitalist system [the ‘free market economy’]

 4. Authoritarianism [central direction/control by a supreme authority]

 5. Right wing religious fanatics [exterminators of perceived ‘evil’]

 6. A secret ‘New World Order’ conspiracy [knights templar, freemasons, bilderbergers]

 7.  Technology [alienates us from nature]

 8.  The Military-Industrial Complex [seeking growth in markets]

 9. Religion [the Catholic Church, monotheism itself etc.]

 10.  Science [mechanistic/atheistic hard logic]

* * *

Part II.  The Wake-Up Call, … How Does it Come? … Or Does it Come?

Mach, also pointed out that the realization that our mental models are too simple to capture the unfoldings of our actual experiential space, has to come through actual experience.  There was a day when we [of the Western culture] believed that the earth was flat and that we were trapped in a flat space that extended outwards in all directions to infinity.

“… with respect to the space in which we live, only experience can decide whether it is finite, whether parallel lines intersect in it, or the like.  The significance of this elucidation can scarcely be overrated.  An enlightenment similar to that which Riemann inaugurated [i.e. that non-euclidian relational geometries of space were just as legitimate as euclidian geometry] in science was produced in the mind of humanity at large, as regards the surface of the earth, by the discoveries of the first circumnavigators.”

So, we escaped from the mental trap that had us believing that we could not ‘go around the world’ as we were trapped on a flat plane extending outwards to infinity, or at least to an ‘edge’ beyond which was an abyss inhabited by dragons.  The circumnavigators had real-life experiences which shattered the flatspace mental modeling paradigm.

What would it take to break out of our current entrapment in the cultural mental modeling default paradigm of three-dimensional space and sight and touch based observation; i.e. ‘observation’ that is far less comprehensive than our full-blown sensory experiencing capacities where we can sense inclusion in rising spatial-relational tensions etc. [which informs us that the emergence of behaviours and organization, hence ‘emergent forms’, can come from the energy-charged relational space that we are included in]?

In this case we need an experience that relates to this passage from the relational space [mathematically four-dimensional or multi-dimensional space] into three-dimensional space and back again, to confirm our experience that things vanish and new things enter into the three-dimensional space of sight and touch.

[[N.B. As Mach would quickly add to statements such as I have just made, the notion of ‘dimensions’ of space is nothing more than ‘mental artifice’ to assist in exploring the nature of our ‘experiential space’.]]

One’s first thought might be that one needs to communicate back, after death, to the living, to confirm the existence of this ‘fourth dimensional space’, as in Mach’s era, that is what people tried to do, much to the chagrin of Mach since it case a spurious interpretation onto this notion of ‘the fourth dimension’.  In Mach’s words;

“Yet in such a case [as where science would postulate a higher dimensional space], this fourth dimension would, nonetheless, remain a pure thing of thought, a mental fiction.  But this is not the way matters stand.  The phenomena mentioned were not forthcoming until after the new views were published, and were then exhibited in the presence of certain persons at spiritualistic séances.  The fourth dimension was a very opportune discovery for the spiritualists and for theologians who were in a quandary about the location of hell…. We have not yet found an accoucheur who has accomplished parturition through the fourth dimension. … I myself regarded multi-dimensional space as a mathematico-physical help even prior to the appearance of Riemann’s memoir [on the equal legitimacy of non-euclidian relational spaces to the absolute space of euclidian geometry].  But I trust that no one will employ what I have thought, said, and written on this subject as a basis for the fabrication of ghost stories.”

Nietzsche who was said [by his sister and others] to be greatly influenced by Mach’s works; Analysis of Sensations and The Science of Mechanics: A critical and historical account of its development, has added a great deal to this topic, in his anti-Darwinist and anti-dialectic philosophical writing.  His ‘Will to Power’ speaks of this deeper substrate which answers the question; ‘Given that we seem to have ‘free will’, what is the source of that which wills us to have a will?’   In terms of Robin Hood’s will, that our Western Justice system would insist is born within Robin Hood, consistent with holding him fully and solely responsible for ‘his own behaviour’ [as fits with the notion of a human as a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour], … his will is a local jumpstarting fountainhead.  To Nietzsche, the ‘Will to Power’ is a will that permeates the energy-charged plenum of Nature; i.e. it is an ‘evolutionary logos’ that not only inhabits the emergent forms of nature but creates them.

“The world viewed from inside, the world defined and described by its “intelligible character”—it would be simply “will to power” and nothing else. —” – Nietzsche, Will to Power, 36.

The notion is that the dynamic forms of the world such as the human organism, ourselves, are like candle flames [Heraclitus], conjugate relations between outside-inward nurturing/orchestrating influence [endosmosis] and inside-outward asserting outflux.  This is Nietzsche’s definition of ‘evolution’ and it applies to all of nature rather than just to ‘life-forms’ that infect a dead universe, as in Darwinism.

But let’s not get caught up in that debate and instead move on with our inquiry into;

WHAT IS BLOCKING US FROM GETTING IN TOUCH WITH OUR EXPERIENCE THAT VALIDATES “RELATIONAL SPACE”, the space that lies beyond three dimensional space of our sight and touch based observations.

Barely showing up on the radar screen of mainstream blame-giving is ‘language’ [or, ‘thought and language’, since these two are closely coupled].  That language is the culprit that lies at the root of our social dysfunction is the view of Friedrich Nietzsche and it has also been ‘accused’ as such by Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré, and others, including Wittgenstein, Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin Whorf, Dan Moonhawk Alford and myself.

‘Language-as-a-key-culprit’ explains why there is such a diversity of targets to point one’s finger at. The subjectifying power of language is what gives us the mental impression that for every observable ‘effect’, there is a ‘causal agent’ responsible for it.

As Nietzsche says;

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

Ernst Mach was  just as adamant as Nietzsche that ‘cause and effect’ is pure abstraction and Poincaré also described how the ‘language games’ we play impute a determinism that is purely ‘visual appearance’ concretized by abstraction [words as simple concepts standing in for what is inherently far more complex].  As Mach says in his historical-philosophical treatise on ‘science’, ‘The Science of Mechanics: A critical and historical account of its development’;

“The basis of science is the economy of thought. … Science is communicated by instruction, in order that one man may profit by the experience of another and be spared the trouble of accumulating it for himself ; and thus, to spare posterity, the experiences of whole generations are stored up in libraries.   Language, the instrument of this communication, is itself an economical contrivance.  Experiences are analysed, or broken up, into simpler and more familiar experiences, and then symbolised at some sacrifice of precision.  … In the reproduction of facts in thought, we never reproduce the facts in full, but only that side of them which is important to us, moved to this directly or indirectly by a practical interest.  Our reproductions are invariably abstractions.  Here again is an economical tendency.”

Mach points out that ‘the first and oldest words’ are the names of “things” and that this naming is;

“… an abstractive process, an abstraction from the surroundings of the things, and from the continual small changes which these compound sensations undergo, which being practically unimportant are not noticed.”  No inalterable thing exists.  The thing is an abstraction, the name of a symbol, for a compound of elements [the sense elements of our experience/perception] from whose changes we abstract.  The reason we need a single word to a whole compound is that we need to suggest all of the constituent sensations at once.  When, later, we come to remark the changeableness, we cannot at the same time hold fast to the idea of the thing’s permanence, unless we have recourse to the conception of a thing-in-itself, or other such like absurdity.”

Science, in Mach’s view, is an economical process for reproducing facts of practical interest to us;

“In speaking of cause and effect we arbitrarily give relief to those elements to whose connection we have to attend in the reproduction of a fact in the respect in which it is important to us.  There is no cause nor effect in nature ; nature has but an individual existence ; nature simply is.  … Cause and effect, therefore, are things of thought, having an economical office. … Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimization problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.  The function of science, as we take it, is to replace experience.”

In Mach’s view [and Nietzsche’s et al], the scientific world view is most often an artificial conception oriented “to the expression of actual facts, and forbids the construction of hypotheses behind the facts where nothing tangible and verifiable is found.  … [thus]… nothing is to be imagined along with these elements except the physical attributes or characteristics directly or indirectly given by observation.”

The problem in all of this, is that ‘science’, whose purpose is to replace experience with economical conceptual re-renderings that substitute for experience, be mistaken for ‘the real world’.  The masses and forces that we use in the economical re-rendering give us a view of the world as in a stage play;

“ A person who knew the world only through the theatre, if brought behind the scenes and permitted to view the mechanism of the stage’s action, might possibly believe that the real world also was in need of a machine-room, and that if this were once thoroughly explored, we should know all.  Similarly, we, too, should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Mach

If ‘mechanics’ are not foundational to the world dynamic, then ‘we have a problem’ because we are using them as such in our attempt to understand the source of rising global social/economic dysfunction.   These quotes from Mach’s 1902 or earlier already identified the problem that we were pushing the mechanical world view of physics beyond its useful application.  Mach stated that we have fallen into the trap of “overestimating [how far we can push the] economical instruments of thought”, remarking that “Physics has wrongly been made the basis of physiology”; i.e. that our sensory experiment is the basis of packets of sensations that our economization of thought reduces to masses and forces, atomic structures and so on.  It therefore makes no sense to use physics to try to explain physiology.  But Mach describes this absurd state of affairs as actually transpiring in science in his day (he died in 1916) due to science specialists lacking the philosophical understanding [of the type Mach is writing about];

“A philosophy is involved in any correct view of the relations of special knowledge to the great body of knowledge at large, — a philosophy that must be demanded of every special investigator.  The lack of it is asserted in the formulation of imaginary problems, in the very enunciation of which, whether regarded as soluble or insoluble, fragrant absurdity is involved.  Such an overestimation of physics, in contrast to physiology, such a mistaken conception of the true relations of the two sciences, is displayed in the inquiry whether it is possible to explain feelings by the motions of the atoms?”

[In Mach’s view, ‘atoms’ are conceptual abstractions that we have derived from sensations in the first place; “All physical knowledge can only mentally represent and anticipate complexes of those elements we call sensations.”.... “the notions of mechanics are economical implements or expedients perfected to represent mechanical and not physiological or psychological facts.”]

Over the past century, our global social collective has been doing exactly what Mach is warning us against doing; i.e. we have continued to push the mechanistic world view of science and rationality beyond its appropriate limit in all manner of activity.

 * * *

Part III. —Closing the loop between the Machean/Nietzschean philosophy of science and our ‘everyday thinking habits’, and particularly, the habit of ‘blame’.

If ‘cause and effect’ is not ‘real’ then there is no-one to blame for authoring an ‘effect’; i.e. ‘lightning’ is not to be blamed for the ‘flashing in the sky’, and the man holding the smoking gun is not to be blamed for the ‘effect’ he is accused of authoring; i.e. the bullet-ridden corpse lying in front of him.

Certainly [in the view of the colonizers of North America], the dead Indians who tried to stand in the way could only blame themselves for their violent deaths, a violence they stirred up by refusing to acquiesce to the will of the recently arrived ‘majority’ and failing to comply with the democratically legislated ‘laws of the land’ that introduced the notion of centrally claimed, controlled and administered ‘property ownership’ which had specified their new and reduced living quarters.

‘Blame’ is essentially a search for root-cause authorship of an ‘effect’.  The trooper holding the smoking gun and standing over the dead body of the Indian is merely the first step in ‘historical’ inquiry that runs back ‘upstream’ in the flow of events, from the downstream ‘effect’ to the ultimate upstream source, kind of like starting from the massive outflux from the Nile delta into the Mediterranean as the observable ‘effect’ and embarking on a search, upstream, for the ‘head of the Nile’.   Ultimately, rather than the source of the Nile and its effect being two ‘endpoints’ marking start and finish of a curvilinear channel, the source-to-effect combo is circular and spatial.  The source is a huge drainage basin, a skyward-pointing receptacle that is continually collecting moisture that is continually being contributed by the Mediterranean and the rest of the surface of the planet and continually re-depositing it in the Mediterranean, thanks to the mediating role of atmospheric flow.

The same sort of situation is exposed in the case of the trooper and the Indian and it is described by Mach’s principle of space-matter relativity; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”

Evidently, we have two different ‘realities’ that we can ‘play with’;

Reality 1. — ‘Reality’ understood in terms of things-in-themselves and ‘what things do’.  This is the reality that is ‘reinforced’ by language and the ‘cause-effect’ model of science and rationality.   It is the world understood as ‘theatre’, the antics of masses and forces.

Reality 2. —‘Reality’ understood in terms of the dynamics of the space we experience inclusion in; i.e. the transformation of spatial-relations.  This ‘relational’ reality is the reality that we actually experience in our lives.  The experience of riding around in a world of horses-and-buggies, oil lamps etc. that gradually, without anyone planning it, giving way to a world of fossil-fuel powered vehicles gliding along superhighways, continent-wide electrical grids, jets that fly us around the world, instant global communications systems etc.

No-one plans ‘reality 2.’   Our living space undergoes continual transformation [and has done so prior to man’s emergence within it].   The film ‘Bladerunner’ is an artist’s rendition of how this transformation of spatial-relations might continue to unfold, but it is anybody’s guess.  It will be amazing and unanticipated and ‘out of our control’, because ‘our control’ is constrained to our science and rationality driven actions, and these transpire in a ‘different reality’; i.e. ‘reality 1.’ which is based on ‘economizing thought’ and ‘substituting science for experience’.

“Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimization problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.  The function of science, as we take it, is to replace experience.”

As Marshall McLuhan observed, scientific man can, and indeed does, design, develop and implement Cadillac and Cornflakes factories; i.e. the production of Cadillacs is an effect whose authorship can be traced back to entrepreneuring inventors and engineers, so cause-and-effect does seem to ‘work’.  But the point that McLuhan and others were making, by this, was that there are thousands of such scientific/rational cause-and-effect programs underway in a community at any given time, and none of the scientists and rational thinkers involved, have a clue as to how the ongoing transformation of our habitat, and the manner in which we relate to one another and the habitat, will be transformed.  How our relational living space is being transformed is not something that science and rationality are drafting plans and implementation procedures for.  In the realm of ‘reality 1.’, the realm of scientific/rational plans and doer-deed implementations, everyone is doing ‘their own thing’ at the same time and in a common living space.  But they do not share one another’s goals and undertakings.  The colonizers and the colonized did not share one another’s rational cause-effect seeking goals and undertakings but they ‘threw themselves body and soul’ into achieving them and the ‘Indian wars’ were one of the results.

In general, how will all our ‘reality 1.’ science and rationality driven activities impact our ‘reality 2.’, the ‘transforming-habitat’ reality that we actually ‘experience inclusion in’, that artists/writers try to anticipate with films like ‘Bladerunner’?

Did the colonizers with their ‘reality 1.’ doer-deed plans of ‘constructing a wonderful new world in the Americas, take into account the ‘reality 1.’ doer-deed plans of the indigenous peoples to defend against the ‘destruction of a wonderful established world on Turtle Island’?

Everyone seems to be a party to some selection of ‘reality 1.’ plans in the science and rationality doer-deed mode, not to mention large groups like the colonizers and the colonized, and everyone works hard to implement them, all within a common living space, but that leaves ‘flapping like a loose sheet in the wind’, ‘reality 2’, the overall reality that we actually experience [i.e. our experiencing of living in a ‘Bladerunner’ world that emerges from millions of different ‘reality 1’ activities].   And it is impossible to imagine how it could be any other way, unless humanity can figure out how to take over control of the unfolding of Nature/Universe.

  * * *

Conclusion:

As Mach points out, three dimensional space is the space of sight and touch based observation.  Mechanics and the doer-deed world view limits itself to this ‘observational’ space.  However, our experience informs us that things are continually coming into and exiting this three dimensional space which suggests that our experienced reality incorporates what might be called a ‘fourth dimension’, whether we call this the energy-charged spatial plenum or some other name.

Our experience informs us that we live in a relational space.  We can feel tensions brewing that we can’t see and touch, but which are about to source the emergence of a visible and touchable dynamic; e.g. we can feel the conditions of space that brew up storm-cells [tornadoes and hurricanes].  As with fields that we sense as ‘pressures’ or ‘gradients’ we are included in [thermal, electrical etc.], these relational sensations are nonlocal, non-visible and non-material, but they are real enough, according to our spatial experiencing.

Since our language is architecturally optimized for rendering our experience in terms of doer-deed dynamics, language gives a representation of our experience that REDUCES our experience to a three dimensional spatial representation rendered in terms of sight and touch based observations.  This reduced spatial representation fails to retain the nonlocal, non-visible, non-material relational dynamics of the energy-charged relational space of our experience, the deeper realm into which material forms vanish and new forms enter, and which not only inhabits visible touchable material forms but which creates them.

Language stirs our thoughts in the direction of cause and effect, but as Mach says; “There is no cause nor effect in nature ; nature has but an individual existence ; nature simply is.”

Our experience is informing us of ‘what is’ and it is far too profound to capture in words.  We therefore need to put our trust in experience beyond our trust in language-bound science.

“Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimization problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.  The function of science, as we take it, is to replace experience.”

Language used in dialogue, rather than as used in debate over ‘who’s to blame’ or ‘which scientific representation of the world is more true’, may bring about the needed restoring of trust in sensory experience [access to nature as it is without loss of dimensionality] over scientific intellection and its variably competent mental modeling paradigms.

* * * * *

Reality is something other than a language game called 'Science'

Science is an internally consistent system that does a good job of explaining ‘appearances’; i.e. ‘what things do’.  What it does not do a good job of, is in giving us an understanding of how the world we live is transforming, and how our ‘what things do’ oriented science relates to the transforming of our living space.

At the end of the nineteenth century there was a wave of scientific applications that we loosed on ourselves.  We knew a lot about how to ‘construct them’ but we didn’t know how their use would transform our landscape and our lives.  That’s because science deals in ‘what things do’ as if these things are ‘things-in-themselves’.

If we understood science and the applications of science in terms of ‘tools’ that have developed, it would be reasonable to say that prior to developing these tools we lived within a continuously unfolding living space dynamic.   When we do our scientific modeling, we do not start with a model of our living space and how are science-informed actions are transforming it.  We start with a concept of a ‘thing-in-itself’ [material system in itself] and ‘what it does’, such as a gasoline engine or an airplane or an electrical generator.   How it will transform the dynamic space we have emerged into, is not ‘covered’ by science.   We don’t know how to describe the dynamic space we are included in.  We only know how to explain apparently ‘local’ systems within it.

If the ‘local system’ is only one of the parts in a relational web of interdependent parts constituting a larger system, then we will be imputing behaviour to the ‘local system’ seen as a thing-in-itself, that derives instead from the larger system in which it is merely a ‘part’.

That is, in fact, the argument of Mach, Nietzsche, Poincaré and Schrödinger [MNPS].  If they are right, then we can expect that the behaviour we [and science] impute to ‘the organism’ as a ‘thing-in-itself’ is not simply coming from the individual, but is somehow coming from the relational web in which ‘the organism’ is included.

This unaccounted for difference in the sourcing of the organism’s behaviour is what Nietzsche suggests is screwing up European thinking and European civilization’s social dynamic which has become the dominant global social dynamic.

MNPS contend that ‘what we do’ does not describe ‘change’.  That is, the space we live in has been continuously evolving and the emergence of organisms is included within that evolving and organisms continue to be contributing participants in the continuing evolving, but science prefers to focus on organisms as if they were ‘things-in-themselves’ and explain their behaviour in inside-outward asserting terms.

The notion that organisms are ‘things-in-themselves’ rather than being included within a larger system [e.g. relational web] is just an assumption that someone made.  It has never been justified.  It is an assumption that goes hand-in-hand with splitting the evolution of the world into two parts, the inorganic realm, and the organic realm’.   The assumption is that the difference between minerals, crystals, rocks, planets etc. and ‘organisms’ is the difference between ‘alive’ and ‘dead’. That is, when an organism dies, it ‘loses its life’ and decomposes into non-living matter.

Of course, not everyone believed this.  Lamarck didn’t believe it; he thought that the world evolved as one and that ‘organisms’ were a more complex form of organization; i.e. the universe has all of the basic influences necessary for organizing into crystals and/or organisms and there is no need to impute the evolution of a new influence called ‘life’ to explain the emergence of ‘organisms’ but that is what the dominating faction of science chose to think and Darwin had a great deal of influence on this one.  In a letter (1871) to botanist Joseph Hooker, Darwin wrote:

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are present, which could ever have been present. But if (and Oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”

Science is still struggling to ‘define life’ and ‘science’ has never departed from the simple notion that in order to explain the difference between ‘organisms’ and ‘crystals’, we have to assume the existence of a special local process, that is only found locally and rarely and in the latter part of the history of the planet earth.  For example, a February 6, 2012 article in ‘Science’ entitled ‘Opinion: What is Life?’ — ‘Designing the simplest possible living organism artificially may lend clues as to what life is’, by Edward N. Trifanov, continues to accept without question the notion that ‘life’ is a mysterious process that marks an absolute boundary between ‘things that are not alive’ and ‘things that are alive’.  In other words, ‘life’ is an invented concept that science uses to define that absolute boundary.  Thus, the absolute boundary stands or falls with the belief in ‘life’.

Lamarck, on the other hand, in his ‘Recherches sur l’Organisation des Corps Vivans’ (Investigations into the organization of the living body) sees the ‘living body’ as a complex form of organization deriving from ‘fields’ (thermal, electromagnetic, gravity) and their interaction with fluids (water, air etc.) in the manner that tornadoes, which are highly organized forms do not form in regions where there is insufficient contrast between warm and cold air and insufficient humidity for the formation of thunderstorms.  In this case, there is no need to postulate an absolute boundary between the more common flow-forms and this special form, defined by a basically different process being responsible for the special form.  That is, the sourcing influences that author the tornado are the same sourcing influences that pervade the universe, however, different confluences of spatial relations can give rise to exotic forms of organization compared to those which are most common.

Since ‘life’ is a concept that in turn enables a ‘thing-in-itself’ view of the organism, there is a whole lot hanging on an unvalidated assumption here.  Right off the bat, one might be suspicious in that aboriginal cultures never split apart nature and organisms; i.e. nature was the living earth and humans were included in the living earth.   One might be suspicious since many things predicted by the aboriginals [e.g. “if we spit on the earth, we spit on ourselves”] have come true since our science has been focused one-sidedly on ‘what things do’ rather than acknowledging Mach’s principle where there is a conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation’ as in the aboriginal belief system.

What would you say is the reason that we hold on so hard to the ‘thing-in-itself’ view of the organism and/or the atom?  The notion that fields transcend matter is an accepted notion in modern physics; i.e. matter is a condensation of the electromagnetic field, matter is curvature in the gravitational field etc.   The sailboater in us is more humble than the powerboater in us, in acknowledging that form, power and steerage derive from the dynamics of space that we are situationally included in.  Only if the ocean space is calm [as when we impose absolute space-framing] do we transform, like the werewolf, from sailboater to powerboater.  Powerboaters have to steal their life-giving blood/fuel by stealth in the dark to keep up the appearance that their power and steerage derives from themselves.

Science’s notion that the material body is a thing-in-itself is a notion we still use [Mach’s complaint against ‘the Church of Science’] because of the simplicity it brings to scientific language.

“Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space ; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible.  Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself, are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics [the physical phenomena of our experience] ; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French.” – Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis

Newton ran into problems with this assumption of the material body as ‘thing-in-itself’ in developing his Principia, and his ‘Euclidian fix’ always stuck in my mind.  That is, he was able to develop his laws of motions in a manner that worked out for two bodies but when he tried to extend it to three or more bodies, he ran into the ‘three-body-problem’.  The three body problem is that in the case that three or more bodies move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence, it is impossible to solve for the behaviour of each individual participant.  Since the intuition of gravity was that everything was simultaneously mutually influencing everything [the gravity field was ‘everywhere at the same time’], there were no mathematics that gave tractable solutions that ‘kept hole’ the notion of a material body as a ‘thing-in-itself’.

As Poincaré said, science is a language game, the simplicity of which is assured by hidden ‘conventions’ in its architecture such as the convention of euclidian space which grants ‘thing-in-itself’ status to the material forms within it.   In order to be able to address the three-body problem, one would have to ‘let go’ of the ‘thing-in-itself’ status of material bodies, which would make the mathematics far more complex/difficult.  That is, one would have to acknowledge the ‘feminine’ aspect of dynamics [outside-inward spatial accommodating] and not just the ‘masculine’ aspect of inside-outward asserting behaviour.   And as Evelyn Fox Keller notes in ‘Reflections on Gender and Science’, in regard to the circularity between mathematical tools and observer preferences;

“To the extent that such models [models that posited central governing elements] also lend themselves more readily to the kinds of mathematics that have been developed, we need further to ask, What accounts for the kinds of mathematics that have been developed? Mathematical tractability is a crucial issue, and it is well known that, in all mathematical sciences, models that are tractable tend to prevail. But might it not be that prior commitments (ideological, if you will) influence not only the models that are felt to be satisfying but also the very analytical tools that are developed?’

So, both in the so-called inorganic realm and in the organic realm, the formulations in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ came under challenge; i.e. in the organic realm, Lamarck’s and MNPS’ proposed to restore/include the outside-inward accommodating influence of space with the inside-outward asserting influence of matter, putting them into a conjugate inhabitant-habitat relation based dynamic unity.

Now, the ‘trick’ that Newton used to avoid the more complex mathematics associated with restoring the female aspect, was the invention of a vector ‘force field’.   This is not a ‘measured field’ but a calculated field where one assumes the two-body version of gravitational influence and computes the gravitational force at any “point-location” in a notional absolute ‘fixed’ space arising from the mass distribution in that space [what effect that each body/mass would have on any point].    This split apart the ‘field’ from the ‘material masses’.

The mass would then ‘experience’ the force as calculated and move in response to its ‘experiencing of the externally applied force.  The mass would be seen as moving relative to an absolute three-dimensional grid of fixed point locations [Euclidian x,y,z space]; a grid that could be divided up into points as small as we like.   The smallness of the grid of absolute fixed space and absolute increments of time would seem to be able to approximate, as closely as we would like, the originally intuited notion of gravitational motion wherein all masses moved under the SIMULTANEOUS MUTUAL INFLUENCE of all masses as in a single interdependent web of spatial-relations.  Measurement-wise, using this ‘vector force field’, we could home in on a particular point and calculate the force due to the overall mass distribution, at that point, which would tell us the direction and motion of a mass at that point.   Being able to calculate the movement of that mass would then allow us to re-calculate the mass distribution and recalculate the force at its new location, and to continue to make these calculations recursively to calculate the ‘trajectory’ of a particular mass, … relative, of course, … to a notional absolute space and absolute time reference frame and assuming ‘ceteris paribus’, all other things staying the same.

In this manner, where we started out with ‘motion’ that we intuited to be ‘relative’ in a spatial-relation sense, we are able to reduce and simplify that motion to ‘the movement of particular things’ [relative to a notional absolute space and absolute time].  To view motion in terms of ‘what things do’ is a far simpler formulation of motion than had we suspended imposing the notions of absolute space and absolute time and allowed motion to be purely spatial relational (as in non-euclidian geometry of space).  Meanwhile, in understanding motion in terms of a transforming web of spatial relations, we would require a far more complex ‘language’ [i.e. a non-euclidian geometry-of-space language] to talk about it; a language in which motion would no longer depend on time; i.e. motion would be in terms of the transformation of spatial relations.

This ‘path not taken’ by science is the path preferred by Ernst Mach as in Mach’s principle of space-matter relativity, and by Nietzsche;

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

Now, you can see here, that there is this juncture in how we RE-PRESENT motion, either (a) in the absolute terms of ‘what things do’ as if within an absolute space and absolute time reference frame, or (b) in the relative terms of a transforming web of spatial-relations.

Furthermore, we shall need different language to talk about dynamics depending on whether we opt for the (a) or (b) RE-PRESENTATION of motion.   That is, we would need a language like the Amerindian languages if we opt for (b) since it keeps everything moving [in flux] and avoids hard dependency on ‘things-in-themselves’.  The Western doer-deed languages of noun, verb and predicate are meanwhile ideal for (a), in re-presentations of motion in terms of ‘what things do’.

If we make our choice and go down the path of (a), of re-presenting dynamic physical phenomena in terms of ‘what things do’, we are at the same time choosing a language with an architecture suited to re-presentations of the (a) type.   The fact that this language makes the dynamics of physical phenomena APPEAR much more explicit and specifiable than the dynamics of our intuition of movement sourced within a gravitational field [which is everywhere at the same time] wherein everything moves under everything’s simultaneous mutual influence.  That is, we are prone to taking the language based re-presentation of dynamics LITERALLY even though different languages capture only a reduced version of our experiencing of physical phenomena.  Poincaré’s reminder on this was that the physical phenomena of our experience are not dependent on the language we use to re-present them; e.g. a language such as our Western language which makes use of the notions of ‘things-in-themselves’ that inhabit a notional ‘absolute space’ and ‘absolute time’ reference frame.

“Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space ; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible.  Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself, are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics [the physical phenomena of our experience] ; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French.” – Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis

What we are forced to conclude here is that our standard language for re-presenting physical phenomena dynamics [mechanics] is not dealing with ‘reality’ but with an ‘idealization’ of reality based on using mathematics to match the ‘appearances’ of the dynamics, starting from idealized ‘things in themselves’ that move, NOT relative to one another, but relative to an idealized absolute space and absolute time reference frame.  This was Mach’s explicitly stated point [2]; that the laws of science deal with ‘appearances’ rather than with ‘reality’.  The production of wood products is commonly conceived of in terms of ‘what things do’; i.e. ‘what we, as skilled producers of wood products do’, what this formulation misses is that the forest is at the same time transformed; i.e. the larger view is in terms of transformation of the spatial relations we are included in.

Only recently have economists accepted that keeping track of ‘production’, the ‘what things do’ side of things, misses the fact that ‘production’ is more comprehensively seen in terms of the transformation of our habitat.  Economists have made a crude adjustment via the term/concept ‘externalities’ which alludes to unplanned ‘results’ of a production operation which is not in the accounting but which someone will ultimately bear the costs of [e.g. ‘pollution’, ‘over-grazing’ etc.].

A compounding complication of this choice of a simple language for re-presenting dynamics in terms of ‘what things do’ as if in an absolute space and absolute time reference frame, is our manner of social organizing that follows from this choice.  That is, organizing into sovereign state collectives that declare their ‘independent’ or ‘thing-in-itself’ status and the freedom to undertake ‘doer-deed’ actions in pursuit of the fulfilment of their own self-interest [their own ‘pursuit of happiness’] never happened in the stateless aboriginal communities and confederacies [Iroquois five nation confederacy] for a reason.  Their conceptualizing of the world dynamic, as captured in their language, did not conceive of dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ within a notional absolute space and absolute time reference frame. Their language, unlike our Western phonetic alphabet and noun-verb-predicate language,  incorporated the ‘complementarity’ or ‘conjugate habitat-inhabitant relational’ archetype for dynamics of relativity and quantum physics.  Dan Moonhawk Alford gives a good account of this ‘connection’ (see footnote [1]) and also an account of how such ideas are so BIG that many academics attack them out for the sole reason that they threaten to bring down the entire Western worldview;

“What are these academics so afraid of that they can’t face and contemplate and answer student’s questions about Whorf’s actual text? Why the smoke and mirrors? I suspect that they fear, and rightly so, that the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part, in fact, is at stake; or at least the superior attitude that often accompanies it. It may be a fear that what we’re culturally heir to is ‘just another worldview and its langscapes’ rather than exemplifying, as we tend to want to believe, eternal and universal human logic, which we’re simply ‘better at’ than people who speak other languages outside of the Indo-European language family. As John Lucy says, relativity “challenges assumptions which lie at the heart of much modern social and behavior research — namely its claim to be discovering general laws and to be truly scientific.”

The fact that language influences our approach to organization not only supports organizing into sovereign state collectives that declare their ‘independence’ or ‘thing-in-itself’ status and the freedom to undertake ‘doer-deed’ actions in pursuit of the fulfilment of their own self-interest [their own ‘pursuit of happiness’], the ‘corporation’ is a homologous organization wherein ‘pursuit of profit’ is the equivalent to ‘pursuit of happiness’.

In this view, these ‘communities’, the sovereigntist community and the corporatist community, are organized so as to behave as doer-deed machines [based on the view of dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ as if in an absolute space and absolute time reference frame].  In the case where dynamics are more realistically understood as the transformation of spatial relations, this is a recipe for disaster by way of ‘incoherence’.

David Bohm describes what happens when the thoughts that our language [which is re-presenting appearances rather than reality] delivers to us inform our behaviour in such a manner that we experience results that are nothing like the doer-deed results of our thought and language based mental models.

“People didn’t set up nations in order to suffer the way they’ve suffered — to suffer endless wars and hate and starvation and disease and annihilation and slavery and whatnot.  When they set up the nations it was not their intention to do that.  But that’s what has happened.  And it would inevitably happen.  The point is that people rarely look at the nation and ask , ‘what’s it all about?’  Rather, they say ‘at all costs we’ve got to go on with this nation, but we don’t want these consequences’.  And they struggle against the consequences while they keep on producing the situation.” – David Bohm, ‘Thought as a System’

Conclusion:

‘Science’ is a way of pursuing knowledge systematically that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions regarding the dynamic universe we live in.

Science needs a language to deliver its ‘understandings’ in, and the contention is that the requirement that the language be able to precisely and explicitly deliver the understandings has been over-riding the requirement that our experience be fully and faithfully captured in the re-presentations of science.

As a result, science, in order to preserve a ‘tongue’ or ‘langue’ that is explicit and precise in its re-presentations, has chosed to describe dynamics in terms of ‘what things do’ as if this activity transpires in an absolute fixed, empty and infinite space and absolute time reference frame [x,y,z,t reference frame].   This precision and these powers of predication come at some sacrifice of reality; e.g. the predictions are portrayed in terms of the results of ‘what things do’ which does not comprehend the more comprehensive experienced reality of dynamics that are in terms of how the habitat in which these doer-deed inhabitant activities are transpiring in, is transforming.  As Marshall McLuhan observed, science can tell us all about the machinery of its applications in terms of what everything does and what the doer-deed result will be; e.g. science can tell us all about how to manufacture Cadillacs or Cornflakes, but it does not begin to inform us as to how our relations with one another and our habitat are transforming in our implementing of scientific applications.

There is a problem here in that the scientific way of understanding that has been the very foundation of Western civilization is a rising source of incoherence.  So long as we stick with the scientific method in our attempts at resolving the dissonances of this incoherence, we shall only exacerbate the problem.  Miring us further in this incoherence is the  powerful matrix of living ‘icons’ of Western civilization whose high and richly rewarded and privileged status would be radically altered by a collapse of belief in the scientific tenets of Western civilization.  Yet we are at a point of ‘revision’ of our understanding wherein, as Dan Moonhawk Alford observes:

“…  the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part, in fact, is at stake.”

Western civilization is running on the flywheel effect of ‘pride’ as Alford suggests, and on the flywheel effect of the matrix of power constituted by the differentially respected, rewarded, privileged and empowered icons of this civilization.

* * *

[1] Excerpt from; The legacy of Benjamin Whorf  [by Dan Moonhawk Alford, MIT linguist]

http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm

What if you had intimations of an idea SO BIG that it took a highly improbable international combination of people interested in consciousness and cognition issues — quantum physicists, field linguists, Native American philosophers and others — to figure out whether it had any validity? And what if the consensus of that group was that it was important for cross-cultural understanding? As we saw in Chapter Five, the perhaps most lasting achievement of disciplinary synthesis that Benjamin Whorf created, which he called the “principle of linguistic relativity” on taking it back from Einstein, has in the 1990s been de facto validated by just such a historic meeting and dialogue.

This principle, seen now as a century-long dialogue between physics and linguistics, occurs at the place where they agree, using complementarity or respect thinking, quantum logic instead of English logic — and it’s at exactly THAT principled intersection, which had never happened before, where Native American philosophers could finally join in dialogue and find Westerners for the first time in 500 years who would actually listen to their words, their insights, their langscapes [languagescapes] and worldviews; as a result, all participants then began to explore together, after appropriate rituals, the logic and worldview of the nounless quantum (spirit) realm, and went away with very special new relationships.

Yet it is this very linguistic relativity principle, this pivotal stage on which such history has happened, arbitrarily renamed a hypothesis⁽²⁾ by many social scientists, presumably “so as to be better tested,” that has sparked the amazingly acrimonious debate, name-calling, and strawman argumentation that’s gone on, until recently, during the five decades since the publication of Whorf’s collected articles by M.I.T. Press.

Worse yet, the debate itself, their own Hypothesis Hoax, is all that most social scientists and their textbooks ever focus on, not the principle that underlies it. Students are urged to learn the intricacies of the debate from all the current and historical players — although a close reading of Whorf himself — in the original, in English — is not necessarily specifically encouraged. And that’s the education that most students get in the social sciences about this topic, unless they actually dig deeper on their own — which they may be discouraged from doing because, they’re told, they’ll just be ‘wasting their time’ on a dead issue. At least, I was.

What are these academics so afraid of that they can’t face and contemplate and answer student’s questions about Whorf’s actual text? Why the smoke and mirrors? I suspect that they fear, and rightly so, that the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part, in fact, is at stake; or at least the superior attitude that often accompanies it. It may be a fear that what we’re culturally heir to is ‘just another worldview and its langscapes’ rather than exemplifying, as we tend to want to believe, eternal and universal human logic, which we’re simply ‘better at’ than people who speak other languages outside of the Indo-European language family. As John Lucy says, relativity “challenges assumptions which lie at the heart of much modern social and behavior research — namely its claim to be discovering general laws and to be truly scientific.”⁽³⁾

David Abram eloquently shows in The Spell of the Sensuous that we long ago disqualified ourselves from claiming anything ‘universal’ as a culture when we adopted phonetic alphabets, which shifted the locus of ‘interaction with the world’ from Nature to the printed page — thereby also transforming air into something empty instead of the inescapable medium of all speech interactions and all life. All the more reason then that we must now listen to the indigenous voices of those who have resisted our cultural attitudes, and who come as speakers from languages with different cognitive structures than our own, which has become so divorced and alienated from Nature.

Whorf was the only linguist of his time who understood the advances in modern physics well enough to understand that physicists had stolen the fire from the philosophy of language camp; he staked his claim and tried to take it back. He knew enough about Hopi to know that, in its proclivity of turning our propositions about things into propositions about events, its structure is more congenial to describing quantum eventings than are the structures of Western languages; in his writings he suggested Hopi as a human language candidate, a real life example, that would demonstrate the quantum logic of nounless realities perplexing physicists. Although Hopi itself has not been considered as yet in the Science Dialogues (because we have had as yet no native Hopi speakers as participants), the addition of Athapaskan, Siouan and Algonquian languages to the ‘quantum language list’ at the Science Dialogues and elsewhere are independent evidence that Whorf was substantially on the right track.

[2] Excerpt from Chapter IV.  [The Formal Development of Mechanics], Section IV. [The Economy of Science], from Mach’s ‘The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of its Development’

http://ia700204.us.archive.org/9/items/scienceofmechani005860mbp/scienceofmechani005860mbp.pdf

tranquil image of a continually transforming space; fixed operating theatre for human dynamics?

All my philosophical investigations have led me back to ‘the mathematics of belief’; to the type of ‘reason’ and ‘logic’ we use to ‘make sense’ of our experiencing of the world, and in the case of Western civilization, to ‘bury reality’ beneath it.

Mathematics derives from symmetries and our sensory experience reveals to us two different types of symmetries that I will call the type 1. symmetry -‘fluid-conjugate-nonlocal’ as in the spherical-radial symmetry of the bubble that forms when we exhale under water.  The ‘form’ of the bubble arises from the conjugate relational between outside-inward force and inside-outward force as is evident from the expansion of the bubble as it rises towards the surface, a changing outside-inward force that we ‘feel’ by way of our sensory experience.  In other words, the growing or shrinking ‘form’ is not the primary phenomena, the primary phenomena is the pervasive tendency in nature to seek balance between outside-inward and inside-outward forces.  Convection cells are a kind of ‘archetypeal’ exemplar for this innate-in-nature balance-seeking.

Now, in the above description I used the word ‘force’ where I would normally use the word ‘pressure’ [force per unit area] to facilitate comparison with the type 2. symmetry -‘solid-oppositional-local’ as in the bilateral symmetry in the human body or the cylindrical symmetry of a tree [the tree has ‘radial symmetry’ in a flat planar cross-section].  While the ‘forces’ in operation in the development of plants and animals [e.g. humans] have been the topic of philosophical argument; e.g. Lamarck and Nietzsche contend that such development or ‘evolution’ arises from a ‘fluid-process’ where ‘endosmosis’ [outside-inward flow] and ‘exosmosis’ [inside-outward flow] are in conjugate relation.    This is consistent with the view that the world dynamic is ‘transformation’ of what is ‘in place’ as seems to make sense with the fact that the biosphere persists in spherical shape and volume while the forms within it, including human forms are in a continual flow of genesis and degeneration.  That is, genesis and degeneration are dual aspects of the one primary dynamic of transformation of spatial-relations.

But my intention is to first recall the basic symmetries in nature that are foundational to reason and logic, so at this point the only thing we need note is that there is a type 2. symmetry which is ‘local’, where things extend in mirror image outward from a local central axis (bilateral or mirror symmetry).  The cylindrical symmetry of the tree is kind of halfway between type 1. and type 2. but I have included it in type 2. because of the common sense that a tree develops outward from its centre, rather than being like the type 1. bubble, the forces underlying its growth/development being ‘nonlocal’ as is the case for ‘fluid dynamics’ in general.  That is to say, in the case of the development of the bubble-form,  the visual appearance is at odds with the actual development forces; it APPEARS as if ‘the bubble is doing the growing’ but the ‘bubble-form’ arises from the tendency in nature for outside-inward accommodating and inside-outward asserting forces to attain and sustain balance.

From these two types of symmetries, two different forms of logic arise that are available to support our ‘reasoning’.

Our sensory experience, which is the sole source that allows us to invent logical ways of conceptualizing ‘reality’, informs us of the outside-inward influence that resists or receptively accommodates our movements such as the expansion of our chest in breathing when we dive deep into the water.   We do not need to ‘see’ a bubble expand in order to ‘feel’ this simultaneous conjugate relation of outside-inward accommodating and inside-outward asserting influences.  We can feel it as well in climbing a mountain.

But if we start with our visual sensing experience rather than our experience of feeling inclusion in something, can start with imagery in which ‘forms’ in the plural, different forms that we can ‘enumerate’ are visible.   A ‘form’ is a ‘local entity’ and we can develop Aristotelian logic based on our sighting of it; i.e. it seems to make sense to say that the form is a material entity that ‘exists’ or ‘does not exist’, ‘is’ or ‘is not’.  This imputing of ‘logical existence’ to a visible local material ‘form’ gives it a ‘persisting identity’ that we can attach a label to, such as ‘Katrina’ [as we do in the case of hurricanes].  This logic of persisting identity [of ‘is’ versus ‘is not’ existence] is the popular choice of logic to undergird Western ‘reasoning’.  If we let ‘K’ stand for Katrina, this logic says that it is impossible for K to equal not.K; i.e. there is no ‘third thing’, ‘L’ that is, at the same time, equal to ‘K’ and at the same time to ‘not.K’, hence Aristotelian logic is ‘the logic of the excluded third’. 

So, that’s what our ‘visual perception of persisting local forms’ allows to do, to invent the logic of the excluded third, the logic that assigns persisting ‘identity’ to a visual form.

Of course, in a fluid dynamical space such as the flow of the atmosphere, ‘forms’ are purely relative; i.e. they are continually transforming spatial relations as in type 1. symmetry.  Their development and persistence is nonlocal and the sense of ‘localness’ or ‘local existence’ that we may associate with the visual imagery is something we impose on the visual image by its closed form symmetry; e.g. we can ‘impute’ a local centre to any ‘closed form’ symmetry.

Does symmetry exist before we observe it?  Is the symmetry ‘out there’ as a property of the object we are observing?  Or is symmetry ‘in here’ in the psyche of the observer who then imposes it on what is ‘out there’? 

using 'idealization' to 'correct' the senses in constructing reality.

Does the ‘triangle’ that intersects with the three circular black objects ‘exist’ ‘out there’ or does it exist firstly ‘in here’ in our minds and we impose it on ‘out there’?   Does the form of anything exist ‘out there’ since the lines and surfaces we use to ‘give it form’ seem to be a function of our ‘macro-viewing’ and if we use a microscope and then an electron microscope these ‘apparently’ continuous form-lines break up and become a kind of ‘connect-the-atomic-dots’ puzzle where the previously discrete distinction between the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ of the object becomes blurry and problematic.

Maybe this question of mutual exclusion of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is a false dichotomy.

That is, in the case of the ‘symmetry of our feeling experience’ when we dive into the water, the outside-inward accommodating that is in conjugate relation with our inside-outward asserting  is impossible to convey in a visual image.  In our ‘feeling experience’, the question of ‘is it in here’ or ‘is it out there’ does not arise since such ‘feeling’ is inherently ‘relative’ or ‘relational’, arising from the conjugate spatial-relational dynamic of ‘in here’ and ‘out there’. 

This was Henri Poincaré’s point in his public argument with Bertrand Russell; i.e. Poincaré argued that one cannot use the word ‘perception’ as Russell did, as if we knew what it meant, because ‘visual perception’ and ‘feeling experience’ are different forms of perception.   As Poincaré further observed, the ‘objects’ that come to us through our visual sensing, that we construe to be ‘local material objects’ of the ‘is’ rather than ‘is not’ persisting identity type, become possibilities thanks to the notion of absolute space, space that is fixed, empty and infinite [Euclidian space], a space that does not participate in the dynamic behaviour [development, motion, interaction] of ‘local material objects’.

This ‘absolute’, non-participating space reference frame, is what makes it possible to speak of the development and activity of these ‘local objects/organisms/systems’ as if this development and activity belonged to these ‘things-in-themselves’.   But this absolute space is an arbitrary ‘reference-space-framing-concept’ we impose on the data of our sensory experiencing, and it is the simplest of such ‘geometric spaces’ in the manner that a polynomial of degree one is simpler than a polynomial of degree two [Poincaré].  In a spherical space, there is no such concept as ‘local’ and everything is framed by everything else in that space, by the web of spatial-relations it is situationally included in.  This is arguably like the space of the earth’s biosphere, and in this space we cannot realistically speak in terms of ‘things moving’ or of ‘things growing/developing’ because in a web of spatial relations there can only be ‘transformation’ of those spatial relations.

In such a space, ‘the genesis of things’, the ‘degeneration of things’ are no longer possible, genesis and degeneration are dual aspects of the one dynamic of transformation.  In such a space, there is similarly no ‘growth’ and no ‘decline’ just as there is no ‘creation’ and no ‘elimination’, nor is there ‘movement’ or ‘stasis’, since all these words depend upon the persisting existence of local objects, and in spherical space, dynamics can refer only to ‘transformation of spatial relations’.

Nietzsche’s world view was one which assumed we live in a transformational space and that we (our Western scientific culture) had confounded ourselves by letting ourselves, our understanding and our behaviour, be informed by our ‘scientific reasoning’ based on over-simplistic Aristotelian logic of the excluded third, the logic that supports the ‘local existence of material objects’, a logic that builds from the assumed ‘reality’ of visual sensing that separates ‘in here’ from’ out there’ and that we allow to over-ride our ‘feeling experience’ wherein ‘in here’ and ‘out there’ are in conjugate relation, making ‘visible form’ secondary, as in the bubbles from our exhalations following our dive into watery depths, that seem to ‘grow’ as they rise towards the surface rises.  Meanwhile it is not that ‘these local form grow’, it is that the evolution of form is the conjugate relation between endosmosis [outside-inward accommodating flow-pressure] and exosmosis [inside-outward asserting flow-pressure]. 

While the logic of the excluded third [Aristotelian logic] associates with the simplest of all geometries of space [Euclidian], the logic of transformation that associates with curved/spherical space is the ‘logic of the INCLUDED third’ where self ‘S’ and other ‘O’ are two VISUALLY different ‘inhabitants’ that are both, at the same time, equal to a ‘third’ entity, namely, ‘H’ (habitat).  This third ‘H’ entity,  ‘habitat’, is the ‘not.S’ and ‘not.O’ space that includes them both, in the manner that the flow of the atmosphere includes hurricanes ‘S’ally and ‘O’scar.

As it turns out, physicists ‘split’ on whether to conceive of space as an energy-charged plenum in which local material objects should be conceived of as ‘excitations’ of the spatial-plenum or as ‘things-in-themselves’.   The physicists who favoured the former, Mach, Poincaré, Bohm, Schroedinger ‘lost out’ to those who favoured the latter [see http://goodshare.org/wp/transformation-where-production-and-destruction-are-conjugates/ ] so that ‘science’ and ‘the scientific viewpoint’, as it shapes our world view, continues to be grounded in the absolutes of local material existence.

Nietzsche, who was greatly influenced by the works of his contemporary Ernst Mach, explained how scientific thinking based on Aristotelian logic and its idealizations of absolute non-participating space inhabited by absolute local materially existing objects/organisms, was confounding our minds and actions so as to infuse dysfunction into our shared living space.  Nietzsche made the following points;

I. The world dynamic is transformational

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

II. Our ‘subjectifying’ language facilitates the isolating of dynamic flow-forms as ‘things-in-themselves’ with ‘their own in-their-own-right behaviours’;

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

III. ‘Reason’ based on the local existence of material objects is ‘appearance’ not ‘truth’.

“Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one [available to our visual sensing]: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

IV.  Being unable to affirm and deny ‘existence’ is ‘our inability’, not a ‘fact of life’; i.e. our inability to say whether visible forms are ‘out there’ or ‘in here’.

“We are unable to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: this is a subjective empirical law, not the expression of any “necessity” but only of an inability.

If, according to Aristotle, the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the ultimate and most basic, upon which every demonstrative proof rests, if the principle of every axiom lies in it; then one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions already lie at the bottom of it. Either it asserts something about. actuality, about being, as if one already knew this from another source; that is, as if opposite attributes could not be ascribed to it. Or the proposition means: opposite attributes should not be ascribed to it. In that case, logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us.

In short, the question remains open: are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept “reality,” for ourselves.?–To affirm the former one would, as already said, have to have a previous knowledge of being–which is certainly not the case. The proposition therefore contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true.

Supposing there were no self-identical “A”, such as is presupposed by every proposition of logic (and of mathematics), and the “A” were already mere appearance, then logic would have a merely apparent world as its condition. In fact, we believe in this proposition under the influence of ceaseless experience which seems continually to confirrn it. The “thing”–that is the real substratum of “A”; our belief in things is the precondition of our belief in logic. The “A” of logic is, like the atom, a reconstruction of the thing–If we do not grasp this, but make of logic a criterion of true being, we are on the way to positing as realities all those hypostases: substance, attribute, object, subject, action, etc.; that is, to conceiving a metaphysical world, that is, a “real world” (–this, however, is the apparent world once more–).

The very first acts of thought, affirmation and denial, holding true and holding not true, are, in as much as they presuppose, not only the habit of holding things true and holding them not true, but a right to do this, already dominated by the belief that we can gain possession of knowledge, that judgments really can hit upon the truth;–in short, logic does not doubt its ability to assert something about the true-in-itself (namely, that it cannot have opposite attributes).

Here reigns the coarse sensualistic prejudice that sensations teach us truths about things–that I cannot say at the same time of one and the same thing that it is hard and that it is soft. (The instinctive proof “I cannot have two opposite sensations at the same time”–quite coarse and false.)

The conceptual ban on contradiction proceeds from the belief that we are able to form concepts, that the concept not only designates the essence of a thing but comprehends it–In fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) applies only to fictitious entities that we have created. Logic is the attempt to comprehend the actual world by means of a scheme of being posited by ourselves; more correctly, to make it formulatable and calculable for us—“ —Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 516 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888)

V.   ‘Transformation’ is ‘nonlocal’ in origin as in field-effects [gravity is everywhere at the same time] and can be visualized by ‘inference’; i.e. as from a continually transforming web of spatial relations.  Evolution thus seen is Lamarckian not Darwinian;

“Anti-Darwinism.. — The utility of an organ does not explain its origin; on the contrary! For most of the time during which a property is forming it does not preserve the individual and it is of no use to him, least of all in the struggle with external circumstances and enemies.

What, after all, is “useful”? One must ask “useful in relation to what?” E.g., that which is useful for the long life of the individual might be unfavorable to its strength and splendour; that which preserves the individual might at the same time arrest and halt its evolution. On the other hand, a ‘deficiency’, a ‘degeneration’, can be of the highest utility in so far as it acts as a stimulant to other organs. In the same way, a state of need can be a condition of existence, in so far as it reduces an individual to that measure of expenditure that holds it together but prevents it from squandering itself. —The individual itself as a struggle between parts (for food, space etc.): its evolution tied to the victory or predominance of individual parts, to an atrophy, a ‘becoming an organ’ of other parts.

The influence of “external circumstances” is overestimated by Darwin to a ridiculous extent: the essential thing in the life process is precisely the tremendous shaping, form-creating force working from within which ‘utilizes’ and ‘exploits’ “external circumstances” — The new forms molded from within are not formed with an end in view; but in the struggle of the parts a new form is not left long without being related to a partial usefulness and then, according to its use, develops itself more and more completely.” – Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 647

~^~

The above points made by Nietzsche are, in their main import, the same understandings that have emerged from my own philosophical investigations, and they put Nietzsche/myself ‘at odds’ with the popular, globally dominating ‘Western’ world view which is grounded in the idealized ‘existence’ of local material objects and dynamics understood in terms of ‘the doer-deed [cause-effect] actions’ of these local material existences [material bodies, organisms, system].

If our experience ‘starts’ from a dive in the ocean and this sense of inclusion in a spatial-medium so that our actions are not one-sidedly sourced from within us, but arise as a conjugate relation between outside-inward accommodating influence and inside-outward asserting influence, this informs us that the shaping of ‘material forms’ derives from the dynamics of the spatial medium [habitat-dynamic] as much as it derives from the inside-outward asserting tendencies of the ‘inhabitants’ of the spatial medium.  Once we allow that dynamic forms are ‘relative’ rather than absolute, our understanding of ‘dynamics’ is in terms of the ‘transformation’ of spatial relations.

But once we go beyond understanding ‘visual forms’ as ‘appearances’ and instead assume as ‘reality’, the absolute local existence of material objects/organisms/systems, then in one fell stroke, we impute the sourcing of dynamics to these inhabitants of the habitat, reducing the ‘habitat’ to a non-participating ‘theatre of operations’, an idealized x,y,z,t reference frame that allows us to ‘measure’ the shape of the material objects as local beings and to ‘measure’ their growth and decline; i.e. ‘THEIR’ evolution and ‘THEIR’ behavioural dynamics.

Try these flip in understanding a few times, from transformational space where inhabitants are relational forms to absolute space inhabited by absolute locally existing material inhabitants.  It can be likened to flipping from a curved space reference frame to a rectangular space reference frame.   The former relates to the latter in the manner that a polynomial of degree two relates to a polynomial of degree one [Poincaré].  In other words, as tools to help us understand our self and the world we live in, if we start from the former, it includes as a special case, the latter, but if we start from the latter, it blinds us to any awareness of the former.  If we started from the latter in the case of the forms known as ‘hurricanes’, by imputing to them their own source of local development and behaviour, we would blinder ourselves to the reality of the nonlocal, non-visible, non-material [energy-charged spatial-plenum based] sourcing, not only of the development and dynamical behaviour of the material forms, but of the emergence of the material forms.

Given that our Western culture opted to equate visual appearances, as in ‘local material objects’ to ‘reality’, it followed as a ‘logical necessity’ [to sustain logical consistency or non-contradiction] to explain ‘dynamics’ not as emerging from the transformation of an energy-charged spatial plenum, but, since absolute local material ‘parts’ imply absolute non-part-icipating space, as associating with the dynamical behaviour of the local material objects/organisms/systems [corporations, sovereign states etc.].  That is, once absolute local material beings are assumed, it follows as a logical necessity to explain dynamic phenomena in terms of the ‘behaviours of things-in-themselves’, and to ‘pull this off’, it was necessary to invent the concept of ‘force’ as an answer to the question ‘what is the source of change?’, or ‘why does the world unfold the way it does?

When we invent ‘force’ as an answer to this question, in the case where we assume that space is a non-participant and all dynamical behaviour derives from the actions/interactions of local material objects/organisms/systems, ‘force’ is also an ‘absolute’ concept in the sense that it ‘originates locally out of nowhere’ as an assertive directional ‘push’.   This contradicts our sensory experience of diving into the water and feeling ‘force’ as a relative outside-inward — inside-outward conjugate relation.  This agrees with Newton’s third law wherein ‘every asserting force encounters an equal and opposite resisting force’; i.e. ‘forces’ seem to come in ‘conjugate pairs’. 

In the relational space of our experience it is impossible to split apart the assertive and accommodating aspects of force.  In logic and mathematics, it is perfectly possible to do so.  Mathematical physics does it by inventing two types of energy; ‘potential energy’ [the ‘energy of position’ within an everywhere-at-the-same-time force-field] and ‘kinetic energy’ [the ‘energy of motion of material objects’].   The principle of ‘conservation of energy’ decrees that while energy can transform into many different forms, heat, light, loading of springs [compression and expansion], the sum of potential and kinetic energy is always a constant.  This principle is recognized in modern as well as classical physics.

The force that breaks the body of the mouse that nibbles on the peanut butter on the mousetrap trigger appears to be ‘locally sourced’ in the trap machine, but in fact, it derives from the unloading of potential energy that accrued from activity in the remote past.  Mathematical physics is not concerned with influences deriving from the ‘remote past’.  Mathematical physics assumes that the present depends only on the immediate past; i.e. we look for the cause of the death of the mouse in the immediate past and that force of the blow from the metal bar striking the mouse is deemed to be ‘the cause of the mouse’s death’.   The person who ‘charged the spring’ in the trap months before is in the clear, as far as the ‘cause’ of the ‘result’ is concerned in ‘scientific reasoning’.

“Origin of Mathematical Physics.  Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics.  We recognise at the outset that the efforts of scientists have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by our experience into a large number of elementary phenomena. And to do this in three different ways : first, with respect to time. Instead of taking into account the progressive development of a phenomenon as a whole, we simply seek to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We assert that the present state of the world depends only on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the memory of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down “its differential equation” ; for the laws of Kepler, we substitute the laws of Newton.”  —  Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Ch. ‘Hypotheses in Physics’, subsection “Origin of Mathematical Physics”

The stored energy of space is thus an invisible source of influence that is ignored in scientific thinking of the mathematical physics type that is in common use since scientific reasoning concerns itself with ‘what things do’ from moment to moment, where things are those visible forms that we impute absolute local material existence to. 

Thus ‘force’ is a concept that answers the question ‘what is the sourcing influence of the changes we see in terms of the developing of forms and THEIR behaviour dynamics? [actions of things and interactions between/amongst things].   This visualizing of change is in terms of ‘time’; i.e. the difference between the present state of the world and the state that ‘existed’ in the immediate past.   This is the definition of the mathematical operation of ‘differentiation’ [ds/dt] which is fundamental to mathematical physics and scientific thinking.  This concept depends upon the notion of ‘absolutes states of existence’ and sees the world dynamic in terms of a time-based ‘PROGRESSION’ from one ‘state of existence’ to the next ‘state of existence’.  Underlying this notion of the world dynamic is the assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’.

Consider the case of the surface temperature [temperature is defined as the average kinetic energy of molecules] on the surface of the earth.   We know from experience that air temperature is moderated by melting lumps of ice since melting absorbs thermal energy from ‘the surroundings’.  Glaciers and permafrost melting due to ambient air temperature lower the temperature of the air relative to what it would otherwise be (due to thermal energy infusions from direct and indirect solar irradiance and retarded releases from thermal energy stored in ocean waters etc.). 

Glaciers and permafrost have generally been ‘deposited’ in the remote (very remote) past, but so long as they persist and melt, like the block of ice in our ice-box, they continue to moderate air temperature, less so as the surface area of ice diminishes.  Thus the air temperature and surface temperatures we measure in the present are moderated directly out of the remote past.  Therefore, a theory of ‘climate change’ based on the present proportions of different gases that make up the atmosphere, which claims that changes in these proportions will immediately translate into changes in surface temperature, assume that the present temperature depends only on the immediate past.  But as just stated, the temperature is being directly influenced from out of the remote past [the deposition of glaciers and permafrost] so that if the contents of the atmosphere remained exactly the same, the graph of surface temperature would still be rising and falling due to events coming from the remote past, which are in fact, contributing to the varying content of the atmosphere; e.g. warming ocean waters release more CO2, while cooling ocean waters precipitate more ‘carbonates’ [limestone etc].

The linear model predictions of ‘anthropogenic global warming’ (AGW) are an example of this simplifying assumption that the present depends only on the immediate past, and gives rise to the usual split between those that acknowledge that physical phenomena are more complex in ‘reality’ than models based on ‘what things do’ that are founded on the assumption that the present state of the world depends only on the immediate past, an assumption that allows predictive modeling by way of differential equations.

The point is that the world dynamic seen in terms of ‘what things do’ is focused solely, one-sidedly, on the realm of ‘material kinetics’ or ‘kinetic energy’ based phenomena, and this ignores the role of potential energy [energy-stored-in-space] and conversions between the two.  Imagine if an inuit grandmother had cached supplies including food, water, snowshoes, rifles and ammunition in a number of shelters/caches across the Yukon as she and her husband migrated across it, and many years later, the grandson ‘crossed the Yukon’, his ‘assertive action’ [kinetics] being nurtured and even orchestrated by the caches, whose locations he had been informed of.  In the end, we say that ‘he crossed the Yukon’ because our description of dynamics is in one-sided terms of ‘what things do’. 

The colonizing settlers could never have crossed the North American continent without nurturance from ‘caches’ in the form of aboriginal communities, stashed in various locations since the remote past, but in the end we speak in terms of ‘what people do’ as if their behaviour were locally originating in themselves, driven and directed from out of their own internal processes.  We speak of the son’s assertive achievements but the energy expended by the mother in terms of loading the space with potentials nurtures and amplifies the assertive kinetics of the son, bringing him rewards and recognition for his ‘assertive achievements’ (kinetic cause-effect results).  It is impossible, in reality, to speak of the ‘actions of the son’ out of the context of the accommodating quality of the space his actions transpired in since the two are dual aspects of a single dynamic called ‘transformation’.  As Mach’s principle says; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”  The mother is conditioning the dynamics of the habitat, charging it with potentials [feathering the nest] to make it more nurturing for the emergence and development of assertive potentialities of her offspring or the cuckoo egg chicks, neighbour kids or etc. 

Conclusion:

The above discussion describes how we use visual sensing [images] and language and logic, together, to synthetically split out and ‘subjectize’ dynamic forms-in-the-flow [excitations in the energy-charged spatial-plenum] such as a ‘hurricane’ and/or a ‘human form’.

Our sensory ‘feeling’ experience, which informs us of our inclusion in a transforming spatial-relational dynamic, we allow to be over-ridden [as informant to our behaviour] by a Fiktional reality based on visual ‘appearances’ wherein we mentally re-render the world dynamic in terms of the actions/interactions of apparently ‘locally-existing-in-themselves material objects/organisms/systems’.

One we have assumed a ‘foundation’ of absolute existence of material objects within an absolute-space-operating-theatre, logical consistency requires us to come up with a schema for locally sourcing dynamic behaviour (developing of form and movement of forms) of local material objects/organisms/systems.   This has been achieved by way of the concept of ‘force’ as a locally arising answer to the ‘loaded’ questions; ‘what is causing this form to undergo change’ and ‘what is making this form move and/or interacting with other forms’.   The questions are ‘loaded’ because they already assume that ‘things move’ rather than ‘space transforms’.   This idealized ‘force’ is the enabler of formulating dynamics in terms of Newton’s laws and is also the enabler of Darwinian theory [in the form of a notional internally arising ‘will-force’ or ‘purpose-force’ to notionally drive behaviour from the inside-outward and to provide the motive force for notional internal ‘genes’ to drive ‘growth’ and ‘development’ from the inside-outward].  Together with the subjectifying powers of language and the discretizing powers of Aristotelian logic, this amounts to the anointing of ‘appearances’ as ‘truth’, and casting out, in the process the ‘greater reality’ of a ‘transformational space’, the all-connecting medium of energy-charged spatial-plenum, the source of not only of the development and movement of dynamic forms but of their excitation/gathering and re-gathering within the transforming spatial flow-plenum.

The prior essay in this series shows how, in all areas of our Western civilization (Economics, History, Justice, Biology, Physics, Medicine and Reason/Logic are given as exemplars) we are experiencing ‘collapse’ or ‘breakdown’ due to the incompetence of foundational assumptions (i.e. in the foundational assumption that the world dynamic can be understood in terms of ‘what things do’, rather than in terms of ‘transformation’).

Since I believe in the ‘reality’ I am presenting in these essays, I have been asked on numerous occasions what ‘I’ am doing about this impending collapse of Western civilization, and what I ‘propose’ that we all should do about it, and I would say; ‘welcome it’, ‘celebrate it’, ‘help it arrive gracefully’, ‘be a mitigator of panic’, share a view of dynamics as transformation wherein all opposites are imposters; e.g. ‘destruction/production’, ‘degeneration/genesis’, ‘growth/decline’, ‘up/down’, ‘left/right’, ‘good/evil’ since ‘transformation’ within a relational space is the ‘real’ world dynamic that transcends the ‘apparent’ dynamics that jumpstart from language-and-logic-subjectified ‘visible forms’.

Such understanding constitutes a resurrecting into public awareness of ‘reality’ that we have buried beneath subjectified materialist ‘appearances’ [in the Western culture] for two-and-a-half millennia.  Reality has lain buried beneath a superficial understanding of the world dynamic in terms of ‘what things do’ [‘cause-and-effect’] and this ‘confusing of idealization for reality’ has spawned a Western civilization dynamic that has oriented one-sidedly to ‘making things happen’, assertively achieving as if the material results attained were ‘real’ rather than ‘appearances’.   As McLuhan pointed out, the material production of our machines [whether they produce Cadillacs or Cornflakes] matters little; what matters is the transforming of our relations with one another and with our living space.

A great self-imposed weight that some philosophers have called ‘the burden of concreteness’ [from the subjectifying powers of language and the discretizing powers of logic] is being ‘let go’ and we all stand to benefit from ‘letting it go’, both as individuals and as a collective [that includes the fourlegged, winged, finned and rooted ones, rivers and sky etc.].   I would compare it to driving in the flow of the freeway and struggling to get through the maze in order to attain our personal destination, … and then re-visualizing ourselves as being participants in the evolving of a web of spatial relations, understanding our actions as transforming the spatial-relational web so as to open up spatial-possibility corridors to accommodate our assertive movements.  This has a certain ‘feel’ to it that is naturally pleasing, this feeling of ‘co-cultivating and sustaining harmonious flow in the continuing present’.  The anxieties over time-based assertive achievement aka ‘progress’ become secondary in this collective consciousness mode.  It is a natural mode of behaving within a transforming relational space as described in Mach’s principle; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”   

But what will happen to our banks that keep currency flowing in the arteries that feed our organs [organizations] and what will happen to the sovereigntist government control centres through which we sustain order by central direction and control, and what will happen to our corporations that are the primary causal agents of material production?

Who knows and what does it matter anyway?  These are the artefacts of our Western ‘belief system’ that has been confusing ‘appearances’ that we have ‘idealized’ with language and logic [into notional local material systems notionally equipped with 'their own' assertive/productive dynamics] and are ‘mistaking for reality’.   The ‘reality’ of our natural [fullblown, not just visual] sensory experience is a ‘reality’ that is in no way a materialist ‘doer-deed reality’ but is instead a spatial-relationally transforming dynamic in which we are included participants, —‘ripples/excitations in the energy-charged spatial-plenum’ in Bohm and Schroedinger’s terms.

The materialist-illusion-born-of-confusion is in collapse.  Vive la résurrection! [de la réalité]

 * * *

'Production' is a concept that ignores its own conjugate, 'destruction'

Would you want to know the source of major dysfunction in the world? … even if it challenged the foundational assumptions/beliefs of your culture?

To hear what it is is one thing, to assimilate it and to let your behaviour be informed by it is quite another, since it is like whipping out from beneath your feet, the ground you have been standing on.  My experience is that many people ‘hear it’ but promptly ignore it because it is ‘just too big an adjustment’ to make ‘on your own’, unless everyone else is making it with you, therefore, almost no-one makes it.

The ‘error’ in our cultural assumptions crops up all over the place.  It is troubling our sciences of medicine and biology.  It is troubling our justice system, economics, politics, history and geography and theology.  I will briefly discuss how this same problem is cropping up in each of these areas and show how it is ‘the same problem’ in all cases.

First, what is the problem?

In the above photograph of a Timber company’s log holding yard, the economist would speak of this as ‘inventory’ and speak of the Timber company’s ‘production’ of ‘product’.

The issue is with this notion of ‘production’.  There is transformation [of the space we live in] going on here, to be sure, and in transformation, production and destruction are dual aspects of the one dynamic of transformation.  If we seek to ‘increase production’, we, at the same time ‘increase destruction’.

There is no such thing as ‘production’-in-its-own-right, there is only ‘transformation’.   The notion of ‘genesis’ without its conjugate partner ‘degeneration’ is religious idealization (e.g. Genesis 1:28).

As Nietzsche has pointed out [1], language (our abstract phonetic language) has the power of subjectification, the power to make ‘beings’ out of anything we assign a word to, after which we can append a verb and predicate to make it appear as if the linguistic-artefact ‘being’ is the author.  After observing a convection cell in a flowing medium, because it has a persisting form even though it is a feature within a continually transforming flow, we use language to ‘subjectize’ it and call it a ‘hurricane’, after which, our language further allows us to append a verb and/or a predicate making it APPEAR in our minds, as if the word-thing is the author of the action and the result; e.g. Katrina is producing giant surf along the Gulf Coast.  Katrina is wreaking destruction on the city of New Orleans.  Katrina is growing, intensifying, moving north, weakening, dissipating.   The word ‘hurricane’ and/or ‘Katrina’ impress on our minds the ‘local sourcing of dynamic behaviour’ when the reality is that the sourcing is inherently nonlocal, as characterizes ‘transformation’.  The fluid-flow of the atmosphere when exposed to solar irradiance is ‘thermally energized’ and erupts in pimples or convection cells born to re-establish thermal energy balance.   These pimples are in no way ‘things-in-themselves’ and the notion that they are ‘producing effects’ is ‘Fiktion’ or ‘appearances’.

There is nothing in the ‘thing-in-itself’ category; i.e. ‘local, visible, material objects/organisms/systems’ that is capable ‘producing’ anything because there are no ‘things-in-themselves’ in spite of language’s ability to ‘make it seems so’.   The universe is, according to the persisting inquiries of physics, a continually transforming energy-charged spatial plenum.

[As a bookmark or footnote [Since the quest for brevity does not permit exploring this in this essay] please note the important point that Mach and Schroedinger both distanced themselves from what they called ‘The Church of Science’ because the majority concensus of physicists trying to understand ‘relativity’ and ‘quantum physics’ chose to retain the notion of ‘local material things-in-themselves’ as the foundations of the world dynamic, even though they had to ‘cloak’ such discreteness in a ‘probability cloud’, rather than to concede the relational/transformational nature of the world dynamic.  Mach ‘quit the Church of Physics’ rather than agreeing to believe in the ‘reality’ of ‘atoms’ and Schroedinger declared that he wished he had never had anything to do with quantum physics in view of the concensus interpretation that retained the notion of a foundation of material things-in-themselves’ particles.  Both of these physicists understood the world dynamic in terms of energy-in-transformation wherein matter was ‘appearances’ (‘schaumkommen’).]

We don’t need to be quantum physicists to recognize what Nietzsche is recognizing [2], we can look at the photo of the log-holding yard and from our own experience acknowledge that ‘production’ and ‘destruction’ are dual aspects of the one dynamic, the transformation of the space we live in [spatial-relational transformation].

While transformation is what is actually unfolding and are included in, language allows us to capture a ‘perspective’; i.e. a historical narrative or ‘time-line’ in terms of ‘what things do’.  For example, the European colonizers’ historical narrative is a time line of events showing that they ‘constructed’ [‘produced’] a wonderful new world in the Americas.  At the same time, the colonized indigenous peoples’ historical narrative is a time-line of events showing that the colonizers ‘destroyed’ a wonderful established world on Turtle Island.  These two historical narratives are irreconcilable within the realm of ‘historical narratives’, but they are resolved in our actual experience of being included in transformation, transformation involving construction and destruction as a conjugate duality.

 Instead of evolution [of the world] being conceived of in terms of a continuing one-sided, inside-outward asserting ‘production’ of new states of the world, it is more realistically understood as the conjugation of outside-inward orchestrating ‘epigenesis’ and inside-outward asserting ‘genesis’.   This is, in fact, the model of ‘evolution’ proposed by Lamarck, Nietzsche, Rütiger, Rolph and Roux and it applies in the world in general, including both organic and inorganic forms.  As they put it, “evolution is a fluid process wherein endosmosis [outside-inward flow of potential-energy-rich nurturance] is in conjugate relation to exosmosis [inside-outward flow of kinetic-energy-charged matter].  This has the same ‘geometry’ as Heraclitus’ ‘candle-flame’ view of matter, which in turn matches the toroidal flow or ‘matter as resonance’ view of quantum physics.  The outside-inward influence is in terms of a many-to-one ‘sink’ of nurturing potentials [fuelling, energizing] while the inside-outward influence [outflux] is in terms of a one-to-many ‘source’ of assertive kinetics.

'Sink' and 'Source' as conjugates

'accommodating habitat' and 'asserting inhabitants' as conjugates

 The influx of potential and the outflux of kinetically asserting action are flip sides of the same coin, as in this composite picture of multiple hurricanes.  The pinwheeling forms are ‘made of motion’ or rather, ‘made of energy-in-transformation’.  They are NOT ‘things-in-themselves’ as language encourages us to make them over into.

* * *

Ok, that is sufficient background to give context to what is ‘going wrong’ in the various ‘disciplines’ of society due to our use of language to notionally ‘split apart’ the conjugate duality [production-destruction, genesis-epigenesis, exosmosis-endosmosis, source-sink etc.] and thus ‘imagine’ that dynamics are in the one sided, inside-outward asserting terms of ‘production’, ‘genesis’, local sourcing’ etc.

Economics:

As in the example this essay pivots from, ‘production’, the notion of production being a ‘process-in-itself’ means that we are not taking into account that something must be destroyed at the same time as something is produced.   Economics treats ‘production’ as ‘real’ and encourages the growth of ‘economic production’ hence our current experience of heading for an ‘environmental disaster’.   As Frédéric Neyrat observes in ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’

“In extending his living space in a manner that destroys the space of others, he destroys his own space. Not initially his inside space, his ‘self’, but his outside space, this real outside-of-self which nourishes his ‘inside-of-self’. The protection of this outside space now becomes the condition without which he is unable to pursue the growth of his own powers of being.”

Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize in Economics, 2003) invokes the notion of a ‘externalities’ as ‘results’ that one get along with the ‘production results’ that are beyond what we keep an ‘accounting of’.   The problem of the inadequacy of the ‘doer-deed’ model of dynamics wherein a local ‘thing-in-itself’ [corporation, sovereign state, entrepreneur] is seen as being capable of ‘production’, is thus ‘acknowledged’ but without any solution to date.  There is certainly no acknowledgement of the psychological problem of allowing language to break the conjugate duality into two parts and simply ignore the ‘destruction’, ‘epigenesis’, ‘sink’ aspect.

History:

As already mentioned, and as noted by Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States”, there is no way to reconcile the historical narrative of the ‘executioner/colonizer’ and the historical narrative of the ‘victim/colonized’.  That is to say, there is no ‘historical narrative’ that can capture the truth in such a form that it is acknowledged as the truth by both the colonizer and the colonized.   Meanwhile, they are both conscious of being included together in a common dynamic space and there is no problem with agreement on what is unfolding, the problem comes when the historical narrative is being fashioned in terms of ‘what things do’ since one must resort to language and the words ‘construction of a new shopping mall’ and ‘destruction of an ancestral burial ground’ both apply to ‘the same dynamic’ and even if the wording is; “A native burial ground was destroyed in the process of constructing a new shopping mall”, the sense of ‘achievement’ goes along with the constructive/productive act; i.e. ‘the reality is that we now have a new shopping mall and what was there before is gone, so there is no point in dwelling on it.’.

 This notion of REPLACING something old with something new is part of the ‘dysfunctional thinking’.  It comes bundled with the notion of absolute space, without which we could not have ‘things-in-themselves’.   As in the case of the hurricane, we get to the notion of it being a ‘thing-in-itself’ by implicitly [psychologically] ‘framing it’ in an absolute space frame so that its inherent inner-outer relations are ignored.  In reality, its evolution and its movements are NOT with respect to an absolute space frame but are with respect to the flow in which it is an included feature.

 Absolute space is the rectangular [straight line] space of Euclid.  If we are in a boat and toss garbage off the stern and sail on in a straight line, we will leave the garbage behind in both time and space, … but in the real world we haven’t left in behind in either space or time and we will see it again in the future, approaching the bow of our boat.  The space we actually live behaves more like a ‘curved space’ or ‘relational space’, and it is language by which we reduce ‘relational forms’ to ‘things-in-themselves’, and ‘things-in-themselves’ cannot exist outside of absolute space where ‘space’ and ‘matter’ are understood [imagined] as mutually exclusive.

 Historians are faced with the same dilemma as economists; i.e. reconciling that which is irreconcilable within the over-simplistic reference framing one is using and will not let go of.  That is, economists are in a dilemma because the ‘global economy’ is moving into ‘implosion’ by our assuming the ‘reality’ of ‘production’-in-its-own-right, and the economists are unwilling to back off this dysfunction-infusing assumption; i.e. the ‘reality’ of ‘production’-in-its-own-right.   For historians, the principle of Lafontaine must be applied; “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure” (The reasoning of the most powerful is always the best.)

Justice:

Our traditional scheme of ‘justice’ goes back to the ‘moral code’ governing individual behaviour which is logically consistent with the one-sided view of Creation as in monotheism.   If God created ‘individuals’ and gave the individual the internal power to source his own behaviour, then we don’t have to worry about the ‘epigenesis’ aspect, the outside-inward orchestrating aspect of behaviour.   Mach’s principle says that; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”  That is; ‘genesis and epigenesis’ are a conjugate duality.   There is thus no way to understand the behaviour of an individual out of the context of the habitat-dynamic he is situationally included in, therefore it makes no sense to apply ‘moral code’ to individual behaviour.  It makes more sense to apply it to the full collective and when one explores this, it leads to a code that is ‘beyond good and evil’ which is based instead on cultivating/restoring/sustaining balance and harmony in a relational world.

 Victor Hugo and others have explored the problem with moral code based justice that is applied to individual inhabitant-dynamic out of the context of the habitat-dynamic.  Clearly, there is ‘something amiss’ when Jean Valjean is convicted of theft for taking a loaf of bread because he could no longer bear to hear starving children crying as they were put to bed hungry.   His motivation was to restore balance in the relational dynamics he was included in, however the justice system is based on imposing moral code on the individual, assuming that he is a ‘thing-in-himself’ with his own internal powers of locally sourcing his own behaviour, a notion that biochemists, biophysicists, neuroscientists and many psychiatrists and psychologists [but certainly not all] would agree to, because science has retained the doer-deed model of the world dynamic, wherein dynamics fountain forth, as Ayn Rand would also have it, from the creative interior of the individual.  This also fits with the religious notion of ‘genesis’ which went into competition of the aboriginal notion of ‘transformation’ [metamorphosis] and has predominated in our globally dominating culture.

 So our justice system is, in effect, anchored to both monotheist religious tradition; e.g. absolute centre-to-periphery directing power vested in the ‘sovereign state’ and in the ‘doer-deed’, ‘cause-and-effect’ belief system of mainstream science.  Economic ‘production’ is thus seen by the Justice system not only as a behaviour that ‘makes sense’ but as a behaviour that society must reward because we must keep renewing the state of things and production allows us to construct tomorrows material needs to replace yesterday’s aging system.  Corporate production is thus encouraged and protected by law, even if it is contributing to the current implosion and to environmental disaster, since moral code only applies to ‘what you do’ as if Mach’s principle did not apply.  Producing timber to build shopping malls is a respected and Justice-system protected behaviour.  Primitive belief based complaints about the ‘sacred forests’ and ‘burial grounds of ancestors are seen as ungrounded; though they basically replicate Mach’s principle of the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation;

 “You must teach the children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. … This we know, the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”

 So, while Economics, History and Justice are all ‘troubled’ by this language based practice of reducing dynamic forms to ‘things-in-themselves’; i.e. to local, visible/iconic, material inhabitants within ‘space’ seen as an absolute fixed, empty and infinite reference frame whose internal activities proceed in time-sequence, there is no willingness to ‘let go’ of the absolutism and ‘subjectification’

Biology:

Biology is currently troubled by the fact that ‘genesis’ does not work the way that it was envisioned, wherein the genes are inside-outward producers of our material form.  The ‘new science’ of ‘epigenetics’ has been invented to explain how it is that cells with identical DNA can create thousands of different proteins/cells depending on environmental conditions.  Furthermore, these environmentally-induced variants persist generation after generation, a phenomena that suggests that Lamarck was more correct than Darwin in his evolutionary theory.  Instead of putting these two sciences of epigenetics and genetics into one, they currently operate as two, as it would be quite an embarassment to ‘over-ride’ Darwinism with Lamarckism [same as Nietzsche’s evolutionary theory] which envisages outside-inward endosmotic activity and inside-outward exosmotic activity as one evolutionary dynamic.

 Dissidents who do not agree with this continuing separation [e.g. Bruce Lipton] have to leave the fold as adhering to a ‘belief in Darwinism and its associated genetics theory’ is compulsory if one wants to remain a fully-fledged member of the biological profession.

 This same problem has cropped up in cell research where researchers have encountered what is being called ‘irreducible complexity’.  This is the case where the relations between the components/processes in the cell appear to be ‘more important’ than the individual parts/processes.  While this is fully compatible with an understanding of dynamics in terms of transformation [relational space or Mach’s principle], if one insists on staying with ‘genesis’ or ‘production’ of systems, it leads one to the notion of an ‘intelligent designer’ who is ‘producing’ these systems.  This has led to the expelling from the biological profession of those who insist that their research shows that the web of relations in the cell predominates over the individual components seen in the standard cause-and-effect model.  The Ben Stein film ‘Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed’ documents the expelling of those researchers from the profession.  Meanwhile, the Machian view of relational space where dynamics are understood as ‘transformation’ is not mentioned.  Instead, those researchers whose research exposes the predominance of webs of relations over the cause-producing-effects of the individual parts leads only to an argument as to whether ‘genesis’ is by way of God or by way of Darwinian evolution.

 Biology remains ‘troubled’ by its insistence on staying with the one-sided ‘genesis’ model.

Physics:

Physics has been troubled as to whether to ‘ground out’ the rendering of physical phenomena in ‘field’ or ‘matter’.  That is, there is no argument that what our senses pick up as ‘empty space’ is an energy-charged spatial plenum, however, there is a difference as to whether to regard ‘reality’ as the visible aspect of space; i.e. the dynamics of material particles/bodies, or whether to regard ‘reality’ as the dynamics of the ‘relational space’ whose ‘ripples’ we perceive as local material particles.

That is, do we take into account the invisible potential energy ‘sink’ flow that is conjugate to the visible kinetic energy source-flow, or do we just ‘go with the latter’?

In ‘The Evolution of Physics’ (1938), Einstein and Infield write;

“We cannot build physics on the basis of the matter-concept alone. But the division into matter and field is, after the recognition of the equivalence of mass and energy, something artificial and not clearly defined. Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? What impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space. We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. In this way a new philosophical background could be created. Its final aim would be the explanation of all events in nature by structure laws valid always and everywhere. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone. There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality. This new view is suggested by the great achievements of field physics, by our success in expressing the laws of electricity, magnetism, gravitation in the form of structure laws, and finally by the equivalence of mass and energy.”

This notion of the possibility of being able understand the world dynamic without ‘grounding it out’ in material existence; i.e. whether to understand the world dynamic in terms of a purely relational, energy-in-flux, space, or whether to ‘ground’ the understanding in the dynamics of material particles was not only a niggling possibility in the minds of Einstein and Infeld, it was troubling many other minds in physics, as well.

David Bohm envisaged a relationship between matter and space analogous to a convection cell in the flow of the atmosphere;

“… what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and that matter as we know it is a small, ‘quantized’ wavelike excitation on top of this background, rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea. In current physical theories, one avoids the explicit consideration of this background by calculating only the difference between the energy of empty space and that of space with matter in it. This difference is all that counts in the determination of the general properties of matter as they are presently accessible to observation. However, further developments in physics may make it possible to probe the above-described background in a more direct way. Moreover, even at present, this vast sea of energy may play a key part in the understanding of the cosmos as a whole. In this connection it may be said that space, which has so much energy, is full rather than empty…It is being suggested here, then, that what we perceive through the senses as empty space is actually the plenum, which is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The things that appear to our senses are derivative forms and their true meaning can be seen only when we consider the plenum, in which they are generated and sustained, and into which they must ultimately vanish.”

Whether or not to accept as reality, the dynamics ‘that begin with material bodies or the purely relational ‘holodynamic’, has been a point of contention amongst physicists which has not been resolved, other than by political concensus.  Mach, Bohm and Schroedinger, in the words of Mach, withdrew from ‘The Church of Physics’;

Ernst mach (1838-1916) realized that science (physics) was becoming ‘the church of science’ and ‘quite the church’ when the self-appointed high priest-of-physics concensus hijacked the concept of a ‘relational space’ [transformation as the world-dynamic] when he was confronted with the demand that he commit to a belief in the reality of atoms or be ‘excommunicated’.  Albert Einstein, who was initially ‘on-the-fence’, was commissioned to ‘convert Mach’ so that he too would be one of the faithful, but as Mach’s notebooks show, he refused. (see ‘Ernst Mach leaves the Church of Physics’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Br J Philos Sci (1989) 40 (4): 519-540.)

Erwin Schroedinger (1887 – 1961) refused on the same grounds as Mach had refused.  Schroedinger said;

“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances). …” “… The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist. …” “Let me say at the outset, that in this discourse, I am opposing not a few special statements of quantum physics held today (1950s), I am opposing as it were the whole of it, I am opposing its basic views that have been shaped 25 years ago, when Max Born put forward his probability interpretation, which was accepted by almost everybody.”

The trouble in physics has exactly the same ‘topology’ as the problem that crops up in Economics, History, Justice and Biology, and it concerns whether to conceive of dynamics starting from ‘material existence’; as in the doer-deed, cause-produces-effect understanding, or whether to take into account the simultaneous outside-inward flow of potential energy that is conjugate to the inside-outward asserting material kinetics.  The material genesis of dynamics with or without the outside-inward invisible energy-flux based ‘epigenetics’.

The difference with this problem as it crops up in physics is that physics accepts the greater reality of the dynamics of the energy-charged spatial plenum and the lesser reality of material existence and material dynamics, but the nature of consciousness is tied up in all of this so that the disagreement is over the nature of perception, and, as argued between Poincaré and Bertrand Russell, whether perception by judgement should predominate over perception by feeling or vice versa.  Feeling allows us to sense inclusion in resonance as with the flock of wildgeese [or bikers] that move into a ‘V’ formation; i.e. resonance arises in the conjugate relation of outside-inward accommodating influence and inside-outward asserting action.  Poincaré comments;

 ”Regarding geometry, I have had a long discussion with M. Russell, and I see that he persists in his opinion as I persist in mine; but there is one phrase that allows one to better understand the origin of our disagreement, ‘so that objects’, says M. Russell, ‘which we *perceive* as near together ..’ and he comes back to the word perceive several times in his writing. as for me, I never use the verb ‘to perceive’, nor the noun ‘perception’ because I don’t know what they mean. I don’t know if the perception is a feeling or a judgment, and I truly believe that amongst philosophers that use this word, some understand it in the first way [feeling] and others in the second [judging]. that’s why I avoid using it.” Henri Poincaré, in a letter to the journal ‘Mind’ in 1906 in response to Bertrand Russell’s critiques of Poincare’s ‘Science and Hypotheses’

 That is, physics does not ignore the fact the conjugate space-matter relation, as expressed by Mach’s principle, but there is a contentious issue as to whether the materialist view (absolute space and absolute being view) should be associated with ‘reality’ [the concensus view of physics] or whether the ‘matter-as-appearances’ view should be associated with ‘reality’ [Mach, Schroedinger, Bohm, Nietzsche].   In the categories of Economics, History, Justice and Biology [and the following categories of Medicine and Reason], the cultural assumption has been to accept the material dynamics view as ‘reality’ and this has gotten all of these fields of understanding into trouble, the suggestion being that our understanding should be informed by ‘relational space’ rather than absolute space and absolute material being.

Medicine:

A summary of the foundational problems that medical research is encountering can be found in Jonah Lehrer’s article in ‘Wired’, ‘Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us?’   Lehrer gives an account of how, when medical sciences messes with one thing (e.g. with a drug or a procedure), something else is changed [and becomes a problem] that was previously ok.   In summarizing, Lehrer observes;

“David Hume referred to causality as “the cement of the universe.” He was being ironic, since he knew that this so-called cement was a hallucination, a tale we tell ourselves to make sense of events and observations. No matter how precisely we knew a given system, Hume realized, its underlying causes would always remain mysterious, shadowed by error bars and uncertainty. Although the scientific process tries to makes sense of problems by isolating every variable—imagining a blood vessel, say, if HDL alone were raised—reality doesn’t work like that. Instead, we live in a world in which everything is knotted together, an impregnable tangle of causes and effects. Even when a system is dissected into its basic parts, those parts are still influenced by a whirligig of forces we can’t understand or haven’t considered or don’t think matter. Hamlet was right: There really are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”

The ‘trouble’ is the same trouble as in all of the afore-mentioned areas; i.e. dynamic relations seem to prevail over our understanding of systems in the one-sided terms of causal-agents-PRODUCING-results.  When medicine designs a chemical or procedure to produce a desired result in the body-dynamic, we get the same result that Stiglitz calls ‘externalities’ in economics.  There is an effect that is beyond our ‘book-keeping’.  The chemical may stimulate the production of more endorphins or whatever, but in the same manner that the timber company produces more logs, creating, in the same act, havoc elsewhere.

Medicine is not immune from what is going on in biology; i.e. both disciplines are encountering ‘problems’ with ‘understanding’ based on the one-sided notion of local material cells/systems causally producing effects.   The implications are that the underlying architecture of the organism’s dynamic life process is web-of-relation based rather than cause-producing-effect based.

The subjectifying power of our noun-and-verb language is greater than we may, at first glance, imagine.  Consider, for example, the web of relations in the flow of traffic on a busy freeway.   The opening of holes/passageways is orchestrating our asserting movements.  We could insist that we are individuals with free will and that we are gifted with locally originating, internal-process produced behaviour, consistent with biology, medicine, neurosciences, biophysics etc. and stop right there.  But our experience informs us that our movement is relative to the other vehicles and that we cannot disassociate our movement from the transformation of the relational space we are included in [from the transforming shape of the space that may open up and accommodate our forward movement or close down and suppress it].  We are well aware that by slowing down a bit or speeding up a bit, we may transform the web of spatial relations so that a driver otherwise trapped behind a slow moving vehicle is able to escape from his entrapment.  If we were to put black paint on the tires of our vehicle and log the movements of the steering wheel brakes etc., after all the traffic had cleared and the road was empty, we could revisit our black-paint path which zigged and zagged all over the place, and while we could explain it fully and solely in terms of ‘the actions of the vehicle that we produced’ without ever mentioning the outside-inward orchestrating influence of the transforming web of relations we were situationally included in, we would have to acknowledge that the zigs and zags were not our inside-outward asserting inventions; i.e. we would have to acknowledge that our actions, at the same time as inside-outward asserting [internally sourced], were being orchestrated by the transforming web of relations we were included in.

Thus, medicine, like biology, history, justice and economics, is troubled by its adherence to belief that dynamics arise from local, visible, material objects/systems whose behaviours ‘produce’ effects, a view in which dynamics are entirely due to ‘what things do’ where space is a non-participant; i.e. where space is assumed to be an absolute fixed, empty and infinite reference frame such that those things one leaves behind recede into the distance and into the time-based past and need never be encountered again; i.e. the belief that the future depends only on the immediate present, that we are continually constructing the new state of the world from the present state [a belief/assumption that Henri Poincaré debunked in Science and Hypothesis, though acknowledging that it is foundational to mathematical physics [4]].

* * *

This same pattern, describing the ‘troubles’ within the scientific disciplines and within Western society, crops up in many more places that have been discussed above, and always with the same ‘architecture’; i.e. the problems arising from considering dynamics in the one-sided terms of cause-produces-effect, rather than relational transformation wherein dynamics have dual outside-inward orchestrating and inside-outward asserting aspects, as in the sink-source toroidal flow shown above.

Therefore, this point being made, it is time to turn our attention to the role of ‘reason’ in our development of ‘understanding’.   Mach and Nietzsche argued that sensory experience should prevail over ‘reason’ in our understanding of self-and-world (inhabitant and habitat and the relation thereof) because ‘reasoning’ as we do it in our Western culture starts by endowing things with ‘identity’.   As Vladimir Tasic observes;

“So [since the problem of certainty in identity such as A=A is handled, in Euclidian geometry, by invoking the notion of invariable solids] “objects” are implicitly assumed to be invariable bodies.  Therefore the axioms of geometry already contain an irreducible assumption which does not follow from the axioms themselves. Axiomatic systems provide us with “faulty definitions” of objects, definitions that are grounded not in formal logic but in a hypothesis — a “prejudice” as Hans-Georg Gadamer might say — that is prior to logic.  As a corollary, our logic of identity cannot be said to be necessary and universally valid. “Such axioms,” says Poincaré, “would be utterly meaningless to a being living in a world in which there are only fluids.”  — Vladimir Tasic, ‘Poststructuralism and Deconstruction: A Mathematical History’ (2001)

Insofar as our reason is ‘logical’, we have already reduced it to an operation based on local entities with persisting identity, so we have bypassed the opportunity to consider/understand things in relational/transformational terms.  That is, we may as well look into ‘Reason’ in the same manner we have looked into economics, history, biology etc.

Reason:

Reason ‘has a problem’ with transformation in that in a relational space, which is the understanding of physical reality described by Mach, Schroedinger, Nietzsche, nothing ‘exists’.   That does not mean that there is nothing there/here, it means that noTHING exists; i.e. there is no ‘thing’ with a persisting identity.  Everything relates to everything else as in a holodynamic.  The transformational dynamic is purely ‘spatial-relational’ as in a fluid dynamical world.  ‘Things’ are, as Schroedinger says; ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’).  They are curvatures in space, concentrations of energy in the energy-charged spatial-plenum.

We are fully capable of understanding this sort of world via our sensory experience, as in the example of driving in the flow of traffic on the freeway.  That is, we acknowledge that our behaviour is orchestrated outside-inwardly by the web of relations we are included in, whether from the flow of traffic, or from the ocean waves when we are sailing, but the outside-inward influence is nonlocal, non-visible and non-material (it is the relational influence) and therefore not easy to ‘talk about’ and if we can’t talk about it, we can’t use reason and logic because these are based on ‘logical entities’ and propositions dealing with logical entities.  Therefore, Nietzsche comes straight to the point;

“Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

In other words, ‘reason’ is suffering from the same problem as the other ‘areas of understanding’, from being based on treatments of logical entities and what they do.  But as Mach points out, things are firstly packages of sensations that we impute ‘thingness’ to.   We feel inclusion in the wind, but that doesn’t make ‘the wind’ an ‘it’ just because we can define and word-label it.  As John Stuart Mill observed; “Every definition implies and axiom, that in which we affirm the ‘existence’ of the object defined.”

Logic is founded on the certainty in being able to discriminate between ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’, this is a requirement of logic, not a property of the way the world is (‘actuality’).  As Nietzsche says in ‘Origin of Reason and Logic’ in ‘The Will to Power’;

“We are unable to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: this is a subjective empirical law, not the expression of any “necessity” but only of an inability.

If, according to Aristotle, the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the ultimate and most basic, upon which every demonstrative proof rests, if the principle of every axiom lies in it; then one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions already lie at the bottom of it. Either it asserts something about. actuality, about being, as if one already knew this from another source; that is, as if opposite attributes could not be ascribed to it. Or the proposition means: opposite attributes should not be ascribed to it. In that case, logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us.

In short, the question remains open: are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept “reality,” for ourselves.?–To affirm the former one would, as already said, have to have a previous knowledge of being–which is certainly not the case. The proposition therefore contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true.”  – Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 516 (for the full quote, see [5])

This point, that logic is a means of ‘creating reality’ was also made by Wittgenstein, who observed that;

“The preconceived idea of crystalline purity [of logic] can only be removed by turning our whole examination around. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.)” – Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 108.

Wittgenstein is saying, as Nietzsche is saying, that since the ‘actuality’ of our sensory experience is one of inclusion in a continually transforming world, a slippery slope of incessantly changing spatial relations, we feel a need for the traction given by a logical reality in terms of ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’, even if such logic delivers a ‘created reality’ that does not conform to ‘actuality’.

Conclusion:

In every one of the categories covered in this essay; Economics, History, Justice, Biology, Physics, Medicine and Reason/Logic, the same problem is cropping up.  The problem is that we, as a culture, and I am speaking of the globally dominating culture [though not the Amerindian culture, for example], are most often letting our behaviours be informed by ‘reason’ that uses language to subjectify the dynamic forms in the continually transforming spatial-plenum, and thus allow us to think of dynamics in doer-deed terms (material-causal-agency — produces results terms).  In understanding our sensory experience in this way, we are perceiving by way of judgement and ignoring the ‘feeling’ aspect of our sensory experience.   That is, when we see a group of bikers move into a ‘V’ formation, ‘reason’ has us perceive this in terms of ‘they are moving into ‘V’ formation’, as if the source of their actions is FULLY AND SOLELY inside-outward, internal-process driven.  For the actual participants, however, their sensory experience enables them to let their inside-outward asserting behaviour respond to outside-inward orchestrating influence, the conjugate relation of the two being the condition of resonance or inside-outward-asserting — outside-inward accommodating ‘attunement’.

In other words, our understanding by way of ‘reason’; i.e. in the one-sided inside-outward asserting ‘cause-produces-effect’ terms where space is a non-participant,…  is ‘schaumkommen’, visual appearance, a ‘mediocre truth’ that fails to acknowledge the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation.

Therefore, it seems evident to me, on the basis that all of the above-discussed categories of understanding; Economics, History, Justice, Biology, Physics, Medicine and Reason/Logic are running into problems going by with ‘straight reason’ and ‘fixes’ in all cases are being contemplated that aim to ‘retrofit’ the purely inside-outward asserting model of dynamics with an outside-inward orchestrating complement, that essentially shifts understanding in all these areas from one-sided ‘genesis’ or ‘production’ to ‘relational transformation’, the conjugation of genesis and epigenesis.

The suggestion is that ‘intuition’ based on the feeling [as contrasted with visual judging] aspect of experience goes deeper than ‘reason’ since ‘reason’ has been ‘dumbed down’ by language and logic.  This is the core message of Nietzsche;

“Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

The overwhelming weight of evidence is in support of this claim, as discussed in terms of the need for retrofits in all of the above categories of understanding.

What, then, is holding us back?

My sense is that it relates to our inability to keep our sensory experience of actuality as it transpires in the moment, our ‘feeling experience’, in its natural primacy over ‘reason’, our penchant for talking to ourselves in terms of historical narrative that plays out [in our minds] from past through present to future, constantly predicting outcomes in causal fashion.   As Pope put it;

Heav’n from all creatures hides the book of Fate,
All but the page prescribed, their present state;

“In pride, in reas’ning pride, our error lies.”

— Alexander Pope, … Essay on Man

My sense also is that it is a huge ‘embarrassment’ for our culture to acknowledge our error in unnaturally elevating ‘reason’ over ‘intuition’ [the feeling aspect of our sensory experience that is informed by the conjugate relation between outside-inward accommodating influence and inside-outward asserting action].  It is not an embarrassment to the people in the streets in the ‘Arab Spring’ and in the ‘Occupy’ initiatives because the behaviours of these people are not informed as much by ‘reason’ or ‘reasoned argument’ as they are by ‘feeling’.  They intuit that the way things are is not the natural way for things to be.  They listen to the cleverly reasoned arguments of ‘the authorities’ but they are not buying ‘reason’ that fails to address ‘the feeling aspect of their sensory experience’.  They know the difference between being situationally included in an accommodating space versus a non-accommodating space, but such ‘topology’ never comes into a reasoned plan.  ‘Reasoned plans’ are constrained to terms of ‘what things’ do’ and blind to the conjugate relation between habitat and inhabitant.

‘Improved communities’ are not something that can be ‘produced’ by the assertive actions of the authorities.  Naturally evolving communities are communities that evolve their membership from outside-inward orchestrating influence as unfulfilled needs arise in the web of relations the members are included in.  The two people who are carrying something heavy and about to topple induce two more persons to come to their aid, to lighten the load and improve the balance.  The nomads passing the oasis settlement notice that the community is in need of skills that they possess and this accommodating ‘opening’ induces them to stay and settle.  Just as in traffic flow, new activity transforms the opening and induces new ‘entrées’.  These ‘holes’ in the relational web induce the coming-into-blossom of assertive potentialities.  One can’t say whether the evolving shape derives from the shape of the hole in the relational web or from the shape of the asserting member that is ‘rising to the occasion’.  That is, the situation evolves as a conjugate outside-inward orchestrating — inside-outward asserting relation.  This is also the Nietzschean view of evolution [6] and it contradicts the one-sided cause-produces-result evolutionary dynamic in Darwinism.

Finally, there is the point that Poincaré made in regard to what convinced Galileo to prefer the Copernican model of the celestial dynamic over Ptolemy’s model, and it was not as it has been vulgarized; i.e. he tried both out and felt that the helio-centric one ‘made more sense’.   In truth, Galileo reasoned that many things that had to be explained away as coincidences if one assumed that the earth did not move; e.g. all of the stars in the sky had small aberrant movements that all had the very same 365.25 day period.  Why was this?  This curiosity disappeared entirely when one used the heliocentric model.  It was this observation that convinced Galileo of the superiority of the Copernican heliocentric model; i.e. one of the theories eliminated more unresolved questions than the other.

In a similar vein, the inquirer that simply ‘tries on’ the relational space model and the absolute space models to see which one he prefers (arguments can be made for both) compares to ‘trying on’ the Ptolemiac and Copernican models where arguments could be made for both.  But also in this case, if we use the relational space model, the coincidence of all of the areas of understanding having the same topology of problem; Economics, History, Justice, Biology, Physics, Medicine and Reason/Logic disappears, and if we stay with the ‘absolute space model’, we then have to accept as a remarkable coincidence, all of these fields of inquiry being plagued by a common ‘problem topology’.

That concludes ‘the argument’ that a relational-space world view accords with our experience more closely than the more commonly assumed [in our Western culture] absolute space.   In other words, many of the incoherencies that arise when we let our behaviour be informed by the absolute space based world view disappear when we let our behaviour be informed by the relational space world view.

* * *

[1] “Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

[2] “And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

[3] “Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

[4] “Origin of Mathematical Physics.  Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics.  We recognise at the outset that the efforts of scientists have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by our experience into a large number of elementary phenomena. And to do this in three different ways : first, with respect to time. Instead of taking into account the progressive development of a phenomenon as a whole, we simply seek to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We assert that the present state of the world depends only on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the memory of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down “its differential equation” ; for the laws of Kepler, we substitute the laws of Newton.”  —  Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Ch. ‘Hypotheses in Physics’, subsection “Origin of Mathematical Physics”

[5] “We are unable to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: this is a subjective empirical law, not the expression of any “necessity” but only of an inability.

If, according to Aristotle, the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the ultimate and most basic, upon which every demonstrative proof rests, if the principle of every axiom lies in it; then one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions already lie at the bottom of it. Either it asserts something about. actuality, about being, as if one already knew this from another source; that is, as if opposite attributes could not be ascribed to it. Or the proposition means: opposite attributes should not be ascribed to it. In that case, logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us.

In short, the question remains open: are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept “reality,” for ourselves.?–To affirm the former one would, as already said, have to have a previous knowledge of being–which is certainly not the case. The proposition therefore contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true.

Supposing there were no self-identical “A”, such as is presupposed by every proposition of logic (and of mathematics), and the “A” were already mere appearance, then logic would have a merely apparent world as its condition. In fact, we believe in this proposition under the influence of ceaseless experience which seems continually to confirrn it. The “thing”–that is the real substratum of “A”; our belief in things is the precondition of our belief in logic. The “A” of logic is, like the atom, a reconstruction of the thing–If we do not grasp this, but make of logic a criterion of true being, we are on the way to positing as realities all those hypostases: substance, attribute, object, subject, action, etc.; that is, to conceiving a metaphysical world, that is, a “real world” (–this, however, is the apparent world once more–).

The very first acts of thought, affirmation and denial, holding true and holding not true, are, in as much as they presuppose, not only the habit of holding things true and holding them not true, but a right to do this, already dominated by the belief that we can gain possession of knowledge, that judgments really can hit upon the truth;–in short, logic does not doubt its ability to assert something about the true-in-itself (namely, that it cannot have opposite attributes).

Here reigns the coarse sensualistic prejudice that sensations teach us truths about things–that I cannot say at the same time of one and the same thing that it is hard and that it is soft. (The instinctive proof “I cannot have two opposite sensations at the same time”–quite coarse and false.)

The conceptual ban on contradiction proceeds from the belief that we are able to form concepts, that the concept not only designates the essence of a thing but comprehends it–In fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) applies only to fictitious entities that we have created. Logic is the attempt to comprehend the actual world by means of a scheme of being posited by ourselves; more correctly, to make it formulatable and calculable for us—“ —Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 516 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888)

[6] “Anti-Darwinism.. — The utility of an organ does not explain its origin; on the contrary! For most of the time during which a property is forming it does not preserve the individual and it is of no use to him, least of all in the struggle with external circumstances and enemies.

What, after all, is “useful”? One must ask “useful in relation to what?” E.g., that which is useful for the long life of the individual might be unfavorable to its strength and splendour; that which preserves the individual might at the same time arrest and halt its evolution. On the other hand, a ‘deficiency’, a ‘degeneration’, can be of the highest utility in so far as it acts as a stimulant to other organs. In the same way, a state of need can be a condition of existence, in so far as it reduces an individual to that measure of expenditure that holds it together but prevents it from squandering itself. —The individual itself as a struggle between parts (for food, space etc.): its evolution tied to the victory or predominance of individual parts, to an atrophy, a ‘becoming an organ’ of other parts.

The influence of “external circumstances” is overestimated by Darwin to a ridiculous extent: the essential thing in the life process is precisely the tremendous shaping, form-creating force working from within which ‘utilizes’ and ‘exploits’ “external circumstances” — The new forms molded from within are not formed with an end in view; but in the struggle of the parts a new form is not left long without being related to a partial usefulness and then, according to its use, develops itself more and more completely.” – Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 647

Human population growth over the past twelve millennia

Answering the following questions may give some insights on how solid is your grasp of reality.

1. Would you say that the following statement is true; “The earth’s human population has grown significantly over the past 12 millennia”?

2. Since the space on the surface of the earth that humans inhabit is finite, would you say that the growth of human population has a simultaneous reciprocal effect on the space ‘between’ humans’; i.e. on the ‘quality of the living space’?  [the back-reflecting of the infusing of new inhabitants in a finite habitat is called ‘reciprocal disposition’ and/or ‘reciprocal compression’]; i.e. is it true to say that the growth of population is SIMULTANEOUSLY ‘reciprocally complemented’ by change in the habitat?

hint: the following figure shows graphic examples of ‘reciprocal compression’ where the inside-outward radial/spherical growth of cells [bee-cells, soap bubble cells, convection cells in a heated fluid layer] confront their own outside-inward [resisting/receptive] back-reflecting pressure.

How outside-inward 'reciprocal compression' co-shapes hexagonal form

 3. Zeno’s paradox of the arrow says that the arrow always occupies the same space when it is at rest and that that which is in locomotion is always, at any moment, occupying the same space, thus the flying arrow is motionless.  Do you agree that there is a ‘paradox’ here that may impinge on how we view the world dynamic?

the lava lamp;

red/white materially independent/dynamically interdependent

4. The denser [white] of two immiscible liquids of slightly different density initially occupies the lowermost position in the lamp but the white liquid in the lowermost position receives a greater amount of thermal energy from the light bulb in the base.  Heating expands the white liquid and its density becomes less that the density of the red liquid and it therefore moves upwards until it cools, becomes more dense and re-descends [the immiscibility giving a great variety of forms to the convecting white fluid].   If we refer to the white blobs as inhabitants and the red fluid as the habitat, do you believe that the ‘dynamics of the inhabitants are independent of the dynamics of the habitat’?

5. Would you agree that the statement is true that [when the heat source is turned on], the body of white fluid ‘grows’ and there is growth in the white blob population?

6. Given that the white fluid and the red fluid are immiscible, do you agree that it is true that the two fluids are ‘mutually exclusive’?

7. Given that the dynamics of the white ‘inhabitants’ and the red ‘habitat’ are in reciprocal complementarity [‘conjugate relation’], do you agree that it is true that the dynamics of the habitat and the dynamics of the inhabitants, in this case, are ‘interdependent’?

8. Philosophically, it has been argued [e.g. by Nietzsche, Poincaré, Wittgenstein] that language has us believing in ‘Fiktions’ or ‘mediocre truths’ by language’s power to ‘subjectize’ ‘things that we consider in themselves’, making them over into notional ‘things-in-themselves’ that we then treat [psychologically] as ‘local, material beings’ in-their-own-right and which we [psychologically] deem to be capable of ‘their own behaviours’, even if they are, like hurricanes, ripples in a flowing medium [‘Dinge an sich selbst betrachtet’ ... rather than... ‘Dinge an sich’].  Do you agree that there is truth in the statement that it is ‘Fiktion’ to impute ‘growth’ and ‘motion’ and in general, ‘doer-of-deeds’ capability to the white fluid as if these dynamic behaviours were fully and solely the behaviours of the white fluid, as Nietzsche suggests in his following aphorism;

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

9. Nietzsche’s view of evolution is one in which ‘growth’ on the part of some ‘thing’ is merely ‘visual appearance’ and that our experience informs us that that ‘the transformation of spatial relations’ is the ‘real’ dynamic.  Do you agree that Nietzsche has a point of view worthy of consideration, where he says;

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

10.  Mach’s principle suggests the relativity of space and matter as can be expressed: “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”   Would you say that this ‘Mach’s principle’ expression of dynamics in terms of conjugate habitat-inhabitant relations [i.e. in term of relativity] is a more comprehensive statement of the lava lamp dynamic than formulations in term of ‘what the white fluid does’ such as ‘it grows in size’, ‘it divides into blobs’ etc. which ‘subjectize’ one aspect of a conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation dynamic [i.e. a ‘dynamic unity’].  Would you also say that this Mach’s principle expression better captures the dynamic of the bees, the soap bubbles and the convection cells than formulations that ‘subjectize’ such as ‘the bubbles grew and as ‘they’ grew in number and size, ‘their’ form evolved from spherical to hexagonal.

11.  Would you agree that Darwin’s theory of the development of organisms ‘subjectizes’ the development of species, implying that the source of development is inside-outward asserting?  That is, do you agree that Darwin’s theory implies the ‘mutual exclusiveness’ of ‘habitat’ and ‘inhabitant’, much as in the case of the ‘mutual exclusiveness’ of the red and white immiscible fluids which then allows us to impute the sourcing of development to the inhabitant as a ‘thing-in-itself’? [i.e. a ‘subject-animated-dynamics’ view]

Note:  An issue is shaping up here in terms of whether bodies/fluids which are ‘materially independent’ [mutually exclusive as with immiscible fluids] can at the same time be dynamically INTERdependent [mutually included within a common dynamic, in the manner that multiple storm cells are included in atmospheric turbulence induced by differential solar irradiance].

12.  Lamarck and Nietzsche defined an overall dynamic; i.e. an overall ‘evolution’ in which outside-inward fuelling influx [endosmosis] and inside-outward fountaining outflux [exosmosis] are in conjugate relation, as in the candle flame analogy of Heraclitus.   ‘Matter’ itself is described in quantum physics as the confluence of energy ‘source’ [endosmosis] and energy ‘sink’ [exosmosis].  No question at this point, just an observation. 

Standing wave 'matter': conjugate sink-source relation

.

13. In the lava lamp dynamic, due to the psychological ‘attraction’ of the blobs, it appears as if the blobs are the ‘active inhabitants’ that are ‘doing the moving’ within a passive habitat even though the dynamics are ‘relative’ and arise from the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation.  Rather than speaking in the doer-deed terms of ‘what the blobs do’, would you agree that it would be more truthful to suspend imputing dynamic behaviour to the white fluid and its blob-making and the blob dynamics, and to instead describe these dynamics in terms of the transformation of spatial relations?  Do you agree that ‘situation animated dynamics’ is a more apt description than ‘subject animated dynamics’?

14.  Howard Zinn, in ‘A People’s History of the United States’ observes that the colonizers of North America, in their historical narratives, describe their actions in the one-sided inside-outward doer-deed terms of creating a wonderful new world in the Americas.   At the same time, the colonized indigenous peoples, in their historical narratives, describe the actions of the colonizers as destroying a wonderful established world on Turtle Island.  Both agree to the reality of living in a common space that is undergoing transformation of [spatial] relations; i.e. relations of one with another and the land they share inclusion in.  Do you agree that the actual dynamic has been more like the lava lamp wherein the colonizers and colonized might be seen as [largely] immiscible cultures, and where one appears to be the ‘subject’ that dominates the ‘animating’ of the dynamic [hence ‘subject animated dynamics’], even though the dynamics are interdependent [as in Mach’s principle] and that the ‘situation animated dynamics’ [transformation of spatial-relations] is the more comprehensive view?  That is, do you agree that just as in the case of the evolving of hexagonal forms of the soap cells etc. it is a Fiktion to ‘subjectize’ the dynamic and make it appear that the changes are determined one-sidedly, from the inside-outward asserting of the white blobs or the white men etc.

15. In question 14., it is apparent that we can form perspectives from the point of view of the ‘red liquid’ and/or the ‘white liquid’ since the two are ‘immiscible’ [materially independent] , imputing subjecthood to either one and/or the other in forming the respective perspectives.  Do you agree that the dynamics of two mutually exclusive material bodies can be ‘mutually inclusive’ (i.e. ‘relative’ i.e. ‘interdependent’), and that the subjectification-based perspectives of growth, development, populating, of a particular ‘species’ is ‘Fiktion’ or as Nietzsche’s alternatively put it; ‘mediocre thinking’?

Note: While matter is considered a local curvature in the energy-charged spatial-plenum, physicists ‘split’ on whether to ground physics [to ground the formulation of theory] on matter [atoms] taken to be ‘real’.  The ‘material realists’ won the battle while those like Mach and Schroedinger who believed in a purely relational space [where change/evolution is by way of the transformation of spatial relations] drew the short straw;

Ernst mach (1838-1916) realized that science (physics) was becoming ‘the church of science’ and quit ‘the church of physics’ when the self-appointed high priests who were hijacking the concept of a ‘relational space’ [transformation as the world-dynamic] where he was confronted with the demand that he commit to a belief in the reality of atoms or be excommunicated.  Albert einstein, one of the self-appointed high priests, was commissioned to ‘convert mach’ so that he too would be one of the faithful, but as his notebooks show, he refused . Schroedinger (1887 – 1961) refused on the same grounds as mach had refused.  Schroedinger said;

“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances). …” “… The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist. …” “Let me say at the outset, that in this discourse, I am opposing not a few special statements of quantum physics held today (1950s), I am opposing as it were the whole of it, I am opposing its basic views that have been shaped 25 years ago, when Max Born put forward his probability interpretation, which was accepted by almost everybody.”

16.  Once we have defined a word like ‘Poland’, we can add verbs and predicates to it, to make it appear that Poland is a doer of deeds rather than as an artefact of transforming spatial relations, but if we look at the history of the ‘secularized theological concept’ signalled by the word ‘Poland’ , we can see the power of the word ‘Poland’ in implying ‘local existence’ or ‘local being’ or ‘the buck starts here’, sufficient ‘sign-ifying’ power to have us accept ‘pure idealization’ in the form of ‘local being’, and relieving us of having to search for a source of meaning for ‘Poland’ in the continually transforming spatial-relational dynamic it is inextricably bound up in.   Would you agree that, thanks to the power of ‘words/language’, we tend to accept ‘idealizations’ of ‘being’ as if we understood ‘explicitly’ what was intended when such understanding is missing or extremely tenuous?

 Note:  ‘Poland’ is like the electron in quantum physics, the probability is that it is there somewhere and we bring it into local explicit existence in the process of actually measuring it.  This was schroedinger’s complaint; that ‘particles’ are not real, they are ‘appearances’ that are concretized in the measurement process.

17. Given all of the above questions, and the answers you have given, would you agree that the initial statement, which is clearly a ‘subjectified, doer-deed’ formulation, is ‘Fiktion’; i.e. “The earth’s human population has grown significantly over the past 12 millennia”, or, at best, ‘mediocre thinking’?  [since, as modern physics contends, ‘space is a participant in physical phenomena’, and since, as discussed above, ‘growth’ is impossible in a world of spatial-relational transformation in the sense that transformation is a more comprehensive understanding of ‘growth’ and/or ‘decline’. [in a holodynamic, there is ‘noTHING to grow’ since a holodynamic is based purely on the coherency of a continually transforming web of spatial relations].

Note: Humans as continually transforming dynamics forms included in the continually transforming flow [spacetime continuum] are not only ‘no less human’, they are ‘more worldly’ and ‘naturally human’ by way of avoiding the psychological alienation brought on by a belief in a dualist self-other, inhabitant-habitat split.  Neither do they lose ‘individuality’ within a dynamical figure/ground gestalt, since they retain their unique perspective [as the colonized indigenous peoples did] without having to confuse it for ‘reality’; i.e. without inverting the natural primacy of sensory experiencing of inclusion in the flow [inclusion in the continually unfolding spatial-relational transformation] over ‘reasoned perspective’ as expressed via historical [time-based] doer-deed narrative.  

18. More generally, do you agree that all statements that impute doer-deed capability to particular subjects are Fiktion, and that the one-sided notion of ‘growth’ is Fiktion, since transformation of spatial relations is the more comprehensive understanding of dynamics?

* * * end-of-quiz * * *

How did you do?  In other words, how consistent with one another and your overall world view do you feel your answers were?  Is ‘your reality’ aka ‘your world view’ a ‘robustly’ constituted, fully coherently-reconciled-within-itself plenum or are there a few ‘loose threads’?

* * *

Summary:

Zeno’s paradox has never been resolved and is not resolvable as long as the scenario is one that imputes absolute being to material objects which in turn requires the imputing of ‘absolute space’ for the absolute being to reside in.  That is, Zeno’s paradox is rooted in the notional ‘absolute existence’ of a ‘material object’ [e.g. ‘the arrow’], a notion that depends upon ‘absolute space’.   Zeno’s proof that motion is impossible dissolves when one envisages space as ‘flow’ [energy in spatial-relational transformation] and material objects as ‘ripples in the flow’ [Bohm, Schroedinger].  Motion is then [in the case of a ‘relational space’] the fundamental substrate, rather than something derived secondarily such as ‘the activity of an absolutely existing material being’.

Language equips us for ‘subjectizing’ ‘visually independent’ forms such as the red and white immiscible liquids and/or the red-man and white-man’s immiscible cultures/populations.   Even though these categories of things are independent in a material sense, does not mean they are ‘independent’ in a dynamic sense.  Thus our habit of re-rendering dynamics by way of subjectification of the materially independent forms gives rise to the fictional notion that these materially independent forms ‘have their own behaviour’.   Language-based historical narratives impute to them ‘their own growth’, ‘their own evolution’ [Darwinism] and ‘their own behaviour’, all of these concepts being ‘Fiktions’.  Thus, the historical narrative of the red-fluid or red-man is bound to be irreconcilable with the historical narrative of the white-fluid or white-man. 

These historical narratives are ‘rational perspectives’ [‘reason-based perspectives’] that do not jibe with our experience of inclusion in a common dynamic habitat.  That is, we ‘reason’ that since the red and the white are ‘immiscible’ or ‘materially independent’ that they are also ‘dynamically independent’, and thus we impute to each ‘their own behaviour’.  But our sensory experience informs us that when red and white share inclusion in a common space, both contribute to a ‘reciprocal compression’; an outside-inward accommodating [spatially variably resistive/receptive] inflow-ence that is conjugate to their inside-outward asserting outflow-ence.  In other words, our experience informs us that Mach’s principle is actually operative: “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”   It is ‘reason’ concretized by the subjectifications of language that converts the ‘appearances’ of dynamic forms to notional ‘truths’. That is, ‘reason’ notionally converts ‘things-considered-in-themselves’ [transient forms in the flow that appear to be things-in-themselves] into, quite literally, ‘things-in-themselves’.

 “Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

Now, we can either operate out of our sensory experience or we can direct ourselves out of our reason, and in general we mix up the deployment of these two [situation animated dynamics and subject animated dynamics] .  The one-sided inside-outward asserting reason of the commanding officer comes down through us and instructs us to drop napalm on a vietnamese village.  Our sensory experience of shared inclusion in a common living space dynamic, however, includes an outside-inward orchestrating influence which is always working on us in-the-moment to moderate [so as to cultivate and sustain balance and harmony] our inside-outward asserting behaviour.   The world of the reasoned perspectives of politician and commanding officer, they claim, is the ‘reality’, the ‘way things really are’, the ‘true world’, a collection of facts assembled in historical narrative form that can be extrapolated beyond the present into the future to depict what will happen without any interventions into the unfolding narrative; i.e. reason gives us a predictive model of what is going to happen if we don’t pre-emptively stop it or at least deflect or warp it.  Historical narratives are ‘reasoned models’ based on the subjectifications of language [the creating of independent ‘beings’] which are in doer-deed terms such as; ‘what the red man is going to do’ if ‘we white men do not deflect, pre-empt or suppress his initiatives’.

But, given that our white and red movements are relative/interdependent, our move by one to pre-empt the anticipated move of the other becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Just because we are materially independent or ‘immiscible’ does not mean that our dynamics are independent.  Our experience informs us that the only ‘real’ dynamic is the continuing transformation of spatial-relations that we share inclusion in.  The subject animated dynamics brought to us by language and based on one-sided inside-outward asserting doer-deed ‘constructive actions’ are ‘Fiktions’.  These ‘Fiktions’ or ‘reasoned perspectives’ are clearly very useful if they are not ‘confused for reality’.  The approach of the colonizer culture has been to use the ‘reasoned perspective’ of the most powerful [‘La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure’ – Lafontaine], taken as ‘reality’ or as a ‘believed truth’, to organize individual and collective behaviours in the colonizer communities.   Whether this ‘reasoned perspective’ is imposed by a dictator or by way of a ‘democratic process’, it uses a piecemeal ‘historical narrative’ to centrally direct, coordinate and organize the community dynamic, and insofar as it over-rides the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation, it disrupts the natural quest for cultivating and sustaining balance and harmony in the web of relations between self, other and the land.  The Amerindian tradition, rather than organizing by way of central direction, let the mirrored-back-from-the-centre [of the learning circle] experiences of the people be the primary orchestrator of their individual and collective behaviours.

figure: note that the little circles are people’s heads as seen from above.  -(left) the colonizer culture’s selection of one reasoned perspective amongst many, -(right), the Amerindian learning circle where experiences are shared and their connective confluence is mirrored back from the centre to inform the individuals and the group.

Left-Selecting amongst reasoned perspectives; Right-imaging collective experience

 The statement “The earth’s human population has grown significantly over the past 12 millennia” is ‘Fiktion’.  It may be ‘useful Fiktion’ if it is not confused for reality, but it is quite literally ‘Fiktion’.  The more comprehensive ‘truth’ is that our living space dynamic is a dynamic continuum/unity, a continual spatial-relational transformation.   The colonizer culture used a common ‘reasoned perspective’ as a centrally-directed organizing theme; i.e. ‘the construction of a new world in the Americas’.  The one-sided inside-outward asserting notion of ‘construction’ obscures its own flip side, ‘destruction’, the two of which are inseparable conjugate aspects of the ‘real dynamic’ of our sensory experience which is spatial-relational transformation.  The colonizers largely ignored the greater reality of spatial-relational transformation and thus they ignored the ‘destructive flip side’ of their ‘constructive’ dynamic.

This same ‘mistake’, the ‘double error’ of subjectification that Nietzsche calls it, is rife in the/our globally dominating culture.   Corporations and sovereign state governments take for the truth, statements of doer-deed production/growth such as “The earth’s human population has grown significantly over the past 12 millennia”.   It is this ‘double error’ of subjectification that encourages corporate chiefs and sovereign state presidents and their operational machinery to mistake for ‘real’ the one-sided inside-outward asserting dynamics of ‘growth’ and ‘construction’, and the [technology-amplified] magnitude of this mistake, fostered by our reliance on reasoned ‘truth’ by way of language constructs, is slowly rising into public awareness.  For example, as Frédéric Neyrat observes in ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’

“In extending his living space in a manner that destroys the space of others, he destroys his own space. Not initially his inside space, his ‘self’, but his outside space, this real outside-of-self which nourishes his ‘inside-of-self’. The protection of this outside space now becomes the condition without which he is unable to pursue the growth of his own powers of being.”

Neyrat is warning of the ‘shooting-oneself-in-the-foot’ action of the ‘whites’ when they, because of their material independence/immiscibility, REASON that their dynamics are independent of the dynamics of the ‘reds’ [others].  Meanwhile, our experience is continually informing us of our conjugate relation as per Mach’s principle which acknowledges the relational/transformational nature of our living space dynamic.

 * * *

Where the periphery-to-centre orchestrating influence predominates over centre-to-periphery asserting drive

As Ralph Waldo Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’, “The tool [of reason] has run away with the workman.”

And as Friedrich Nietzsche says in ‘Twilight of the Idols’;

“Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.”

We have all seen ‘cold hard reason’ as in ‘the ends justify the means’ overpower the testimony of our senses so that some reasoned principle has us drop napalm into a village of men women and children who are simply trying to live their lives in harmony with nature. We have heard utterances from respected public icons known for their well-reasoned world views, advocating the supremacy of those with the most well-developed powers of reason, such as this statement from Winston Churchill in giving testimony in 1937 on the issue of Palestine;

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.” — Churchill’s testimony to the Peel Commission (1937) on a Jewish Homeland in Palestine

Many times in our lives within our globally dominant ‘Western’ reason-driven civilization we have run up against the problem as to ‘whose reason’ shall direct the behaviour of our social collective, and we have been [often painfully and despairingly] reminded of the answer given by LaFontaine in his fable of the wolf and lamb; “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure” (“the reasoning of the most powerful is always the best”).  This is how the citizens of central authority driven sovereign states and corporations find themselves part of social machinery (essentially ‘war machinery’) that directs them to ride roughshod over their sentient experience as it informs them how to stay in balance and harmony with the living space dynamic they are situationally included in, so that they find themselves having become part of the blade or battering ram of a giant remotely piloted [drone] bulldozer, involuntarily pushing around their own families/friends, sometimes to the point of humiliating and/or crushing them.

No wonder, then, that there are ‘anti-civilization’ and ‘neo-Luddite’ movements cropping up in response to where ‘civilization’ continues to take us, such as John Zerzan’s ‘anarcho-primitivist’ movement which supports the views [if not the tactics] of unabomber Ted Kaczynski; i.e.

“Kacynski argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization.”

But wait a minute, isn’t Kacynski’s ends-justifies-means violence yet another example of how cold hard ‘reason’ trumps sentient experience?

I would say so.  One doesn’t stay in balance with the living space dynamic one is included in by blowing up one’s neighbours. ‘Technology and technology pushers’ are not what is taking our freedom away, reason is. That is to say, the unnatural elevating of reason over our feeling experience of inclusion in the unfolding evolutionary dynamic; i.e. ‘The Hijacking of Sentience by Reason’, is the recipe for the rising dysfunction that global ‘civilization’ is currently experiencing.

* * * Part II * * *

When the Nenet tribesmen wake up and find that the reindeer have ‘moved on’, they pack up their tents and rejoin them. Their sentient experience of situational inclusion predominates over their ‘reason’; i.e. their inside-outward movement is orchestrated from the outside-inward. They are chasing moonbeams, or rather, ‘sunrays’. The reindeer always go to where lichen are exposed and the lichen always expose where the favourable climatic conditions orchestrate their going and the lichens consume sunrays and convert them into substance; i.e. sunray-preserves and the reindeer eat the sunray preserves and repackage them and the Nenets follow suit and the whole food web is a sunray based ecosystem.

The ‘learning circles’ of these, and many other ‘primitive’ peoples, were processes within which information flowed from the periphery of the circle (as each person spoke of their experience ‘from the heart’) to connective confluence in the centre at the same time it was moving from the centre to the periphery (as each participant on the periphery absorbed the connective confluence forming from the web of relationships connecting the diverse experiences, mirrored-back-from-the-centre). This ‘geometry’ of communication (sharing of experience) is one in which a ‘many-to-one sink’ flowing from the periphery is in conjugate relation with a ‘one-to-many source’ flowing from the centre. A moment’s reflection suggests that this is also the ‘geometry’ of behavioural dynamics of the ‘primitives’; i.e. the outside-inward orchestrating in-flow-ence of the dynamic space they are situationally included in, and their inside-outward asserting out-flow-ing behaviour are dual aspects of one spatial-relational dynamic [‘evolution’ in the sense of the transforming of spatial relations].

The conjugate ‘source-sink’ archetype for these ‘communications’ and ‘behavioural’ dynamics is the spiralling torus, a convection cell-like relational dynamic that the new physics says pervades, in a fractal sense, across all scales, the universe. The sun itself is motion-within-motion described by the spiral torus and this motion is otherwise known as ‘evolution’.

Convecting cell: endosmosis and exosmosis in conjugate relation

One might therefore say that the ‘primitives’, by themselves orienting their behaviour to this conjugate source-sink toroidal flow, are staying attuned with or grounded in the evolutionary dynamic. [this source-sink pattern is the same for black holes, galaxies and imputedly for the flow of the universe]

Surprisingly, since relativity and quantum physics had not yet been formally formulated, Nietzsche and the evolutionary theorist of the early to mid-19th century, such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, William Rolph, Wilhelm Roux, and Ludwig Rütimeyer all came up with a close to common concept of ‘evolution’ and their concept echoed this same conjugate source-sink relational flow.

“ In developing this aspect of the will to power, Nietzsche drew heavily on the ideas of an obscure Anglo-German zoologist, William Rolph (‘Biologische Probleme’). … Rolph denies the existence of an instinct for self-preservation – or at the very least rejects the notion that such a drive represents the principle motivation of animal behaviour. Rather, life seeks primarily to expand itself. This elementary proposition is expressed as a law of assimilation, a law operative in both the organic and inorganic world. Growth, Rolph argues, is determined by a process of diffusion, in which endosmosis predominates over exosmosis. All organic functions, from nutrition and reproduction right up to evolution, can be explained by, and reduced to, this fundamental activity; they are not, as most contemporary biologists assumed, a manifestation of the instinct of self-preservation.” – Gregory Moore, ‘Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor’.

Given that ‘endosmosis’ has the spatial-relational pattern of a many-to-one, periphery-to-centre ‘sink’ while ‘exosmosis’ has the spatial-relational pattern of a one-to-many centre-to-periphery ‘source’, and given that the two are in simultaneous conjugate relation, this view of ‘growth’ is very close to the view of the ‘evolutionary force’ archetype of the universe as in quantum physics.

And in spite of how Gregory Moore captures this ‘growth archetype’ (more from the side of Rolph than the side of Nietzsche), Nietzsche’s anti-Darwinist writings chide the ‘mediocre truths’ of thinkers such as Darwin, Spencer and Mill, for subjectizing what is essentially ‘flux’ and re-rendering dynamics in terms of the dynamic forms within the evolving world unity by using language to concretize their subjectification; e.g;

“Our judgement has us conclude that] every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

What I am suggesting is that Nietzsche would not see the conjugate endosmosis – exosmosis relational dynamic as ‘growth’ [he would not have the one ‘predominate’ over the other] since he did not believe that ‘growth’ was ‘real’; i.e. he believed that what appeared to be ‘growth’ was ‘transformation’ of spatial relations; i.e.;

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income … This world is the will to power–and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power–and nothing besides!” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

The point here is that ‘growth’ does not exist in this Nietzschean viewpoint, there is only transformation of what’s ‘in-place’. Thus, this notion of ‘will-to-power’ cannot be interpreted in terms of ‘will to individual growth’ in the sense of  an individual’s will to ‘growth’ of property, wealth, power to control the behaviours of others etc. it is instead intended in the sense of continual ‘self-transcendence’, continually evolving so that the next ‘Übermensch’ precipitates out of the outside-inward flowing aura of the inside-outward outflowing matter, and so on and so forth for the next, and the next, ….in a continual flow of  ‘Übermensching’, making nonsense of the apparent ‘material’ aspect in the centre of the toroidal flow.

In a space where transformation is the prevailing dynamic, transformation subsumes the language-anchored Fiktion of ‘being’.  It then makes no sense to impute evolutionary force or any other locally-jumpstarting ‘inborn’ force to individual ‘beings’, such as an inborn ‘instinct for self-preservation’, since the notion of ‘a being’ is synthetic, based on visual appearance concretized with language, and it cannot therefore serve as an absolute  fountainhead for anything; not for the development of form, not for the development of behaviour and not for the cause of a result.

Convection cell as fractal archetype from atom to cell to organism to planet to galaxy

Nietzsche and quantum physics are thus in close accord, and this may not be as coincidental as it may at first seem since Nietzsche was also greatly influenced [according to his sister and his letters and library] by Ernst Mach whose was the mentor of Poincaré, Einstein and others who developed into formal theory, Mach’s early ideas on relativity. Meanwhile, his findings on sensory experience [Analyse der Empfindungen] seemed to ‘get lost in the shuffle;

“The sensations are not “symbols of things”. On the contrary the “thing” is a mental symbol for a sensation-complex of relative stability. Not the things, the bodies, but colours, sounds, pressures, times (what we usually call sensations) are the true elements of the world.” – Ernst Mach

Nietzsche, like Mach, rejected the subjectification, by language, of the forms that come to us through our sensory experience and it is this problem with ‘subjectification’ [reducing the world-in-flux to material beings] that is behind Nietzsche’s labeling of Darwin et al’s ideas as ‘mediocre truth’.

What Nietzsche means by this can be described using the example of a convection cell or ‘storm-cell’ in the atmosphere, recalling his point about ‘lightning flashes’ cited earlier. Does a tropical storm ‘evolve’? We certainly talk about it as if it does. We say that it ‘is developing’ that ‘it is strengthening or intensifying’, that ‘it has developed into a class 5 hurricane’ etc. etc.

Is this ‘true’? Does the storm grow?

Nietzsche would call this a ‘mediocre truth’ since by subjectifying the convection cell using words and definitions [reducing a ‘thing-considered-it-itself’ to a ‘thing-in-itself’], we move on from there to impute its own locally originating behaviour to it, and by making a habit out of this, we create a doer-deed based world view in which our backwards-in-time inquiry into the source of dynamic behaviour ‘truncates’ or ‘cul-de-sacs’ in the interior of the subjectified flow-feature.

Does the storm grow? Yes, but does the flow of the atmosphere transform as solar irradiance silhouetted by cloud cover cultivates within it a heterogeneous thermal field and associated pressure imbalances that induce rebalancing movement? Yes, also.

Apparently, the truth that ‘storms grow’ is a ‘more mediocre truth’ than the truth that ‘the atmospheric flow transforms’ since the former is a visually sensed feature in the other; i.e. it is not ‘real’ but made of motion within motion. As Emerson says, the cascade appears to be a ‘thing’ because of its persisting form, though this is just ‘appearances’ since it is ‘made of motion’.

In Nietzsche’s world view, then, there is no such thing as ‘growth’, other than as the ‘mediocre truth’ that comes from visual ‘appearances’, there is only ‘transformation’ of spatial relations, therefore an animal does not ‘evolve’ but is instead a feature within the overall universe-wide transformation of spatial relations. As he also says, the subjectification of visual flow-features is ‘useful’ and perhaps ‘necessary’.

* * * Part III * * *

The above discussion sets the stage for describing how ‘mediocre truth’ is setting us against ourselves. In the following dialogue from the ‘anarchistnews.org’ discussion forum, I try to make the point that John Zerzan’s ‘anarcho-primitivism’ derives from ‘mediocre truth’. I am given some ‘leverage’ to make this point by John having ‘joined forces’ with Amerindian ‘de-colonizer’ activists and his opining of the common-ness of the goals of the ‘de-colonizers’ and his ‘anti-civilization’ anarcho-primitives.

That is, in my view, John Zerzan continues to let ‘reason’ dominate in his communications and in his advocated behaviours, while the Amerindian activist groups, or rather the followers of Amerindian traditionalist beliefs (activists are not necessarily traditionalists), are in the mode where sentient experience naturally predominates over reason, with ‘reason’ playing a ‘support’ rather than a ‘lead’ role.

The person I am dialoguing with is reluctant to accept my claim that Zerzan is mistaken to confuse the removing of technology [technology that, by requiring large-scale organization, enslaves us.] with re-establishing an unmediated relationship with the land, in the manner of the Amerindian traditions. That is, Zerzan continues to put ‘reason’ into an unnatural primacy over sentient experience, it is this unnatural inversion wherein we put visual appearance and language-concretized subjectification-based reason into primacy over our full-blown sensory experience of inclusion in a transforming web of spatial relations, that is the deeper problem, since it leads to one-sided centre-to-periphery flow of communications and to one-sided centre-to-periphery flow of actions, and technology is then secondarily brought to bear to serve the requirements of centre-driven thinking and action.

What Zerzan (and our society) has to come to grips with is the need to restore our sentient experience to the helm and to demote ‘reason’ based on subjectification concretized by language, to a support role, and to resist having the ‘tool [of reason] running away with the workman’.

The dialogue follows and I have highlighted the key portions of it to allow a ‘quick read’.

john zerzan appears to be

emile – Wed, 2012-01-04 16:02

john zerzan appears to be deceiving himself with his own reasoning. the problem starts from understanding ‘community’ in terms of it being constructed by its participants. the indigenous people understand, instead, that people are emanations of the land, thus ‘community’ starts with the land and is constituted by resonance in the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation. in the logical understanding mode of a ‘western thinker’, the community dynamic is determined by the participating people, and the distinction that zerzan makes is between ‘people with advanced technologies’ and ‘people without advantaged technologies’ because he is constrained by his own modeling framework, which does not allow that people are emanations of the land and thus all dynamics are sourced out of the land (out of the energy-charged spatial-plenum) including the people-making dynamic. as nietzsche says, we subjectize people or lightning even though these forms are included within a larger dynamic and by circular reasoning, we attribute them the sourcing of their own dynamics, as in ‘lightning flashes’, ‘people construct community’, giving the ‘Fiktion’ or ‘illusion’ that the sourcing of the community dynamic starts from the action of people.

if one asked john zerzan whether convection cells created atmospheric flow or whether the atmospheric flow created the convection cells, john might attempt to solve that ‘nature versus nurture’ problem by way of reason. but in the real world of our experience, we notice that there seems to be more of these ‘cells’ about when it is hot and humid, suggesting that there is a deeper non-local, non-visible, non-material influence that predominates over both; i.e. that ‘space is a participant’ in physical phenomena, as einstein observed and as lamarck/nietzsche propose in their views on ‘evolution’. zerzan’s differentiating of the evolution of man and community with or without advancing technologies does not touch on the question of whether evolution is predominantly by transformation of spatial relations influenced by non-local, non-visible, non-material energy-field as in relativity/nietzsche [see ‘quantum nietzsche’ by william plank], or predominantly by local, visible, material inside-outward-asserting mechanics as in darwinism.

Zerzan writes in the posted

anon – Thu, 2012-01-05 12:04

Zerzan writes in the posted text that “In truth, there is no community” and that “Only by abandoning what is passed off in its name can we move on to redeem a vision of communion and vibrant connectedness in a world that bears no resemblance to this one.”

It seems here that he actually wants to define “real” community by way of the indigenous relationship that you are talking about.

views such as john zerzan’s

emile – Fri, 2012-01-06 00:15

views such as john zerzan’s anti-technology views are not to be found in presentations of indigenous peoples’ philosophy, and there is a good reason for this. western thinking, as nietzsche has pointed out, re-conceived dynamics/behaviour from conjugate outside-inward accommodating – inside-outward asserting relational form, reducing them, with the help of the ‘subjectizing powers of noun and verb language, to ‘subject animated dynamics’ or ‘doer-deed’ dynamics. dynamic behaviour such as ‘lightning’ or ‘manning’ is reduced by imposing ‘subjecthood’ or ‘being-ness’ on these dynamics so that when we add a verb and predicate, we reverse engineer the source of the dynamic, attributing it to a notional ‘being with the first cause buck-starts-here powers of sourcing its own dynamics. thus ‘lightning flashes’ and ‘man does his manly deeds’.

now that ‘man’ has been subjectized, his behaviour no longer starts from the dynamic habitat he is born into, the sun-fed plants, phyto-plankton and outside-inward flow of nutrient, that he lives his life within and is regathered into. his behaviour is seen, by the western mind, to ‘jumpstart from inside of him’. he is a God or a deputy of God in a garden that he is supposed to proliferate in and take control of;

“God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” – Genesis 1:28

we needn’t kid ourselves that this idea is just for the religious right and it has otherwise faded away, it is built into modern mainstream science. just ask a neuroscientist or a biologist or a biochemist and apart from a few rebels (who are unable to get their rebel ideas published in ‘respectable’ scientific journals) you will hear from the best experts, that, yep, human behaviour jumpstarts from within the material organism that that biologists call a ‘machine made of meat’; a notional ‘local system’ with its own ‘locally originating internal process driven behaviour’. they don’t mind saying that relativity and all of that stuff that denies the possiblity of a ‘local independently existing system’ is abstract bullshit that doesn’t apply to their theories of organic life (powered by an internal spark called ‘life’ that was lit when lightning hit a mess of nearly-organic inorganic soup back a few billion years) and started from there to ‘infect small parts of the dead universe’.

once you believe that man’s behaviour jumpstarts from within him, and that ‘flashes’ jumpstart from within something called ‘lightning’, language has hijacked most of your marbles. the implication is that if there’s going to be ‘community’ then its going to have to be deliberately constructed by man, since this subjectized conception of man does away with outside-inward organizing influence of nature, and so if we see many people moving out of the dustbowl conditions of oklahoma into green valleys that beckon to them, we have to explain this ant-like reorganization in terms of ‘great minds think alike’. that is, our subjectized western doer-deed models don’t allow for any outside-inward organizing influences such as climate influence geomorphological dynamics where nature teases us by first putting green valleys over here, then shifting them ‘over there’ with the result that the human hordes chase after them like crowds of lizards chasing the mole on elizabeth taylor’s face on the screen of an outdoor movie cinema in a jungle town. sure they know what they’re doing. sure their organized behaviour is driven from out of their interiors. sure, that is indeed true. it’s what nietzsche calls a ‘mediocre truth’ since its clear that the ‘epigenetic geo-morphological dynamic predominates over internal genetics in the development of this sort of organized collective behaviour.

so, zerzan is stuck with this western model where we have subjectized man’s behaviour in which case the dynamics of land are no longer (short of relativity and quantum theory) understood as being shaped by outside-inward spatial nurturing influences [in conjugate relation with one’s inside-outward asserting actions].

in western man’s view; i.e. in zerzan’s view, the land can’t possibly orchestrate the behaviour of individuals and collectives. in the western view [i am referring to the globally dominating culture’s view, whatever whether we want to call it 'western' or whatever], organization can only have an local centre sourced inside-outward asserting genesis.

therefore, the problem of technology arises in man’s perceived act of constructing his community in a subject-animated-dynamic, doer-deed fashion. as zerzan says in an interview just after the death of steve jobs;

“People like Jobs who devise this Brave New World type stuff are choosing, and there’s a moral dimension to those choices. I remember Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog saying at one time that “in the sixties some of us realized the question was ‘technology, yes or no?’ and we basically answered yes.” That includes people like Leary and Kesey and others who thought there was this great promise to technology, that we could achieve all of these things through the magic of computers. That was a conscious choice by some of these people, and it was the wrong choice. And so you have to ask, critically, how has it worked out? It’s not just a question for theory, it’s an empirical question: What does a society look like that embraces that, and goes full tilt for that way of living?”

zerzan is talking about ‘constructing community’ rationally, deliberately, deterministically, and it is IN THAT CONTEXT… that his remarks on technology are pivoting from. otherwise, he would not be harping at those who made the wrong choices [re technology] in constructing community, but would instead be harping about how we are assuming ‘the land belongs to man’ instead of ‘man belongs to the land’ as the native traditionalists are. constructing community [and then making 'the right decisions' about technology in that context] is not the way zapatistas and native traditionalists understand the development of the community; i.e. community development is outside-inwardly orchestrated by the dynamics of the land, by entering into a resonant conjugate outside-inward accommodating – inside-outward asserting relation with/in the sacred, parenting living space.

i’m sure that native groups appreciate there is ‘overlap’ in the respective aims and appreciate that zerzan endorses ‘de-colonizing’, even if he sees ‘community’ in the ‘traditional western’, doer-deed, constructivist terms.
zerzan is right about technology enslaving us, but that is because of our centre-of-power driven constructivist views of community. if one doesn’t let the land orchestrate community from the outside-inward, and we instead seek to deliberately construct it, then technology will inevitably be used to amplify the inside-outward asserting powers of man, growing ever-larger centres of economic/productive power at the expense of ‘the will of local community’ and the mom-and-pop enterprises that form within the local community as it tries to cultivate and sustain a resonant conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation within the shared living space.

as ivan illich observed, once one introduced the PA system to amplify one man’s voice (the voice of whomever had primary access to the microphone), centres-of-power driven construction of opinion was bound to happen in cultures that didn’t embrace the EMPTY-CENTRE [mirroring-back] learning circle approach to developing one’s world-view. technology has been amplifying a dysfunctional centre-driven communications model and the result is ever more powerful centre-driven opinion-shaping media voice projection. don’t blame the technology, blame the centre-driving, inside-outward asserting western culture’s model of dynamics in general.

the progressive technology-fertilized-and-amplified growth of centres of economic power continue to deepen our enslavement. the native traditionalist will attribute this to western man’s ‘constructivist’ view of community wherein he inverts the understanding that ‘man belongs to the land’ [rejects space as a participant in physical phenomena] and assumes instead that ‘the land belongs to man’, while john zerzan blames technology for enslaving us because he continues to hold on to the subjectivized, doer-deed, constructivist view of men and community. in fact, he subjectivizes ‘technology’ itself, by his ‘anti-technology’ stance.

with a view of ourselves as the biological and social sciences would have it, as a ‘machine made of meat’, we are bound to try to apply technology to ‘turbo-charge ourselves’ to get the job of ‘constructing community’ done ‘the way we want it done’, according to our inside-outward asserting deterministic plan. the enslavement that results is enslavement precipitated by the inverted western viewpoint [wherein organizing is conceived of as being determined by inhabitants, and NOT orchestrated by the dynamics of habitat]. it is because of, and starting from this inverted viewpoint that we then use technology in a purely inside-outward asserting approach that is hijacking peer-level relational webs by progressively aggregating control over subject-animated-dynamics [what things do] in ever-larger centres of economic power.

Again: if we read the text

anon – Fri, 2012-01-06 10:44

Again: if we read the text there is a distinction between Community(1) and Community(2), the latter being a concept that aims for unmediated presence (no technology, whatever that means)–generally, a world that is “nothing like” the one we inhabit as socially constructed-technologized beings. Yet somehow you want to say this concept (community(2)) is defined by the first, and in a nontrivial way, indeed in a problematic way.

I admit that I do not find this second concept to be very helpful. Indeed, I think that it fails to signify anything non-vacuous. So, I have a hard time understanding your contention that it is at sixes and sevens with a land based ethic, a view that sees all meat machines as nourished by Mom. Perhaps you want to say that this view MUST be at odds with technology; but I have always read this Zerzan-term as meaning insofar as it presupposes experts, the state, and everything else that takes away from the right that we have to live our lives. So, I think you have conflated what Zerzan means with what say, David Watson means. So, I think that if we accept Zerzan’s words, we do not have any reason to pit them against a land-based way of life.

zerzan sees ‘community’ as

emile – Fri, 2012-01-06 18:03

zerzan sees ‘community’ as being ‘determined’ by the people ‘who make up the community’. zerzan’s musings on community focus on the manner in which people relate to one another [anthropocentrism]. zerzan defines the desired people-determined community in terms of the negation of the current people-determined [non-]community;

“Only a negative “community,” based explicitly on contempt for the categories of existent community, is legitimate and appropriate to our aims.”

zerzan’s view on climate change is that it is determined by people (AGW).

in all of these views the dynamic is understood in a one-sided, inside-outward asserting, people-determined manner.

that is, john zerzan sees two possible versions of community; ‘people-determined Community (1)’ the established community in which ‘we’ opted for technology [who makes these conscious decisions?] and ‘people-determined Community (2)’ which as you say “being a concept that aims for unmediated presence (no technology, whatever that means)– generally, a world that is “nothing like” the one we inhabit as socially constructed-technologized beings.”

i am saying that the root problem is the attempt to ‘determine’ community. how we use technology follows from our colonizer culture’s addiction to ‘determining everything’ in an inside-outward asserting manner. the colonized indigenous peoples cultural tradition is to acknowledge the role of outside-inward orchestration of the living space we share inclusion in.

this cultural difference in our behaviour-animating world views can be visualized in terms of the relation space of a circle and the flow between the centre and periphery;

(I) communications:

—I.a amerindian learning circle, the flow of shared experience/information is from the periphery to the centre; i.e. an image forms in the centre from the connective confluence of the sharing of experiences. the flow is from the periphery to the centre and at the same time from the centre to the periphery [conjugate outside-inward feeding --- inside-outward asserting relational flow, a 'toroidal flow'].

—I.b colonizer-culture instruction circle, the flow of information is from the centre to the periphery; i.e. the biggest, toughest guy hijacks the centre of the circle and with a bullhorn, barks out his perspective on ‘the way it is’ to those on the periphery [in the case of the individual, this is a model of the ego-at-the-centre of the self]. the flow is unidirectional from the centre to the periphery.

(II) sourcing of behavioural dynamics

—II.a amerindians let their individual and collective behaviours be orchestrated from the outside inwards in such a manner as to cultivate and sustain resonance-based organization via their conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation [conjugate outside-inward nurturing/orchestrating--- inside-outward asserting/producing relational dynamic]. the flow is from the periphery to the centre and at the same time from the centre to the periphery [toroidal flow]

—II.b colonizer culture uses knowledge, intellection/reasoning and purpose as the inside-outward driver of their individual and collective behaviour; i.e. the behavioural dynamics and organization of the individual and collective is one-sidedly, inside-outward assertively driven. the thrust is unidirectional from the centre to the periphery.[linear, unidirectional flow]

* * *

of course we all know what the problem is in ‘reason-driven’ and ‘purpose-driven’ community, … it becomes a question of ‘whose reason’ and ‘whose purpose’ will coordinate the deterministic construction of community? … and the answer is, … as written into the fables of LaFontaine; “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure” (the reasoning of the most powerful is always the best).

what is lost in the colonizer culture’s deterministic, reason-driven approach to community? everyone downstream of the centre has to betray/ignore/demean the sensory information coming outside-inwardly from their particular situational inclusion in the world dynamic and give precedence to the flow of centre-to-periphery driving reason [whether from our own colonizer ego-centre or from the self-similar centre-driven socio-political organizational structures that come from replicating our ego-structure in the dynamics of the social collective].

as nietzsche observes, reason is based on subjectification, the imputing of ‘being’ to dynamic forms which are inclusions in a larger dynamic [e.g. as storm-cells in atmospheric flow]and then being in a position to impute first-cause sourcing of behaviour to the ‘being’. out of the inherent transience of behaviour, we create the illusion of a ‘true’ world based on ‘being’;

“Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie. –Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

as our real life experience informs us, ‘community behaviour’ is often of the general type where two people are carrying a heavy object that is about to topple and we rush in to ‘fill the gap’ and restore balance and stability. it is a ‘mediocre truth’ to say that ‘I reasoned that this would be a good thing to do’. the greater truth is that the dynamic we found ourselves situationally included in exerted an outside-inward orchestrating influence on us that we responded to with our inside-outwards asserting behaviour. [the flow in natural community is 'toroidal flow']

the colonizer society is one in which we confuse mediocre truths for ‘reality’ when they are nothing more than ‘appearances’ [‘schaumkommen’ – Schroedinger] and then we go around constructing one-sided deterministic organizations.

conclusion. colonizer society has been using technology in support of I.b and II.b where communications and actions are one-sided and flow linearly and deterministically from the centre to the periphery.

john zerzan says we are using technology to enslave ourselves.

no, we are using the centre-to-periphery models of communications and behavioural dynamics to enslave ourselves, and technology is being brought to bear in support of those models; i.e. john zerzan’s truth is a mediocre truth.

* * * Part IV: Conclusions * * *

Modern physics presents the view that the universe is essentially ‘energy-in-[transform-]motion’ while matter is, as Schroedinger has said ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearance’).

Space does not have static ‘points’ in it since it is everywhere energy-in-motion, movement-within-movement and the form of this movement is like a convection cell where source and sink are in conjugate relation; [as in fluid-dynamics, wave-dynamics]

space has 'motions in it' rather than static points

In such a world, if we want to ground ourselves or couple ourselves to the continually unfolding evolutionary dynamic, we would be wise to communicate and behave in the style of the Amerindian tradition (where the outside-inward orchestrating and our inside-outward asserting is sustained in resonant conjugate relation).

However, our current ‘problem’ is that the globally dominating ‘colonizer culture’, using subjectification concretized by language, has created a ‘doer-deed’ pseudo-reality that we are confusing for ‘reality’. That is, we are grounding ourselves or coupling ourselves to nothing other than ‘appearances’, the objects we declare to have ‘independent being’ that are in reality evanescent forms made of motion-within-motion. Our perspectives that we base on these subjectified forms we share and animate using the same ‘subjectifying’ archetype by communications that are centre-to-periphery flowing [the opinionated strong man with the bullhorn blasting out his perspective on ‘the way the world really is’ to everyone around him], and by actions that are centre-to-periphery driving [the ‘reason’ and ‘purpose’ driven organization where the ‘reason’ and ‘purpose’ at the centre dictate individual and collective behaviours out into the periphery, over-riding the outside-inward orchestrating influences sentiently experienced by the individuals subject to the centre-to-periphery directorship].

Widespread reaction to the failings of the [subjectification based mediocre truth] centre-to-periphery driving communicating and animating archetype are currently on the rise. But so long as the ‘centre-to-periphery’ mode of understanding remains in place, inquiry into the failings will be in a doer-deed sense, searching for ‘those responsible’ who sit at the centre of the circle whose self-interested dynamics are transmitting dysfunction out into the peripheral world around them. That is, so long as this one-sided centre-to-periphery archetype for understanding the world dynamic is the popular choice, where there is rising dysfunction, we will be looking for ‘locally centred sources of dysfunction’. Meanwhile, the dysfunction is deriving from the ‘mediocre truths’ from which we are constituting our popular ‘archetype’ for understanding dynamics.

Colonizer civilization has arisen from the hijacking of sentient experience by visual form-subjectifying reason.

* * * * * *

Footnote 1. :  The atomic foundations of scientific thinking.  Is science human-dependent or is it not?

Ernst Mach, Erwin Schroedinger, Henri Poincaré believed that the objects of science, such as atoms and particles, are ‘appearances’ that form in our minds, rather than being ‘real-in-themselves’.  They are ‘the minority that lost out’ to the ‘atomists’ or ‘materialists’ in the ‘official’ discipline of science.  The essay above assumes that space is ‘relational’ in keeping with the views of Mach, Schroedinger and Poincaré, even though that I did not ‘start my inquiry’ on such an assumption.  In fact, I started it from the standard materialist view but was led there my observations and experiences and by bringing a multitude of observations and experiences into connective confluence (into a web of relations).   While Poincaré just at the time the science community was ‘coming down hard’ in support of ‘atoms’, Mach’s rejection remained strong till his death and Schroedinger’s as well.

The following abstract provides the gist of Mach’s anti-atomist views; i.e. his support for ‘relational theory’.

Ernst Mach Leaves ‘The Church of Physics’

by John Blackmore

[The British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, Br J Philos Sci (1989) 40 (4): 519-540.]

Abstract:

A study of the published and unpublished parts of Ernst Mach’s last notebook (1910–14) suggests that Max Planck’s attack (1908–11) provoked Mach into opposing ‘The Church of Physics’ more strongly than previously realized. Shortly after Mach threatened to leave the discipline if belief in atoms were required. Albert Einstein tried to persuade him to accept atomism (September 1910). Mach declined to mention Einstein again in his publications and increasingly criticized ‘The Church of Physics’.

Evidence that Mach opposed relativity theory and the absence of evidence that he favored it is pointed out. It is suggested that Mach’s alleged ‘friendly interest’ in Einstein’s work in early 1914 may have been stimulated by the hope that the young genius might develop a continuum or field theory to refute Planck’s discontinuity physics.

The paper concludes with suggestions on how philosophers who defend Mach’s non-realism such as Gereon Wolters and Paul Feyerabend might be better off switching to a realist epistemology more compatible with rationally-held science, religion, and common sense.

* * *

An ‘interesting connection’;

There is a connection between Ernst Mach, Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung which is interesting with respect to questions in regard to grounding our ‘reality’ in transformation or matter.

Ernst Mach’s family and Wolfgang Pauli’s family lived in Prague Czechoslovakia.  Pauli’s grandfather Jacob W. Pascheles was the proprietor of a bookshop in the Old Town Square in Prague [As elder of the congregation of the well-known ‘Gipsy’s Synagogue’, he had presided over the “confirmation” (bar mitzwah) of Franz Kafka whose family also lived on the Old Town Square] and his son (Wolfgang Pauli’s father) Wolfgang Joseph, studied medicine at Charles University in Prague, together with Ernst Mach’s son Ludwig, receiving his doctor’s degree there in 1893.  Ernst Mach was at that time a professor of experimental physics at Charles University, until 1895, when he moved to the University of Vienna.  Wolfgang Joseph Pascheles also moved to Vienna in the medical faculty where he converted to catholicism and chose the surname Pauli.  His son, Wolfgang Ernst Friedrich Pauli was given his second name, Ernst, in honour of Ernst Mach who had agreed to be the godfather.

In Wolfgang Pauli’s writings on physics, there is close attention to questions of ‘reality’ that associate with the deepening understanding of physical processes through the continuing development of theories in physics.  Pauli writes in ‘Writings on Physics and Philosophy’;

“Matter has always been and will always be one of the main objects of physics.  By speaking on “matter as an aspect of the nature of things,” I intend therefore to give you an impression of how laws of nature concerning matter and belonging to physics can be found and how they gradually develop.  It is true that these laws and our ideas of reality which the presuppose are getting more and more abstract.  But also, for a professional, it is useful to be reminded that behind the technical and mathematical form of the thoughts underlying the laws of nature, there remains always the layer of everyday life with its ordinary language.  Science is a systematic refinement of the concepts of everyday life revealing a deeper and, as we shall see, not directly visible reality behind the everyday reality of colored, noisy things.  But it should not be forgotten either that this deeper reality would cease to be an object of physics, different from the objects of pure mathematics and pure speculation, if its links with the realities of everyday life were entirely disconnected.”

Whether Pauli saw space as ‘relational’ as Mach did is not clear, but he would certainly have carried such ideas into his discussions with Jung, in the wake of his ‘breakdown’.  Thus these foundational questions of reality tied up with scientific thinking and psychology have undergone an interesting bifurcation at which time the ‘hidden’ realm beneath the material facade ‘went underground’ [the material appearances were chosen as the foundation of reality in science].  Meanwhile, the dispute has not gone away as the following wikipedia comment on ‘relational theory’ makes clear.

[Wikipedia on ‘Relational Theory’: - In physics and philosophy, a relational theory is a framework to understand reality or a physical system in such a way that the positions and other properties of objects are only meaningful relative to other objects. In a relational spacetime theory, space does not exist unless there are objects in it; nor does time exist without events. The relational view proposes that space is contained in objects and that an object represents within itself relationships to other objects. Space can be defined through the relations among the objects that it contains considering their variations through time. The alternative spatial theory is an absolute theory in which the space exists independently of any objects that can be immersed in it.

Someone who has constructed or a relational theory or promotes relational theorising is called a relationist.

The relational point of view was advocated by in physics by Gottfried von Leibniz, Ernst Mach (in his Mach's principle), and it was rejected by Isaac Newton in his successful description of classical physics. Although Albert Einstein was impressed by Mach's principle, he did not fully incorporate it into his theory of general relativity. Several attempts have been made to formulate a full Machian theory, but most physicists think that none have so far succeeded. For example, see Brans-Dicke theory

A Relational approach to quantum physics has been developed, in analogy with Einstein's special relativity of space and time.

Relationist physicists such as John Baez and Carlo Rovelli have criticised the leading unified theory of gravity and quantum mechanics, string theory, as retaining absolute space. Some prefer a developing theory of gravity, loop quantum gravity for its 'backgroundlessness'.]

* * *

Mach’s ‘anti-atomism” cited in The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy

Mach’s opposition to atomism has become one of his best known legacies, with Mach seen as an anti-realist about unobservable entities. While anti-realist arguments can indeed be found in Mach, their origins lie not in philosophical skepticism but in his bio-psychological view of science. Furthermore, his concerns about atoms were often specific to the various competing theories of the time. It should be noted that the issue of atomism was a central scientific controversy of this period; there were a variety of theories of atoms being put forward as well as varieties of alternatives. In his Principles of the Theory of Heat, Mach aligned himself with a phenomenological approach to thermodynamics—a temporarily fruitful research program that avoided the problems of positing theoretical causal entities. Mach’s experimental research was not in this area, but at stake was not just the reality of atoms but an understanding of science. Mach’s attitude toward atoms was an outgrowth of a view of science.

He became embroiled in a long-standing dispute with Boltzmann, propounder of the kinetic theory of gasses. Boltzmann and Mach ended up agreeing in essence: if atomic theory was fruitful it should be used, but adopted what today might be considered an anti-metaphysical stance toward a theory that was still largely unsubstantiated. It is generally agreed that it was not until 1905 with Einstein’s study of Brownian motion that the kinetic theory of molecules found full verification.

Mach’s views on atomism are most clearly presented in an exchange with Planck. In 1909 Planck wrote an essay “The Unity of the Physical World-Picture”, which contained a severe criticism of Mach’s philosophy. Mach replied in 1910, with “The Guiding Principles of My Scientific Theory of Knowledge and Its Reception by My Contemporaries.” Planck responded in 1910 with “On Mach’s Theory of Physical Knowledge: A Reply.”

At issue were differences on how to make science free of human subjectivity, and how to achieve a unified science. Planck [1909] argues that while we once defined heat according to sensations, the study of heat has gone beyond this, now being under the purview of electrodynamics and kinetic theory; similarly, tones and color are now understood as frequencies or wavelengths. Although physics had its beginnings in the analysis of sense impressions, its current success is due to removing these anthropomorphic elements. Planck formulates a vision of a human-independent science in reaction to Mach’s claim that science is human-dependent.

Planck thought that physics can go beyond psychological dependency by basing itself on psychologically independent universal constants: “the constants appearing in the laws of heat radiation in free ether, like the constants of gravity, have a universal character and involve no reference to any special substance or any special body” [1909]. They are human-independent in a way that a unit like a centimeter is not. These constants can be used to “establish units of length, time, volume and temperature, which must of necessity retain their meaning for all time and for all cultures, even extra-terrestrial and extra-human ones” [1909].

Mach’s response is one of his last statements of position:

I have no doubt that if, somewhere in the universe a creature organized like ourselves could make observations … it would perceive a universe working similarly to that we ourselves describe …. As for the reality of atoms: I have no doubt that if atomic theory corresponds to the reality given by the senses, the conclusions drawn from it will also bear some relation to the facts — though what relation remains unclear. The distance from the glass of the first dark ring in reflected light corresponds to one-half of the period of Newton’s ‘fits’, but to one quarter of Young and Fresnel’s ‘wavelength’. The findings of atomic theory, likewise, can undergo a variety of convenient reinterpretations, even if we are in no great hurry to take them for realities. [Mach 1910: 36-37]

transformation over 'time' as distinct from 'space'

Is there not a ‘dark side’ to the ‘cleansing of Ebenezer Scrooge’ in Charles Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol’?  Scrooge, the ‘bad boss’ transforms into Scrooge the ‘good boss’, persuading us that ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ are absolutes that fountain forth from the interior of individuals understood as ‘sovereign powers’ or ‘things-in-themselves’.  Surely the ‘good action’ of the individual is, as Nietzsche says, a ‘mediocre truth’ that conceals a ‘shadow’ aspect. 

The ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ of the players in the continually warring communities of Europe could not be determined from their acts, which erupted from a sea of not-directly visible, non-material, relational tensions in the manner that earthquakes and avalanches ‘erupt’, … the action-inducing tensions being the shadow-force that predominates over the visibly manifest acts of ‘goodness’ or ‘evil’ of the individual person or state.  The visible acts of the individual play out in ‘time’ while the tensions they emerge from are spatial-relational and invisible.  The boss who is the epitome of goodness in his manifest actions would not still be the boss without retaining his controlling influence over the living space via spatial-relational alliances that keep his workers ‘corralled’.   The boss that transforms his overtly abusive/manipulative behaviour into overtly benevolent behaviour without relinquishing his ‘living space control’ deepens the covert or ‘shadow’ aspect of his manipulation.   The truth in the visible acts of people is a ‘mediocre truth’ as Nietzsche points out.

~^~

Just to elaborate a bit on the above ‘introduction’ before delving into the ‘shadow aspect of Christmas’, I should say that I have difficulty with everything that is based in ‘belief’, … that has its roots in the past, in someone else’s placement of values that purportedly should be ‘mine’ too.   Belief in a ‘boss’ is merely one instance of the general case of imputing ‘reality’ to a ‘subject animated dynamic’.   A boss that is appointed by a team as a device of convenience, of relational synthesis/coordination, makes sense, but the boss whose power is pronounced to be ‘incarnate’ in him is, in my view, not merely nonsense, it is superstition. 

I believe that the ‘dummy dimension we call ‘time’’ is the enabler of the ‘mediocre truth’ that imputes ‘power’ to ‘beings’ and ‘their acts’.  Scientific thinking aka ‘rational thinking’ rests dependently on the dummy dimension of time.  Science assumes that the present depends only on the immediate past so that when a good or bad action ‘erupts’, we can always identify the ‘causal agent’, the ‘subject that animates the dynamic’.  When Germany invades Poland, the scientific thinker applies his science which is based on ‘time’ and time-based differentials.  Yesterday Europe was ‘at peace’ and today there is conflict.  What is the cause of this outbreak of conflict?  We search for the causal agency within this short past-to-present time interval and we identify it as the German Wehrmacht directed by Adolph Hitler.  We are asked to believe that Hitler is the cause of the conflict.  But what about the cartoons in the newspapers that came out with the 1919 finalizing of the Treaty of Versailles, suggesting that Germans born into the harsh conditions of the treaty would, by the time they reached the age of maturity (21 yrs) be waging the next European war.  What about Churchill’s hardliner support for the harsh conditions of that treaty [abusive and unjust to the innocent generation arising], and his alleged dislike for the Germans?  What spatial relational tensions did Churchill contribute to with testimony such as;

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.” — Churchill’s testimony to the Peel Commission (1937) on a Jewish Homeland in Palestine

As the introduction suggests, the truth we impute to the visible actions of individuals, that we associate with events arising from one moment to the next, is mediocre truth.  It is the truth that science has ‘settled for’; e.g;

Origin of Mathematical Physics.—Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset that the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.

First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.”  – Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’

There is a thus a deeper truth that resides not in visible, material actions that transpire in time, but in non-visible, non-material transformative relations that reside in space.  In other words, we are included in a web of spatial relations that is deeper source of dynamic behaviour.  Insofar as we deny our connection to what we see transpire in front of us, we build ‘shadow’.

“It is the face of our own shadow that glowers at us from Nazi Germany.” as Carl Jung might have said

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Although I am loathe to accept ‘time-scheduled events’, I understand events like the ‘winter solstice’ where a few days ago, our planet earth completed another dos à dos with its/our celestial dance partners.  This is something that I feel ‘included in’, and for me, it underscores the fact that ‘we are all in this together’.  I can celebrate this one ‘naturally’.  Down on the rocks by the beach I paint-sprayed a line from the setting sun to a marker on the bank, where, a few years ago, I had paint-sprayed a line from the setting sun of the summer solstice.  It occurred to me that now that I was looking at the angle between them, I could measure that angle and, knowing my latitude, I would ‘know’ how much the earth ‘tilts’ relative to the plane of its orbit around the sun.

 This thought brought back into mind Poincaré’s warning that it is non-sense to say ‘the earth rotates’ [or ‘the earth tilts’], because ‘the earth is not doing it’.   The earth is included within a larger celestial dynamic and it has no ‘local’ behaviour of its own, only as a participant in a larger dynamic; i.e. as a participant in the transforming space it shares inclusion in.  It is only ‘language’ that imputes to the earth ‘its own behaviour’.  The same goes for ourselves since we are bound up in the transforming earth which is bound up in the transforming universe.

 At Christmas time, this ‘shadow’ seems to speak from out of the darkness of my deeper consciousness, the usually silent ‘back-benches’ of my self.  It doesn’t speak ‘words’, only music, … kind of like the music from the film ‘Jaws’.  It is telling me that ‘now ist venn vee dahnce’, in a creepy, commanding way, like Dieter in SNL.   It is a different sort of signal to action, radically unlike the orchestrating action of the sun breaking through the clouds on a warm summer’s day that draws thousands to the beach, inducing them to act together, to strip off most of their clothes and prostrate themselves as if before a God.

 Don’t get me wrong.  As a child, I was eager for Christmas to come; it was like a warm and rising tide that I could let myself float away in.  It could have been from anything, from the winter solstice or from the arrival of a ‘new year’ or whatever, why look a gift horse in the mouth?  It was ‘party time’ and who needs to search for and understand the rationale for people getting together and having a good time.

 Still, those lines from the setting sun at summer and winter solstice that I painted on the rocks formed a large angle that I haven’t ‘checked out’, but I’m pretty sure it would be 309° – 234° = 75° as the tables for my latitude show.

 In fact, I needn’t have waited several years for a clear, non-cloud-covered view of the winter solstice, I could have calculated the two azimuth angles, built a stainless steel protractor pointing to the two extremes of the setting sun, and set it in concrete down by the beach.  Then I could have used it to predict when the sun was going to reach its southernmost and northernmost sunset azimuths; i.e. I could have done all of this work using a calculator and a compass without even having to look at the sun; i.e. working the problem backwards and so avoiding ever having to experience the feeling of being included in the celestial dynamic.  My knowledge, recorded on the calendar, would then inform my behaviour and my actions would be inside-outward asserting, playing out ‘in time’ rather than being outside-inwardly orchestrated by the dynamics of space, the dynamic spatial relations I am included in.

 This reducing of experience of being included in something that is continually, unknowably unfolding, to ‘knowledge’ that henceforth tells us what is going to happen as a function of ‘time’, is part of this ‘shadow’ that is bothering me about Christmas.  Everything gets inverted to its natural order.  Instead of our actions being orchestrated from the outside-inward influence of our experience of inclusion in a transforming web of spatial relations, our knowledge furnishes an inside-outward assertive driver for our actions that then play out in a kind of clockworks fashion.

 Knowledge seems to be a neutered version of experience which inverts the direction of our behavioural sourcing.  Christmas is coming.  When is it coming?  Someone [some ‘authority’ like Dieter] has calculated that it comes on December 25^th, a number/date on the Christian calendar aka Gregorian calendar.  This is the date when Dieter or someone has said “now ist venn vee dahnce”.

 The authorities will recalculate it as necessary so we must keep listening for the signal of when to start the partying; e.g.

“The motivation for the Gregorian reform was that the Julian calendar assumes that the time between vernal equinoxes is 365.25 days, when in fact it is presently almost exactly 11 minutes shorter. The error between these values accumulated at the rate of about three days every four centuries, resulting in the equinox occurring on March 11 (an accumulated error of about 10 days) and moving steadily earlier in the Julian calendar at the time of the Gregorian reform. Since the Spring equinox was tied to the celebration of Easter, the Roman Catholic Church considered that this steady movement in the date of the equinox was undesirable.  … The Gregorian calendar therefore began by skipping 10 calendar days, to restore March 21 as the date of the vernal equinox.” – Wikipedia

Knowledge drives behaviour like clockworks.

 Is knowledge not a dangerous thing then?  Does it not take us out of our attunement with the unfolding habitat dynamic, the transforming web of spatial-relations in which we all share inclusion?

 I’m not being facetious here, I think we are in trouble.  I think ‘knowledge’ is running away with us, … ‘the tool is running away with the workman’ as Ralph Waldo Emerson said in ‘The Method of Nature’.

 The more we become ‘enlightened’ by knowledge, the larger and deeper the shadow grows.  This is the ‘jaws music’ I hear as Christmas is approaching and ‘the number of calendar days left’ is read off to us like an omen by the shop-keepers.

 Everybody knows when Christmas is, it is when Dieter or Pope Gregory or whoever is in charge of calendars and dates says “now ist venn vee dahnce”.

 We have been getting smarter and smarter, meaning that we ‘know more and more’ about the way the world works, the way that people work.

 Does this not mean that we are moving more things from the darkness of the unknown into the light of the known?

 Carl Jung said something about this that, today, rings bells for me as if I were trapped in a cathedral belfy during Angelus;

“The world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman Objects: it was projected, as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At most it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another: already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals. Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, rumours, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is.” – Carl Jung, ‘Psychology and Religion’.”

Have you noticed the ‘shadow growing’?

Have you noticed how people are coming out of their silence on issues such as sexual harassment and paedophilia and seeking retribution for decades old events?

Have you noticed how people want to give schizophrenics full punishment for offences they committed while in a hallucinatory state.

Have you noticed how people want to punish people whose unintended mistakes led to tragedy, on the basis of the magnitude of the tragedy, as in the case of the man who accidently dropped his cigarette into a deep layer of dry pine needles while installing a satellite antenna, which started a fire he couldn’t put out, which started the forest on fire and burned down his entire town?

Have you noticed how the media gets onto these cases and/or actually stirs them up through ‘investigative journalism’?

Have you noticed how the media and society demonize not just sexual harassers, but also fallen dictators such as Saddam Hussein and/or colonel Qaddafi of Libya.

As someone who lived and worked in Libya over the transition when the revolution led by Qaddafi interrupted the play of the colonizing powers which had been kicking Libya about like a football on their global pitch, I am amazed at how the media now isolates Qaddafi from the turbulence of colonization (which continues on in a more subtle-than-before political-economic dynamic) in which we are all participants.  As Jung said in an earlier era; we are not independent of these actions we see ‘out there’ in front of us;

“It is the face of our own shadow that glowers at us across the Iron Curtain.” – Carl Jung

And so it is, in my view, with the ‘evil’ faces of Saddam Hussein and Muamar Qaddafi selected for our viewing by the popular media.

Does it seem to you, as I say this, that I am trying to ‘make excuses for paedophiles and evil-monster-dictators’?

What I am getting at is this increasingly ‘surgical separating’ of the ‘perpetrator of immoral acts’ from the overall ‘moral’ mainstream of society; i.e. the projecting of our own ‘shadow’ on our fellow participants in a common living place dynamic.

What I am getting at is our growing sense that individual behaviour is driven inside-outwardly by ‘knowledge’ rather than by our experienced participation in the larger living space dynamic in which we are situationally included.

Was Qaddafi’s behaviour coming from his internal knowledge or from his experienced participation in the world dynamic?

To what degree is the individual’s behaviour ‘coming from his own internal knowledge-based direction’ and to what degree is it ‘coming from his experience of participation in the societal dynamic?’

There is evidently a rapid shift going on here as to how the media sees this; how mainstream society sees this, and it is decidedly moving towards the view that the individual’s behaviour is fully and solely internally driven, particularly if ‘immorality’ is involved.

For example, nine years ago, on the first anniversary of 9/11, CBC interviewer Peter Mansbridge asked then Prime Minister (Canada) Jean Chrétien:

“By the end of the day [9/11], what were you thinking about in terms of how the world had changed?”, and Chrétien replied:

“… it is a division in the world that is building up. And I knew that it was the inspiration of it.  For me, I think that the rest of the world a bit too selfish, and that there is a lot of resentment…. You know, the poor, relatively, get poorer all the time. And the rich are getting richer all the time. … You know, you cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others.  And that is what the Western world, not only the Americans, the Western world has to realize, because they are human beings too, and there are long-term consequences if you don’t look hard at the reality in 10 or 20 or 30 years from now.”

Although an Ipso-Reid poll found that 84 percent of Canadians believed the United States was at least partly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, and although Senator Douglas Roche commented;

“This was a very perceptive comment [Jean Chrétien's]. It was waiting to be said–needed to be said. It was something that many of us have been saying for a long time. Any anti-terrorism policy has to be seen within the totality of economic and social conditions that are the obvious spawning ground of this desperate activity.”

There was an uproar, particular in the United States where people accused Chrétien of ‘making excuses for terrorists’ and in Canada, …

“Canadian Alliance leader Stephen Harper called on Chrétien to apologize to the U.S. and to the families of Canadians killed in the attacks. “(His) comments, particularly coming on the anniversary of Sept. 11, blaming the victim are shameful,” Harper charged. “What was behind the events of Sept. 11 are the forces of evil and hatred…. These must be resisted by free and democratic societies and their leaders.”

This ‘division’ in peoples’ views based on (a) whether behaviour is ‘situation animated’, making it impossible to ‘cleanly isolate’ behaviour and attribute it to internal sourcing within the individual, entirely out of the context of the social dynamic [the transforming web of spatial relations] we are all participants in and helping to ‘condition’, or (b) whether behaviour is ‘subject animated’ so that we can ‘blame individuals’ for their ‘immoral acts’, … appears to be heading somewhere; i.e. to the overwhelming predominance of (b)].

The case of the firing of Joe Paterno, the famed Penn State football coach over sexual misbehaviour of a staff member he was informed of but failed to report to the police is another such event, riots over austerity in Britain are another;

“Prime Minister David Cameron blamed the worst riots in Britain for decades on street gang members and opportunistic looters and denied government austerity measures or poverty caused the violence in London and other major English cities.”

The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and other ‘Occupy’ protests around the globe are eliciting similar divisions of view as to the basic ‘origins of behaviour’,  in governments and in the social collective, the choice being between seeing the action of protesters as (a) deriving from the overall community dynamic, or (b) deriving internally from the rational knowledge and intellection of the dissenting individuals.

I will tell you what all of my inquiry into such conflicting views of dynamics points to, which fits what Nietzsche has written into his works, that ‘mediocre truths’ as in (b) are increasingly on the rise.   The media and the mainstream view is increasingly re-rendering the world dynamic in terms of subject-predicate, doer-deed, cause-effect, as is the mode of mainstream science.

“Our judgement has us conclude that] every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

Is lightning responsible for the flashes in the sky?  Is the corn producer responsible for the corn harvest, does the looter loot, the sexual harasser harass, or are these views of dynamic behaviour simply a ‘language game’ we are playing, a ‘mediocre truth’ as Nietzsche says, which fails to capture the deeper physical origin of these phenomena which lies within a transforming web of spatial relations?  Is there both a ‘breeding ground’ for ‘terrorism’ that we are all helping to condition as Chrétien argues and which Harper wants us to ignore, so that the blame can be focused fully and solely on the ‘terrorist acts’ of the individual, as if they originated locally, in the individual’s internal knowledge, intellection and purpose?  If one sees things as Chrétien does, then the truth in the statement ‘the terrorist terrorizes’ is a ‘mediocre truth’.

Still, as we grow our knowledge of ‘how things work’ we become more confident in explaining all manner of phenomena in terms of ‘how things work’ as if behaviour originates, in a ‘first cause’ fashion [God-like creationist fashion] from within things.

The more we psychologically isolate the source of behaviour to ‘the inner workings of the thing’, the more we deny our own involvement, the more our ‘shadow’ grows.  It is a Pinocchio’s nose sort of thing except that we cannot see the ‘shadow’.

Why am I talking about ‘the shadow’?   It is because it is evident to me that the ‘real’ sourcing of physical phenomena is spatial-relational and that individual behaviour is ‘idealization’ that is concretized by language and grammar [by ‘language games’] that conceals the ‘real’ source.   I am not talking about ‘the shadow’ because Carl Jung wrote about it, but his words are certainly of interest in this regard, in my view;

“How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious? Primitive man’s perception of objects is conditioned only partly by the objective behaviour of the things themselves, whereas a much greater part is often played by intrapsychic facts which are not related to the external objects except by way of projection. This is due to the simple fact that the primitive has not yet experienced that ascetic discipline of mind known to us as the critique of knowledge. To him the world is a more or less fluid phenomenon within the stream of his own fantasy, where subject and object are undifferentiated and in a state of mutual interpenetration.” – Carl Jung

Yes, this captures the sense that the space we experience life in, “‘our world’ … is a fluid phenomenon… where subject and object are undifferentiated and in a state of mutual interpenetration.”  That is what relativity and Mach’s principle say it is.  That is what quantum physics says it is.  That is what my experience informs me it is, as in the case of WWII and other examples above.  A world that is firstly a transforming web of spatial-relations in which we all share inclusion ‘is’ a fluid phenomenon where subject and object are not mutually excluding, where habitat and inhabitant are conjugate relations within a common fluid dynamic in the manner of the convection cells [inhabitants] in the flowing medium [habitat].

And just to interject, before continuing, a ‘personal note’ on why I have called this essay ‘A Christmas Shadow’.   I have called it this because of how I feel about Christmas and for the information of those who feel nothing of the sort, I am not saying that anyone else should feel as I do.  My feeling is that ‘Christmas’ is kind of a ‘command performance’ that comes out of nowhere, out of pure ‘knowledge’, down through the individual, as if everyone is supposed to listen to the voice of some faceless high priests who design calendars marked with days deemed important for all of us, to cue the correct behaviours in us.  As mentioned, if the celebrations were coming from the outside inwards, from our real current experience, as in harvest festivals, solstices, the arrival of spring, the warmth of summer days, these unfoldings that naturally orchestrate individual and collective behaviours, I feel good about them.

When the first sunny snow-cover-dissipating day of spring arrives after a long winter, it brings out a happy celebratory mood in everyone, and sharing that good mood seems to come naturally through us, through our experiencing of the world dynamic.  There are no media announcements giving us the calendar count on the number of days till the ‘happy day’ arrives where it is written and so that we ‘know’, …  ‘now ist venn vee dahnce’.   It is not just to the fixing of Christ’s birthday celebration that my spirit rebels, it rebels at the fixing of birthday celebrations and other time-cued celebratory schedules in general.   This is my ‘eccentricity’ if you like, … my feelings, … that I have no desire to impose on anyone.  I share it here to provide some background perspective as to how I am coming to conclude that ‘the shadow is growing’ in lockstep with ‘the growth of knowledge’, scientific knowledge and ‘rational knowing’, in particular.

Are we headed for an ‘Omega’ as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggests, … a global awakening event?

Yes, I believe we are headed there and it seems that we are moving swiftly, although I don’t see ‘Omega’ in the same terms as Teilhard does.

The remainder of this essay describes ‘the findings’ of my inquiry which largely parallel and are conformant with those of Nietzsche, Poincaré, Mach, Bohm, Schroedinger, all of whom suggest that our scientific knowledge based on matter and material dynamics [‘what things do’], is Fiktion, ‘a house of cards’, ‘appearances’, ‘maya’ (illusion), or perhaps most aptly, ‘mediocre truth’.

Materialist science and its technological applications along with rational thinking [scientific thinking] have been taking us deeper into that ‘illusion’ wherein we understand the world dynamic in the ‘mediocre truth’ terms of ‘what things do’ [subject animated dynamics rather than situation animated dynamics] and the deeper we have been ‘buying into’ that illusion, the deeper the ‘shadow’ becomes, and the more predominant our projection of that shadow onto others becomes.

This is my view, as a ‘scientist’ who ‘thinks scientifically’ and who uses scientific thinking as a tool, but who in no way accepts ‘science’ as anything more than a tool in support of understanding our far more complex life experience; … as a scientist who, as well, reflects on how science transforms our relations with one another and the dynamics of our shared living space and thus contributes to a complexity that is beyond its own explanatory reach.  All of my researches and experience affirm my view on this deepening of the illusion that would have us understand the world dynamic in the ‘time-enabled’ [clockworks] terms of ‘what things do’, and with the deepening of the illusion, the deepening of denial of our involvement and deepening of the shadow.

The primary charge here is not the declared falsity of rational knowledge, subject-predicate, cause-effect, ‘what things do’.  It is instead that such a view of dynamics is, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘mediocre truth’ aka ‘useful Fiktion and perhaps necessary Fiktion’.  What he means by that is that while we live within a continually transforming space [in a flow of ‘becoming’], in order to ‘talk about it’, we must reduce it to ‘being’ and in the process split apart the observing subject from the observed object.  It is this talk in terms of ‘beings’, ‘things-in-themselves’ that is ‘Fiktion’, ‘useful Fiktion’ and ‘perhaps necessary Fiktion’.  That is, it is an orienting to visible, material acts; i.e. to ‘subject animated dynamics’ that seem to tell a complete story thanks to ‘power of words’ [thanks to our ‘language games’] so that while these acts we describe are experimentally validated truths, they are mediocre truths.  The establishing as ‘the truth’ that a particular ‘terrorist act’ was ‘caused by’ particular ‘terrorist agents’ does not speak to the issue of whether the condition of our global society vis a vis the tensions that reside in its web of spatial relations, in which we are all participants, is not providing a fertile breeding ground for such ‘eruptions’.   This is why it is a ‘mediocre truth’.

All of the ‘type (b)’ knowledge that is mentioned above, that understands people’s behaviours in ‘subject-predicate’ form, as if their behaviour is fully and solely coming from the ‘doer’ [person, nation, corporation], from their internal knowledge, intellection and purpose, is what could be called ‘mediocre truth’.   This knowledge is what ‘science is all about’, and this is where the great growth in scientific knowledge is coming from.

The ‘type (a)’ understanding recognizes situational experience within the ‘continual becoming’ as the primary orchestrator of behaviour, while acknowledging that we can short cut our description of behaviour by imputing it to assert itself inside-outwardly from the interior of the individual [person, nation, corporation etc.].  Chrétien’s observation that, within the continually transforming global web of relations that constitute the world dynamic, some of us may experience ‘humiliation’ does not imply that the humiliation has to be ‘intentional’ to be ‘real’ and ‘experienced’.  As Chrétien said

“Power cannot be exercised to the point that it humiliates others, … History is full of stories of power that was not curbed” … and at a talk in New York to an audience of the powerful in business and politics, he said; “When you’re powerful like you are, you guys, this is the time to be nice.’ That’s one of the problems. You cannot exercise your power to the point of humiliation for the others, … The Western world, not only the Americans, but the Western world has to realize because they are human beings, too. .. There are long-term consequences if you don’t look hard at the reality, in 10 or 20 or 30 years from now.”

There is no room in mainstream/popular science or in scientific thinking (rational thinking) that allows for behaviour to be outside-inward orchestrated from the relational dynamics in a shared living space.  Yet, that is all that is allowed in ‘relativity’ and ‘quantum physics’.  Mach’s principle says that; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”   This is the view of the world dynamic as a ‘continual becoming’, as a ‘transformation of spatial relations’ wherein visible local material beings are ‘appearances’ (‘schaumkommen’), ‘ripples in the energy-charged fluid medium of space’ [Bohm, Schroedinger].

Bohm and Schroedinger are presenting a view of the real physical phenomenal world and along with it they are implying that ‘type (b)’ knowledge is ‘mediocre truth’ that ‘subjectizes’ on the basis of visual appearances, that takes visible material forms, ‘things that we consider in themselves’ and synthetically endows them with ‘subjecthood’ as ‘things-in-themselves’.  It is from this point of having subjectized visible forms within the continual becoming, that we then impute to them ‘their own behaviour’.   We do this with ‘language’ and ‘grammar’, as Nietzsche says;

“Our judgement has us conclude that] every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

This is the general psychological-linguistic process by which we impute behaviour to ‘beings’.   We can substitute all manner of ‘subjects’ into Nietzsche’s above statement and make the same point about the circular reasoning; e.g. ‘the terrorist terrorizes’.  The dictionary tells us that ‘the terrorist is a person who employs terror or terrorism.’  Those who claim to fight against what they feel is oppression and humiliation by their more powerful brothers, who call themselves ‘freedom fighters’, are labelled ‘terrorists’ by their more powerful brothers.  Meanwhile, ‘Just War Theory’ says that to qualify as being a legitimate conflict, “only duly constituted public authorities may wage war”, making just war a deliberate ‘rational act’ on the part of the warring parties.

War was not formally based on moral judgements.  Wars ‘happened’ like avalanches and earthquakes happen, when tensions grow beyond the threshold limits where the parties to the conflict can sustain a troubled balance.   Over the last two centuries, wars have been ‘rationalized’ on the basis that “violence is an evil that can in certain situations be condoned as the lesser of evils”.

Thus, instead of war erupting from long-standing relational tensions in Europe, war was instead seen as a rational necessity to defend against the evil actions of Hitler-led Nazi Germany; i.e. as the lesser of evils, the alternative being to be subjugated by an evil ‘colonizer’ empire [Nazi Germany].  Colonization was not justified except in the case where one race was truly superior to another, as Churchill said;

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.” — Churchill’s testimony to the Peel Commission (1937) on a Jewish Homeland in Palestine

The notion that ‘lightning flashes’ and/or ‘the warrior wars’ is circular reasoning, type (b) knowledge, ‘mediocre truth’ that surgically extracts the individual or group from their experience of inclusion within a social dynamic, a web of spatial relations that may well be oppressive and serve to orchestrate, from the outside-inward, individual and collective behaviours of those situationally included within the web of relations.

Instead of ‘situation-animated dynamics’ as in (a), we may [and increasingly often do] substitute the ‘mediocre truth’ of ‘subject-animated dynamics’ as in (b).

Am I ‘making excuses for terrorists’?

This discussion is not about judging the merits of different sides to a conflict, it is about different modes of understanding the same dynamics.  The colonizers of America were bothered for a long time with terrorist activities perpetrated by ‘the Indians’, the indigenous peoples who the colonizing culture has for several centuries continued to oppress and humiliate.

We are getting closer, here, to the nub of how; “as we are growing our knowledge, so are we growing our ‘shadow’”

Howard Zinn points out in ‘A People’s History of the United States’, the historical narrative of the colonizer [whom he, following Camus, refers to as ‘executioner’] is the absolute opposite of the historical narrative of the colonized indigenous peoples [‘the victims’].  The former’s view is that they are the creators of a wonderful new world in the Americas while the latter’s view is that the colonizers are the destroyers of a wonderful established world on Turtle Island.   These views are value-laden perspectives that are not reconcilable.  They are ‘mediocre truths’ based on ‘what people do’.   For the more comprehensive truth, one must recall that the world dynamic is a continual becoming, a transforming web of spatial-relations.  The overall world dynamic is characterized by continual transformation of spatial-relations.  The colonizers and the colonized experienced inclusion, together, in a common transforming living space.   Their difference in view comes in terms of a time-based narrative in terms of ‘what things do’ [what the respective players are doing and whether it is ‘constructive’ or ‘destructive’].

Genesis and degeneration are dual aspects of the one dynamic of ‘in-place’ transformation.  The biosphere undergoes in-place transformation.  Growth of population is ‘apparent’, it is not ‘real’.  Growth as in development of material structures [houses, buildings, roads] is ‘apparent’, it is not ‘real’.  How could the ‘constructive’ side of things be ‘real’ since what is already ‘in-place’ must be destroyed in the process of ‘constructing’ something new?   The current indigenous peoples of the Gulf Islands are committed to preserving and protecting the natural ecosystems and the ‘rural character’ of the islands.  The developers are eager to create a new presence.  It is impossible to construct something new without destroying something already established.  Only in a psychological modeling of new construction, as if in an absolute fixed, empty and infinite Euclidian space operating theatre, could ‘construction’ proceed without its conjugate twin ‘destruction’.

In other words, there is only ‘in-place transformation’ where what has been established is destroyed in the act of new construction.  Thousand of human life-cycle generations of ‘production’ and ‘growth’ will not ‘add up’ because they are not ‘real’ [as Schroedinger observes, ‘matter’ is not real, it is energy in transformation, a ripple in the energy-charged spatial-plenum.  Just because it is convenient for us to subjectize and concretize it in language does not ‘make it real’].  Transformation of spatial relations is real and it is what both the colonizer and colonized actually experience in spite of the one claiming that ‘construction’ is ‘taking place’ and the other arguing that ‘destruction’ is what is ‘taking place’.  Historical narratives are in terms of ‘mediocre truths’; i.e. in terms of notional ‘time-sequence’ accounts of ‘what things do’, ‘subject-predicate’ action where ‘producers produce’ in the circular reasoning that underlies ‘mediocre truth’.

As Nietzsche observes, our living space, e.g. the biosphere, does not grow bigger or smaller, it only transforms ‘in place’;

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income … This world is the will to power–and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power–and nothing besides!” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

Economic theory, meanwhile, is based on ‘mediocre truth’ that treats ‘production’ and ‘growth’ as if they were ‘real’.

This ‘mediocre truth’ is presently in a state of collapse, and this is ‘the writing on the wall’ that suggests the coming of some sort of nexus or ‘awakening’.

But the proponents of the reality of (b), ‘subject animated dynamics’ wherein ‘the producer produces’ are not accepting the collapse of this ‘illusion’ without a fight.  The lines are hardening.

On the (a) side, economists such as Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize in Economics, 2003) are noting that what is happening to the space that the producer draws resources and labour and other inputs from and discharges products and outputs into, is the more comprehensive suprasystem dynamic, a dynamic [relational] ‘fluid medium’ in which a particular producer is a participating ‘ripple’ or ‘convection cell’.  This is euphemistically described in terms of ‘externalities’ that associate with production; i.e. that are ‘fallout’ that is not taken into account in the book-keeping, but that nevertheless conditions the living space we all share inclusion in, and thus affect us all.

Marshall McLuhan pointed this out before Stiglitz in ‘Understanding Media’ (1964), where he observes that even as we focus on ‘what things do’,

“it matters little whether the machinery we put in place constructs Cadillacs or Cornflakes, what [predominantly] matters is how our relations with one another and the living space in which we share inclusion are transformed.”

And Frédéric Neyrat similarly expresses this same point in ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’;

“In extending his living space in a manner that destroys the space of others, he destroys his own space. Not initially his inside space, his ‘self’, but his outside space, this real outside-of-self which nourishes his ‘inside-of-self’. The protection of this outside space now becomes the condition without which he is unable to pursue the growth of his own powers of being.”

Because the space of the earth’s biosphere persists in its sphericity and volume even as ‘production’ and ‘growth’ appear to go on within it, we cannot claim that ‘something grows’ in that space; i.e. the notion that ‘something grows’ is a ‘mediocre truth’ since the dynamics of the space of the biosphere are constituted by the transformation of spatial relations.   Growth/genesis and decline/degeneration are dual simultaneous aspects of the single dynamic; i.e. ‘transformation of spatial relations’.

As discussed above, it is the ‘power of words’ that allows us to psychologically isolate the ‘producer’ by circular reasoning as in ‘the producer produces’, or ‘the grower grows’, making it appear as if the subject is the doer of the deed when both subject and object are bound up in the continuing transformation of spatial relations, in the same sort of manner as storm-cells in the atmospheric flow-space [or as ‘ripples in the spatial-plenum’, in Bohm’s words].

Science has been in charge of developing our ‘production technology’ and our rate of accruing knowledge of ‘how things work’ and how we can ‘make things happen’ has been rapidly escalating.  Thanks to science, we are not only gaining technological proficiencies on the macro level, we are extending our ‘make things happen’ technologies into the micro and nano levels.

But the more that we orient to ‘making things happen’ [i.e. the more we ‘understand’ dynamics in these terms] the more we blind ourselves to ‘what is really happening’ (the transformation of our living space).  We are like the colonizers who focused on constructing a wonderful new world.  And then, when we look upon the evil face of the dead Indian that we have just killed, that had been terrorizing us, just as when we look upon the evil face of a Saddam Hussein and a Muamar Qaddafi that had been terrorizing us, and/or the rioters and protestors in the streets; “It is the face of our own shadow that glowers at us” as Jung says.

The concept of ‘the producer that produces’ is fiction that ignores the reality that the producer is more realistically seen as a convection cell within the fluid medium of the biosphere, but we have built a global economy upon ‘the mediocre truth’ of ‘appearances’, and this ‘growth-based economy’ is imploding, as is inevitable.

Within a relational space, outside-inward ‘nurturance-affording’ [destructive] influence and inside-outward asserting [constructive] influence are dual aspects of one dynamic [relational transformation].  At some point the outside-inward ‘reciprocal compression’ that inevitably and always associates with inside-outward asserting action becomes manifest.  For example, the inside-outward asserting ‘growth’ of a cluster of warming bubbles generates outside-inward reciprocal compression that transforms the spherical bubbles into hexagonal cells.  The faster the bubbles grow, the more intense the reciprocal compression and the more radical the transformation of spatial relations.  Only if space ‘really were’ an absolute fixed empty and infinite operating theatre would we avoid the simultaneous reciprocal compression, … the outside-inward accommodating influence that is simultaneously conjugate to any/all inside-outward asserting influence.  How it manifests will not be obvious, as Mach’s principle suggests [“the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat”]; i.e. the transformation of spherical cells to hexagonal cells, and the ‘V’ flying formation of the wildgeese are exceptional cases where the ever-present outside-inward orchestrating influence that is conjugate to inside-outward asserting influence becomes visibly manifest.

The imploding economy is the result of confusing ‘appearances’ for ‘reality’, for mistaking ‘growth’ as something ‘real’, and in the process ignoring the shadow, the ‘externalities’ we are infusing into the common living space dynamic.

The ‘intellectual economy’ is headed in the same direction; i.e. it is headed for ‘implosion’.  We have been attributing ‘constructive acts’ to constructive people and ‘destructive acts’ to ‘destructive people’ and allocating rewards and punishments on the basis of these notional ‘subject animated dynamics’, these ‘mediocre truths’.  The heroes of our ‘production’ and ‘growth’ industries, that are being termed “the 1%”, are becoming seen as the evil, manipulative ‘executioners’ of we ‘the innocent victims’, that are being termed “the 99%”.

Churchill rallied the bulk of the global collective behind him when he interpreted Germany’s invasion of Poland in the ‘mediocre truth’ terms of ‘their evil act’, thus opening the door to a rational ‘just’ war based on the morals of individual [person, nation] behaviour wherein “violence is an evil that can in certain situations be condoned as the lesser of evils”.

The ‘error’, of course, is in the psychological disassociation of ourselves, participants in the transforming web of spatial relations, the situation-animated dynamics that constitutes the world dynamic, from the ‘apparent subject animated dynamics’ that we impute to be going on ‘out there’ in front of us.

Stephen Harper and George W. Bush, thanks to the appeal of their ‘moralist’ message, left Jean Chrétien speaking to empty seats with his premise that we must acknowledge that we participate in a conditioning of the common living space in such a manner as to cultivate imbalances, disharmonies [humiliations] and in general ‘relational tensions’ that make our living space a ‘breeding ground’ for eruptions of violence.  In other words, the ‘winning’ [by popular acceptance] combination of moral judgement and ‘mediocre truth’ [subject animated dynamics conditioned in our minds by ‘scientific thinking’] puts us into a state of denial fertile to the growth of our ‘shadow’; i.e.

“It is the face of our own shadow that glowers at us from the terrorist camps and from the pictures of sexual predators.”

We are at the point where the continuing shift to a belief in ‘subject animated dynamic’ is making it a ‘moral imperative’ for ‘all good men’ to take it upon themselves to root out ‘the evil ones’ in the world, not only the Saddam Hussein’s and the Muamar Qaddafi’s and the Osama bin Ladin’s, but the sexual predators and looters and rioters that poison our streets.  By our very act of seizing the initiative to root out evil in the world, we purify ourselves, and confirm our disconnection from those out there who are only themselves responsible for their inside-outward asserting evil actions, whose hateful ugly evil faces we can and must spit upon and stone.

Our ethic of ‘keeping it simple’ means that it is not necessary to go to the trouble of recalling how our web of spatial relations evolves and connects us all together when we, as colonizers/executioners see the ugly evil face of a colonized-indigenous/victim-turned terrorist pop up, and duly plug a few bullets through his ugly head.  Like Churchill, it is sufficient to apply rational, scientific thinking to such matters; i.e.

Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.”  – Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’

Time, therefore, plays a very important part in ‘colonizer justice’.  It is the basic enabler of ‘mediocre truth’.  Calendars and clocks can help us  escape from the primitive world described by Carl Jung where subject and object are in a state of mutual interpenetration, in the manner of the convection cell in the flowing medium;

“How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious? Primitive man’s perception of objects is conditioned only partly by the objective behaviour of the things themselves, whereas a much greater part is often played by intrapsychic facts which are not related to the external objects except by way of projection. This is due to the simple fact that the primitive has not yet experienced that ascetic discipline of mind known to us as the critique of knowledge. To him the world is a more or less fluid phenomenon within the stream of his own fantasy, where subject and object are undifferentiated and in a state of mutual interpenetration.” – Carl Jung

Scientific knowledge can drive and direct our behaviour in the same sort of time-triggered manner as an important date marked on the calendar; i.e. it can start up our behaviour, inside-outwardly, from scratch, informing us in the manner of an invisible commander; …  ‘now ist venn vee dahnce’.  Such knowledge can tell me when I must run down to the beach and spray a paint-line on the rocks to denote the winter solstice, without ever having to see the sunset and to contemplate how the outside-inward orchestrating influence of the celestial habitat-dynamic conditions our inhabitant-behaviours, as we, somehow, are at the same time conditioning the dynamics of the habitat we are included in.

In Dickens’ ‘ A Christmas Carol’, clocks and chimes abound, announcing to Scrooge and to us that this is a story rendered in terms of ‘what things do’ where change is seen as transpiring ‘in time’.  We can clearly see the message that Scrooge ‘must change his behaviour’ before ‘it is too late’.  His ‘time is running out’ and his material actions, ‘what he does’, his ‘subject animated dynamic’ is portrayed as of first order importance.  Yes, it is a ‘popular classic’ in the ‘moralizing story’ category, even though it sees ‘transformation’ in the ‘mediocre truth’ terms of the ‘transformation of the individual’ and ‘what he does’.

“ A Christmas Carol has been deemed a biting piece of social commentary by some. Critics have underscored the scathing criticism of 1840s London, an economically and socially stratified city that Dickens believed imprisoned its poor and oppressed its lower classes. The prevailing socio-economic theory of that time held that anyone who was in debt should be put in a poorhouse. In his story, Dickens contended that the reformation of such a materialistic, shallow society can be achieved gradually through the spiritual transformation of each individual … Scrooge’s metanoia has also been placed within its historical and literary context, and critics have related it to the religious revival then fervent in nineteenth-century England”

No doubt, part of the appeal of the story comes from an awareness of the ‘power’ that Scrooge holds by virtue of his ‘productive achievements’ as a sort of Plantation Owner.  The conversion of ‘worker-abusing plantation owners’ to ‘benevolent plantation owners’ parallels the evolutionary path of our global society.  Scrooge, meanwhile, remains the ‘plantation owner’ and thus the story is cast in terms of ‘moral behaviour’ based on the ‘mediocre truth’ of ‘subject animated behaviour’, what a person is ‘seen to do’.

Scrooge is radically unlike a Mohammed Bouazizi, the humble Tunisian who lacked the power of wealth to perpetrate ‘good’ in an inside-outward asserting manner, but whose self-immolation ‘induced’ massive transformation of spatial relations in the living space he shared inclusion in.  Scrooge is a model for how to deploy the power that we feel arises within us, to ‘good purpose’.  It is a model that likely invites welcome embrace by a George W. Bush, a Winston Churchill and a Stephen Harper and by all of us who believe in being the author of good works during our brief ‘time’ on earth.  What I am saying is that ‘A Christmas Carol’ begins and ends in the realm of (b), subject animated behaviour or ‘mediocre truth’.

The present day ‘colonized’ aboriginal appreciates the fact that his ‘colonizer’ has transformed ‘over time’ from being an ‘abusive’ colonizer to becoming a ‘benevolent colonizer’, but the ‘colonized’ indigenous person is not looking for such time-based transformation that is in terms of ‘what things do’, he is looking for transformation in spatial relations that have been holding him captive and subjecting him to ‘domestication’.  His understanding of the world dynamic goes beyond the ‘mediocre truth’ terms of ‘what people do’ and whether it is morally good or bad.  His understanding is in terms of how our ‘inhabitant dynamics’ are conditioning the ‘habitat dynamic’ at the same time as the ‘habitat dynamic’ is conditioning our ‘inhabitant dynamics’.   He understands that the tensions in Europe were the breeding ground for the actions that became visible eruptions in the form of ‘what evil Hitler/Nazi Germany’ did, and/or what benevolent, heroic Churchill/Britain did.   Is it even meaningful to make the ‘moral assessment’ of the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of the ‘individual nation’ when it comes to war?  Are we not all bound together within a continually transforming web of spatial relations?  Are not ‘all wars civil wars’?  Is Mitakuye Oyasin, ‘we are all related’ not the transcending truth that trumps the ‘mediocre truth’ of ‘individual behaviour’?

In the eyes of the world, Churchill/Britain is a hero and Hitler/Germany is a villain, and to argue otherwise is to make oneself very unpopular.  Few people are going to listen to complex arguments that seek a more ‘comprehensive truth’ than the ‘mediocre truth’ that is embodied in such moral assessments.

By the same token, few people are going to accept that action that originates by ‘time-cues’ such as calendar dates can lead to ‘mediocre behaviours’, the sort of scientific, clockworks behaviours of the -  ‘now ist venn vee dahnce’ – genre, the sort of behaviours that derive inside-outwardly from ‘knowledge’ without the conjugate twin of ‘outside-inward orchestrating’ influence.  I am certainly not claiming that this is the full story on time-cued, subject animated dynamics.  Once the celebration starts, a more resonant outside-inward orchestration is ‘enabled’ in conjugation with inside-outward asserting, so – ‘let the dahncing and celebrations begin’-, by all means.

The happy and loving face we are looking into is ‘the face of our own shadow that is glowing back at us’.

When the mirroring is simultaneous in both directions, ‘time’ is removed from the ‘equation’ and only the relations of space persist.

Who said that a ‘Christmas Shadow’ could not have dual faces?

With the elimination of ‘time’ the observer/receiver becomes one with observed/transmitted in timeless ‘holey communion’.

* * *

Language makes every 'state' into a 'subject' capable of predicative action. The 'Poles' continue to be 'the same subject people' regardless of how physical content varies.

Introduction:  Behaviours can be ‘situationally animated’ and they can be ‘language animated’.  When we get together to try to understand ‘the world dynamic’, we do so using synthetic realities constructed with ‘words-as-subjects’ to depict the ‘animating agencies’.  In the above graphic, situation animated dynamics ‘actually’ shape the boundaries of ‘states’.  But once we have a ‘name’ for the state, we can use that word, as if it were a real ‘thing-in-itself’;  i.e. as the fixed subject of predicative behaviour.   ‘Subject animated dynamics’ are clearly not the same as ‘situation animated dynamics’.  The problems that arise when we put our psycho-LOGICAL view of the former into an unnatural precedence over our experience of the latter are increasingly manifest in today’s society.

The globally dominating culture, call it ‘Western’ or ‘colonizer’ or whatever, portrays our life experience by way of a ‘language game’ wherein we substitute ‘subject animated dynamics’ for ‘situation animated dynamics’. One is not allowed to call attention to the fact that we are ‘playing this game’, and if we do, we break the rules of the game, and we are punished for it.

The policing is not by some group of control-seeking conspirators but ‘by ourselves’, by practice embodied in the fabric of culture;

 “… where Chimpanzees were sprayed with ice-water [which they hate] every time they touched a distinctive red ladder placed in their cage.  The chimps quickly learned to police one another so that there would be no climbing by anyone on that ladder.  There was soon no longer any need to spray the ice-water since their mutual policing was so effective.  When newcomers joined the group, they were quickly trained not to touch the red ladder, and when the entire group was replaced, one after the other, with new residents who had never experienced the spraying of ice-water in association with touching the red ladder, the entirely new group continued to police themselves so that they did not climb on it.  Learning ‘good behaviour’ was by way of revelation of what the group held to be ‘good behaviour’.”

The ‘language game’ for which the ‘policing’ is embodied in the fabric of our culture has been described by Nietzsche as follows;  We observe/experience a dynamic unfolding, a brilliant light in the sky or a violent swirling of wind and clouds, or a dynamic form that is physically like ourselves.  Though our experience informs us that these dynamic forms that continually out-well and in-well, are like ‘ripples’ in the energized medium of the space we live in, a space that persists as these things come and go within it, we begin the language game by giving these things ‘names’; e.g. ‘lightning’, ‘hurricane’, ‘man’ etc. and making these words ‘subjects’ that become their own sources of action; ‘lightning flashes’, ‘hurricanes blow/destroy’, ‘man does such-and-such’.  We make these ‘words’ into ‘doers of deeds’, even though our experience informs us that these forms are transient developments in the energy-charged medium that we live in.

 We let our understanding slip, without excuse or justification, from ‘things considered in themselves’ [Dinge an sich selbst betrachtet] to ‘things in themselves’ [Dinge an sich].   Our subjectivity, the subjectivity of the observer/experience is what juridically/logically endows these ripples in the spatial-plenum with local objects/organisms/system ‘being’ status, which prepares them for our notionally equipping them with their own local, internal sourcing powers for developing form, behaviour and collective organizing.   Thus it is our own ‘subjectivity’ that re-renders the world dynamic in ‘inside-outward asserting’ terms by means of a language game, even though every aspect of our life experience informs us that we live in a continually evolving space wherein outside-inward orchestrating influence predominates over inside-outward asserting influence; i.e. the flow predominates over the ripples that continually develop within the flow and that participate in its transformation [the ripples are the agents of transformation of the flow they are inclusions in].   As Mach’s principle of space-matter relativity says; “The dynamics of the flow condition the dynamics of ripples at the same time as the dynamics of the ripples are conditioning the dynamics of the flow.” 

The language game will take a life experience such as where the occupants of a boat that springs a leak start frantically bailing out the inflowing water, a ‘situation-animated dynamic’ wherein the occupants are participants in the transformation of spatial relations, and re-cast it in language-game terms of ‘what people do’ as if their actions are entirely inside-outward asserting, sourced by knowledge, intellection and purpose.  We say that the ultimate source of inside-outward asserting people-action is the ‘survival instinct’.   The language game falls back on this a lot, and even ‘explains’ evolution (inside-outward genetic development) as being powered by ‘survival instinct’ [ignoring the outside-inward epigenetic influence].

 Scientists who openly opine that epigenetics [outside-inward orchestrating of the formative dynamic] predominates over genetics [inside-outward asserting of the formative dynamic] break the subject-predicate rules of the language game and are ‘expelled’ from their profession, or else they learn to ‘keep their mouths shut’ and obediently observe the rules of the language game.  As the psychiatrist-philosopher Ronald Laing put it;

They are playing a game.  They are playing at not
playing a game.  If I show them I see they are, I
shall break the rules and they will punish me.
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

Politicians and economists play the same language game as scientists.  The Polish are a ‘proud people’, so be careful when telling ‘Polish jokes’.  But who are the ‘Polish?’.  If one reviews the ‘boundary game’ that goes hand in hand with the ‘language game’ we see that Poland’s borders have transformed under the epigenetic influence of the political collective in which it is included.  Yet the language game treats the Poles as a ‘subject’ that one can associate predicative action to; ‘The Poles expanded their boundaries, the Poles had to pull back their boundaries.  So who are the Poles?  According to Wikipedia;

 “The Polish people, or Poles are a nation indigenous to Poland.”

That’s interesting, ‘the Poles are circularly defined as the people who live in Poland’, …particularly  in view of the oscillating borders of Poland.  But Wikipedia continues;

 “The preamble to the Constitution of the Republic of Poland defines the Polish nation as comprising all the citizens of Poland.”

This second definition is a juridical/logical one.  If you have your Polish citizenship papers, you are a Pole.

If the ‘authorities’ give you this name, that is what ‘you really are’! … according to the language game.  The Pole who has just got his U.S. citizenship is not only going to punch you out for telling Polish jokes, he is going to kick your ass for burning an American flag.

Economists will calculate you a GDP for Poland regardless of its borders that will inform you as to whether the Poles are superior or inferior ‘producers’.  They merely have to plug the new border information into their database and re-gather the economic data on that basis.  They will give you the GDP for Kosovo the day after it is juridically/logically decreed an ‘independent state called Kosovo’.  A week later, economic experts will sit beside the politicians and ratify the proposed economic programs to improve the Kosovan GDP as if it were an inside-outward determined result, rather than seeing the region as an inclusion within an evolutionary unfolding wherein outside-inward orchestrating influence [epigenetics] predominates over inside-outward asserting [genetic] influence.

Theologians are also members of the language-game club.  They tell us that once a man has a name and is thus a ‘being’ [one of God’s ‘creations’], he has ‘his own inside-outward asserting behaviour’ and since he ‘has his own behaviour’, and is fully and solely responsible for it [in denial of the real world of our experience where human behaviours are situationally animated and where we are participants in the relational transformation of the living space we all share inclusion in], he can be judged as to the moral goodness or badness of his behaviour.  But as Chuang Tzu observed;

Teaching love and duty

provides a fitting language

with which to prove that robbery

is really for the general good.

A poor man must swing,

for stealing a belt buckle,

But if a rich man steals a whole state

He is acclaimed as statesman of the year.

Of course we don’t have ‘our own behaviour’, except in the world of language games where we use the subject-predicate doer-deed constructs based on word-names as a basis for re-rendering the spatial relational dynamics of our experience, in the synthetic terms of visual form-animated dynamics wherein we picture ourselves as navigators in a dynamic space where the dynamics are due to named-forms like ourselves that act/interact sequentially [‘in time’] in an absolute, fixed, ‘operating theatre’; i.e. in a fixed reference-frame or x,y,z Euclidian space. [essentially, we use the language game to remove the spatial-relational character of the space of our real-life experience and substitute a fixed and empty operating theatre box filled with local named beings that are imagined to be the first cause source of the world dynamic]

The language game only works in Euclidian space where things can exist ‘absolutely’ as ‘local beings’.  In a relational space such as the one we experience living in; i.e. in the space on the surface of the earth, there is only spatial-relational ‘becoming’ and there are no persisting ‘identities’ [in our natural, pre-lingual experience].  Our dynamics are animated by the spatial-relational situations that unfold [that we participate in unfolding]; i.e. we participate in transforming the common living space we share inclusion in. 

Sure, the European colonizers can speak in language game-‘what named-things do’ terms, and claim that they are the authors of the genesis of a wonderful new world/civilization in the Americas while the colonized indigenous peoples can speak in language game-‘what named-things do’ terms, and claim that the colonizers are the authors of the degeneration and destruction of a wonderful established civilization on Turtle Island.  This leads to the usual irreconcilable difference in language game world views.  Of course a video-camera on Mars focused on the earth would see all earth activity as being included with a continuing spatial-relational transformation.  When the colonizers said they ‘moved from ‘Europe’ to ‘America’’, … without the language game artefacts ‘Europe’ and ‘America’ to anchor the movement and present it in terms of absolute motion, it would be seen as part of a rearranging of the overall spatial relations in the space on the surface of the sphere of the earth, the only sort of motion (spatial-relational rearranging/transformation) that is possible in such a [spherical] space.

Therefore, while the reality of our experience is of the transforming spatial relations that we share inclusion in; i.e.  the colonizer notion of ‘genetic authorship’, of growth and construction and the colonized peoples notion of ‘degenerative authorship’, of collapse and destruction, are flip sides of the one ‘real dynamic of our experience’; i.e. transformation of the space in which we share inclusion.   As Nietzsche puts it;

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income … This world is the will to power–and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power–and nothing besides!” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

And as McLuhan said, it matters little what name we attach to the factory we plunk down into the town, ‘Cadillac’ or ‘Cornflakes’, what matters is how our relations with one and other and the habitat are transforming.  And generation after generation of flickering picture-shows of human families rising up and collapsing ‘in place’ give history to the same place in terms of its transformation.  We are that transforming place that we are living and experiencing in.

Now, another sponsor of language game play, along with Scientists, Politicians, Economists and Theologians is the ‘Romantic’.  The ‘Romantic’, like the theologian, wants to ‘reconnect’ the ‘named subject’ with the real world he/she/it was synthetically split out from.  The ‘Romantic’ wants to reverse the ratcheted sequence from ‘Ding an sich selbst betrachtet’ to ‘Ding an sich’, but without ‘dropping the name’.  The ‘Romantic’ notionally infuses a ‘heart’ and ‘soul’ into the named subject to restore its ‘connection’ with the unfolding spatial ‘All’, so that the named entity can be seen as a channel that the universe is acting through.   This is akin to an attempt to acknowledge that hurricane Katrina is a ripple in the spatial flow-plenum without abandoning the power of the word ‘Katrina’ in notionally attributing local, internal sourcing powers [first-cause creative authorship powers] to Katrina.   The internal organs of ‘heart’ and ‘soul’ become notional channels through which the powers of the universe find expression through the named subject.   This preserves the language game’s salient characteristic, namely, that all action in the universe is inside-outward asserting, even though every aspect of our experience screams out that outside-inward orchestrating predominates over inside-outward asserting influence [i.e. while ‘epigenetics’ and ‘genetics’ are flip sides of the one spatial-relational dynamic, ‘epigenetics’ predominates over ‘genetics’ as in any fluid, field-flow dynamic].

It is a degenerate form of understanding to say that the frantic bailing actions of the occupants of the boat derive, on a first cause basis, from their internal processes of intellection and purpose (their so-called ‘survival instinct’ mocked by Nietzsche).  They may not feel their lives threatened at all.  They may want to keep their clothes dry.  They are evidently participants in situationally animated dynamics; … they are participants in transforming the spatial relations they are situationally included in.   Like the people of the deer [Nenets] when the herd moves, they move, in order to sustain balance and harmony in their conjugate habitat-inhabitant relations.  It is only the language game that allows us to re-render these spatial-relational dynamics in a manner that notionally points to the sourcing of the dynamics as originating in the interior of the named ‘form’ that we have, using the language game, ‘broken out’ of the spatial relational dynamic continuum.

The language game is totally screwing us up.  The economists are looking silly and so are the politicians.  They continue to stick with the language game and with the belief [based on juridical/logical declarations] that nations and corporations are subjects with predicative authoring capacities, a ‘total Fiktion’ as Nietzsche would say [a ‘useful fiction’ if not confused for reality].    The theologians continue to claim that each person is a local subject with full and sole responsibility for predicative action, and thus is governable by moral code and conscience, even though the Chuang Tzu observation has generally been on the rise; i.e. that “A poor man must swing, for stealing a belt buckle, But if a rich man steals a whole state He is acclaimed as statesman of the year.”

The Romantics, who ignore that the source of the dysfunction lies in the language game, preserve the named subject and argue that we must develop more loving hearts and more soulful souls as an antidote to the ‘self-otherness disconnect’ between the named entities and the space they share inclusion in.  My take is the same as R.D. Laing’s;

They are all playing a game.  They are all playing at not
playing a game.  If I show them I see they are, I
shall break the rules and they will punish me.
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

And no, I don’t presume I’m the only one.  Nietzsche said it very plainly, and so did Poincaré and it has probably occurred to most of us.  Poincaré seems to have originated the term ‘language game’ and confounded his colleagues and the public by saying that the proposition ‘the earth rotates’ is nonsense.  His point, first made in ‘Science and Hypothesis’ and after the confusion it caused, explained again in Science and Method’, is that ‘the earth’ is the name we give to a dynamic phenomenon within a larger dynamic phenomenon, thus it is not the first cause ‘subject/author’ of its own behaviour.  His point is the same as Nietzsche’s where Nietzsche used the example ‘lightning flashes’. 

“Our judgement has us conclude that] every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

Wittgenstein also pointed out that our logical propositions are ‘language games’.  The ‘nouns’ we use in language, as the basis for our logical propositions, enjoy ‘absolute being’, something alien to our experience, but only within the language game realm.

No-one, not Poincaré, Nietzsche or I, are saying that this language game is not useful or that it has not helped us achieve amazing things in the realm of technology.  It has given us the Cadillac and Cornflake factories and much more, but as our focus has turned to ‘what things do’, treating these ‘names’ such as the Cadillac factory [or ‘Poland’ etc.] as first-cause authors of their products, we lose sight of the fact that we and the factory are included in a spatial-relationally transforming common living space.  This space is the ur-author of both ourselves and the Cadillac factory, so that merely putting a name on ourselves and the factory is not sufficient to magically convert us into the first-cause creative ‘subject/authors’ of ‘our own behaviour’.  But that is what we do with the ‘language game’ and then we re-render the world dynamics in terms of ‘named things’ and ‘what they do’; i.e. the Polish nation, and we report on this in the media as if it were ‘the real world’, when it is ‘maya’ [Vedics], ‘schaumkommen’ [Schroedinger], ‘Fiction’ [Nietzsche].

If we believe in the ‘independent existence’ of the Polish nation/state or any other named state or named being, we may as well believe in faeries (in good faeries and in daemons).

But who will be the first to expose ‘the Emperor’s New Clothes’ in this case?  Nietzsche made a good attempt and the jury is still out.  That is, his ideas are so outrageous when viewed by most of us, we-all who have been indoctrinated into belief in the language game.   So that while these outrageous ideas tickle our experiential understanding, inviting it to return to its natural precedence over ‘maya’, the ‘illusion’ constituted by the language game reality, we are at the same time confounded by the fact that this requires us to go against the bulk of what is commonly understood and accepted in our culture.

The language game [not the game itself but our confusing its ‘illusion of reality’ for ‘reality’] is proving toxic to our collective health and there seems to be a natural self-correction underway.  People are no longer paying as much attention to what politicians and economists have to say, and neither are they paying that much attention to theologians, who seem as confused and without answers as everyone else; i.e. the theologians advocate the same things as always.  In spite of the rejection of language based advice and the desire to re-tune to situation-animated dynamics where we are participants in transforming spatial relations in our shared living space, we remain addicted to the language game through our addiction/dependence on ‘money’.  ‘Money’ is the currency of the language game and its ‘what things do’ illusion.  Money is the predicate of the subjective authorship of product.   Money is needed to buy Cornflakes and Cadillacs and to ‘keep the global economy healthy’.

If we fly around the world, we see villages nesting in oases, in green valleys, in sheltered ports.  Our video-camera on Mars would have recorded the climate induced migration of green areas and the Okies in hot pursuit, and in general, the evolution of these communities in terms of ‘situation-animated dynamics’, like the bailing of the occupants of the leaking boat, wherein ‘epigenetics’ [outside-inward orchestrating influence] predominates over ‘genetics’ [inside-outward asserting influence] though the two are flip sides of one dynamic; i.e. spatial-relational ‘in place’ transformation.  Certainly, the imposing of names and the power of subject/author status the forms we ‘name’ gives us the psychological ‘traction’ to re-render these dynamics ‘one-sidedly’ in the inside-outward asserting terms of a subjectively authored ‘genesis’, so long as we can suspend or ‘temporarily forget about’ the more comprehensive understanding of these dynamics as in-place spatial-relational transformation.  There is the problem that the growth and genetic constructions of thousand of generations of human inhabitants ‘just doesn’t add up’ as seen on our Mars video-camera.  Apparently, all of this production and construction is ‘not real’ and what is going on is captured in Nietzsche’s description, as ‘in-place’ relational transformation;

“This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income”

To sell our services for money is to become slaves of the language game which perceives ‘production’ as ‘real’, rather than as a rearrangement of things in spatial-relational terms [as it would be understood by Mach’s principle, in the relative space, or non-euclidian space, rather than as in absolute space of the language game].  Insofar as ‘production’, ‘what things do’, or ‘what we do’, animates our social dynamic, we remove ourselves from the ‘situation animated dynamics’ of pre-technological society, the dynamics of naturally evolving communities wherein we understood ourselves as participants in spatial-relational ‘in-place’ transformation.  I would like to say ‘pre-lingual’ society here, but its not a question of ‘before we played the language game’, it is a question of whether or not we put the ‘language game-reality’ in precedence over the reality of our situational experience.  We didn’t do this ‘early on’ and we still wouldn’t do it if we were a group that was ‘marooned’ in the ‘wilderness’ [i.e. subject to normal life experience once again]; i.e. our language games would be secondary support while we responded to the outside-inward orchestrating influences of nature.

But of course, once we swear an oath of allegiance to the Polish nation or whatever, we are committing to putting a language-game based organizational system in precedence over the outside-inward orchestrating influences that elicit our local situational responses.  In other words, our societal organizing structures embody the upside-down precedence of the language game reality over the situationally animated dynamics of our experience, and this becomes the ‘new normality’. As R.D. Laing also observed;

“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.”

So, right now we are in the position of having made ourselves dependent on the ‘blood’ that sustains the life of the language game culture; i.e. ‘money’, the ‘currency’ of the ‘what things do’ illusion that we confuse for reality.  The economists tell us that continuing growth is important for us to be able to sustain the way of living that we have become accustomed to, but the video camera on Mars is showing us that ‘growth’ is and illusion.  Our actions are, in reality, participating in a continuing ‘in place’ transformation of our common living space.  Thousands of generations of ‘production’ and ‘construction’ have not ‘added up’, genesis and degeneration are flip sides of a single ‘real’ dynamic, in-place [spatial-relational] transformation, like Mach and Nietzsche and Poincaré have suggested.

Evidently, we of the colonizer culture can convert to the belief system of the colonized peoples which was not afflicted by ‘language game’-zombification.  The ‘decolonization’ initiatives patiently sustained by aboriginal traditionalists appear to be coming into a growth phase [‘growth’ means that more of the people ‘in this place’ are undergoing conversion].  The ‘decolonizing’ initiatives [arguably present in the ‘Arab Spring’ and ‘Occupy’ metapulse] include the globalizing of the Zapatista ‘man belongs to the land’, ‘evolutionary ethic’ [it is more evolutionary than revolutionary].  These movements, which are really in-place transformations of world view, that are supplanting the inverted ‘the land belongs to man’ ethics of the language game based colonizer culture, represent a ‘demoting’ of the ‘language-game illusion-reality’ to a support role, where it should be.  Putting the land first, simply suspends the artificial ‘subject/authoring powers that come with the language game; i.e. it re-embraces as ‘primary’ the situation animated dynamics of our experience wherein we understand that we are participants in the in-place transformation of our living space. 

No, we are not local, independent, material organisms/systems with our own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development of form [Darwinism/genetics] and behaviour [Neuroscience], as the subject-predicate grammar of the language game, hyped by scientists, politicians, economists, theologians and romantics have been telling us is the case.   We are, as our experience has been continually informing us, spatial situation animated participants in the in-place transformation of our shared living space.

 * * *

Figure and Ground: Static Version

The phenomena of figure and ground, wherein we can extract meaning from a static array of shapes by bringing a subset of those shapes or ‘spatial-relations’ into connection in our minds so that they form a familiar, recognizable pattern, is usually exemplified by a black and white silhouette such as the above.

The point ‘made’ is that the ‘figure’ is not ‘innate’ in what we are looking at, but is something that we fabricate with our mind.    That point is underscored by the fact that we can see this pattern either as a black figure on a white ground (a saxaphone player) or as a white figure on a black background (a woman’s face). 

What we make into a meaningful ‘shape’ by ‘recognizing it’, at the same time, reduces what is left to ‘shapelessness’, and it is impossible to ‘see both shapes at the same time’.   We might therefore surmise that our visual sensing apparatus has some limitations here; e.g. we can look at all the closed form shapes of the continents on the earth, but what is the shape of the oceanic space between the continents [It is impossible to see it 'all at once'; i.e. to get its shape 'in front of you'.]

The static figure and ground case is interesting but arguably more interesting is the ‘dynamic version’ of figure-and-ground.

If we see a toe wiggling in the sand [the dynamic figure], our experience informs us that it is connected to the [currently] motionless body of the sunbather, so that we cannot consider the body of the sunbather part of the ‘non-dynamic ground’.

But this question of separation of the dynamic figure from the non-dynamic ground impacts, fundamentally, our world view, and it is not nearly so easy to establish as in the sunbather’s toe example.

If we were to watch the feathery limbs of barnacles (cirri) in motion, we might be tempted to include its rigid volcano cone-like shell as part of the non-dynamic ground.  But, having established that the shell should be part of the dynamic figure, we might then be startled by the sudden movement of the whale that the barnacle is attached to, forcing us to include the barnacle and its volcano-cone shell in the dynamic figure of the whale.

As it turns out, relativity forces us to abandon the notion of ‘non-dynamic ground’ since, for example, the dynamic ground of gravity is ‘everywhere at the same time’ and there is no ‘detachment’ of any ‘dynamic figure’ from the ‘dynamic ground’.  As David Bohm observes, ‘material forms are ripples in the dynamic spatial-plenum’.  That is, there is ‘flow’ [dynamic ground] and ‘flow-features’ [dynamic figures] but it is only our mind that is detaching the ‘dynamic figures’ from the ‘dynamic ground’.

“In Newtonian and special relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities – particles and fields – what remains is space and time. In general relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities, nothing remains. The space and time of Newton and Minkowski are reinterpreted as a configuration of one of the fields, the gravitational field. This implies that physical entities – particles and fields – are not all immersed in space, and moving in time. They do not live on spacetime. They live, so to say, on one another. It is as if we had observed in the ocean many animals living on an island: animals ‘on’ the island. Then we discover that the island itself is in fact a great whale. Not anymore animals on the island, just animals on animals. Similarly, the universe is not made by fields on spacetime; it is made by fields on fields.”   — Carlo Rovelli, in ‘Quantum Gravity’

Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers who goes directly to ‘this point’ and to its significant influence in shaping our world view.   He points out that our habit is to reduce the ‘thing considered in itself’ [‘Ding an sich selbst betrachtet’] to a ‘thing-in-itself’ [‘Ding an sich’].   In the case of a ‘dynamic feature in the flow’, we use this psychological ‘sleight of hand’ to convert a flow-feature’ to a ‘dynamic figure’ that lives within a non-dynamic ground.

For example, if we insert a microscopic probe into the human body, we can observe blood cells as ‘dynamic figures’ within a shapeless ground; i.e. we lose the sense of the ground being a larger dynamic figure in which the foreground dynamic figure [the blood cell] is included since our visual sensing system is not capable of ‘seeing’ both at the same time.

What ‘the mind does’ here, to make up for the fact that it can longer ‘see’ that the dynamics of the blood cell derive from the larger dynamic ground of the body [and from the world], is to impute the capabilities of internal ‘intellection and purpose’ to the individual blood cells, so that ‘its’ behaviour can be understood in terms of ‘locally originating, internal process driven behaviour’.

While we call this ‘science’, Nietzsche calls this a ‘great stupidity’;

“In every judgment there resides the entire, full, profound belief in subject and attribute, or in cause and effect (that is, as the assertion that every effect is an activity and that every activity presupposes an agent); and this latter belief is only a special case of the former, so there remains as the fundamental belief the belief that there are subjects, that everything that happens is related attributively to some subject. ..[snip] … That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force–in will, in intention–it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?”  -Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 550.

Nietzsche is calling it as it is, a mental trick to synthetically ‘break the dynamic figure out’ of the ‘dynamic ground’, by imputing ‘intellect’ and ‘will’ [intention/purpose] to it.

“Our judgement has us conclude that] every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

The world view ‘we end up with’ by this process is one in which we see every ‘animate entity’ [dynamic figure] aka ‘organism’, as having its own locally originating, internal process driven development of form, behaviour and organizational savvy.

This means that ‘evolution’ is a local phenomenon; something that is undergone by the ‘organism’ or ‘dynamic figure’.   This leads us to Darwinist thinking.  If the entire world were the one animal, the one dynamic ground [one spatial-relationally transforming energy-charged plenum], as relativity and quantum physics say it is, then ‘evolution’ would be a process that the world undergoes, as in the view of Lamarck, Nietzsche, Rolph, Roux;

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income … This world is the will to power–and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power–and nothing besides!” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

Now, Nietzsche’s critiques are evidently right on target.  Who is challenging them?  [many are ignoring them]  And if we accept them, they make a huge difference as to how we understand the world dynamic and our self-other-world relationship.

How would our world view change and how would that change our social dynamic?

If we acknowledge that the world is, as Nietzsche describes it, a spatial-relationally transforming unum in which we are included, then our world view based on states of being that change with the passage of time has to be ‘demoted’ from its current position of precedence.  Our relationship with the dynamic unum we share inclusion in would then be by way of Mach’s principle where we would see ourselves akin to ‘convection cells’ in a common ‘flow’; i.e. “The dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants.”  But since the flow or ‘dynamic habitat’ is what persists while the ‘dynamic inhabitants’ are continually coming and going, we might want to invert our manner of expressing Mach’s principle to; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamic of the habitat.”

Here we can clearly see Nietzsche’s [and Lamarck’s et al] expression of ‘evolution’; i.e. it is ‘transformation’ that transpires within a space that does not itself grow [Nietzsche's aphorism 1067, Will to Power, cited above].  What might that look like if it could be pictured?

.

Space does not grow, it transforms

Quantum physics and relativity suggest that there ‘is no outside to spacetime’ so that it is not possible to picture things in this manner, from the outside-looking-in.  Nevertheless, you can still imagine yourself as a convection cell in the flow; i.e. as one of those transforming material forms situated within a transforming energy-charged spatial plenum that is ‘all there is’.  Everything you see, every bit of matter, is like a ripple in the energy-charged flow-field, like a convection cell or torus;

Every bit of matter can be likened to a toroidal energy-flow

Summary:

The figure-ground problem has its counterpart in the dynamic realm; e.g. we can see the convection cell; i.e. the ‘dynamic figure’ but we can’t see its counterpart, the ‘dynamic ground’.  We know its there because we can see the ‘dynamic figure’ but it is not picturable to us, other than indirectly through the ‘dynamic figures’.

The temptation is, therefore, to impute the sourcing of motion to the local, visible,’dynamic figures’ themselves, and to avoid the complications of Mach’s principles wherein there is conjugate relation between the dynamics of the figures and the dynamics of the ground that the dynamic figures are included in.

The goal is therefore to develop a science where we can assume that all physical phenomena are locally, inside-outwardly, sourced.

This is ‘cheating’ but it is our cultural habit.  It is cheating because, for example, we know that the ‘gravitational field is ‘everywhere at the same time’ and its influence is non-local, not-directly visible, and non-material.  We know that this is the nature of ‘fields’ and we know that ‘fields’ predominate over local, visible, ‘matter’.

Our ‘cheating’ is called ‘approximation’, and the cheating that we do in science to make it seem as if physical phenomena are locally originating (to match the cheating we do in ‘grammar’ and ‘language’ as in Nietzsche’s ‘lightning flashes’ ) is described in footnote 2. , an excerpt from Henri Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis.  There are ‘three trick’ which are built into the foundations of mathematical physics which have been ‘borrowed from there’ and used in all the sciences;

1. Pretend that the present depends only on the immediate past.

This reduces wave-dynamic to one way dynamics and denies the ‘spring-loading’  capacity of space.  Our experience says that this is plainly NOT the case.  If we set off an explosion, the blast front may head away from us initially since we are at the centre of it, but it can reflect back to us as well, or go around the earth.  If we are in an oval shaped stadium and under crowded conditions, we push the people to the right, the pulse of pushing could go all the way around the stadium and hit us from left.  There would be no problem to set up dominos to illustrate this connection between the present and the remote past.  Our approach to analyzing dominos would be to take two dominoes and get the general pattern for the dynamics of one piece falling onto another.  Condition 1. applies when we solve for the local dynamics where the present depends only on the immediate past, but if set up the dominos in the space on the surface of a sphere, as they fell and ‘dominoed’, the pulse could ‘go around and come back around and bonk the first domino ‘from behind’.

A cold period millions of years ago deposited glaciers whose summer-icemelts cool our summer air.  when these have totally melted, they will no longer provide ‘air conditioning’ and our temperatures will rise.  This will be ‘whack’ from the remote past the directly effects the present.  This demonstrates the spring-loading/unloading capacity of space.

This ‘assumption’ gives us the illusion that the causal factors for what is happening in the present act out of the immediate locality and the immediate past, which is not true.

2. Pretend that local macro phenomena are locally sourced from the inside.

For example, a thermal field associated the sun may heat a body of water differentially so that convection flow is induced.   The concept of ‘temperature’ is a device to impute local sourcing to thermal field effects.  Temperature is defined as the average kinetic energy of the molecules so it will give a ‘local measurement’ anywhere.  The curvature in the thermal field (the field influence is non-local, non-directly visible and non-material) is removed by ‘temperature’  measurement which is ‘scalar’. A local  hotspot, we say, is the source of expansion (e.g. convection cell activity in the atmosphere).   By this ‘pretending’, we make it appear as if something essentially nonlocally-sourced is ‘locally sourced’ [this leads to arguments such as whether climate is nonlocally or locally sourced]

3. Pretend that spatial phenomena can be dissected into elemental parts.

For example light [electromagnetic fields] has differing effects on things depending on its spectrum.  We can pretend that light can be decomposed into elemental ‘frequencies’.   Mathematically we can decompose light or any wave energy into as pure and narrow a frequency as we like, but that sort of taking things apart is ‘mathematical’ and not physically realizable.  The beauty and deception of the mathematical treatment is that it allows us to model any phenomena ‘locally’ in terms of ‘what local, visible, material things do’.

* * *

Science has thus used synthetic means to reduce the scientific modeling of physical phenomena to make them appear exclusively local and inside-outward driving.  These synthetic devices permit the artificial breaking down of the spatial plenum, into local material objects and organisms, that match visible forms, and re-rendering their dynamics in terms of local forces.  Thus the development of form and behaviour of the local, visible, material form such as a ‘human’ and/or a ‘cell’ is notionally stripped out of the energy-charged spatial plenum wherein outside-inward nurturing influence predominates over inside-outward asserting influence.

In other words, we are using mathematical techniques in science to notionally ‘take physical phenomena apart’ in a non-physically realizable way, to re-present these phenomena as if they were locally arising (inside-outward asserting).  In this manner, we deceive ourselves so as to make ourselves blind to, and in denial of the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation [the conjugate dynamic-ground --- dynamic-figure relation] in which outside-inward nurturing influence predominates over inside-outward asserting [notionally causal] influence.

What’s at stake here?

What’s at stake is the difference between the social dynamics of a people who believe

(a) ‘the land belongs to the people’ rather than ‘the people belong to the land’

(b) ‘we are all individuals’ rather than ‘we are all related’

(c) ‘what things do’ predominates over ‘how space accommodates actions’ rather than vice versa

In addition, intellectual-theory driven central direction, as PRIMARY means of organization, no longer makes any sense, nor does it make sense to use the application of moral code to individual behaviour as PRIMARY means of managing social dynamics [since there is no such thing as 'individual behaviour'].

Now, since we have modern physics supporting the shift to the Nietzschean world view (or something like it) and an awareness of the contrivances in the mathematical treatments in science that synthetically re-render physical phenomena in purely inside-outward asserting [causal] terms, where are the log-jams?

I will mention two of biggest.

Logjam 1. Science reduces physical phenomena to purely inside-outward asserting dynamics, the ‘causal’ view.  This allows science to predict results/outcomes, and, where the causal agencies are applied, to control the outcomes.  This has great psychological appeal.  The problem is that the reality of our experience is in terms of ‘spatial transformation’, while the prediction is in terms of ‘what things do’.  As McLuhan observed, and Howard Zinn, it matters little whether ‘what we do’ is producing Cadillacs or cornflakes, what matters is how our relations with one another and the habitat are transforming.   Mach’s principle says the same thing; i.e. we do not determine the transformation of our living space.  The dynamics of the space we are in are conditioning our dynamics at the same time as our dynamics are conditioning the dynamics of the space we are in.   It is not that we do not notice that our penchant for controlling ‘what gets done’ is getting us in trouble.  There is all kinds of awareness of impending ‘catastrophe’;

As Frédéric Neyrat observes in ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe;

“In extending his living space in a manner that destroys the space of others, he destroys his own space. Not initially his inside space, his ‘self’, but his outside space, this real outside-of-self which nourishes his ‘inside-of-self’. The protection of this outside space now becomes the condition without which he is unable to pursue the growth of his own powers of being.”

After two+ millennia of our culture’s beliefs in the causal model, we are in the flywheel phase, we are thinking about changing our ways, but our addiction to the control-based approach, and our associated fear of ‘anarchy’ is part of the logjam.

Logjam 2. People who have become used to the materialist model, assume that we are independently existing individuals and that our ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ belongs to the individual.  The Nietzschean reality seems to ‘dissolve’ our individuality into the great unbounded ALL [spatial-plenum] and this doesn’t make sense to many people.  It doesn’t make sense to Gregory Moore whose book on Nietzsche I have quoted extensively from below.  He says;

Before we move on, however, we should remind ourselves that, far from advancing a radical, coherent and effective critique of Darwin, Nietzsche simply reiterates the many errors and misunderstandings perpetrated by his contemporaries.  Like them, he dresses up a metaphysical and anthropomorphic view of nature in the language of modern evolutionary biology.

This anthropomorphism charge laid on Darwinism and science by Nietzsche, is seen by Moore as a ‘strawman’ that Nietzsche brings down in place of bringing Darwinism down.   This is where Moore errs, because he trusts in the notion of the ‘individual’ while Nietzsche sees belief in ‘individual beings’ as anthropomorphism; i.e. that’s how we see ourselves, as individuals with free will whose development of form and behaviour is inside-outward driven etc. and thus that’s what we impute organisms in general to be.

In order to ‘let go’ of this idea of ‘self’ as ‘individual’, one needs to envisage the world in non-euclidian space terms; e.g. in terms of each object/organism being a centre that is mirroring back what it is included in, as in ‘Indra’s pearls’, or just plain old non-euclidian space, which, if one exercises one’s mind with it, is this ‘empty circle’ that reflects back outside-inward influence as inside-outward influence.  It is not ‘nothing’ because it is reflecting back from its own spatial-relationally unique situation.  One can imagine the ‘learning circle’ of the Amerindians in this ‘reflecting’ context.   Those physicists who are bootstrappers are also into the same concept.  The following are a couple of comments from a ‘high energy physics’ website;

“Leibniz constantly speaks of the monads as being in `mirroring’ relations. But what are the relata of the mirroring relations? Mirrors mirroring other mirrors. Leibniz’s monadic kingdom is a pure bootstrap operation.”

 The fact that Leibniz’ monads and the Chinese elements are both bootstraps may not be coincidental or even archetypal. Leibniz’ philosophy was strong influenced by Chinese Neo-Confucian thought brought back to Europe by Jesuit missionaries. To the right is the frontispiece of a paper by Leibniz on Chinese philosophy, one of the first such studies carried out in Europe:

the Buddhists provide my personal favorite image of the bootstrap, called Indra’s net of pearls: -”In the heaven of Indra, there is said to be a network of pearls, so arranged that if you look at one you see all the others reflected in it. In the same way, each object in the world is not merely itself but involves every other object and in fact is everything else.” (Avatamsaka Sutra)

[Source: High Energy Physics  See also Indra's Pearls & Non-Euclidian Space, and the Double Spiral ]

 

Speaking of Jesuits bring this ‘mirroring back from the centre circle’ back from the east, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit Priest and evolutionary biologist [implicitly anti-Darwinist in the same way as Nietzsche] who struggled to share ‘how an individual was, and was not, and individual’ in the context of Christ as the vital evolutionary force built into the world [Nietzsche's 'will to power'] which de Chardin sometimes called ‘Christogenesis’;

“There is nothing strange about there being a universal physical element in Christ.  Each one of us, if we but reflect, is enveloped, aureoled, by an extension of his being as vast as the universe.  What we are aware of is only the nucleus which is ourselves. But the interaction of monads would be incomprehensible if an “aura” did not extend from one to the other, i.e., something proper to each one and common to all.  How, then, are we to imagine the constitution of Christ as cosmic Center of creation?  Simply as an extension, a transformation, brought about in the humanity of Jesus, of that “aura” which surrounds ever human nomad.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin  

[Source 'The Body of Christ in the Writings of Teilhard de Chardin', by Christopher F. Mooney, S.J.]

* * *

These two ‘logjams’; addiction to the predictive capabilities in our ‘what things do’ oriented science, even though the real dynamics, the transformation of our common living space, is whipping us about like a loose sheet in a gale, … and our addiction to ‘individualism’ in a simplistic ‘Euclidian sense’ of disconnectedness, are mutually reinforcing.  One’s sense of individualism combined with ‘what things do’ leads to the ‘doer-deed’ model of achievement which is the core teaching of our globally dominating Western culture.

It is under attack , to be sure.  Intellectual theory driven central direction, which comes from science’s artificial reduction in our way of modeling physical phenomena, to purely inside-outward asserting action is foundational to this authoritarian system of governance, and it is under increasing attack from public protests [e.g. 'Occupy Wall Street]. 

The ideal of ‘the individual’ is also being ‘re-assessed’ within these protests; i.e. something very similar to the Amerindian ‘learning circle’ is under development in the ‘Occupy’ and related protest initiatives.  The new ‘leader’, rather than emulating the inside-outward asserting central authority, which has been the de facto standard in our culture, is looking more like the ‘mirrorer-back’ from the space the circle is situationally included in.

Meanwhile, the action to date is largely ‘intuitive’ as there is less adhesion than ever to particular theories, since it is recognized that most theories become implicit authoritarian control systems.  It would seem likely that the currents of change are not all that far off from sweeping away the two logjams that are currently suspending major ‘awakenings’ as to the foundational glitsches in our globally dominating Western culture ‘belief system’.

____________________________________

Footnote 1.  Excerpt from Nietzsche, biology, and metaphor By Gregory Moore,

In developing this aspect of the will to power, Nietzsche drew heavily on the ideas of an obscure Anglo-German zoologist called William Rolph.  In his only major work, Biologische Probleme, zugleich als Versuch zur Entwicklung einer rationellen Ethik (Biological Problems, and the pursuit of the development of a rational ethics ), which Nietzsche probably acquired during mid-1884, Rolph seeks to refute the orthodox Darwinian conception of the ‘struggle for existence’, and proposes a novel mechanism by which to explain the origin of variation and diversity in nature.  But his anti-Darwinian theory of evolution is intended only as a foundation on which to construct a moral theory rooted in biological ‘facts’ and formulated as an explicit rebuttal of Herbert Spencer’s system of evolutionary ethics.  It should be obvious, then, why Nietzsche might be interested in Rolph’s work.  Of even greater interest, perhaps, was the basic thesis underlying both Rolph’s discussion of basic physiological processes and his thoughts on the development of human morality from primitive biological imperatives.  For Rolph denies the existence of an instinct for self-preservation – or at the very least rejects the notion that such a drive represents the principal motivation of animal behaviour.  Rather, life seeks primarily to expand itself.

This elementary proposition is expressed as a law of assimilation, a law operative in both the organic and inorganic world.  Growth, Rolph argues, is determined by a process of diffusion, in which endosmosis predominates over exosmosis.  All organic functions, from nutrition and reproduction right up to evolution, can be explained by, and reduced to, this fundamental activity; they are not, as most contemporary biologists assumed, a manifestation of the instinct for self-preservation.  For this process of assimilation by endosmosis is limitless, leading Rolph to describe each cell, and consequently each more complex organism, as effectively ‘insatiable’ (unersättlich), impelled by an involuntary ‘urge to assimilate’ constantly to increase its intake of nutriment: ‘In the economy of nature, therefore, it is not a question of merely covering expenditure, but rather of increasing the income, of the turnover of material.’

From 1884 onwards, Nietzsche’s notebooks are littered with jottings and comments which suggest that Rolph’s influence on him was no less profound than that of Roux.  Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Nietzsche incorporated all the basic premises of Rolph’s biology into his own thought.  Without enumerating the many instances of his borrowing here, it is nevertheless worthwhile to pick out some of the main threads of his Rolph-inspired notes.  For example, like Rolph, he regards assimilation as ‘that basic organic function on which all growth rests’.  The only difference is that Nietzsche holds the assimilative activity observable in both the organic and inorganic worlds to be further reducible to the behaviour of the will to power.  Yet he defines the will to power itself as a process of assimilation, and even, echoing Rolph’s terminology, as an ‘insatiable appropriation [unersättliche Aneignung]’.  In other words, Nietzsche once again adds an ‘inner world’ to what is ostensibly a purely mechanical process of diffusion; he raises Rolph’s principle of insatiability to the level of an ens realissimum.  Nietzsche further claims that all organic functions – and he lists amongst these nutrition, reproduction, adaptation, heredity and the physiological division of labour – are reducible to the will to powr.  All such organic processes – and, as we have already seen, the organism itself, as the totality of these processes – are means employed by the will to power to increase the extent of its influence; nutrition, for example, is merely ‘a consequence, a practical application of that original will to become stronger’.  Following Rolph, Nietzsche maintains that this insatiable acquisition of nutriment – and thus power – would suggest that organisms are not driven by an instinct for self-preservation: ‘one cannot derive the most basic and primordial activity in protoplasm from a will to self-preservation: for it takes in absurdly more than would be necessary for survival’.

Rolph further argues that the principle of insatiability explains the reproductive behaviour of primitive organisms – indeed, the two forms of reproduction which he differentiates, conjugation and division, are in fact disguised forms of nutrition.  Conjugation involves the merging of two unicellular organisms to form one single organism, and takes place when normal food supplies are scarce.  It is, in fact, simply ‘a particularly favourable form of taking in food,’ a process of ‘isophagous’ nutrition brought about by the organism’s original ‘striving for satiation’.  Cell division, on the other hand, takes place in more favourable circumstances: it is a consequence of the cell’s insatiable assimilation of organic matter when there is abundant nutriment.  The nucleus of the cell is a ‘centre of attraction [Attractionscentrum]’ which exercises a unifying and ordering influence on molecular changes that take place inside the cell.  But during cellular growth an imbalance arises between the surface and the interior of the cell: while the peripheral protoplasm receives enough nutriment, the nucleus does not.  This increase in the mass of peripheral protoplasm eventually overcomes the ‘centralising force of attraction’ exerted by the nucleus.  In short, the cell’s appetite has outstripped its capacity to process the material effectively, and, as a consequence, it ‘dissolves into two separate individuals, it remains in existence as a double being.

These ideas are echoed in numerous notes which Nietzsche composed between 1885 and 1887.  In one of the first instances, he writes:

The weaker presses towards the stronger because of a shortage of food; it wants to take shelter, possibly to become one with it.  Conversely, the stronger defends itself, it does not want to go under in this way; rather, in growing, it divides into two or  several more organisms.

But for Nietzsche these processes of division and conjugation do not only take place amongst organisms; he elevates Rolph’s discussion of reproduction in primitive organisms to the level of a universally valid principle describing the behaviour of entities in the inorganic as well as the organic world.

Struggle of the atoms, like that between individuals; where there is a certain difference in strength, however, two atoms develop out of a single atom and two individuals out of a single individual.  Likewise when, conversely, two develop from one when the inner state contrives a disintegration of the centre of power.

Nietzsche concludes this passage with the remark: ‘Therefore against the absolute concept “atom” and “individual”!’ Given the issues that it raises, it is unsurprising that Nietzsche seizes upon Rolph’s account of cellular reproduction to explore the concept of the ‘individual’.  From the ‘standpoint of the theory of descent’, even cells, the most elementary organisms know to nineteenth century biology, are not absolute indivisible monads.  And this is just as true for what Nietzsche terms the ‘soul-monad’.  For if, as he maintains, ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ is indeed an integral part of organic matter, and is therefore present in the most basic organisms, then the idea of an indivisible soul or subject cannot be sustained.  For, during the inevitable process of cell division – or even in more complex forms of reproduction – that unity of which a rudimentary ‘spirit’ is a part collapses.  Language lacks the means ‘to designate the degrees of intensity on the path to the individual, to the “person”.  Two develop from one, one from two: this one sees with one’s own eyes in the reproduction of the lowest organisms’.

Ultimately, it is the will to power which ‘propagates’ itself in this way.  Only weak centres of power, those which are spent and in decline, seek first and foremost to preserve themselves; only they are driven by ‘hunger’, an impulse to obtain a ‘restoration of loss’.  That is why they endeavor to unite with others; conjugation is always the result of hunger, of impotence.  On the other hand, the very voracity of the strong, ascendant will to power undermines its integrity and survival; its intrinsic ‘desire not to preserve itself’, its accumulation of more energy than it is able to assimilate, leads to the development of a ‘counter-will’, a new ‘centre of organisation [Organisationscentrum]’ (Rolph’s ‘centre of attraction’).  A struggle between the two wills ensues, with the emergent, stronger will ultimately detaching itself from the original, whereupon the whole process starts over again. But in describing the will to power in this way, Nietzsche speaks of it not merely in terms of a vague impulse at work in nature, but implies that it, too, is an entity, an organism that itself feeds and procreates.  In other words, power itself seems to have a ‘physiology’.  This involves a degree of circularity – inasmuch as he reduces physiological processes to functions of the will to power, but at the same time derives the characteristic activity of the will to power from those same physiological processes as described by Rolph and others.  What is more, however, in describing ‘processes of power’, as analogous to the behaviour of primitive organisms, he appears to revert to the same Romantic conception of the universe as organism that he had criticised in The Gay Science: ‘Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being.  Where should it expand?  On what should it feed?  How could it grow and multiply?

In formulating his conception of the will to power, Nietzsche commits another metaphysical error which he had earlier studiously avoided.  He had questioned the necessity of positing a separate instinct for self-preservation as early as 1876-7.

Why assume an instinct for self-preservation [Erhaltungstrieb] at all?  Among countless non-purposive developments there arose viable ones, ones capable of continuing to live; the individual human organs required millions of years of adaptation until finally the present body could arise regularly and until those facts regularly appear which are usually ascribed to the instinct for self-preservation.

In this passage and, as we shall see in the next chapter, in other contexts, Nietzsche regards such an instinct for self-preservation as superfluous and teleological; he expresses the hope that it might one day be possible to trace the phenomena attributed to it back to ‘their chemical and mechanical laws’.  But while the later Nietzsche also repudiates the notion an instinct for self-preservation because he claims that it is a redundant teleological principle, he is perfectly happy to replace it with a Trieb that is no less teleological than the one which he rejects.

[[ two next pages missing from the online ‘preview’ from which this is taken]]

… the normal, to develop new needs and to satisfy them:

Then the life-struggle is no longer waged for existence, it is no struggle for self-preservation, no struggle for the ‘acquisition of the most indispensable requirement of life’, but, rather, a struggle for an increase in one’s acquisitions… It is constant, it is eternal; it can never be extinguished, for there can be no adaptation to insatiability . . . Furthermore, the life struggle is then no defensive struggle, but rather a war of aggression. . . But growth and reproduction and perfection are the consequences of that successful war of aggression. . . While the Darwinists hold that no struggle for existence takes place where the survival of the creature is not threatened, I believe the life-struggle to be ubiquitous: it is first and foremost precisely such a life-struggle, a struggle for the increase of life, but not a struggle for life!

If all this sounds somewhat familiar, it is because Nietzsche incorporates all the main points of Rolph’s anti-Darwinian argument -  the claim that the struggle for existence is an exception, occurring only in rare conditions of scarcity; that there is in fact an abundance of resources to fuel the rapid evolution of organisms; that the basic impetus in nature is towards an increase in life – into aphorism 349 of The Gay Science, in the fifth book that was added to the second edition of 1887.  Once again, the only significant change he makes is to translate Rolph’s terminology into his own, with the latter’s term the ‘increase of life’ (Lebensmehrung) becoming the more recognisably Nietzschean ‘expansion  of power’ (Machterweiterung):

The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation. . . In nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity.  The struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the life-will [Lebenswille].  The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power – in accordance with the will to power which is the will of life.

With slight modifications, and under a more explicitly anti-Darwinian rubric, the same argument reappears the following year in Twilight of the Idols: ‘life as a whole is not a state of crisis or hunger, but rather a richness, a luxuriance, even an absurd extravagance – where there is a struggle, there is a struggle for power . . . Malthus should not be confused with nature’.

What all this means is that organic change is for Nietzsche – as it is for Rolph – merely the by-product of the acquisition of power. This

[[Even Rolph speaks of the Grundtrieb of life as the acquisition of ‘wealth, power and influence’ (Biologische Probleme, p.222).  Elsewhere, Nietzsche echoes him more closely when he speaks of the ‘intensification of life [Lebensteigerung]’.]]

perspective allows him once again, he believes, to circumvent the issue of utility.  For Darwin, as we have seen, the use of a particular adaptation is determined by its value in securing an advantage in the struggle for existence.  Nietzsche, on the other hand, is utterly unconcerned with the fact whether an organism survives or not – indeed, the truly evolving organism precisely does not endure, but is inevitably destroyed by its own pregnant potency.  He understands evolution not in terms of the gradual accretion of adaptive and self-preservative variations, but as the sudden eruption of life’s creative energies:

‘Useful’ in the sense of Darwinian biology – that means proving itself advantageous in the struggle with others.  But it seems to me that the feeling of increase [Mehrgefühl], the feeling of becoming stronger, is itself, quite apart from its utility in the struggle, the real progress: only from this feeling does the will to struggle arise.

However, only by positing this universal thirst for power is it possible, Nietzsche believes, to account for what Darwin refuses to acknowledge: that the ‘struggle for existence’ does not always result in the survival of the ‘fittest’ – by which Nietzsche means the ‘stronger, better-constituted’.  In fact, as the history of humanity attests, the very opposite is the case: ‘the elimination of the strokes of luck, the uselessness of the more highly developed types, the inevitable ascendency of the average, even the below average types’.  How does the will to power explain this topsy-turvy state of nature, this ‘inverted struggle for existence’?  The answer lies in the fact that both the strong and the weak seek to improve the conditions of their existence, to obtain power.  But on the one hand, was we have seen, higher forms are rare and radically unstable.  Such is their profligacy in expending energy which they so voraciously acquire; such is their immanent diversity that these exquisite creatures are prone to disintegration and are thus short-lived: ‘the higher type represents an incomparably greater complexity, – a greater sum of co-ordinated elements, thereby also making disintegration incomparably more likely’.  On the other hand, the weak tend to congregate in herds, thereby consolidating and increasing their collective power as compensation for their individual impotence.  (In other words, the evolution of the individual and the herd are moments in the endless self-propagation of the will to power, constituting processes of either conjugation or division.  As such, they can be explained in terms of the fundamental lwa which Nietzsche had earlier formulated: ‘The greater the urge towards unity, the more one can infer weakness; the greater the urge towards variety, difference, inner disintegration, the more power there is’.  Against these organised herd instincts, the ‘strong’ are relatively powerless.  The weak, then, prevail not through brute strength, but by sheer force of numbers and as  a result of developing various adaptive strategies for survival – pre-eminently, of course, morality.

And it is to Nietzsche’s account of the evolution of morality that we now turn.  In doing so, we shall take up and elaborate the major themes of Nietzsche’s theory of evolution as they have been expounded in the foregoing discussion: the rejection of an instinct for self-preservation, the relationship between the individual and the herd, and the concept of the social organism.

Before we move on, however, we should remind ourselves that, far from advancing a radical, coherent and effective critique of Darwin, Nietzsche simply reiterates the many errors and misunderstandings perpetrated by his contemporaries [Not true!!!].  Like them, he dresses up a metaphysical and anthropomorphic view of nature in the language of modern evolutionary biology.  The will to power is essentially a Bildungstrieb, and is, as it were, an amalgam of a number of competing non-Darwinian theories: Nägeli’s perfection principle, Roux’s concept of an internal struggle, and Rolph’s principle of insatiability.   And although Nietzsche refuses to equate evolution with ‘progress’ or a linear ascent of organic forms; although he argues that the apparent purposiveness of organs arises as a result of a process of contingent struggle and denies that an instinct for self-preservation guides the actions of all organisms – despite all this, he reintroduces a teleological aspect to evolution by claiming that there is in nature a vital force that seeks the increase of power.  Ironically, Nietzsche’s evolutionism is more representative of nineteenth century thought than Darwin’s theory of natural selection.”

[[What the author of this text, Gregory Moore, does not acknowledge is that Nietzsche elsewhere (the Will to Power, 1067) clearly holds the world to be one thing, a thing that does not ‘grow’ but transforms-in-place; i.e. spatial-relationally.  The ‘teleology’ that Moore accuses Nietzsche of ‘reintroducing’, in the paragraph immediately above [“he reintroduces a teleological aspect to evolution by claiming that there is in nature a vital force that seeks the increase of power”], is radically unlike ‘teleology’ as it is commonly understood;

A thing, process or action is teleological when it is for the sake of an end, i.e., a telos or final cause. In general it may be said that there are two types of final causes, which may be called intrinsic finality and extrinsic finality.

• A thing or action has an extrinsic finality when it is for the sake of something external to itself. In a way, people exhibit extrinsic finality when they seek the happiness of a child. If the external thing had not existed that action would not display finality.
• A thing or action has an intrinsic finality when it is for none other than it’s own sake. For example, one might try to be happy simply for the sake of being happy, and not for the sake of anything outside of that.

This definition breaks teleology into an ‘outside-inward influence’ and an ‘inside-outward influence’ but Nietzsche is saying that these two influences are going on at the same time, the nurturance is coming outside-inward (endosmosis) while the development of form and behaviour is asserting inside-outwardly.  This is like the convection cell in the flow of the atmosphere or quantum physics’ ‘ripple in the energy-charged spatial plenum’.  These are dual aspects of one dynamic, a conjugate extrinsic-intrinsic dynamic of the ‘Mach’s principle’ type.]]

Footnote 2.  Excerpt from Science and Hypothesis (Henri Poincaré)

Origin of Mathematical Physics.—Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset that the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.

First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.

Next, we try to decompose the phenomena in space. What experiment gives us is a confused aggregate of facts spread over a scene of considerable extent. We must try to deduce the elementary phenomenon, which will still be localised in a very small region of space.

A few examples perhaps will make my meaning clearer. If we wished to study in all its complexity the distribution of temperature in a cooling solid, we could never do so. This is simply because, if we only reflect that a point in the solid can directly impart some of its heat to a neighbouring point, it will immediately impart that heat only to the nearest points, and it is but gradually that the flow of heat will reach other portions of the solid. The elementary phenomenon is the interchange of heat between two contiguous points. It is strictly localised and relatively simple if, as is natural, we admit that it is not influenced by the temperature of the molecules whose distance apart is small.

I bend a rod: it takes a very complicated form, the direct investigation of which would be impossible. But I can attack the problem, however, if I notice that its flexure is only the resultant of the deformations of the very small elements of the rod, and that the  deformation of each of these elements only depends on the forces which are directly applied to it, and not in the least on those which may be acting on the other elements.

In all these examples, which may be increased without difficulty, it is admitted that there is no action at a distance or at great distances. That is an hypothesis. It is not always true, as the law of gravitation proves. It must therefore be verified. If it is confirmed, even approximately, it is valuable, for it helps us to use mathematical physics, at any rate by successive approximations. If it does not stand the test, we must seek something else that is analogous, for there are other means of arriving at the elementary phenomenon. If several bodies act simultaneously, it may happen that their actions are independent, and may be added one to the other, either as vectors or as scalar quantities. The  elementary phenomenon is then the action of an isolated body. Or suppose, again, it is a question of small movements, or more generally of small variations which obey the well-known law of mutual or relative independence. The movement observed will then be decomposed into simple movements—for example, sound into its harmonics, and white light into its monochromatic components. When we have discovered in which direction to seek for the elementary phenomena, by what means may we reach it? First, it will often happen that in order to predict it, or rather in order to predict what is useful to us, it will not be necessary to know its mechanism. The law of great numbers will suffice. Take for example the propagation of heat. Each molecule radiates towards its neighbour—we need not inquire according to what law; and if we make any supposition in this respect, it will be an indifferent hypothesis, and therefore useless and unverifiable. In fact, by the action of averages and thanks to the symmetry of the medium, all differences are levelled, and, whatever the hypothesis may be, the result is always the same.

The same feature is presented in the theory of elasticity, and in that of capillarity. The neighbouring molecules attract and repel each other, we need not inquire by what law. It is enough for us that this attraction is sensible at small distances only, and that the molecules are very numerous, that the medium is symmetrical, and we have only to let the law of great numbers come into play.

Here again the simplicity of the elementary phenomenon is hidden beneath the complexity of the observable resultant phenomenon; but in its turn this simplicity was only apparent and disguised a very complex mechanism. Evidently the best means of reaching the elementary phenomenon would be experiment. It would be necessary by experimental artifices to dissociate the complex system which nature offers for our investigations and carefully to study the elements as dissociated as possible; for example, natural white light would be decomposed into monochromatic lights by the aid of the prism, and into polarised lights by the aid of the polariser. Unfortunately, that is neither always possible nor always sufficient, and sometimes the mind must run ahead of experiment. I shall only give one example which has always struck me rather forcibly. If I decompose white light, I shall be able to isolate a portion of the spectrum, but however small it may be, it will always be a certain width. In the same way the natural lights which are called monochromatic give us a very fine ray, but one which is not, however, infinitely fine. It might be supposed that in the experimental study of the properties of these natural lights, by operating with finer and finer rays, and passing on at last to the limit, so to speak, we should eventually obtain the properties of a rigorously monochromatic light. That would not be accurate. I assume that two rays emanate from the same source, that they are first polarised in planes at right angles, that they are then brought back again to the same plane of polarisation, and that we try to obtain interference. If the light were rigorously monochromatic, there would be interference; but with our nearly monochromatic lights, there will be no interference, and that, however narrow the ray may be. For it to be otherwise, the ray would have to be several million times finer than the finest known rays.

Here then we should be led astray by proceeding to the limit. The mind has to run ahead of the experiment, and if it has done so with success, it is because it has allowed itself to be guided by the instinct of simplicity. The knowledge of the elementary fact enables us to state the problem in the form of an equation. It only remains to deduce from it by combination the observable and verifiable complex fact. That is what we call integration, and it is the province of the mathematician. It might be asked, why in physical science generalisation so readily takes the mathematical form. The reason is now easy to see.  It is not only because we have to express numerical laws; it is because the observable phenomenon is due to the superposition of a large number of elementary phenomena which are all similar to each other; and in this way differential equations are quite naturally introduced. It is not enough that each elementary phenomenon should obey simple laws: all those that we have to combine must obey the same law; then only is the intervention of mathematics of any use. Mathematics teaches us, in fact, to combine like with like. Its object is to divine the result of a combination without having to reconstruct that combination element by element. If we have to repeat the same operation several times, mathematics enables us to avoid this repetition by telling the result beforehand by a kind of induction. This I have explained before in the chapter on mathematical reasoning. But for that purpose all these operations must be similar; in the contrary case we must evidently make up our minds to working them out in full one after the other, and mathematics will be useless. It is therefore, thanks to the approximate homogeneity of the matter studied by physicists, that mathematical physics came into existence. In the natural sciences the following conditions are no longer to be found:—homogeneity, relative independence of remote parts, simplicity of the elementary fact; and that is why natural scientists are compelled [les naturalistes sont obligés] to have recourse to other modes of generalisation.