Peaks from 'positive' or 'negative causality'?

(Can be read in conjunction with ‘How Science is Displacing Spirituality’)

RST = Relational-Spatial Transformation

MCD= Material-Causal-Dynamics

Mach, Nietzsche, Bohm, Schroedinger contended that the world is a continually transforming relational spatial Plenum, … ‘the All’, and that material bodies are ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’).   Berkeley had argued the same, and had pointed out errors in the foundations of Newton’s ‘Principles of Natural Philosophy’, which have become part of our everyday scientific viewing of ‘how the world works’.

This is a brief summary of the ‘errors’ in the foundations of Newtonian scientific constructions of understanding, … ‘errors’ which force the abandonment of the RST view and the single-minded opting for the MCD view.

According to Mach, our experience is psycho-physical; i.e. the mind experience and the matter experience are conjugate aspects of one psycho-physical experience.   One can ‘visualize’ this in considering the current revising of view of the biological cell and then applying this ‘archetype’ to the ‘human’.  For a long time, the activities of the cell, its development and behaviours, were assumed to be driven and directed by a central controlling authority  in the nucleus of the cell in the same manner as it was assumed that the activities of the human body are driven and directed by a central controlling authority constituted by the brain.  The advantage of this model is that fits our MCD philosophical notion of the ‘organism’ as a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own locally originating, internal process determined development and behaviour [i.e. there is no ‘blurring’ of the entity and its environment as in the RST philosophical notion of a transforming relational spatial Plenum, where the inhabitant-habitat relation is like that of a storm-cell in the atmosphere which requires BOTH/AND rather than EITHER/OR logic]

The changes that are currently in progress, in our understanding of the cell and its inhabitant-habitat relationship, no longer see the nucleus as some kind of God-like jumpstart director of the cell’s development and behaviours.  While textbooks and Wikipedia still portray the ‘nucleus’ as being the command-centre and the central-intelligence of the cell;

“The function of the nucleus is to maintain the integrity of these genes and to control the activities of the cell by regulating gene expression — the nucleus is, therefore, the control center of the cell.” — Wikipedia

In ‘The New Biology’, Bruce Lipton observes;

“As is described by Nijhout, genes are “not self-emergent,” that is genes can not turn themselves on or off. If genes can’t control their own expression, how can they control the behavior of the cell? Nijhout further emphasizes that genes are regulated by “environmental signals.” Consequently, it is the environment that controls gene expression. Rather than endorsing the Primacy of DNA, we must acknowledge the Primacy of the Environment!” —Bruce Lipton

Instead of a stand-alone, internally driven and directed thing-in-itself, the new biology is re-rasting the cell from a ‘unit of being’ that ‘does stuff’, to a ‘unit of perception’ that is continually giving expression to the relational transformation it is included in.

“Receptor IMPs [Integral Membrane Proteins]  ”see” or are “aware” of their environment and effector IMPs create physical responses that translate environmental signals into an appropriate biological behavior. The IMP complex controls behavior, and through its affect upon regulatory proteins, these IMPs also control gene expression… The IMP complexes provide the cell with “awareness of the environment through physical sensation,” which by dictionary definition represents perception. Each receptor-effector protein complex collectively constitutes a “unit of perception.” –Bruce Lipton

This view of the cell as a ‘unit of perception’ accords with Mach’s view of ‘sensa’ whose experience is psycho-physical being the basic elements of the world.   This puts ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ together, or rather, does not begin by splitting ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ apart as in the notion of a ‘sentient being’ which we picture as analogous to a thing-in-itself machine loaded with inboard sensing equipment akin to radar, sonar, robotic tactility, image and sound processing capabilities etc. that relates to the world it lives in by gathering and processing a load of sensory data.   Moving our view from ‘sentient being’ to ‘unit of perception’ does away with the dualist split between mind and matter and instead conceives of these as conjugate aspects of psycho-physical experience in the cell now seen as an embedded agent of perception.

Like a storm-cell in the atmosphere, the cell is ‘the universe/atmosphere/habitat expressing itself.  When the atmosphere is differentially heated by the sun and ocean, becomes pressured and tensioned, the ‘cells’ that emerge are themselves expressions of the condition of the mother-space.  As receptor-effectors, their ‘effecting’ is in conjugate relation with their receptive/experiencing of the condition of the space they are included in. The ‘ARE’ recepting-effecting that is built into the transforming relational space, they ‘ARE NOT’ sentient beings, inhabitants that are at arms length from their habitat that send out sensing signals like radar and sonar and receive and process them in a central processing unit so that it is the central process unit after it has done its analysis that is the first to discover ‘what is going on out there’.

Can we adjust our dualist view of ourselves as humans from ‘sentient beings’ whose understanding of the self-other or inhabitant-habitat relation derives from ‘sensory information processing’, to embedded receptor-effector agencies, strands in an interdependent web-of-life?   Apparently so since aboriginals have never abandoned this non-dualist view of the self-other relationship.

 * * *

The foregoing was to point intuitively to the alternative views of the mind-matter, self-other relations, and to suggest that the more comprehensive view is the non-dualist RST view, as embedded agents of perception which are included in a continually transforming relational spatial Plenum.  The MCD view derives when we impose, using language and grammar, absolute local being or ‘subject’ status (with God-like jumpstart authoring powers) on the embedded forms in the flow (i.e. features of the flow in the flow, as with storm-cells in the transforming relational space of the atmosphere).

By conceiving of forms that are flow-features in the continually transforming relational space as local, material ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own locally-originating internal process driven and directed behaviour, we have to conceive of their actions being driven by their INTENTION.   Nietzsche’s charge is that ‘science is anthropomorphism’ since we get this notion of ‘intention’ from ourselves [our ego] and we then infuse it into every exemplar of dynamics in the world.

Emerson, whose philosophy was much admired by Nietzsche, similarly observed that “the genius of nature not only inhabits the organism but creates it” and this ‘genius’ which is immanent in the unfolding world, gives ‘talent’ to a pear-tree to ‘make pears’, but pear-tree’s ego may have it thinking that the pear-making FORCE jumpstarts from within the pear-tree, and that its job in life is take these jumpstarting powers and deploy them to the fullest.

 

“But nature seems further to reply, `I have ventured so great a stake as my success, in no single creature. I have not yet arrived at any end. The gardener aims to produce a fine peach or pear, but my aim is the health of the whole tree, — root, stem, leaf, flower, and seed, — and by no means the pampering of a monstrous pericarp at the expense of all the other functions.’” — Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’

However, as Emerson continues, we seem prone to letting our ego hijack our understanding of our being agents of perception within a transformational dynamic greater than ourselves, so that we focus on ‘our ends’, like the pear-tree focusing on his own acts, his making pears, rather than taking his place in the larger-than-himself scheme of things;

“Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine.”

In the aforementioned revised model of the biological cell, the cells focus is no longer seen in terms of some central authority in the nucleus directing the activities of the cell, but in seeing cell as a receptors and effectors in conjugate relation, the cell’s primary job is now seen as ‘transmitting influences from the vast and universal to the point on which its genius can act’.  

This is the RST (relational-spatial transformation) worldview, wherein the forms in nature emerge, like the storm-cell in the atmosphere, to ‘transmit influences from the vast and universal to the point on which its genius can act’.

But this is not the common view in the Western culture.  The common view is the MCD (material causal dynamics) worldview, wherein we impute two things, ‘subjecthood’ and ‘inside-outward driving force of intention’, as a ‘stand-in’ for emerging events are inherently inseparable from the flow they are included in.  As Nietzsche says, these two notions we impute are ‘a double error’ or ‘circular reasoning’.

“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

And as Alan Watts says, in the same vein;

“As soon as one sees that separate things are fictitious, it becomes obvious that nonexistent things cannot “perform” actions. The difficulty is that most languages are arranged so that actions (verbs) have to be set in motion by things (nouns), and we forget that rules of grammar are not necessarily rules, or patterns, of nature. This, which is nothing more than a convention of grammar, is also responsible for (or, better, “goeswith”) absurd puzzles as to how spirit governs matter, or mind moves body. How can a noun, which is by definition not action, lead to action?” —Alan Watts, ‘Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’

This conceptualizing notionally splits apart the interdependent connectedness of the RST and reduces it to a MCD, notionally introduces GOD-LIKE local jumpstarting FORCE AND INTENTION into the interior of a form, linguistically idealized as a ‘thing-in-itself’.  In a human, we put it in ‘the brain’ and conceive of the brain as a central authority, a centre of intentional/purposeful drive and direction of the activities of the notional thing-in-itself organism,… the flow-feature that we have split out of the flow thanks to these conceptual idealizations.

Now, this imputing of ‘intention’ to dynamics in general, is what Newton built into his mathematical models or ‘Principles of Natural Philosophy’.   And he did it by introducing the concept of FORCE as a local jumpstarting power [God-like, since it arises out of nothing].  The form that is visibly individual is a flow-feature in the RST that is not the jumpstart source of his own FORCE and INTENTION.  In modern, Machean physics, the actions of the form are NOT LOCALLY JUMPSTARTED but are constituted by the ‘transmitting influences from the vast and universal to the point on which its genius can act’

The world/flow, in opening itself up to give birth to a form-in-the-flow is informing the assertive activity (development and behaviour) of the form-in-the-flow. 

As in the Western language and grammar based rendering of the world dynamic [in dualist MCD mode], so too, in the mathematical language developed by Newton for the ‘newtonian’ dualist, MCD worldview.  Berkeley’s critique, point to two mutually compensatory errors in the mathematical foundations of calculus, is pointing to the same two mutually compensatory errors that Nietzsche is pointing to;

 

 1.  The capture of unfolding events in the sense of their being the ‘result’ of some wilful ‘intention’, and,

 

2. The invention of a notional ‘being’ to provide a logical, local, jumpstart ‘intentional authoring source’ for the ‘results’.

 

This is the ‘formula’ for splitting out and disconnecting the forms-in-the RST flow, like Charlie, Francis, Ivan and Jean.  Differential calculus provides three coupled differential equations that can ‘explain’ each ‘flow-feature’ as if it were a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour, and impute to it ‘its own trajectory’.  By this revisionism, the continuing relational spatial transforming (RST) of the atmosphere is fragmented and reduced to disconnected material-causal dynamics (MCD).

Using calculus to remove interdependent connectedness

Hurricane Katrina, even as it comes bearing down on a terrified New Orleans, is under the influence of its sister and brother cells all around and on the other side of the globe.   In our self-centred focus, we are like the victims of a mass-killer; i.e. we are not really interested in how the web of relations he is included in is ‘transmitting influences to the point on which its genius can act.’  In fact, the same superstition that has us believing in God-like local jumpstarting out of nothing forces, is going to suggest to us that his actions jumpstart from his local, internally jumpstarting ‘intention’; i.e. an ‘evil force’ that jumpstarts from within his interior.

Now, given that his actions jumpstart from an evil Force within his interior, … there’s not much point in bothering to investigate what’s going on out there in the web of relations he is included in which embodies an intelligence that is continually ‘transmitting influences to the point on which its genius can act.’.

This is where the ‘restorative justice’ of the aboriginal belief tradition gives way to the ‘retributive justice’ of the Western european superstition-based scientific belief tradition.

Yes, scientific thinking IS superstition based because of its building into its foundations the notion of a God-like Force that, notionally, locally jumpstarts creative authorship of development and behaviour out of nothing.

 

“I am afraid we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

 

“As soon as one sees that separate things are fictitious, it becomes obvious that nonexistent things cannot “perform” actions. The difficulty is that most languages are arranged so that actions (verbs) have to be set in motion by things (nouns), and we forget that rules of grammar are not necessarily rules, or patterns, of nature. This, which is nothing more than a convention of grammar, is also responsible for (or, better, “goeswith”) absurd puzzles as to how spirit governs matter, or mind moves body. How can a noun, which is by definition not action, lead to action?” —Alan Watts, ‘Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’

What Newton did in his ‘mathematical architecture’, by way of his two mutually compensatory errors cited by Berkeley and which are analogs to the ‘double error’ cited by Nietzsche in our popular psychology, was to build in ‘positive causality’ so that ‘negative causality’ and ‘circular causality’ were excluded.

In the RST worldview, ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ do not exist as processes-in-themselves; i.e. there is only ‘transformation’ in which ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are ‘appearances’, … ‘conjugate aspects’ of the one dynamic of relational-spatial transformation.  When a human collective creates a new housing development, they are at the same time destroying a forest and ecosystems.  As Mach’s principle says;

 

“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”

 

Nevertheless, in our Western culture, we are addicted to seeing the world in the dualist MCD terms; i.e. in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, as if these ‘things-in-themselves’ are locally jumpstart animated by a God-like force-coming-from-nowhere in their own thing-in-itself interior.  As Marshall McLuhan says in ‘Understanding Media’ [understanding media as relationally transforming media];

 

“Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. — Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media’  [the transforming relational 'medium is the message']

What Western minds, conditioned with the dualist MCD belief system ‘just don’t get’, is that space opens up the possibilities that are conjugate to the asserting activities of the inhabitants.  If one makes space into a fixed empty void and instead imputes the sourcing of dynamics fully and solely to the ‘inhabitants’ of that space, then we are forced to explain emerging dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ as if these actions are jumpstart driven from out of the interior of the ‘things-in-themselves’.  The conjugate relation between the opening of relational spatial possibility and the asserting development and behaviour is lost from view and understanding, as the imposing of the convention of absolute fixed and empty space notionally shifts the sourcing of dynamics to the absolute local, independently existing things-in-themselves that inhabit the fixed and empty [non-participating] space.

To cut to the quick, the ‘negative causality’ constituted by this relational spatial opening of possibility has been ‘engineered out’ of the mathematical foundations of Newtonian physics and thus out of science in general which is supplied by mathematical physics with foundational concepts that it uses in its reckoning of how things work.

This ‘negative causality’, in our Western culture, has been driven out of our minds and mind-tools as we apply them to reckoning as to ‘how things work’.  For example, as Pasteur on his death-bed conceded to Antoine Béchamp that;

‘le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’ (the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything)

In this view, ‘negative causality’ is at work in the world; i.e. the proliferation of certain strains of bacteria arises when there is a deficiency in ‘le terrain’ of the body.  The body as a grazing meadow for bacteria, when it gets out of balance becomes hugely nourishing for particular strains of bacteria and they flourish and multiply and grow to huge populations and dump a lot of toxic excrement into le terrain which troubles the workings of the terrain. 

Because we Western European acculturated people are people with big egos that have us believe that we are, and thus everyone is, fully and solely responsible for their own behaviour, we impute ‘intention’ to the microbes and invoke judgement upon them as in our retributive justice which seeks to punish them for their malicious actions against the state of our being.  We condemn them as ‘pathogens’ that are the ‘cause’ of our illness, and we impose the punishment of lethal injection of an anti-biotic [life-killing-drug].  These cow-like microbes protest, saying that the gates were left open and the fields were full of nutrition for them so that as they partook of the goodies, their population exploded, cramming many of them into the same space so that their excrement was too much for the normal recycling processes where others are there to consume it, and the steaming stinking piles began to mount, polluting and toxifying the terrain.  Even though they were only 1% on the basis of the number of species, they took over control of the terrain that the other 99% shared inclusion in, and with things out of balance in this way, there was a hell of a mess.

‘Negative causality’ is next to invisible to us which is why it took us so long to figure out that scurvy was due to a deficiency in ‘le terrain’ that elicited the growth of bacteria; i.e. the growth of bacteria was not coming from the force and intention of the bacteria;

 

“The first noticeable symptom of scurvy is the appearance of reddish-bluish bruise-coloured spots on your skin. … Without treatment, the spots can grow and merge to create large dark patches on your skin”  — U.K. NHS

The body appears to be ‘under attack’ by some pathogens.  The spots themselves are seen as positively asserting ‘eruptions’ in the skin.   The vision of having left the gates open for innocent microbes simply coming in for munchies, is not in the mind of the observer of these growing spots; the view of some evil alien intruder leaps into the Western acculturated mind ever since the Aesculapian (reductionist) concept of health took over from the Hygiean’ (holist) concept of health of Hippocrates;

As Robert Herwick, M.D. reminds us, much in the same vein as Pasteur and Béchamp;

“One of the most ancient concepts of health was that personified by Hygiea, the Greek goddess of health who watched over the corporeal welfare of the residents of Athens. Health was then based upon a unity with nature, a temperate lifestyle and the belief that good health was a natural attribute. Rather than treating the sick, Hygiea embodied the ideal of the preservation of natural health through living in harmony with nature. Slowly this ancient concept was replaced after the fifth century B.C. by the cult of Aesculapius, the son of Apollo and the god of medicine. … The salient point about the cult of Aesculapius is that it was a therapy of intervention, of combating a disease and seeking its expulsion from the body. The restoration of health was based to a large extent upon superstition: and at times almost charlatan mysticism which effected a magical cure together with an increase in the temple coffers

… Throughout history this dichotomy of Hygienic health through natural harmony and Aesculapian healing by intervention eternally recurs. Hippocrates, the great Greek father of medicine, returned to the former tradition and stressed the treatment of the person as a whole, reflecting and participating in a natural order of natural health.

In the former, Hygiean approach the ‘physician’ [same root as physis or physics] instituted a treatment to reestablish an inner harmony with the natural order.

This notion that the body will heal itself and the role of the physician, rather than to take control of things, is to re-establish the conditions by which the natural balances in the terrain [natural health] can restore themselves.”

Here once again, the RST and MCD worldviews vie for primacy.  The so-called ‘realists’ [dualists] see only the MCD view, while the so-called ‘pragmatist idealists’ [non-dualists] see BOTH the RST view and the MCD view, but recognize the noun-verb MCD view as being ‘nützliche Fiktion’ (useful fiction, Nietzsche) that facilitates discourse on dynamics of experience that transcend the discursive capabilities in their attempt to RE-PRESENT the dynamics of experience.  

In any case, Western retributive justice thinking, the Aesculapian view in terms of evil agents that must be expulsed, dominates our thinking and obscures the Hygiean view in terms of health as a balancing of outside-inward orchestrating influence and inside-outward asserting influence.   This ‘outside-inward orchestrating influence is the NEGATIVE CAUSALITY [which is in conjugate relation to positive causality, both being conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of relational spatial transformation (RST)].  This obscuring has greatly hampered our ability to understand ‘disease’; e.g.

 

 “The evidence from disease would have led sooner to a conception of these food constituents and their functions but for a not unnatural bias in thought.  It is difficult to implant the idea of disease as due to deficiency.  Disease is so generally associated with positive agents — the parasite, the toxin, the materies morbi— that the thought of the pathologist turns naturally to such positive associations and seems to believe with difficulty in causation prefixed by a minus sign.” — Medical Research Committee, Report on the present state of knowledge concerning accessory food factors (vitamines), Special Report No. 38, London, H.M.S.O, 1919.  Cited in ‘The Germ Theory, Beriberi, and the Deficiency Theory of Disease’ by K. Codell Carter 

Here again, we are talking about the ‘psychology of the observer’, … how the observer makes sense of his observations and experiences.

But the point of this note is to propose that Newton infused the Aesculapian view into the mathematical foundations that constitute the ‘Principles of Natural Philosophy’, and furthermore, how and where this happened is captured in Berkeley’s critique of Newton’s fluxions, which identified the presence of two mutually compensatory errors of reasoning that are incorporated in the architecture of calculus, that are of the same topology as the circular reasoning identified by Nietzsche as arise in our Standard Average European language based tools for RE-PRESENTING the physical phenomena of our experience.

It is not at all difficult to follow the argument of Berkeley, which goes through the algebra and geometry used by Newton.  Eugene Bowman of Penn State will take you through it here, in ‘Casting Out Beams’  (or copy and paste this URL into your browser http://www.personal.psu.edu/ecb5/Courses/M475W/SuggestedReading/AnalystControversy-Published.pdf )

 

“First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and thou shalt see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” — King James Bible, Matthew 7:5

You will recognize in the mathematics, the same circular reasoning cited by Nietzsche, in that one starts from a set of raw observations, such as the temperature taken at successive times, that can be RE-PRESENTED as a continuous curve; e.g. of temperature versus time.   The actual curve used in Newton’s development of fluxions, however, is a parabola (y² = x) because that is used traditionally a well-behaved simple curve to develop and prove out concepts on.  Of course, this mathematics is needed to represent physical phenomena such as the variations of temperature over time, … or is that a ‘physical phenomenon’?

No, it is an ‘idealization’ of a physical phenomenon but not a physical phenomenon according to Mach and RST, because the attributes of a transforming relational space do not ‘change in time’.  ‘Time’ does not come into the physical dynamics of a transforming relational space because the transforming space or holodynamic is ‘ALL’ there is, and we are inside of it, and therefore it makes no sense to think of ourselves, the observer, as being outside of the transforming relational space and using an absolute clock and an absolute measuring rod to RE-PRESENT what is going on inside the RST.

So, let’s take another look at this curve and its derivative.  The derivative is directional in the sense that we look at ‘differences’ as proceeding from the left (from the past) to the right (into the future), the difference, in the limit as the interval (t2-t1) gets smaller of (y2-y1)/(t2-t1).  This is already the embodiment of a psychological RE-RENDERING of dynamics, as Poincaré describes;

“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.

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.”   —Henri Poincaré,  ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics.

That is, in order to simplify, we break down physical phenomena into tiny local packets of space and tiny increments of time and imagine that each of these contains a God-like FORCE which is the jumpstart animating source of the physical phenomena.  For example, Newton’s second law defines the God-like FORCE in terms the rate of change of movement of a material thing-in-itself.  The ‘force’ is presented as something that comes out of a space and time pixel, but as we know from our experience, the dynamics of the space we are included in orchestrates and shapes our asserting behaviour; i.e. the transforming relational space ELICITS a ‘rising to the occasion’ in us.  But the mathematics of physics contrains the RE-PRESENTATION of dynamic physical phenomena in terms of these physical phenomena arising from a local jumpstarting God-like FORCE AND INTENTION, as in our ego-based impression of our ‘self’ [implying that this mathematical physics or mathematical science RE-PRESENTATION is ‘anthropomorphism’ because it is based on our hubris of believing that the animating source of our behaviour jumpstarts from inside of us, which is pure ‘superstition’ if we really believe it, but otherwise can serve as ‘nützliche Fiktion’ or ‘pragmatic idealization’ if we don’t confuse it for physical reality but just use it as a supportive tool].  That is, the constructs of language, which in the case of Standard Average European languages imply fixed empty Euclidian space as an idealized operating theatre for material causal dynamics or ‘what things-in-themselves do’, … but which differ according to the architecture of the language, … are useful so long as we don’t confuse them for ‘physical reality’.

 

 “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

 

“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously  built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”  – Edward Sapir

Mathematics is another language, and fluxions/calculus is a language with a particular architecture that imputes to a curve, such as y = f(t) where ‘y’ stands for ‘temperature’ and ‘t’ stands for time, the notion that the sourcing force for the variation that the curve is showing, derives from the curve itself, from inside of the tiniest increments that manifest as variations of temperature.  The ‘force’ of ‘intention’ to ‘vary’ is thus embodied in Newton’s fluxions,  these tiniest packets of space and time responsible for the variations that give the form of the curve.  But Berkeley argues that what is there when the mathematical operations reduce the variations of the curve to ‘local force and intention’ is the ghost of a departed force;

“And what are these Fluxions? The Velocities of evanescent Increments? And what are these same evanescent Increments? They are neither finite Quantities nor Quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the Ghosts of departed Quantities?”

If we examine the curve of temperature as a function of time, these Newtonian mathematics condition our thinking such that;

 

“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.”

So, what are we to think if we bring a variety of different blocks of ice into our house, at different times, so that the melting of these blocks is depressing the temperature for as long as it is melting then abruptly stops depressing the temperature when it fully melts.  This effect on the temperature will look something like as follows in the diagram; i.e. the top curve shows the temperature-depressing effect of a series of melting blocks of ice brought into the house [in the constant warmth of the tropics] in december, say, and the second curve shows the temperature-depressing effect of a series of melting blocks of ice brought into the house in june.  The combined effects of these two series of temperature-depressing effects is shown at the bottom.  That is what we would graph up as y = f(t), as our temperature as a function of time.   

Do peaks represent 'positive' or 'negative' causality?

If we just take the bottom curve to a person who is unaware of the complication of the provisioning mechanism of melting ice blocks, when he looks at the temperature curves with the peaks on it, … is he not liable to think in the positive causality terms of there being some ‘assertive force’ that is the positive cause of these peaks?

In fact, if we take ‘differences’ as in ‘differential calculus’, we will be left with a series of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ anomalies that we will have to explain, ‘periods of warming’ and ‘periods of cooling’.   This is because the inflexions in the curve, to have meaning, require that;

 

“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.”

 

But the placement of these melting blocks is in the remote past and the continue to influence the curve from out of the remote past.  So the person (e.g. Al Gore and the AGW warmists) that look at this curve and want to give meaning to the variations in the curve, must assume that some force in the immediate past is positively causing the temperature to rise.  As they round up the usual potentially guilty suspects to see if they can find a positive correlation between their activities and these results, the concentration of CO² in the atmosphere shows up.   Some ‘denialists’ state the obvious that when oceans which contain dissolved CO²  are warmed, CO² is released into the atmosphere.  Those that see the upward variation as positively caused, however, will search for a model that would explain how rising CO² concentration will be the positive cause of the upward variation.  

But who says the ‘peaking’ in the temperature curve is a positive causal affect as a ‘warming interval’?   Why not a negative causal affect as in a ‘lessening of cooling’?

No, Newton’s fluxions do not allow that because the calculus HAS BY ITS MATHEMATICAL ARCHITECTURE IRREVOCABLY BLINDED ITSELF to negative causality and circular causality (as in continuing relational-spatial transformation), by building in the assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’.  In order to recognize ‘negative causality’ as the source of the peaking in temperature, one must accept that the present depends also on the remote past. 

Here we are getting away from the superstition of local-in-space-and-time GOD-LIKE FORCE-AND-INTENTION, and opening understanding like the aboriginal traditionalists, in terms that ancestral dynamics are continuing to be with us.  Newton’s MATHEMATICALLY-RENDERED PRINCIPLES OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY exclude the RST view wherein the world dynamic is a continually transforming relational spatial Plenum, by virtue of its mathematical RE-PRESENTING of dynamics in terms of time-based change wherein it is assumed that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’.  This is a view in where there is only ‘positive causality’ since ‘negative causality’ derives from spatial-relations that extend outward into remote spacetime.  Positive causality implies locally jumpstarting GOD-LIKE FORCE-AND-INTENTION, a ‘superstitious’ notion that has been effectively built into the architecture of the mathematics of physics and mainstream science.

It is the same dualist, MCD, ‘positive causality’ based ‘psychological aberrance’ (distortion of the physical reality of our experience by way of superstitious idealizations that conjure up the notional of locally [out of thin air] jumpstarting GOD-LIKE FORCE-AND-INTENTION ) that gives rise to moral judgement and retributive justice.  In this superstitious worldview, which has been institutionalized in the governance, commerce and justice systems of the globally dominating Western culture, one assumes, by way of double error, that evil events arise from evil intentions, and that evil beings exist that are the subject-authors of the evil results.  This saves us a lot of ‘thinking’, and it is thus ‘scientific’;

 

“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

This reduction in the expenditure of thought gives rise to moral judgements and retributive justice which sees individuals as ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own locally originating [locally-jumpstarting GOD-LIKE FORCE-AND-INTENTION].  In this reduced thought process, events can be seen as arising from intention and as being authored by local subject-authors or ‘beings’ possessed by God-like jumpstarting-out-of-nothing force and intention].   Banished from this view is the RST view wherein individuals are understood as ‘nature expressing itself’; i.e. that nature gives rise to forms for ‘transmitting influences from the vast and universal to the point on which its genius can act’.  

The superstitions that are built into the foundations of Western culture are also built into the foundations of the mathematics of physics and mainstream science.  All of this would be ‘nützliche Fiktion’ as Nietzsche observes, if our outlook is that of ‘pragmatic idealization’ wherein we acknowledge the utility of the MCD worldview without falling into the trap of believing that it RE-PRESENTS the physical reality of our experience.  The situation we are in at the moment is where we have institutionalized the ‘nützliche Fiktion’ and are imposing it by force on ourselves, through ‘retributive justice’ and ‘central authority based controlling directives’ in an attempt to MAKE IT THE PHYSICAL REALITY.
In referring back to the title The World Dynamic: – both RST and MCD  vs  either RST or MCD? , the associations can now be seen in the terms that ‘pragmatist-idealists’ understand dynamics in terms of both RST and MCD while ‘realists’ insist on either RST or MCD which excludes RST on the basis of its inherent ‘both/and’ logic and embraces MCD on the basis of its inherent ‘either/or’ logic.

The controlling of what goes on according to the enforcement of the MCD worldview amounts to a dispiriting or de-spiritualizing of society.  This is what tweaked Berkeley to his critique of Newton’s mathematical Principia, because he could see that this superstition of a GOD-LIKE FORCE-AND-INTENTION being inside of a fluxion was a total crock; i.e. that these fluxions were no more than “the Ghosts of departed Quantities”

The bottom-line effect on our society is that we have installed psychological aberrance as ‘normality’, … a superstition based psychological aberrance that derives from our confusing the linguistic idealizations of MCD for ‘physical reality’, which puts us at odds with our own inclusion-in-the-continually-transforming-relational-space experience.   As R.D. Laing put it;

 

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

 

The compounding problem, from my experience, has also been captured by Laing;

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.

 

* * *

Berkeley: How Science Is Displacing Spirituality

This is one of those stories like Copernicus told; a simple suggestion as to how we are missing something that is with us everyday; another way of seeing the same things we are seeing; another way that ‘makes more sense’ than our current established way of seeing it.

I would call this story; ‘How spirituality is displaced by science’, and increasingly so, as scientific thinking infuses ever deeper into the fabric of everday life.

This story ‘feels’ something like ‘The Da Vinci Code’.  There is the suggestion that something historical is being hidden, that what we have come to believe about the rise of science is concealing the true story.  There is also a murder in this story, the murder of spirituality.

In order to follow and assimilate this story, one must open the door to one’s own spiritual capacities.

I’m not sure where to start this story, which threads its way through twenty years of psycho-philosophical investigation, …  so I’ll start with a chronology of personal investigations leading up to the current state of illumination.  My intuition says that I should just present the plain facts since the spiritual aspect, to me, is like ‘the Tao’, … something that we can feel and experience but which is beyond being directly articulable.   Understandings that are spiritual, in essence, are something that is to be awakened in the reader.

In about 1993, I maneuvered my way, in my work, to undertake a study of ‘exceptionally performing teams’.  I had been asked to develop a workshop for producing managers [within a petroleum exploration and production operational setting] on ‘how better to invest in ‘information technology’.   My idea was to explore exceptional team operations, to see how they were ‘drawing in technology’ into their operations, so that the investigation didn’t have to start from the various current strains of technology and specify ‘how these should be used’.

A lot of things fell out of this investigation, and a successful workshop was developed, which was run two or three times prior to truncation by a major company re-organization.  But there was an important ‘philosophical finding’ that I was left ‘holding in my hands’, that needed to ‘go somewhere’, to be communicated and then more deeply understood,  but I did not know where to take it, or exactly how to share it, since it was very subtle.

My early ‘retirement’ in March 1, 1996, was strongly influenced by my desire to ‘work on’ a continuing investigation into this ‘philosophical finding’ and developing ways to generally share it.  One place I took it was to ‘Complexity’, the Journal of the Santa Fe Institute which was a new ‘university’ orienting to the ‘sciences of complexity’.   This institute was created by scientists-philosophers who felt that universities were pre-occupied with ‘linear theory’ and that ‘nonlinear dynamics’ was being largely ignored.

This seemed like a very appropriate ‘home’ for my ‘orphaned’ philosophical finding and I tried to capture it in an essay entitled  ‘Complexity and the ‘Learning Organization‘:  Addressing team performance in new science terms’.  The ‘new science’ referred to modern physics, relativity and quantum physics, which opened the door to ‘re-connecting’ the ‘team’ and the ‘environment’ that it was situationally included in, in the manner of [and this came to my attention later] Mach’s principle; “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.”

That is, the ‘orphaned philosophical finding’ I was left ‘holding in my hands’ was that the ‘identity’ of the exceptionally performing team ‘blurred’ by virtue of its building resonance into its interfacing with the world [with its host community; its suppliers, customers, service contractors, employee families etc.].

The orthodox ‘best practice teams’ were more like precision engines, ‘things-in-themselves’ with clear stand-alone identities and well defined component parts [employee roles] while the three teams that were identified as ‘exceptionally performing’ that we [myself and a colleague] ended up ‘investigating’ were distinguished by BREAKING ALL THE RULES, having thrown away their business cards [abandoned their defined credentials and position descriptions] and put the organization chart in the blender [The largest of the three teams, ‘team X’, was comprised of 150 members and used an unused aircraft hanger to have their ‘general assemblies’] .   They had also blurred the interfacing between their ‘self’ and the ‘others’ they were engaging with, dragging portions of the activities of the others inside of their team operations and letting part of their own activities be drawn into the operations of the others.  This was an operation in which everyone’s spirits soared.  In fact, one of the hourly union workers who was made a full member of the team like everyone, extolled the process saying how happy he was to work in this team-X environment since it had ‘put his head back on his shoulders’.

[To put this person's comment into context, hourly workers in typical operating situations are simply 'told what to do' and are not privy to what the operations are all about much less the business, and in team-X's reinventing of itself, everyone was given instruction in all aspects of the operation, including the financial/business aspects, and union workers found themselves sitting beside engineers after hours, on their own hook, watching the vital statistics of the operation on computer monitors and using their on-site knowledge to kibitz on how to solve performance problems and devise performance improvements].

So the philosophical problem was at the same time a quasi-mathematical problem.  As always, headquarters management scrutinized the production of all of the teams, giving rise to a ‘system performance’ curve as a function of ‘time’.   This curve was outstanding in the case of the team under study, and seemed to be almost doubling the performance of the best ‘normal’ teams.  Headquarters management, far from the teams themselves, were ecstatic and naturally wanted to promote the members of the team most responsible for this remarkably high production, and clone the team.

The members of the exceptional team realized that HQ management was ‘getting it wrong’, the high performance was not coming from them, the team components/members in the sense of the team as a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own locally originating, internal process driven and directed ‘production’, … the exceptional performance was coming from the team’s deliberate attempt to be defined more from the outside-inward, by the needs of those they were engaging with.  They were moving away from being locally defined; i.e. they were moving towards letting the defining of the team = ‘the universe expressing itself’, in the sense that the web of relational engaging they were included in was influencing them outside-inwardly at the same time they were influencing the relational web inside-outwardly [Mach’s principle].

What ‘the numbers said’ was clear in a historical graph of production.  The production of ‘team X’ had climbed up to where it was doubling the performance.  Even after describing the ‘complex source’ of this rising production, headquarters management regressed to the view that the rise in production had to be attributed to ‘improvements in the team’; i.e. improved skills and commitment of the team members, improved cooperation, teamwork, synergy within the team, improved leadership in the team.  In other words, the increase in production, they attributed to the team seen as a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own locally originating, internal components and processes driven and directed productive behaviour.

Headquarters’ management selected those team members who most impressed them, promoted them and transferred them to other operations so as to ‘clone’ this high performing ‘team X’.   But it didn’t happen.   It turned out that it had been a rare exception in team X’s middle management having let team X ‘break all the rules’ and blur their positional role plays within the team and blur the boundaries where the team operations ended and the supplier, customer, service contractor operations began.  The middle management in the case of team-X not only provided this umbrella protection beneath which team X was breaking all the rules of engagement, but in their [middle management's] interfacing with headquarters management, they translated everything arising in the new mode of team play into the orthodox format thus presenting a continuous picture of what was going [in the usual numbers based format].  Team X could not be cloned because such umbrella protection and translation was a rare item and it had been a necessary prerequisite to what had been the spontaneous emergence of the exceptionally performing ‘team X’.

The philosophical problem I was left holding on to was;

‘how does one explain that the source of ‘local’, ‘visible’, ‘material’ physical results derives from purely relational dynamics; i.e. from influences that are ‘non-local’, ‘non-visible’ and ‘non-material’ as seemed to be the case with ‘team X’?

The associated mathematical problem was;

‘how does one show that the bending in the curve [team X’s production as a function of time] comes NOT from the ‘point’ that is describing the trajectory, that little fiery spark, the moving point-source genie that determines the direction of each new increment, according to the calculus?

Of course, my 1997 essay, ‘Complexity and the ‘Learning Organization’’ was an attempt, as if by a man who had no tongue for it, to share the questions and formulate some sort of explanation.

Over the next sixteen years from 1997 to 2013, I worked every day, almost, putting in well over 40 hours per week almost without exception, to try to get to the bottom of these questions, which as I say, were only in implicit form in my mind, and not as clearly articulated as I have just formulated them above.

A whole series of essays began back then which I posted on my website www.goodshare.org.  For a glimpse at what my investigations into these questions led me to write in the three year 1998 to 2000 time frame, click ‘here’.  This pace has pretty much been sustained into the present.  There were also presentations, one jointly with Martine Dodds Taljaard (Stellenbosch University, SA) at the International Society of the Systems Sciences in Toronto (2000);

There was another presentation, jointly with Jacques Rainville (Montréal Abenaki-French artist/musician/actor – pool-partner/friend) at the Subtle Technologies conference in Toronto in 2001;

 In the year 2000 I also ‘connected’ with Douglas E. Caldwell, a biologist (University of Toronto, later U. Saskatchewan) whose research into the evolution of multi-species microbial communities yielded important ‘non-Darwinian’ results, and A.D.M. (Alan) Rayner, a biologist at the University of Bath, U.K. and former President of the British Mycological Society whose research also yielded fascinating ‘non-Darwinian’ results.  Together, and with Nigerian mathematician Lere Shakunle (Berlin) whose ‘transfigural’ mathematics led to the same ‘non-Darwinian’ evolutionary implications, we began an internet based ‘research circle’ into the topic which we called ‘inclusionality’.  Also ‘plugged in’ directly or indirectly were Howard Ward (LA Blues musician) and Nicholas French (Dallas based Jungian psychologist).

Many others, in spite of our line of investigation being rare, were linked into this initiative (particularly aboriginal acquaintances in addition to Jacques Rainville who brought in their knowledge of the medicine wheel and the ‘circle process’, and these mentions are not an attempt to provide an investigative history but are simply to give a flavour of where the pursuit of these questions was leading and what sort of ideas/understandings were feeding into it.

To continue this narrative to the ‘point of epiphany’;

Martine Dodds-Taljaard (Martine died of cancer in June, 2001 in South Africa) had been an enthusiast of Friedrich Nietzsche, and her studies had centred on his philosophical works.  My continuing investigation of these questions included exploring the thoughts of Nietzsche and in particular, the very basic thought that our belief in language and grammar was like a belief in God.   Here again was the idea that the headquarters’ management were unable to ‘get beyond’, the idea that the ‘productive results’ of the team jumpstarted from nowhere else but from the team as a local, independently-existing thing-in-itself’;

“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

In this statement of ‘double error’, the story of the productive results of ‘team X’ re-emerges, and indeed, the general concept wherein we think of events as ‘results’ that must have a ‘causal author’.  Why so!?

Before we leave it to investigate more foundational assumptions wherein this ‘double error’ crops up, the double error can be elaborated on as it was by Alan Watts, who points to implications of ‘the occult’ and to ‘superstition’;

“As soon as one sees that separate things are fictitious, it becomes obvious that nonexistent things cannot “perform” actions. The difficulty is that most languages are arranged so that actions (verbs) have to be set in motion by things (nouns), and we forget that rules of grammar are not necessarily rules, or patterns, of nature. This, which is nothing more than a convention of grammar, is also responsible for (or, better, “goeswith”) absurd puzzles as to how spirit governs matter, or mind moves body. How can a noun, which is by definition not action, lead to action?” —Alan Watts, ‘Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’

What Watts is implying is that, in order for us to believe that ‘actions’ springs forth from ‘being’, we have to be superstitious and suppose that there is a God-like power of ‘jumpstart creation’ in this local, independently-existing thing-in-itself ‘being’.

What he is pointing to here is something that lies in the foundations of the difference between the Western worldview and the aboriginal and Eastern worldview; i.e. the difference between understanding the world-space as an energy-charged, relational-spatial ‘Plenum’ expressing itself through dynamic forms that are like storm-cells in the flow of the atmosphere, the ‘nexa’ of influences in the flow.  This view sees ‘things’ as being a manifestation of ‘the universe expressing itself’, and this is indeed Erwin Schrödinger’s world view where the human self is a ‘variation in the structure of relational space’, setting up the relationship as in Vedantic belief [also where Watts was coming from] where Atman [personal self] = Brahman [eternal self, the living continuum].

The Western worldview, on the other hand, is one in which ‘things’ are understood as local, independently-existing material systems, and ‘organisms’ such as ‘humans’ are understood by science as ‘local, visible, material, independently-existing systems with their own locally originating, internal components and processes driven and directed dynamics [including ‘their development’ and ‘their behaviour’] which run about and interact within a ‘void space’; i.e. an absolute space and absolute time reference-measuring-frame-come-operating theatre.

To Nietzsche, the first part of the ‘double error’ was to conceive of a dynamic feature in the flow as having arisen from some ‘intention’ and the second part was to impute to the dynamic human storm-cell in the dynamic flow, on the basis of the static appearance of the persisting human form in our viewing-frame of observation, as a ‘thing-in-itself’, a ‘local, visible, material being’ that would then serve as the author of its own purportedly intended, action-determined results.

The error is not only in ‘inventing being’ where there is no justification in physical experience for so doing since our physical experience informs us that πάντα ῥει [panta rhei, everything is in flux, constantly changing], but also in imputing an ‘intention’ explaining emerging events.   As Nietzsche further says;

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] … our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “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’ 484

So, in Nietzsche’s and Watt’s terms, and consistent with Mach and Bohm and Schrödinger and others, … it is superstition to believe in an ‘occult force’ that inhabits local absolute ‘material beings’, giving them a ‘will’ that jumpstarts their development and behaviour so that emergent events, are re-cast as the ‘results’ of their ‘intention’ -driven actions.  Nietzsche sums this up with;

“I am afraid we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

What language-and-grammar based notional ‘occult force’ that provides local in-situ jumpstarting powers to explain how the world is animated, is something that science has built into itself, by way of the assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’.  As Poincaré recounts;

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.

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.”   —Henri Poincaré,  ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics.

In other words, we have built this ‘superstition’ that occult forces inhabit our notional ‘beings’ so as to animate the world,… into mainstream science.   That is, we have built artificial Gods into the language and grammar of science.

But what have we lost in the process?   As in the ‘team X’ example, we have lost the understanding of the local dynamics that we characterize as the local team and its internal components and processes driven and directed behaviour, as being ‘the universe expressing itself’.  We have lost track of ‘Mach’s principle’ whereby; “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.”

That is, by inventing ‘beings’ and infusing occult like powers into them, we have lost touch with the physical reality of our experience wherein we are the universe expressing itself; i.e. like storm-cells in the flowing relational Plenum, we are the agents of sensory perception of the relational-spatial Plenum we are included in.  Our Atman = our Brahman.

This idea of internal central authority and direction, which we have built into our science is coming to the point of collapse.  We infused there in the concept of the biological cell and while our encyclopedias continue to insist that the cell’s behaviour is directed by an internal central authority called ‘the nucleus’, this concept has been over-taken by the view that the cell, rather than being a ‘unit of being’ is instead a ‘unit of perceiving’.

If you look up ‘cell nucleus’ on wikipedia, you get;

“The function of the nucleus is to maintain the integrity of these genes and to control the activities of the cell by regulating gene expression — the nucleus is, therefore, the control center of the cell.”

Whereas, in Bruce Lipton’s essay ‘The New Biology’  one reads;

“As is described by Nijhout, genes are “not self-emergent,” that is genes can not turn themselves on or off. If genes can’t control their own expression, how can they control the behavior of the cell? Nijhout further emphasizes that genes are regulated by “environmental signals.” Consequently, it is the environment that controls gene expression. Rather than endorsing the Primacy of DNA, we must acknowledge the Primacy of the Environment!” —Bruce Lipton

The ‘bottom’ line for Lipton is that our conception of a biological cell is shifting from a ‘thing-in-itself’ or ‘unit of being’ to a ‘unit of perception’, the sensing/experiencing ‘eyes’ of an environment expressing itself thus;

“Receptor IMPs [Integral Membrane Proteins]  ”see” or are “aware” of their environment and effector IMPs create physical responses that translate environmental signals into an appropriate biological behavior. The IMP complex controls behavior, and through its affect upon regulatory proteins, these IMPs also control gene expression… The IMP complexes provide the cell with “awareness of the environment through physical sensation,” which by dictionary definition represents perception. Each receptor-effector protein complex collectively constitutes a “unit of perception.” –Bruce Lipton

A very similar ‘topology’ of ‘becoming’ starting from the earth as habitat, has been expressed by Peter Westbroek in ‘Civilizing Earth’;

“A growing chorus of philosophers and opinion makers is claiming that, since the ideologies of the twentieth century melted away, we are in need of a new ‘big story’. This is exactly what the fundamental sciences provide. The vision inspired by Earth System Science may seem scary at first; but it is a liberating experience to leave our cocoons, become aware of the immeasurable depth our our roots, and orient our lives in agreement with the real world. We should not forget that, when the Apollo 8 astronauts observed the Earth from deep space, it was the Earth seeing herself for the first time in 4.6 billion years – through our eyes.” —Peter Westbroek

Hurricane Katrina is engendered by the earth to engage with the earth, itself, so as to transform the earth and itself at the same time.  The ‘storm-cells’ like Katrina have a dynamical behaviour that is NOT directed out of the interior of their ‘self’, as if they ‘really were’ local, material ‘beings’ as language and grammar pretends, but is instead the habitat expressing itself as in Mach’s principle; “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.”

Could it be that we have infused this superstition of occult powers inhabitant notional ‘beings’ as an alternative view of the animating source of the world dynamic, … into the foundations of science, so that as our trust in science as the explainer of dynamics, both social dynamic and the dynamics of nature in general, has grown, superstition has hijacked our the understanding of our natural experience?

If so, where would we have infused this superstition and belief in the occult power of ‘being’?

Berkeley: science's hijacking of spirituality

Berkeley’s critique of Newton’s fluxions (calculus) in 1734, I had known about for some time in terms of Berkeley’s famous quote;

“And what are these Fluxions? The Velocities of evanescent Increments? And what are these same evanescent Increments? They are neither finite Quantities nor Quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the Ghosts of departed Quantities?”

But this quote touches very close to the philosophical and mathematical ‘orphaned finding/questions’ that I was carrying around; i.e.

The philosophical problem I was left holding on to was;

‘how does one explain that the source of ‘local’, ‘visible’, ‘material’ physical results derives from purely relational dynamics; i.e. from influences that are ‘non-local’, ‘non-visible’ and ‘non-material’ as seemed to be the case with ‘team X’?

 

The associated mathematical problem was;

‘how does one show that the bending in the curve [team X’s production as a function of time] come NOT from the ‘point’ that is describing the trajectory, that little fiery spark, the moving point-source genii that determines the direction of each new increment, according to the calculus?

 

So I naturally sought to deepen my understanding of Berkeley’s critique of the foundations of calculus [the foundations of science, really, since science depends on concepts developed in mathematical physics, which, as Poincaré explains in the earlier quote, built into itself a dependency on the notion that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’; i.e. in order to understand the unfolding ‘future’, according to this simplification built into science,  it is not necessary to understand the entire unfolding of phenomena, only the immediately previous state of the system of the world.  [the contributions of the ancestors have no lingering value, so says science].

I didn’t trust this one at all since my experience as a pool player [pool, to me, mirrors a lot of real-life symmetries] told me that as one acted, ostensibly to achieve some particular result, one was at the same time transforming the relational configuration of things.   More than this, it was always good strategy to sacrifice the achievement of particular results to the ‘conditioning’ of the relational configuration so that it would by-and-by become more fruitful in its results-giving.  In pool, the saying is “It’s not what you make, it’s what you leave”, meaning, its not the results you produce in your turn, its how the relational configuration has been transformed since that determines what results it will continue to give.

In the same vein, as Marshall McLuhan had observed;

“Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. — Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media’  [the transforming relational 'medium is the message']

That is, our view of dynamics always gives us these two alternatives, to see dynamics in terms of ‘what things do’, or to see them in the more comprehensive sense of the continually transforming relational spatial Plenum.  Space is not empty.  The space we act in is continually transforming.  It doesn’t stop for us to build a factory and insert it into the continually transforming space.  Our actions are like those of the sailboater in unending turbulence where we derive our power and steerage from the flow we are included in.  This flow does not take instruction from us and accommodate our powerboater moves.  As Emerson says, the flow not only inhabits us, it creates us.  And as Nietzsche says, it is our ego that wants to invert this natural order of things.

These same relations as in the game of pool etc. show up in the social dynamic.  Parents create a nurturing space for their children that transcends their direct interactions with their children.  The mother keeps the cookie jar stocked with cookies, the linen closet stocked with freshly cleaned towels, the clothes freshly washed, the floors cleaned, and the father brings supplies into the family living space and removes rubbish etc.   The space becomes nurturing to the children and their friends and guests.  The dynamic is one in which the dynamics of the parents-as-inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat/living-space at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat/living-space are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants [not only the parents but also children and friends].  Mach’s principle applies, and it is not possible to understand this dynamic in terms of ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’.  It might well be that the now deceased grandfather put in the vegetable garden that continues to help re-stock the pantry.

So the more general case is that people condition the relational space we share inclusion in at the same time as ‘people deliberately do things’.  As in the game of pool, both of these views are available to us at once.  The same is true as we move in the flow of the freeway, where the relational spaces that open up to us elicit our movement into them, and ‘our movements’, understood as contributing to the transforming of the relational configuration we share inclusion in, are, at the same time, furnishing us with spatial-relational openings that elicit and orchestrate our individual movements.  We are aware that our movements relative to others can either trap or liberate others.  We can keep another driver trapped in behind a truck in the slow lane, or we can back off to open up space to liberate him.  If we are in a heavily loaded truck going up a steep mountain grade on a two-lane-each way freeway, by creeping up the slope side-by-side with another heavily loaded truck, we can close down any openings and trap many others behind us.  The point is that, as in pool, our actions can not only be seen in the simple sense of ‘producing results’, our actions can be seen as conditioning the common relational space we share inclusion in, which is [due to its relational-spatial character], at the same time conditioning our actions.

Some people put the results orientation first which screws up the conditioning of the relational space for others, while some people suspend any results orientation and commit their efforts to cultivating a nurturing space.  This different orientation has been noted by feminists in the phrase; ‘My grandfather was a famous engineer; my grandmother had no name.’

All of this hangs in the back of my mind in coming back to Berkeley’s critique of Newton’s fluxions.  Like, why did Berkeley address the critique to an ‘infidel mathematician’?

Was he not speaking of this reduction of dynamics due to the assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’, an assumption that science builds into its models that says that the contributing of our ancestors died with our ancestors?  But is it no so that the ice that was deposited thousands of years ago continues to moderate air temperatures today?

We have already seen that the world dynamic seen as a continually transforming relational space is like an ‘energy bank’ that we invest in and ‘charge up’ and that we ‘make withdrawals from’ for kinetic activity?  Didn’t the plants and animals of the ecosphere contribute during the passage of eons in the continuing evolution of our earthly commons to the reserves of petroleum that we now draw from?

That is, as the farmer drives his fossil-fuel powered harvester, is it fair to understand what is going on in the double error terms of — ‘the farmer farms’ — or,  ‘the farming team produces results’, and ‘the pear tree produces pears’?  What about the sun and the soil and atmosphere and the rainfall?   Does the pear author its own development on the branch?  As Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’, ‘the genius of nature not only inhabits the organism, it creates the organism’.  In other words, in spite of the fact that science imputes development and behaviour to jumpstart out of notional [linguistically idealized] ‘things-in-themselves’, the influences that are purely relational; i.e. ‘non-local’, ‘non-visible’ and ‘non-material’ are the ur-source of dynamics that manifest to us as ‘local’, ‘visible’, ‘material’.   It is not that the pool player ‘doesn’t know’ that he is charging and discharging the potentials in the spatial-relational configuration as he takes his turn, it is just that, like headquarters managers, all we can MEASURE is the local, visible, material ‘results’ which are the ‘smaller story’ of dynamics in general.

Without being a religious person myself, but as one who deeply appreciates how living forms can infuse nurturance into our common living forms-engendering relational space, as understood in the aboriginal belief tradition, I can understand why Berkeley, the Bishop of Cloyne, might use the adjective ‘infidel’ to describe the development of a system of mathematics for modeling/describing the dynamics of nature, in which the notion ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’ is infused into its most basic foundations.

A few days ago, in delving more deeply into Berkeley’s critique of calculus, I discovered that Berkeley had come across the same ‘double error’ pattern in the reasoning that forms the foundations of calculus, that Nietzsche had discovered in the ‘psychology of language and grammar’ and that was also in evidence in the investigation of exceptionally-performing teams.

The two ‘mutually compensatory’ errors, again, are;

1.  The capture of unfolding events in the sense of their being the ‘result’ of some wilful ‘intention’, and,

2. The invention of a notional ‘being’ to provide a logical, local, jumpstart ‘intentional authoring source’ for the ‘results’.

In terms of reconstituting a mathematical curve/trajectory with differential calculus, any particular point on the curve could be deemed the launch pad for the succeeding increment to the trajectory.  The succeeding increment, which one could make as small as you like, can be found by finding the slope to the curve in a small interval about the point.  This implies the notion that each point of the curve is inhabited by the intention of incrementing itself (error 1.).  The point can then be imputed to have local ‘being’ inhabited by the intention to produce the next result (error 2.).   The curve as seen by calculus undergoes a kind of Darwinian, rather than Nietzschean/Lamarckian evolution which is purely inside-outwardly progressing and assumes no outside-inward influence from the space it is included in.  This is mathematically correct, but science is about using mathematics to model physical phenomena.

The trajectory of a vehicle in the flow of the freeway can certainly be understood and reproduced as a series of differential increments, but as drives, we understand that the relational spatial openings orchestrated and shaped our assertive trajectory, and while the trajectory can be measured and recorded, the outside-inward non-local, non-visible, non-material relational openings vanish as soon as we look at the trajectory.   This is because the trajectory renders the movement of an individual entity relative to absolute space and absolute time, whereas the movement of the included experient in the flow is orchestrated and shaped outside-inwardly by the transforming relational-spatial openings of possibility-to-move.  The included experient’s intention is to rise to the occasion as space opens up for him, the trajectory he happens to lay down (e.g. if he had paint on his tires) is a degenerate account of his experience; i.e. we can say that ‘he did it’ but as in our sailboater lives, what we do is relative to the relational possibilities that open up for us.   Team-X flipped from the ‘standard’ powerboater mode in which the team determines it’s trajectory [or so it makes believe] to the sailboater mode in which it accepts the ‘call of the habitat’ to take its place in the scheme of things, to let its individual and collective behaviours be orchestrated and shaped by opening of possibilities in the relational space it is included in.  Yes, it still left a trajectory as its production results attested to and it was an impressive trajectory, but it was not inside-outwardly forced by the team as a local thing-in-itself machine.

Calculus similarly understands a curve/trajectory in terms of increments that push off successively from the immediate past.    As Poincaré says in describing ‘the origin of mathematical physics’, the time derivative IS the assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’.  This simplifies things very nicely, but it bears no resemblance to the physical reality of our experience, wherein the remote past continues to directly influence the present [e.g. as in the development of an embryo].

Berkeley showed how Newton had erred in his calculation of the differential increment, but by an amount that was exactly compensated for in the error in defining the contribution of the ‘being’ responsible for the increment.  [see 'Casting out Beams: Berkeley's Criticism of the Calculus' by Eugene C. Boman]

There are simplifications here that don’t map into our physical world experience.  E.g. in moving in the flow of the freeway, an incremental movement could be seen to be due either to the opening of a relational-spatial corridor ['negative causality'] or to the assertive action of the driver ['positive causality'].  By determining the increment by way of the assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’, we are always looking back to the terminus of the last increment to attach our current increment to and so build the curve.   In reality, the increment may be induced by the opening of a relational-spatial corridor propitious to a forward increment.   By the same token, Pasteur, on his deathbed conceded that Antoine Béchamp had been right, that the proliferation of germs was the RESULT of illness rather than the CAUSE; i.e. that the causality was negative rather than positive.  His words were ‘le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’ (the microbe is nothing, the [balance] of the terrain is everything).  Diseases that were clearly deficiency induced waited decades if not centuries to be acknowledged;

“The evidence from disease would have led sooner to a conception of these food constituents and their functions but for a not unnatural bias in thought.  It is difficult to implant the idea of disease as due to deficiency.  Disease is so generally associated with positive agents — the parasite, the toxin, the materies morbi— that the thought of the pathologist turns naturally to such positive associations and seems to believe with difficulty in causation prefixed by a minus sign.” — Medical Research Committee, Report on the present state of knowledge concerning accessory food factors (vitamines), Special Report No. 38, London, H.M.S.O, 1919.  Cited in ‘The Germ Theory, Beriberi, and the Deficiency Theory of Disease’ by K. Codell Carter 

Calculus is an embodiment of the assumption, in no way physically justified, that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’.  If the relational matrix developed by team-X opens up the floodgates of opportunity for the team, the natural flow will source the accelerated animation of the team activity.  The accelerated activity of the team corresponds to the ‘productivity numbers’.  The headquarters management will see the accelerated activity of the team members and excellent ‘team production numbers’.   Like calculus, they will be right for the wrong reasons;

The two ‘mutually compensatory’ errors, again, are;

1.  The capture of unfolding events in the sense of their being the ‘result’ of some wilful ‘intention’, and,

2. The invention of a notional ‘being’ to provide a logical, local, jumpstart ‘intentional authoring source’ for the ‘results’.

In all of this, we have the exact overlay of what happened in the different ways of understanding the nature of ‘team X’.  The members of the team whose spirits were lifted by this mode of operation in which the team ‘became one with the world around them’ understood the dynamic of the team as being the environmental dynamic expressing itself.  The headquarters management understood the team by its ‘productive results’ and when they saw those ‘results’ rise, there was no other place for them to go, in their mind, to explain those results, but to the team as a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own locally originating, internal components and processes driven and directed behaviour.  And this was of course ‘true’ so long as one held the ‘identity’ of the team to be a concrete thing.  But the identity of a storm-cell in the flow of the atmosphere is not a ‘concrete thing’.  In fact, in a fluid-dynamical world, ‘identity’ is nonsense.

“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

 

If, as Mach, Poincaré, Bohm, Peat, Schrödinger, Rovelli maintain, that space is a continually transforming relational spatial Plenum, then ‘identity’ is nonsense, every form is being continually reinvented as the nexus of influences within the flow.  True, the visual form seems to persist and we can ‘slap a name on it’ to give it a kind of pseudo-identity, but there are no ‘identities’ in a physically real sense, only in a ‘schaumkommen’ (appearances) sense.

Returning to the realm of social dynamics, … headquarters’ management made two mutually compensatory errors, the same one’s as laid out by Nietzsche; i.e. their first error was in assuming that the numbers they saw, that were associated with ‘team-X’ which was in the physical reality of their experience like a storm-cell in the flow of the environment in which it was included, were the ‘results’ of the actions of the team.   Their second error, was in defining the team as the jumpstart author of ‘productive results’.   This two-fold, mutually compensating error meant that nothing stood in the way of interpreting the numbers as being the ‘results’ of the ‘team-X’ intentional actions.  By this double error, the primary influence that was animating the dynamic which was purely relational and thus ‘non-local’, ‘non-visible’ and ‘non-material’ had been purged from the understanding, and all that remained was the superstitious Fiktion in terms of dynamics that were ‘local’, ‘visible’ and ‘material’ and which were locally jumpstart animated by an occult force inhabiting the notional ‘local beings’ that were purported to be the intention-infused ‘authors’ of the notionally ‘causally determined’ ‘results’.

This heuristic, intuitive treatment of Berkeley’s critique of the mathematical foundations of calculus, could eventually be supplemented by a more in-depth mathematical treatment.  In all likelihood, such formulation will involve ‘complex numbers’, the real component of which is delivering the quantities we are measuring and mistaking for ‘reality’ when, in fact, the physical reality of our experience is ‘complex’.

[[Technical Note: The work of Gabor is recalled here in his quantum physics compliant 'Theory of Communications' wherein the communications signal becomes 'complex' as the transmitting and receiving become conjugate aspects of one dynamic.  The production of team-X might similarly be seen as a 'transmission' that is 'received' by the web of relations in which team-X is included.  As the relations become more 'team-X - relational matrix' engaging becomes more integrated, the two dynamics of transmission and reception become conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of relational resonance.  Distinguishing separate 'identities' of the 'inhabitant' and 'habitat' in this web of relations then becomes impossible.   Gabor gives the analogy of the crossed pairs of poles on a dynamic for this resonance based 'complex' dynamic, which involves a rotating element  and conjugate rotating field that is ninety degrees phase shifted [= multiplication by the imaginary unit 'i'] with the former, ‘real’ as in ‘visible’, ‘material’ dynamic element.  This recalls the ‘complex’ relationship in the game of pool, between the ‘charging’ and ‘discharging’ of the spatial-relational configurations, though what we can measure is limited to what is discharged as ‘results’.  This, in turn, recalls the conservation of energy which is continually transforming from ‘potential’ or purely relational [energy of relational situation] and kinetic energy, the energy associated with what we can measure, the local, visible and material aspect of dynamics.  The headquarters management insisted on a view of dynamics that was not ‘complex’ but was constrained to what could be measured; i.e. the local, visible, material aspect of dynamics.  The members of team-X who experienced this mode of operation understood the ‘complex’ nature of the dynamic in which their local individual inhabitant-identity [Atman] blurred with their nonlocal, collective habitat-identity [Brahman].]]

To push the ‘complex’ [real + imaginary] analogy further, the purely relational component of dynamics corresponds to the ‘non-local’, ‘non-visible’, ‘non-material’ or aspect that we can only ‘imagine’, as in the possibility-charging and discharging of the relational-spatial configuration of billiard balls, that meanwhile ‘delivers results’ via explicit local, visible, material actions that we say are ‘real’ because we can measure them.

Berkeley’s original 1734 Analyst write-up can be found by clicking on ‘THE ANALYST; OR, A DISCOURSE Addressed to an Infidel MATHEMATICIAN WHEREIN, It is examined whether the Object, Principles, and Inferences of the modern analysis are more distinctly conceived, or more evidently deduced, than Religious Mysterie and Points of Faith.

Given the foregoing discussion, it is perhaps unnecessary to explicitly state it again, but my own view is on the same page with Berkeley’s, that the reduction of the world dynamic to notional beings inhabited by occult, locally jumpstarting powers of launching inside-outward asserting action, is ‘superstition’ that goes also by the name ‘science’ [mainstream science].  I agree with Nietzsche and Poincaré, Mach et al, that ‘science’ is ‘nütliche Fiktion’ (useful fiction).  It is far less useful when its models of local beings inhabited by occult powers are confused for physical reality.

“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

Nevertheless, as Nietzsche pointed out, and as has been underscored by Edward Sapir, Benjamin Whorf, Alan Watts and others [F. David Peat, Moonhawk Alford], it is the language we use that delivers the concepts we use that condition our interpretation of the data of our experience;

“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously  built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”  – Edward Sapir

“As soon as one sees that separate things are fictitious, it becomes obvious that nonexistent things cannot “perform” actions. The difficulty is that most languages are arranged so that actions (verbs) have to be set in motion by things (nouns), and we forget that rules of grammar are not necessarily rules, or patterns, of nature. This, which is nothing more than a convention of grammar, is also responsible for (or, better, “goeswith”) absurd puzzles as to how spirit governs matter, or mind moves body. How can a noun, which is by definition not action, lead to action?” —Alan Watts, ‘Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’

Bohm did note, however, that our (Indo-European) languages tend to be highly noun-oriented and well suited to discussions of concepts and categories. By contrast, quantum theory demands a more process-oriented approach, a verb-based language perhaps that emphasizes flow, movement and constant transformation. (Bohm’s Holomovement – the movement of the whole.) — F. David Peat, ‘Language and Linguistics’

“I am afraid we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

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Conclusion:  Some data has been assembled here for sharing, that is for you to form your own understandings/conclusions regarding.  For my own part, the evidence clearly points to science,  however useful it has been in informing us in the realm of the material and mechanical [the 'real component' which does not equate to the complex physical reality] has been the abnegator of the spirituality that is immanent in the world since it denies the primary influence of the non-local, non-visible, non-material.

Berkeley’s view, like Mach’s, Schrödinger’s et al, was that space is relational and that persisting forms are secondary, in the manner of storm-cells in the relational-spatial flow of the atmosphere.  That is, his view was that non-local, non-visible, non-material influence was in a natural precedence over local, visible, material influence.  Like Nietzsche, he viewed the imputing of being via subject/attribute in language to be idealism not to be confused with physical reality;

George Berkeley (12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753), also known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne), was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called “immaterialism” (later referred to as “subjective idealism” by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived. Thus, as Berkeley famously put it, for physical objects “esse est percipi” (“to be is to be perceived”). Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism.” — Wikipedia

This view is held also by Mach and Poincaré ['pragmatic idealism'] and is what one arrives at if one inverts the understanding of space as ‘void’ or ‘nothingness’ to ‘fullness’; space as a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum whose dynamical forms are resonance features identified by the observer.  This is also the ‘Eastern’ and aboriginal view;

“As will become apparent in the following pages, the `nothingness’ of which Eastern scholars are fond of alluding to is not a nothingness relative to the fullness of being, but a positive, fecund and pro-generative emptiness in which something and nothing, subject and object emerges. This is entirely different from the `negative’ form of nothingness, a nihilistic mood, that would result from the insistence on remaining silent or a refusal to engage. Heidegger’s `conversations’ with a Japanese friend revealingly shows the metaphysical `gulf’ separating Eastern and Western attitudes towards emptiness and nothingness when the Japanese expressed amazement at Western reactions to Heidegger’s work. `We marvel to this day how the Europeans could lapse into interpreting as nihilistic the nothingness of which you speak. To us, emptiness is the loftiest name’. Yet, this state of `absolute nothingness’ [what Nishitani calls ‘sunyata’] cannot be reached through premature abandonment. Instead it is attainable only through the long and endless struggles and `companionship’ with both language and silence. Neither language nor silence can express the full richness of the real. We are therefore pushed beyond both language and silence. Words are taken lightly and only as `surface pointers which must not be thought to exhaust the depths of the actual experiences encountered. At best, they lead to beneath the surface “hows” to the deeper causes and regularities of things and events, which only the keenest and most experienced observer will have noticed… .it probes beneath the surface of appearances’. It is this relentless and unceasing emphasis on encountering and engaging with an unseen and unseeable `other’ which marks the Eastern mode of thought from the West.” —Robert Chia

Berkeley put his finger directly on the problem of science expunging spirituality, early on, even as the superstitions of notional occult forces inhabiting ‘being’ were being built into the foundations of the mathematics of physics, by Newton.   Not that Newton necessarily intended that his ‘Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’ (1687) be mistaken for ‘physical reality’; i.e. he made the following comments concerning the shortfalls of his ‘principia’ in the ‘Author’s Prologue’ and in his summarizing ‘Scholium’;

“I wish we could derive the rest of the phaenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from physical principles; for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they all may depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain; but I hope the principles laid down will afford some light either to this or some truer method of philosophy.”  Newton, Author’s Preface in the ‘Principia’.

“… and the planets and comets will constantly pursue their revolutions in orbits given in kind and position, according to the laws above explained ; but though these bodies may, indeed, persevere in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws.  . . .  This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”  — Newton, Scholium in the ‘Principia’

What stands out as a residual point of interest here is how Berkeley managed to reconcile his philosophy with his ‘monotheist’ theology since his views appear decidedly ‘aboriginal’ or ‘Eastern’ rather than ‘monotheist’.  My currently, mostly uninformed view, is that he held Church doctrine to be not-absolute and in a state of flux, … perhaps to the point that it needed to catch up with ‘relational philosophy’ which imputes the animating source of the world dynamic to reside within the world dynamic; i.e. within the transforming relational spatial Plenum aka ‘holodynamic’ aka ‘Great Mystery’ [Wakan Tanka] aka ‘ALL’.

It appears that the ‘pendulum is swinging back’ from this deep displacement of spirituality by science, and indeed there are indications of this, in the resurgence of aboriginal belief based practices such as the ‘circle process’, which is currently making inroads through, for example, the global ‘restorative justice’ movement.  As Kay Pranis (‘Peace-Making Circles’) observes, there is something like a ‘restorative impulse’ that is underway globally;

“I believe that the restorative justice movement is a manifestation of something much larger than itself: a fundamental shift in how Western culture understands the nature of our species and the nature of the universe.  Assumptions about human nature and the universe underlie all our social institutions and all of our relationships—with self, with others, with the natural world.  These assumptions shape the actions we take each day in the context of institutions such as our families, faith communities, neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, social services, and justice systems.” –Kay Pranis

This ‘restorative impulse’ is rallying us to retreat from a centuries long trend to superstitious/occult scientific subjectifying and related moral judging, that is opening up the societal web of relational context to a re-entrant primal flow of the non-local, non-visible and non-material; i.e. a re-entrant flow of the spiritual;

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Epilogue:

Over the past twenty years, I have wrestled with the above-described psycho-philosophical-physical issues, which pop up in every/any context imaginable.

What does it matter to me?

My experience has informed me that, as a social collective, the differences in how we understand the world can themselves lead to conflict.   It seems natural, to me, to seek ways to help us ‘get on the same page’, and in lieu of that, to understand the different ways in which different people understand the world and to jointly find ways to deal with the reality that those differences do exist.  Conflict arises from the combination of believing that one’s view of the world is ‘the truth’ and concluding on that basis, that there is no need to further consider the ‘false’ views of others.

As a thinking tool to aid talking about alternative world views, I like this picture of Bénard cells because it facilitates an understanding into how one can read into it three different options of understanding ‘the one and the many’ and their relationship.

benard convection cells in thin bottom-warmed fluid layer

The upper portion of the figure is a time-exposure [photograph] of the convection cells in plan view from above, … while the schematic diagram in the lower part of the figures shows a front elevation of the thin fluid layer, where currents of water warmed from below rise and cool on the cool surface above and dive again to the bottom where they are again heated and rise to the top.  As these currents push against one another laterally, this ‘reciprocal disposition’ sets up the convection cells and gives them this hexagonal shape [the shape that packed spheres bend into as they push against one another; i.e. experience reciprocal back-pressure, in a finite space]

Note that this is a relational spatial plenum; i.e. there are no ‘things’ in it, the hair-like lines that give form to the cells are ‘flow lines’ made visible by putting tracers into the fluid so that the direction of flow movement will show up in a time exposure.

This could be the earth’s atmosphere, if the earth’s surface was as smooth as a ball bearing’s.  The convection cells in the earth’s atmosphere are not so regular because the earth’s surface is not smooth, but the same processes are there and the tendency to hexagonal form.

[hexagonal form arises when the expansion of spherical cells is confronted by reciprocal back-pressure arising from the cells’ own expansion into a space that is limited, or where backpressure arises from relative inertia within the cluster of expanding cells].

In any case, this view starts from a relational spatial plenum, so we can start from the most general case of the topological relationships between ‘the one and the many’ [whether ‘atoms’ or ‘organism’s] and work our way down.

3. Most General: —Space is erupting in a rash of pimples/cells.  There is no separation between space and inhabitants because there is only space and it is a fullness that engenders dynamic forms within itself.  The dynamic form aka ‘cell’ is a ‘sensum’ [Mach]; a conjugate receptor-effector relation within the continually transforming relational space.  As human sensa, our experience is psycho-physical.

2. Less General: —The cells are understood as independent of the space they share inclusion in but their development and behaviour are shaped by a combination of internal genetic forces and by mutual influence. [leads to the classic ‘nature-nurture paradox’].  Example, trees in a grove grow tall and straight, trees on their own, grow gnarly and twisted from the influence of wind.

1. Least General: —Each cell is understood as an independent system, independent of the space it is in, whose behaviour is driven and directed fully and solely from out of its internal nucleus.  It’s development and behaviour is influenced by what lies outside of it, only through its central direction [e.g. by sensing and responding].  [Headquarters management view of team-X]

Note that in 1. and 2. the cells have internal centres of intelligence, whereas in 3., since the cells are ‘the plenum expressing itself through the ‘sensa’ that the plenum engenders within itself, the ‘intelligence’ is sourced from the plenum.   As Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’; ‘the genius of nature not only inhabits the organism, it creates it’.  He also notes that the genius of nature gives the pear tree the ‘talent’ to make pears, but the ‘know-how’ or ‘intelligence’ to make pears does not jumpstart from the ‘tree’ as a local cell-in-itself, the talent of the pear tree is an aspect of the genius of nature.  The genius of nature that not only inhabits the pear tree but creates it, as in 3.  Or, the relational dynamics of the flowing plenum not only inhabit the cells but create them.

Even though [hurricane] ‘Katrina’ is (3.), the atmospheric plenum expressing itself by engendering dynamic forms within itself, we, with the facilitation of language and grammar, impute to her (as in 2. and 1.)  the jumpstart powers to drive and direct ‘her own’ development and behaviour, just as we impute to the pear tree is own jumpstart powers to produce pears.  Language and grammar make this very easy to do; e.g. ‘Katrina is growing larger and stronger’, … ‘Katrina is moving north’, … ‘Katrina is ravaging New Orleans’, … ‘Katrina is dissipating’.   These statements ‘sound’ very real but are just ‘useful fiction’; a language and grammar based mental model that we create by imposing a notional ‘subjecthood’ on a visible pattern within a flow (3.).

Where did we get this archetype of a ‘thing-in-itself’ that has the local internal powers of jumpstart sourcing its own development and behaviour.  This archetype is our ‘ego’.  That’s how we tend to think of ourselves.  It is also the ‘God’ archetype since we portray God as having the local internal powers of jumpstart sourcing its own Creations.

This archetype is an idealization that cannot be found in physical reality.  It is at odds with our experience of being included in a continually transforming relational space where παντα ρει, ‘everything is in flux’ as in the convecting fluid.

Our choice of these optional views of habitat and inhabitant and their associated relations is not just academic.  For example, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA chooses option 1., the independent cell that is fully and solely internally driven and directed.

“Crick suggests that a person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them. He argued that traditional conceptualizations of the soul as a non-material being must be replaced by a materialistic understanding of how the brain produces mind; that religions can be wrong about scientific matters, and that part of what science does is to confront the errors that exist within religious traditions.”

I have called this option (1.) the ‘least general’.  It is like the headquarters management view of team-X.   It sees the performance of the team as deriving fully and solely from the internal components and processes of the team.  If performance improves or deteriorates, the source has to be internal.

If one STARTS from this thinking, there is no way to get back up to (3.)  However, if one starts from (3.), the view of the individuals as features in the flow, it is possible to ‘hold onto that’ as one’s physical experience, and to acknowledge the convenience, for discourse, of using language and grammar to reduce that to an idealized mental model that is in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what they do’.  Science does indeed do this reduction, as Mach notes;

“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

But Crick is a hard-liner in his starting from (1.), just like headquarters management was with respect to team-X. and it follows from this (1,) view, for example, that ‘mental disorders’ must derive from the interior of the individual and not, for example, from the anxiety of one’s situational inclusion in a stressful social dynamic.  This means that the search is on for genetic sources and/or viral/pathogen sources of mental disorder and, as well, it means that the treatment focuses on the individual and not at all on the dysfunctional social dynamic that is stressing the sensitive ‘miner’s canaries’, as in 2. or 3.  What I am saying is that the choice of the relational topology of the one and the many of (1.) leads to a major difference in how we treat each other.  For example;

  “The prevalence of insanity, which was once considerably less than one case per 1,000 total population, has risen beyond five cases in 1,000. Why has mental illness reached epidemic proportions? What are the causes of severe mental illness? Why do we continue to deny the rising numbers, and how does this denial affect our ability to help those who are afflicted?

In The Invisible Plague, E. Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller examine the records on insanity in England, Ireland, Canada, and the United States over a 250-year period, concluding, through both qualitative and quantitative evidence, that disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar illness are an unrecognized, modern-day plague. This book is a unique and major contribution to medical history [!!!]. Until now, insanity, and its apparent rise over the centuries, has been interpreted as a socially and economically driven phenomenon [this is a strawman that was never firmly in place, cited here to set up Torrey and Miller's superstitious conjecture]. Torrey and Miller insist upon the biological reality of psychiatric disease and examine the reasons why its contemporary prevalence has been so profoundly misunderstood.”
.
“Dr. Torrey has conducted numerous research studies, particularly on possible infectious causes of schizophrenia. He has become well known as an advocate of the idea that severe mental illness is due to biological factors and not social factors. He has appeared on national radio and television outlets and written for many newspapers. He has received two Commendation Medals by the U.S. Public Health Service and numerous other awards and tributes. He has been criticized … for… his support for forced medication as a method of treatment ” — Wikipedia

 

On the other hand, much has been written about the stress of the society leading to differences in the incidence of mental breakdowns, as cited in works such as ‘Misogyny or Madness’?  In general, it appears that anxiety can trigger mental disorder and stress can give rise to anxiety and social-relational disorder can produce stress (e.g. 9/11)

In the view in 1., the focus will be on repairing or controlling the individual seen as a stand-alone system.  The view in 2. would see mental disorders as being influenced by both internals and the societal dynamics.  3. would understand it according to Mach’s principle, and thus acknowledge outside-inward habitat-inhabitant sourcing of mental disorder.  That is, both 2. and 3. views would understand that the individual’s mental disorder could be suspended by either moving them out of stressful environment or transforming the environment so that it will be less stressful.  If people who feel alienated go postal, then measures that resolve the feelings of alienation can resolve the mental disorder

The Reagan Administration championed the trend to over-reliance on drugs to do the work of society and therapy [e.g. health-restoring clinics].  That is, in the (1.) view, one does not see the source of mental disorder as originating in the relational social dynamics the individual is included in, but instead, as jumpstarting from in the interior of the individual.  Many people with mental disorders who were in therapy of some type which involved taking them out of stressful circumstances were given a supply of meds and found themselves on the street or in prison.  The solution was seen in the (1.) level view as operating on their internals which were seen as where the mental disorder originates.

Again, if one starts on the (3.) level, one can acknowledge several ways to work on mental disorder; i.e. one can work on both removing the person from the stressful environment and/or transforming the environment [as is the suggestion in books such as ‘misogyny or madness’] AT THE SAME TIME AS tending to the individual’s internal biochemistry and biophysics.   However, if one STARTS FROM LEVEL (1.), then one will not just administer psychotropic drugs while getting the person out of the stressful environment and/or transforming the stressful environment, one will ignore the environment (e.g. ignore its myogynistic or alienating social dynamic and not bother to try to transform them) and focus on the symptoms; i.e. the biochemical imbalances that are provoked by stress.  This could mean that the individual is medicated for his/her entire life and that the stress of the dysfunction environment endures for his/her life.

The same choices and impacts associate with retributive justice (implying the 1. level view) and restorative justice (implying the 3. level view).

In other words, the popular choice of (1.) in the culture I live in, has already had a major impact on myself and those close to me, and this is an incentive to continue to work on communicating the issues surrounding our alternative reality choices and how these impact our lives and our general social dynamic.

* * *

Ayn Randism also represents a hardline choice of (1.) as the preferred reality.   In Rand’s view, the indigenous aboriginals [who understood the world in (3.) terms], who were ‘treading lightly’ in their habitat-inhabitant relation, were seen as lazy and ignorant because they were not ‘productive’.  In Ayn Rand’s view, the space we live in is not a plenum that expresses itself in its engendering of us, as in the (3.) view, the consciousness of the plenum being our Brahman [eternal self] and our plenum-engendered form our Atman [personal self].   Instead, Rand’s philosophy splits apart the inhabitant from the habitat, as in (1.) and sees the habitat as something to be owned and controlled by the inhabitants; i.e. by those that ‘know what to do with it’.

“They [the indians] had no right to a country merely because they were born here and then acted like savages. The white man did not conquer this country. And you are a racist if you object, because it means you believe that certain men are entitled to something because of their race. You believe that if someone is born in a magnificent country and doesn’t know what to do with it, he still has a property right to it. He does not. . . .Any European who brought with him an element of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it’s great that some of them did.” — Ayn Rand

 

Since this philosophy of Ayn Rand’s, which is essentially the ‘colonizer’ worldview,  is alive and well and is the basis for a good part of the political views in the United States, if not in the world, it is having a major impact on our/everyone’s lives.

The values of the colonizer culture put ‘construction’ into precedence over ‘destruction’.  That is, it is ok to destroy a forest to develop a shopping mall.  This is called ‘improvements to the land’.  The indigenous aboriginals of Turtle Island, who were coming from (3.) [there is no such thing as ‘construction/creation’ and ‘destruction’ as things-in-themselves, there is only relational-spatial transformation]  protested at this practice of the colonizers (1.) of mentally splitting themselves out of the land and focusing on construction while ignored ‘destruction’ of the forests, ecosystems etc. but the values of (1.) are institutionalized in Western governance, justice and commerce.

The values of (1.) are clearly effecting all of us because, the reality is, that we are all included in a common living space, and as Mach’s principle (3.) observes; “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.”   While Ayn Randism encourages people to exploit the land, exploiting the land does not do direct offence others, but it does do indirect [perpetrator-laundered] offense by way of Mach’s principle.

These ‘Ayn Randian’ political views that are grounded in (1.) are also having an affect on myself and everyone in our common living space.

* * *

Our use of language and grammar to subjective the forms-in-the-flow and to impute them to have internal jumpstart powers of self-development and behaviour, as in (1.) is, again, nützliche Fiktion (useful fiction) but it is also holding us back from deepening our understanding, since in many cases, especially in science, people are confusing it for physical reality.

As already mentioned, our concept of a biological cell in the (1.) terms of a unit of ‘being’ is being superseded by the notion of a biological cell as a unit of perception, due to its conjugate receptor-effector relational dynamic.

In the case of plants, another major challenge to our (1.) level concepts because of what is being called ‘the amazing intelligence of plants’ as is manifest in complex coordination of behaviours across different species of plants and also across the plant, insect, bird, bear divisions [of course these are language-based divisions we have imposed on nature].  The David Suzuki ‘Nature of Things’ video called ‘Smarty Plants’

The difficulty expressed by scientists, in trying to figure out where this ‘plant intelligence’ is coming from, since plants don’t even have a nucleus or central nervous system into which we can impute a centre-of-intelligence, is arising from the (1.) based definition of a plant as a ‘thing-in-itself’.  In the (3.) level view, there is no problem because we recognize that nature is a transforming relational-spatial plenum that engenders many different forms within itself.  To use language and grammar to re-locate the animative sourcing of dynamics from the plenum, notionally into the interior of the flow-form is ‘nützliche Fiktion’ that facilitates discursive sharing.  This we can understand if we start from acknowledging the more comprehensive view of dynamics in terms of (3.).  However, our current custom is to start from (1.) in which case we hold to the notion that a plant is an ‘organism’ which in level (1.) terms is “a local, independently-existing material system with its own locally originating, internal components and processes driven and directed development and behaviour.

This level (1.) science is, as Mach and Nietzsche agree ‘anthropomorphism’; i.e. we are taking the simple [Fiktional] ego-view of self as ‘real’ and imposing it into cells and organisms and organizations/institutions because it is a ‘simple way of thinking about things’; i.e. in the language and grammar facilitated terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.

This ego-archetype we have infused into level (1.) science is giving us a lot of problems; i.e. it denies that we are all children of a common plenum; it sees us each as absolutely independent with our own locally jumpstarting behaviour, and it therefore leads to retributive justice and retributive justice leads to punitive wars amongst ourselves.  If we start our understanding from level (3.), then we understand that the source of all dynamics, including dynamic forms, is the relational spatial plenum, the dynamic Unum, the ‘ALL’.  This leads to an understanding individual behaviour is firstly ‘the universe/community expressing itself’ so that the community must acknowledge responsibility for dissonance that manifests through individuals.  This dissonance is like a short-circuit in a connected relational network.  This level (3.) understanding leads to restorative justice and healing of dissonance by way of relational transforming.

I find this fact that we can have different ways of understanding the same dynamics, not just interesting, but having had, and continuing to have, impact on my life, the lives of those close to me, and ‘our lives’ in general.

I believe that it is something we need to talk about.  If we continually start off from level (1), we are not, in effect, ‘talking about it’.  I know that headquarters management insisted in staying with the level (1.) view because that was ‘their job’, what they were being paid to do, because ‘the corporation’ is a level (1.) concept and because ‘the sovereign state’ is a level (1.) concept.  Evidently, we need to get this conversation about these levels, going in a space where people are thinking of how to achieve balance and harmony in our relational space on an overall ‘inclusional’ basis, that goes beyond ‘the health of the corporation’, ‘the health of the nation’ and ‘the health of humanity’, and accepts that our ‘web-of-life’ captures all things within an interdependent connectedness [the relational spatial plenum].

The bottom line in all of this, in my view, is that the level (1.) view constrains our understanding of ourselves and our world to a collection of local, visible, material ‘things-in-themselves’ [essentially 'machines'] and ‘what they do’.  This is Crick’s view; i.e. that that’s all there is.  And therefore our inspiration or ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’, if there is such a thing, must come from internal biochemistry and biophysics.   In the level (3.) view of the aboriginal belief tradition and Machean physics, our ‘spirit’ is the non-local, non-visible, non-material influence that is engendering us and others; it is Brahman, our eternal self, the continually transforming relational spatial Plenum, that harbours within it our Atman, our uniquely, situationally included flow-feature self.

Crick can have his ‘soul’ made of internal biochemistry and biophysics per his level (1.) worldview.

“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules:” — Sir Frances Crick, ‘Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul‘.

Such intellectual disconnection from our experience of inclusion in the natural world would elevate one’s own ego to a seat of supreme authority over oneself, to give direct one’s behaviour on the basis of the best intellectual rationales one can come up with [and shutting off our attuning to the orchestrating influence of the transforming relational space we are uniquely situationally included in, that implores us continually, to rise to the occasion rather to simply drive and direct ourselves by our internal processes such as knowledge and intellection informed purpose.

If Crick's poor choice were all that was involved, that would be one thing, but there is much more to it than that.  The worldview that is built into our institutions of governance, justice and commerce are all at stake, and Crick is one of the staunch gatekeepers of using the level (1.) reality as the foundation for those institutions.  Since level (1.) derives from the ego and is all about 'central control', this unnatural elevation of the ethic of control impacts all of us.

As it did with Ernst Mach, level (3.) reality makes far more sense to me.  But like Mach, my belief in level (3.) reality makes me a 'false prophet' in the eyes of the Crick's and in the eyes the majority of science's gatekeepers who help to keep level (1.) reality in its unnatural primacy, and as the foundation for our institutions.  As Mach said about his 'excommunication' from science that had opted for the level (1.) reality;

“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 belief 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’. See also ‘Ernst Mach leaves the Church of Physics’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Br J Philos Sci (1989) 40 (4): 519-540.))

And as Julian Barbour, one of the modern day relational space theorists observes;

 “Mach insisted that science must deal with genuinely observable things, and this made him deeply suspicious of the concepts of invisible absolute space and time. In 1883 he published a famous history of mechanics containing a trenchant and celebrated critique of these concepts.” … “Taking this further, thinking about the position and motion of one object is artificial. We are part of Mach’s All, and any motion we call our own is just part of a change in the complete universe. What is the reality of the universe? It is that in any instant the objects in it have some relative arrangement.”

That 'relative arrangement' and how it is continually changing is something a long-time pool player can appreciate.  That is not to trivialize this discussion at all.  It is just to observe that nature is filled with symmetries that inform us in many simple, everyday ways that the changing arrangements of things are the 'real dynamics' as we actually experience them.  We don't experience, and can't possible experience the movement of a thing-in-itself.  Such a movement would have to be in an absolutely fixed space; i.e. such a movement depends on abstract idealization.  What we experience physically is movement relative to other moving things; i.e. what we physically experience is our inclusion in a transforming relational configuration of things, as Barbour mentions.  And the transforming relational configuration persists well beyond the lifetimes of dynamic forms that gather and regather within it.

The level (3.) reality understands that πάντα ῥει [panta rhei, everything is in flux, constantly changing],

“[The smoothness we admire in the order of the world] is the smoothness of the pitch of the cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation. If anything could stand still, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted” – Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature‘

As Nietzsche suggested, the time has come for a re-valuation of all values.  Implicitly, this must come from restoring level (3.) reality, and thus ‘spirituality’, to its natural primacy over the linguistic idealized, double-error contaminated level (1.) reality that has been institutionalized in ‘science’ and society.

* * *

the body sources a mind that defines the body

‘Nutshell’ Introduction to ‘What is going wrong with [Western] society’?

Nutshell: – Psychologists [the discipline] don’t understand physics to the point of being able to challenge it and physicists [the discipline] don’t understand psychology to the point of being able to challenge it, so each domain settles for treating the other domain as a ‘separate’ domain.  But the point of departure for physicists is ‘psychology’ (sensation) and the point of departure for psychologists is ‘physics’ (physiology).  Mach argues for the psychophysical (one domain).  If Mach is right, and I have at least 20 years of investigative work that, for me, point to him being right, then space is ‘relational’ and there are no ‘things-in-themselves’ [they are relational sensa], so the ‘mind’ and ‘body’ do not split into two.  But because we treat them as if they were split and we treat things as ‘things-in-themselves’ rather than relational nexa or ‘sensa’ [centres of perception/experience], our modern western society mistakenly [mis]takes for ‘reality’, an intellectual scientific concept based [linguistic idealization based] world of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what things do’.  What remains hidden beneath it is the world of sensation, the basic world of sensory experience, which we have ‘paved over’ with purified scientific concepts.  Society’s ‘disconnect’ is that we are using our intellect to engage with this non-real world of purified scientific concepts, which is not the world of our sensory experience.  This is a major source of ‘incoherence’ in our societal dynamic. Currently, we are ‘stuck’ and prevented from communally discovering [acknowledging] ‘our disconnect’ because of our continuing treatment of the realm of the psychological and the realm of the physical as two different realms, rather than as one psychophysical phenomenal realm.

‘What is going wrong with [Western] society’?

An insight-giving document I have added to my references on this topic is an article that Mach wrote at the behest of Alfred Binet, entitled ‘Sur le rapport de la physique avec la psychologie’, L’Année Psychologique, vol. 12.  [see URL below].  This article (discussed below) adds clarification to where Mach is coming from, and how his view differs from where modern psychology and modern physics have gone.  Continuing discoveries in biology, such as ‘epigenetics’ [which recasts the cell from a thing-in-itself to a center-of-perception/experience] add credence to Mach’s views, but the problem is that the implications are so big, that few people other than those whose opinions ‘don’t matter’ will have the ‘impertinence’ to proffer and stand up for these contra-to-cultural-grain views.  As Nietzsche, who is in ‘the same camp as Mach’ says;

“I am only too well aware of the conditions under which a man understands me, and then necessarily understands. He must be intellectually upright to the point of hardness, in order even to endure my seriousness and my passion. He must be used to living on mountain-tops, – and to feeling the wretched gabble of politics and national egotism beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never inquire whether truth is profitable or whether it may prove fatal… Possessing from strength a predilection for question for which no one has enough courage nowadays; the courage for the forbidden; his predestination must be the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for the most remote things. A new conscience for truths which hitherto have remained dumb. And the will to economy on a large scale: to husband his strength and his enthusiasm… He must honour himself, he must love himself; he must be absolutely free with regard to himself. … Very well then! Such men alone are my readers, my proper readers, my pre-ordained readers. …”  —Friedrich Nietzsche from “The Antichrist”

* * *

The following is, in my view, a viable understanding of ‘what troubles us’ about modern society; i.e. the feeling that ‘we are the bus that we are passengers on’ and we don’t understand what is animating its unfolding travelogue.  We have the sense that the lack of response from our attempts to control the unfolding of our social dynamic with determined, powerful and purposeful wrenchings on the steering wheel, is telling us that the linkage between the steering and the wheels has been severed [or never connected].  In other words, we have the sense that there is a ‘disconnect’ of some sort between the world as we are seeing and engaging with it, and the world as it ‘really’ [i.e. ‘physically’] is.

My view is that Mach and Nietzsche [and again, Poincaré, Bohm, Peat, Schrödinger, Rovelli and others] have given us the answer to this, and that both ‘psychology’ [the discipline] and ‘physics’ [the discipline], are obscuring this answer, by promoting the concept of the human organism as a locally existing ‘thing’, a physiological system ‘with a psyche’ as a separate system.

In the Machean view, there are no such things as ‘things-in-themselves’.  Mach’s ideas are being born out in biological cell research, where the ‘cell’ which was seen as a ‘thing’ with a ‘mind of its own’ [our models implied that ‘it knew how to reproduce itself’, the cell centre or nucleus being the director of such things, ... without dependency on outside direction.].  The ‘new science of epigenesis’ models the ‘cell’ as a ‘unit of perception’, wherein the reproduction of the cell is informed by ‘signals from the environment’ giving us a concept of the ‘cell’ that corresponds to the ‘storm-cell’ in the atmosphere, suggesting that such things as we thought were ‘things-in-themselves’ are instead, in the case of cells, are purely relational ‘sensa’ or ‘nexa’ within the ‘flow’ [within the continually transforming relational spatial plenum] consistent with modern physics.

The ‘relational space’ view of Mach, Nietzsche, Poincaré, Bohm, Peat, Schrödinger, Rovelli, in which there are no ‘things’; i.e. in which ‘things’, including the ‘thing-with-a-psyche’ view of psychology and physics, are intellectual constructs that have no basis in physical phenomena.

The ‘Double Error’

Both Nietzsche and Poincaré have discussed the ‘double error’ [petitio principii] which splits apart a nexal centre of perception into a subject ‘perceiver/experient’ [doer] and a ‘perception/experience’ [deed].

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

Experiencing/perceiving is a case in point.   We are aware of our continual perceiving/experiencing, but where is the physical-phenomenal justification for intellectually breaking this experiencing into two components, the ‘experient/perceiver’ as doer of the deed, and ‘experience/perception’ as the deed?

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] … our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “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’ 484

This same philosophical problem crops up in mathematics in the guise of ‘Cantorism’, which Poincaré describes as a ‘disease that mathematics will have to recover from’.  It is the same problem in that it involves an unjustified splitting apart of the definer and the thing defined.  The set of whole numbers is defined by a process which reeks of ‘petitio principii’ [Poincaré] and we come away a category, integers, that we can indefinitely ‘make more of’ by recursive incrementing; i.e. N(n+1) = N(n) + 1.  For some mathematicians, ‘infinity’ is already established by this relation [Poincaré refers to these mathematicians as ‘Cantorian realists’] while for other’s, this incrementing process cannot be bypassed, and since it would take an infinite time to increment to infinity, the existence of infinity is not proved by ‘induction’.

Here one can imagine counting storm cells that emerge in the atmosphere.  Since the storm cell is a visual pattern recognized by an observer, we need the observer or observers to count the storm-cells and thus we can’t have more storm-cells than observings; i.e. we can’t jump to the conclusion that the number ranges to infinity.  As Poincaré says in ‘Dernières Pensées’, Ch. V., Les Mathematiques et la Logique;

Let us attempt therefore to study the psychology of the two opposing schools  [‘Cantorian realists’, ‘pragmatist-idealists’] from a purely objective point of view just as if we ourselves were not a member of these schools, as if we were describing a war between two ants’ nests. We shall first of all observe that there are two opposite tendencies among mathematicians in their manner of considering infinity. For some, infinity is derived from the finite; infinity exists because there is an infinity of possible finite things. For others, infinity exists before the finite; the finite is obtained by cutting out a small piece from infinity.

What Poincaré is saying here is that in mathematics, the only meaning we can take away is the meaning that comes from mathematical proofs; at least this is the view of the pragmatist idealist, such as Poincaré.  In this case, there must be a mathematician present to witness the proof.  If one says that if the sequence N(n+1) = N(n) + 1 is true for n = 0, 1, 2, 3, … it is true for all n, … this ‘proof by induction’ is a conclusion that we might usefully use, but it is not a ‘verifiable conclusion’ since the verification is ‘postponed’ and the mathematician verifying it would have to wait around well beyond his lifetime in order to verify it.  Here we see again this question of whether the observer can be split apart from the observed, the prover from the proved; i.e. whether the subject can be split apart from the object, so as to suppose the existence of an objective world independent of the observer.  Or, on the other hand, as Mach would claim, ‘observING’, in general, is a psycho-physical unitary that cannot be split apart, as far as physical phenomena are concerned, into ‘doer-and-deed’, ‘observer-and-observed’, definer-and-defined, … the physical phenomenon being ‘observING’ and the split into ‘observer-observed’ being an intellectual idealization.

“Does a theorem which does not result in any verifiable conclusion have a meaning? Or, more generally, does any theorem whatever have a meaning apart from the proofs which it involves? This is where the mathematicians differ. Those of the first school, whom I shall call pragmatists (since it is necessary to assign them a name) say no; and when a theorem is brought to their attention without giving them a means of verifying it, they see in it only unintelligible verbiage. They wish to consider only objects which can be defined in a finite number of words. When in an argument an object A is mentioned as satisfying certain conditions, they understand an object which satisfies these conditions, whatever may be the words used to complete its definition, provided these words are finite in number.  Those of the other school, whom I shall call for short Cantorians, do not wish to allow this. A man, however talkative he may be, will never in his lifetime utter more than a billion words. Consequently, shall we exclude from science the objects whose definition contains one billion and one words ? And if we do not exclude them, why should we exclude those which can be defined only by an infinite number of words, since the formulation of the first type of definitions is, like that of the second, beyond the scope of mankind ?

Now, Poincaré is discussing here; “the psychology of the two opposing schools  [‘Cantorian realists’, ‘pragmatist-idealists’]”.  This is central to our quest to understanding what is going on in our society since we [globally dominant Western society] has ‘institutionalized’ one of these two ‘psychologies’; i.e. Cantorian realism.  This is Nietzsche’s ‘complaint’, as well, where he effectively chides Descartes for his ‘I think, therefore I am’, saying “Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?”

In a relational space, as implied by the physical-phenomena of our sensory experience, space itself is the engenderer of observer and observed; i.e. ‘consciousness’ is a property of the relational space in this Machean/Schrödingerian view, and individual perspective arises from the unique, relational situation of ourselves as ‘nexa’ or ‘sensa’ within the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum.

The ‘disconnect’ that arises from splitting apart the unitary of ‘observING’ into observer and observed ‘thing’ introduces mucho confusion into our social dynamics.  Starting from ‘observING’[‘perceivING’, ‘experiencING’] and breaking this psycho-physical unitary into ‘observer’ and observed thing forces us to RE-render dynamics in terms of ‘what things do’, yielding a notional world dynamic in which ‘observING’ is no longer part of the dynamic.  There are things that move and other things, called observers, that capture in intellectual conceptual terms [e.g. linguistic idealizations], the story of motion in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves are doing’.  ObservING is no longer the primary physical phenomenon; it has been reduced to an internal process animated behaviour on the part of a local, independently-existing thing-in-itself, ‘the observer’.  Thus do we have the internal psychological realm of this process of observing, and also the external physical realm of ‘what physical things-in-themselves are doing’.  In other words, we have intellectually split apart the psychophysical unitary of ‘observING’ [‘experiencING’, ‘perceivING’] into the doer-deed duality of ‘observer-observed’ [‘experient-experience’, ‘perceiver-perceived’].

That is, confusing the intellectual concept of a ‘thing’ and the associated view of ‘dynamics’ as ‘what things do’, for physical phenomena, gives rise to our modern, globally dominant  quote-unquote ‘reality’ that we model in terms of ‘sovereign states’ and their institutions of government, corporations and justice [morality applied to ‘thing’-behaviour].  This ‘thing-based’ reality is ‘linguistic idealization’; i.e. it is based on the logical constructions of thought and language that employ ‘purified scientific concepts’ and which is otherwise known as ‘rationality’.

The ‘bottom line’ is that the physical phenomenal ‘reality’ of our psycho-physical experience is being over-ridden by ‘linguistic idealization’.  That is, the dominant organizing of the globally dominant Western-culture [SAE language idealized] social dynamic that supports war and peace, commerce and justice, as managed by our institutions of government and justice is ‘DISCONNECTED’ from the ‘physical-phenomenal reality’ of our psycho-physical experience.

Our psycho-physical experience is our only primary source of understanding the world dynamic that we are included in, and it not only informs us of a relational world dynamic, it is itself a relational sensing.  In psychology, one first assumes the existence of the ‘thing-in-itself’ inhabited by the psyche, and understands the behaviour of the thing as ‘its behaviour’ though directed by a complex psyche [Jung] where the individual is informed by his consciousness and at the same time by a ‘personal unconscious’ and a ‘collective unconscious’.  The problem here is with the notion of ‘individual thing-in-itself behaviour’.    In the Machean view, the notion of ‘the behaviour of an individual’ is an ‘intellectual concept’ born of convenience or ‘the economy of thought’ as in the case of the behaviour of an ‘individual storm-cell’ [‘Katrina is growing, strengthening, moving north, ravaging New Orleans, dissipating’, ... is linguistic idealization rather than physical phenomenon].

In a paper by Hayo Siemsen, ‘Alfred Binet – Ernst Mach: Similarities, Differences and Influences’, … under the section heading ‘Psychophysics’, Siemsen describes the dialogue between Binet, coming from psychology and reaching out tie into physics, and Mach, who started out in physics which led him into psychology and the attempt to understand the connection between the two.   The following excerpts describe how, Mach, unlike Binet, refused to allow any dependence in his psychophysical Erkenntnistheorie, on the intellectual notion of a ‘thing-in-itself’ while Binet did;

“Contrary to psychologists, such as Binet or James, Mach instead distinguishes clearly between the intellectual concept of an “object” and the phenomenal concepts of bodies, colours, etc. “The thing is therefore an intellectual entity (a complex of views or a scientific concept) ; the phenomenon on the contrary is a sensual entity, which can concur with the intellectual entity and can achieve the expectations, which it induced, but which it can also completely disappoint.“ (Mach, ‘Sur le rapport de la physique avec la psychologie’, L’Année Psychologique, vol. 12 ). What Mach does in this case is to use Binet’s critique of the abstraction from the physiological in the concept of perception also on the physical part of perception. The world as we can know it consists only of the relations between objects or things, not of the objects themselves.”

 

Mach’s critique of the Kantian thing-in-itself goes beyond physics into philosophy. The thing-in-itself is not a physical, but an intellectual (i.e. philosophical) postulate. “When we analyze our thoughts, even the most abstract, we have to notice that they directly or indirectly contain the elements of our sensual perceptions in an undefined form and newly interconnected.” (Mach, ibid.).  These sensual roots should not be abstracted from in order to keep them hidden in intuition. “[…] it is not enough to replace the instinctively acquired opinions of everyday life, which have crept into philosophy under different guises, by a purified scientific perspective. One has to lay bare their psychological roots ; otherwise they will continue to tiller.” (Mach, ibid)

[‘tiller’ (verb): -A shoot of a plant which springs from the root or bottom of the original stalk; a sapling; a sucker.]

The bottom line here is that ‘the disconnect’ is to confuse the ‘purified scientific view’ in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what they do’ for ‘physical phenomena’.  They are not physical phenomena because there are no ‘things-in-themselves’.  ‘Things’ are purely relational and from our sensings of visible form and tactility, and with the ontologizing support of language, we intellectually idealize the relational form as a ‘thing-in-itself’.

Currently, we are ‘stuck’ and prevented from discovery of ‘our disconnect’ because of our continuing treatment of the realm of the psychological and the realm of the physical as two separate realms.  The lock is further ‘cemented’ by the massive Western social investment in (institutionalizing of) linguistically idealized pseudo-reality, which has been paving over the ground-level psychophysical phenomena of our experience.

* * *

from final paragraph in; Mach, ‘Sur le rapport de la physique avec la psychologie’, which can be found in .pdf form at http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/issue/psy_0003-5033_1905_num_12_1  (it is the last article of the first part of that issue, pages 303-318)

Mach is saying that, for the physicist, the world of psychology is inaccessible to him, but nevertheless, it is his point of departure.  On the other hand, the psychologist’s point of departure is the physical world; i.e. he has to trust the physicist’s views in regard to the physical aspects of man and the world.

N.B.  Here, in this crosswise mutual dependency where the definitions of psychology depend on the definitions of physics and the definitions of physics depend on the definitions of psychology, we have a ‘re-enactment’ of the ‘double error’ of Nietzsche and the ‘petitio principii’ of Poincaré; i.e. physics and psychology become mutually defining whereas the physical phenomena is a unitary psycho-physical phenomena.

The philosopher of physics, meanwhile, understands that the real physical world is inaccessible to him and that while he commences with psychological intuitions/sensations, he ‘refines them’ into intellectual concepts that appear certain, but which are built upon these uncertain ‘sensations’ that now hide beneath them.  Both the physicist and the psychologist, therefore, have to work with ‘two worlds’ that are ‘heterogeneous’, the physical and the psychological because of this ‘mutual dependence’ of each one on the other, … but this situation is not inevitable, it is an artefact of the splitting of inquiry into these two realms.

* * *

Extract from , ‘Sur le rapport de la physique avec la psychologie’, by Ernst Mach

Le physiologiste étudie l’organisme de l’homme ou de l’animal en pur physicien et en pur chimiste. Mais, aussitôt qu’une induction analogique le conduit à attribuer des sensations à l’objet de ses recherches, il se figure qu’il abandonne le palpable, l’objectif, et qu’il s’engage dans le domaine de l’incertain et de l’insaisissable. Il ne songe pas que le physicien use perpétuellement aussi d’inductions analogiques de cette espèce, qu’il considère comme une masse palpable la lune accessible seulement à la vue ou qu’il attribue à un conducteur traversé par un courant toutes les propriétés d’un tel conducteur, bien qu’il ne puisse les vérifier à nouveau dans chaque cas, et que parfois il ne soit point du tout en mesure de le faire. Quoiqu’il en soit, le naturaliste considère le domaine physique qui lui est familier comme le monde véritable, la sensation, au contraire, et, en général, le domaine psychique, comme un monde entièrement étranger et inaccessible. Le psychologue, docile au préjugé de la physique, — tant aussi les nécessités biologiques poussent tout homme à se comporter en physicien, — le psychologue accepte à son tour l’opposition de deux mondes hétérogènes; mais, tandis que pour le physicien le monde psychique semble insaisissable, c’est dans ce dernier qu’il voit justement la donnée immédiate et le point de départ nécessaire; en revanche, du point de vue philosophique où il s’est placé, le monde physique recule pour lui à une distance inaccessible. Ce résultat paradoxal est-il inévitable? Je ne le crois pas. Aussi bien, dans les deux domaines, la fin de toute recherche est identique : établir des équations de la forme F (A, B, C,…)= 0.

Ernst Mach

PART II:  WHY DUALISM?

This part II of ‘What is going wrong with [Western] society copies a forum discussion that starts with an interview of an aboriginal who is commenting on a protest movement, ‘Idle No More’.  This discussion brings out how the philosophical dualism of splitting apart the ‘physical’ and the ‘psychological’ come into play in societal dynamics.   In particular, it brings out why ‘non-dualism’ ['reality' in terms of relational space and the psycho-physical as phenomenal unitary] should prevail over ‘non-dualism’ ['reality' in terms of absolute space, absolute time and 'what things-in-themselves are doing'].  It also gives insight into why ‘non-dualism’ is NOT rising into its natural primacy over dualism.

Zig Zag on Idle No More: “In any liberation movement there are internal and external struggles”

Tue, 01/22/2013 – 13:35 |  Anonymous

From Sketchy Thoughts

We are living in exciting times, with large numbers of people clearly fed up and taking action, no longer content to wait for the right moment or the right ideas or the right leadership to tell them what to do. Whether we think of Occupy, the Arab Spring, or the current Idle No More upsurge, spontaneity and taking a stand seem to be the order of the day. For those of us have lived through less exuberant times, it is a welcome change. That said, this new environment that clearly comes with its own potential pitfalls and weaknesses.

In order to try and understand this better, i asked some questions of Zig Zag, also known as Gord Hill, who is of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation and a long-time participant in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance movements in Canada.  Gord is the author and artist of The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book and The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book (published by Arsenal Pulp Press) and 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance (published by PM Press); he also maintains the website WarriorPublications.wordpress.com.

Here is what he had to say…

K: What are the living conditions of Indigenous people today within the borders of what is called “canada”?

ZZ: Indigenous people in Canada experience the highest levels of poverty, violent death, disease, imprisonment, and suicide.  Many live in substandard housing and do not have clean drinking water, while many territories are so contaminated that they can no longer access traditional means of sustenance.  In the area around the Tar Sands in northern Alberta, for example, not only are fish and animals being found with deformities but the people themselves are experiencing high rates of cancer.  This is genocide.

K: Dispossession has been a central feature of colonialism and genocide within canada. Can you give some examples of how people have resisted dispossession in the past?

ZZ: Well in the past Native peoples had some level of military capability to resist dispossession, which ended around 1890.  More recently there have been many examples including Oka 1990, Ipperwash 1995, Sutikalh 2000, Six Nations 2006, etc.  At Oka it was armed resistance that stopped the proposed expansion of a golf course and condo project.  At Ipperwash people re-occupied their reserve land that had been expropriated during WW2, and they still remain there to this day.  At Sutikalh, St’at’imc people built a re-occupation camp to stop a $530 million ski resort. They were successful and the camp remains to this day.  At Six Nations they re-occupied land and prevented the construction of a condo project.

K: The canadian state has an army, prisons, police forces, and the backing of millions of people – not to mention the fact that it is completely integrated into world capitalism, both as a major source of natural resources and as an imperialist junior partner, messing up peoples around the world. What kind of possibilities are there for Indigenous people to successfully break out of this system, and resist canadian colonialism? What is the strategic significance of Indigenous resistance?

ZZ: Indigenous peoples must make alliances with other social sectors that also organize against the system.  The strategic significance of Indigenous peoples is their greater potential fighting spirit, stronger community basis of organizing, their ability to significantly impact infrastructure (such as railways, highways, etc, that pass through or near reserve communities) and their examples of resistance that can inspire other social movements.

K: What are bills C-38 and C-45, and how do they fit into the current global economic and political context?

ZZ: Bills C-38 and C-45 are omnibus budget bills the government has passed in order to implement its budget.  They include significant revisions of various federal acts, including the Navigable Waters Protection Act, environmental assessments, and the Indian Act. These are generally seen as facilitating greater corporate access to resources, such as mining and oil and gas.  The amendments to the Indian Act affect the ability of band councils to lease reserve land.  The move to open up resources, by removing protection from many rivers and lakes and “streamlining” environmental assessments is clearly meant to bolster Canada as a source of natural resources and to overcome public opposition to major projects such as the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline and others.

K: Is this something new, or more of the same old same old from the canadian state?

ZZ: These bills are new in that they’re designed, in part, to facilitate greater corporate access to resources, primarily in the changes to the environmental assessment and Navigable Waters Protection Act.  These are measures designed to re-position Canada as a major source of oil and gas for the global market, and particularly Asian markets, while diversifying Canadian exports of such resources away from a US focused one, as the US economy continues to decline.  At the same time they are indeed a continuation of policies adapted by the federal government for many years now, which include major projects such as the Alberta Tar Sands and proposed pipeline projects.  These policies are the result of the neo-liberal ideology that states have been following for the past few decades.

K: What is one to make of this Idle No More movement that has sprung up over the past six weeks?

ZZ: It’s similar to Occupy in that it reveals a yearning for social change among grassroots Native peoples, but it is also reformist and lacks any anti-colonial or anti-capitalist perspective.  It is fixated primarily on legal-political reforms, specifically repealing Bill C-45 (which passed in mid-December).  Although it has mobilized thousands of Natives, this is only to create political pressure on the government.  The four women from Saskatchewan who founded the movement are lawyers, academics, and business managers, so it is no surprise that the entire trajectory of the movement has been focused on legal-political reforms.  Another prominent speaker on behalf of INM has been Pam Palmater, a lawyer and Chair in Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University.  Last summer, she campaigned against Shawn Atleo for the position of “grand chief” of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN).

As it isn’t anti-colonial or anti-capitalist, it has been a safe platform for many Indian Act chiefs and members of the Aboriginal business elite to participate, and many have in fact helped orchestrate the national protests and blockades that have occurred.  In fact, INM allied itself early on with chiefs from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario.  It was chiefs from these provinces that made the symbolic attempt to enter the House of Commons on Dec. 4, an event that in many ways really launched INM and built the December 10 day of action.

These chiefs oppose Atleo, support Palmater, and have been the driving force behind most of the major rallies and blockades that have occurred in their respective provinces (with notable exceptions, such as the Tyendinaga train blockades).  

The involvement of the band councils has helped stifle any real self-organization of grassroots people.  The reformist methods promoted by the original founders has included the imposing of pacifist methods and so has dampened the warrior spirit of the people overall. Another factor in the INM mobilizing has been the fast carried out by the Indian Act chief Theresa Spence in Ottawa.  This has motivated many Natives to participate in INM due to the emotional and pseudo-spiritual aspects of the fast (a “hunger strike” to the death).  Despite the praise given to Spence, she revealed her intentions in late December when she made a public call for the chiefs to “take control” of the grassroots.

K: What you are outlining seems to be a class analysis of the INM movement. Some people have suggested that class analysis is incompatible with anticolonial analysis, that it is divisive, or amounts to applying a european framework that is not relevant to Indigenous people. What do you make of this?

ZZ: Under colonization the capitalist division of classes is imposed on Indigenous peoples.  The band councils and Aboriginal business elite are proof of this.  Under capitalist class divisions, there are new political and economic elites that are established and who have more to gain from assimilation and collaboration, despite any movements for reform they may be involved in.  As separate political and economic elites, they have their own interests which are not the same as the most impoverished and oppressed, which comprises the bulk of Indigenous grassroots people.  Middle class elites are able to impose their own beliefs and methods on grassroots movements through their greater access to, and control of, resources (including money, communications, transport, etc.).

For a genuinely autonomous, decentralized and self-organized Indigenous grassroots movement to emerge, the question of middle-class elites, including the band councils, must be resolved.  I would also say that in any liberation movement there are internal and external struggles.  The internal one determines the overall methods and objectives of the movement, and therefore cannot be silenced or marginalized under the pretext of preserving some non-existent “unity.”  In fact, only when internal struggles are clarified can there be any significant gains made in the external one, against the primary enemy (state and capital).

K: January 11 was the day that Harper was initially supposed to meet with Spence and other chiefs from across canada. But on the day of the meeting, due to Harper’s shenanigans, Spence and most other chiefs opted to boycott it, and Spence declared she would be continuing her hunger strike. How deep is this split, and does it signify that some chiefs are breaking with the neocolonial setup and developing a radical potential?

ZZ: There have always been divisions within the AFN and between regions.  As I mentioned, some Indian Act chiefs, especially in Saskatchewan, Ontario and Manitoba, have been spearheading many of the Idle No More rallies and breaking from the AFN’s agenda.  This shouldn’t be interpreted as proof that they are more radical, but rather that they have their own agenda.  ”Grand chief” Nepinak of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, the AFN’s provincial wing, has been very active in promoting INM rallies and blockades, etc.  But Nepinak’s AMC also suffered massive funding cuts announced in early September.  His organization will see their annual funding cut from $2.6 million down to $500,000.  He is fighting for his political and economic career and has little to lose by agitating for more grassroots actions, but that doesn’t mean he’s now a “radical.”  Rather, the band councils and chiefs must be understood as having their own agenda in regards to their power struggle with the state.  Many are easily fooled by militant rhetoric and symbolic blockades, but these are old tactics for the Indian Act chiefs.

Along with chiefs fighting for the maintenance of their provincial or regional organizations (such as the AMC or tribal councils), which is contributing to band council participation across the country in INM mobilizing, the chiefs in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario have a political struggle with Atleo and have their own vision for greater economic development.  It was the chiefs from these provinces that boycotted the meeting between the PM and Atleo, and who called for the January 16 national day of action.

Delegations of these chiefs have travelled to Asia, Venezuela, and Iran seeking corporate investors, especially in the oil and gas industry.  Chief Wallace Fox of the Onion Lake Cree Nation, one of those at the forefront of recent events and an outspoken opponent of Atleo, is the chief of the top oil producing Native band in the country (located in Alberta and Saskatchewan).  Fox and other chiefs have also attempted to gain access to OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, for partnerships with corporations.  Nepinak and other chiefs also met with Chinese officials in December, also looking for potential partnerships.

The rationale of these chiefs, Palmater and their allies in INM (the four “official founders”) is that Atleo is collaborating with the assimilation strategy of the Harper regime.  Meanwhile, it is they who seek to take control of the AFN and impose their own version of Native capitalism, based in part on foreign investment in resource industries.  Ironically of course, many INM participants are rallying to defend Mother Earth, in many ways being used as pawns in a power struggle between factions of the Aboriginal business elite.  Many INM participants, I would say, are unaware of these internal dynamics.  Their mobilization under the slogans of “stop bill c-45,” “defend land and water,” etc., are positive aspects of INM, and show the great potential for grassroots movements.  But this is something that is in the early stages, and the movement will have to overcome the parasitical participation and control of the Indian Act chiefs as well as middle-class elites for it to advance.

K: There were hundreds of Idle No More actions on January 11. Here in Montreal, roughly three thousand people demonstrated, by far the largest protest related to Indigenous issues i have ever seen in this city. At the same time, the demonstration was overwhelmingly made up of non-Indigenous people, ranging from radical anticapitalists to members of Quebec nationalist and social democratic groups. This seems in line with the INM strategy of framing the movement as representing all canadians. How compatible is this with an anticolonial perspective, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of such diverse support?

ZZ: The first priority and main focus for an anti-colonial liberation movement must be its own people.  This is how it develops its own autonomous methods and practise, free from outside interference.  This helps to unify the movement and establish it as an independent social force.  Alliances are clearly necessary, and while the ultimate goal might be a multi-national resistance movement, colonialism and the unique history as well as socio-economic conditions of Native peoples means they must be able to organize autonomously from other social sectors.

I think in principle to frame Idle No More as one representing all Canadians is correct, but the way in which they are doing this waters down and minimizes the anti-colonial analysis that is necessary for radical social change.  By trying to appeal to the “Canadian citizen” it may broaden its appeal but to what end?  In the process it will have weakened the anti-colonial resistance.  Even now you can see the renewed calls for “peaceful” protests from INM’ers, as well as statements from the “official founders” that they don’t support “illegal” actions such as blockades.  They’re very sensitive to any loss of public support, claiming it is now an “educational” movement and that they don’t want to inconvenience citizens.  The reformists might claim that in this manner we can build a bigger movement to defeat Bill C-45, but clearly such bills are just part of a much larger systemic problem we can identify as colonialism and capitalism.  Without addressing the root causes we’ll just be doing the same thing next year against another set of bills. And of course, basing one’s anti-colonial resistance on the opinion of the settler population will never lead to liberation.

K: We seem to have entered a period of spontaneous upsurges like INM internationally, be it the Arab Spring or Occupy or the recent anti-rape protests in India; in each of these cases masses of people are clearly fed up and willing to throw themselves into action, but for better or for worse they often bypass any of the organized anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist groups or traditions. Is this a sign of a failure on our part, that when circumstances finally give way to revolt we are not connected to those doing the revolting? Or is there something else going on?

ZZ: I would say a part of these mobilizations is the use of social media in spreading information and coordinating actions. Certainly in the Arab Spring, Occupy and now Idle No More, this has been a significant component of the mobilizing that has occurred.  It seems that there are more people who have been influenced by these ongoing social revolts and mobilizations, that then decide to take action of some kind, and the internet empowers them to organize rallies, etc.  They don’t need the already existing radical groups to do this, and may not even know of their existence.

This leads to the situation where mobilizations are called, gain traction and then expand — but they have a very shallow analysis of the system and lack experience in real resistance.  In both Occupy and INM we see inexperienced organizers who believe they have re-invented the wheel, who feel they know best how social movements should conduct themselves, etc.  At best, these mobilizations show that there is a yearning for social change among a growing number of people, but social media enables them to bypass more experienced and radical groups, and their naivete leads them to think that these groups fail because they’re too radical. Therefore they appeal to the most basic and populist slogans, the least threatening forms of action, etc.

I don’t know if I would characterize it as a failure on the part of radical groups that they are somewhat disconnected from these types of mobilizations.  They’re not revolts, they’re largely reformist rallies without a radical analysis dominated by liberals and pacifists, middle-class organizers, etc.  Until these movements are radicalized there is little possibility for radicals to be fully involved.  Another aspect of these types of mobilizations is their relatively short duration.  Occupy was largely over three or four months after it began, with some exceptions (such as Oakland).  How long will INM endure?

K: Although their leadership may be neo-colonial and middle-class, surely many of those in the grassroots who are attracted to surges like INM are not. How should established Indigenous anti-colonial groups relate to these mass mobilizations? Are there specific approaches that are more effective than others? And are there things to avoid?

ZZ: I would say Indigenous anti-colonial groups should engage such movements critically, and not simply take the role of cheerleaders. When large numbers of people are aroused and mobilized, it means they’re thinking about, and discussing, concepts such as colonialism, tactics, strategies, methods, etc.  So it is an opportune time to contribute radical anti-colonial and anti-capitalist analysis, even though some participants in the movement think that such debate “divides” people. I would avoid denouncing such movements, or opposing them, of course, because there are both positive and negative aspects.  Promote the positive and try to illuminate the negative, the contradictions, etc.  As many participants are new and inexperienced, anti-colonial groups can contribute a lot to expanding and radicalizing the movement.

(Traduction française par Média Recherche Action http://montreal.mediacoop.ca/blog/m%C3%A9dia-recherche-action/15791 d’une entrevue originalement réalisée par Sketchy Thoughts http://sketchythoughts.blogspot.ch/2013/01/zig-zag-on-idle-no-more-in-an… Dessin de Zig Zag)

Vous pouvez retrouver Média Recherche Action sur la Coop média de Montréal à http://montreal.mediacoop.ca/user/9295

Comments

Permalink Submitted by emile on Wed, 01/23/2013 – 16:12.

Reports by indigenous

Reports by indigenous aboriginal spokespersons, in English, French or any of the SAE (Standard Average European) languages are inherently confusing, as has been pointed out by Sapir and Whorf because they will IN ALL LIKELIHOOD be interpreted in the ‘usual way’ (in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves are doing’) by people whose first language is an SAE language.

Communications from indigenous aboriginal groups and from anarchists ‘who are coming from the same worldview’ would benefit from, at a minimum, adding some clarifying symbols to the text, as follows;

҈ to stand for a ‘centre’ like the eye of the hurricane; ‘the universe expressing itself’. [hold down ‘alt’ and enter 1160 to get this character]

This is the aboriginal’s view of himself, all organisms and organizations in nature, and it conforms with modern physics and with the physics of storm-cells in the atmosphere; i.e. the storm-cell is not animated from out of its own centre, it is the flow it is included in, expressing itself.

The SAE language, as pointed out by Sapir, Whorf, Nietzsche, Poincare and others, IDEALIZES the ‘local cell or organism’, by dropping out the relational spatial plenum and imputing subjecthood to the centre, as in ‘the earth rotates’, … giving us, a ‘nonsense’ view, wherein the animative sourcing of the form is imputed to be coming out of the centre of itself. Therefore we need a new symbol for this centre;

ʘ to stand for a ‘centre’ like the linguistically idealized [subjectized] ‘local system with its own locally originating, internal components and processes driven and directed development and behaviour [hold down ‘alt’ and enter 0664 to get this character]

Authoritarianism is based on a governing centre like this ʘ while indigenous anarchism [non-authoritarian] is based on a governing centre like this ҈ .

The ‘dot’ in the centre of the authoritarian centre of governance symbolizes the ‘leader’ who is going to put some or other ‘rational plan’ into action, through this inside-outward asserting leader-follower structure.

When we see a person’s lips move and his tongue flap, we must decide whether what is coming out is ‘the universe expressing itself’, or some idiot rational plan that he has concocted. [The representative democracy of authoritarian sovereign states, is where the people actually put the person with the most impressive rational plan into the central seat of leader-follower authority!!!] Of course, once in power, he can look for some newly arising data to fit his personal rational plan to, …. not the one he ‘sold’ to the crowds to get elected.

What is ‘rationality’, this thing that authoritarian leader-follower organization ʘ uses as the basis of organizing the masses via leader-follower directives.

If we interviewed different ‘authoritarian leaders’ we might get some very different understandings of what was ‘rational’ to the man ‘at the centre’ ʘ who is rolling out the leader follower action plan;

(a) What is most important is that our actions are consistent with what is written in our holy books. It doesn’t matter how the relational-spatial environment is transformed when we fire our nuclear missiles, what will matter is that we will have done our best in the fight of the good against the evil. – Benjamin Netanyahu (or Mahmoud Amadinejad)

(b) I made our very challenging profit plan objectives five years in a row. We paid our fines for pollution and we paid our workers far more than did the farms they left behind them when we talked them into leaving the farms and coming to work for us. – Allen Jones, CEO Cadillac manufacturing division

(c) What is real, is my celebrity status, my mark in the history books. No-one has wasted more students in a single session than I have. Check me out in the Guinness Book of Records, mass murder section, right next to Pol Pot who wasted 26% of the Cambodian population of 8 million [it took him years]. – Adam Lanza

(d) What was good for my grandfather is good enough for me. The way we do things around here has been proven to work over many generations. – John Bull

“The German sociologist Max Weber proposed an interpretation of social action that distinguished between four different idealized types of rationality. The first, which he called Zweckrational or purposive/instrumental rationality, is related to the expectations about the behavior of other human beings or objects in the environment. These expectations serve as means for a particular actor to attain ends, ends which Weber noted were “rationally pursued and calculated.” The second type, Weber called Wertrational or value/belief-oriented. Here the action is undertaken for what one might call reasons intrinsic to the actor: some ethical, aesthetic, religious or other motive, independent of whether it will lead to success. The third type was affectual, determined by an actor’s specific affect, feeling, or emotion – to which Weber himself said that this was a kind of rationality that was on the borderline of what he considered “meaningfully oriented.” The fourth was traditional, determined by ingrained habituation. Weber emphasized that it was very unusual to find only one of these orientations: combinations were the norm. His usage also makes clear that he considered the first two as more significant than the others, and it is arguable that the third and fourth are subtypes of the first two.” —Wikipedia

As in Weber’s analysis, there is usually a combination of ‘rational arguments’; e.g. Authorities can claim that both Libya’s Qaddafy and Syria’s Assad are ‘evil’, but the economics look a lot better for going to war on Qaddafy than for Assad. In Rwanda the good-against-evil ‘rationale’ could have been used, but the economics looked really poor, thus the US authority kept the white knight costume in the closet on this occasion.

RATIONAL ARGUMENT IS NOT THE BASIS IN ABORIGINAL CIRCLE-PROCESS GOVERNANCE [RESTORATIVE JUSTICE]. The circle-process is a ‘relational process’ which becomes a portal for ‘the universe/community expressing itself’ ҈ It allows actions to be guided by heartfelt input coming from the real physical world.

‘Peacemaking circles’ in aboriginal restorative justice are based on assuming that the behaviour of a member of the community is ‘the community expressing itself’, ҈ rather than seeing the behaviour as the emanation of a [subjectized] local system with its own local internal centre driven and directed behaviour ʘ . The relational social plenum is thus seen as the source of conflict in the community and it is the restoring of balance and harmony in the relational web of social context that defines ‘justice’ in the aboriginal peace-making circle ҈

In the authoritarian state which demands leader-follower submission as defined by laws governing individual behaviour ʘ conflict is portrayed as an ‘offender-victim’ transaction and justice is ‘retributive’, focusing on punishing the offender [and often ignoring the victim since the ‘case’ is seen as ‘the offender versus the state’; a failure to comply with authoritarian leader-follower dictates].

In any case, when leadership arises in the aboriginal community, it can be of the ҈ type or it can be of the ʘ type, and more than that, an individual who starts off showing himself as a leader of the ҈ type can, as people begin to gather around him, … quietly transform into the ʘ type; e.g. he can get on a Netanyahu/Ahmadinejad crusade or on a money-seeking campaign.

In terms of ‘violence’ or not and the ‘right image’ needed to ‘grow’ the movement, that is all ‘rational’ stuff that orients to ‘what the participants should do’ ʘ . the actions of the participants in the movement should be defined by ‘the universe expressing itself’ ҈ which means that the participants must become ‘portals’ for the universe/earth/community to defend itself against the rational plans being pushed out by authoritarian leader-follower action roll-out centres, while continuing to cultivate a shift from ʘ leader-followership to ҈ becoming a portal of the universe/community expressing itself.

the person who is a portal for the universe to express itself ҈ does not have to respond to questions from the authoritarian centres like ‘what do you want’, … ‘how can i pay you off’, … what is needed is dissolution of authoritarian centres ʘ so that the highest level of organization will be portals of universe/community expressing itself ҈ .

Permalink Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 01/23/2013 – 19:48.

But language follows the

But language follows the uniformitarian principle.

Permalink Submitted by emile on Thu, 01/24/2013 – 00:41.

Sapir was a pioneering

Sapir was an early proponent of uniformitarianism in linguistics, and is quoted as follows;

“When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, and Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam” — Edward Sapir, ‘Language’ (1921)

Sapir saw no conflict between “uniformitarianism”, which he subscribed to, and the ‘Sapir-Whorf’ hypothesis. Uniformitarianism, in his view, discredited attempts to link language to race (superiority);

“Uniformitarianist assumptions helped clear the air of nineteenth-century race theories and, as formulated by Sapir’s teacher Franz Boas, were a powerful weapon against the various twentieth-century attempts to link race, intelligence, and inherent ability [e.g. by fascist Germany and Italy, and for different reasons, Stalinist Russia]. … since the oldest language that we have on record—the earliest samples of Bayblonian, Chinese, Greek, and so on—manifest the same grammatical devices as modern languages, one has typically concluded that there is no overall directionality to language change. That is, human languages have always been pretty much the same in terms of the typological distribution of the elements that compose them. …”

“… the extension of uniformitarianism to the denial of links between language, culture and world-view was manifestly not Sapir’s position. Indeed, he believed strongly that such links exist. Such a belief even has his name enshrined in it: the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Sapir believed that the structure of one’s language directly shapes one’s view of the world, and that different structures impose on the consciousness a different perception of reality.”

—Frederick J. Newmeyer, “Uniformitarian Assumptions and Language Evolution Research”

Sapir and Whorf are not saying that Turtle Island aboriginals are a more ‘highly-evolved species’ due to their language, … a language whose relational constructs do not ‘hang it up’ on the notion of linear time like ours does. As Whorf put it, the Hopi language is more tied to physical reality than the Indo-European languages, and this view is also in Nietzsche’s critique of European languages’ ‘grammar’; i.e. this practice of creating doer-deed structures DOES NOT reflect physical reality [e.g. ‘lightning flashes’ and 'the earth rotates' and 'farmers produce crops' DOES NOT reflect physical reality].

“Benjamin Whorf published three articles in the MIT Technology Review titled “Science and Linguistics”, “Linguistics as an Exact Science” and “Language and Logic”. He was also invited to contribute an article to a theosophical journal, Theosophist, published in Madras, India, for which he wrote “Language, Mind and Reality”. In these final pieces he offered a critique of Western science in which he suggested that non-European languages often referred to physical phenomena in ways that more directly reflected aspects of reality than many European languages, and that science ought to pay attention to the effects of linguistic categorization in its efforts to describe the physical world. He particularly criticized the Indo-European languages for promoting a mistaken essentialist world view, which had been disproved by advances in the sciences, whereas he suggested that other languages dedicated more attention to processes and dynamics rather than stable essences. Whorf argued that paying attention to how other physical phenomena are described in the study of linguistics could make valuable contributions to science by pointing out the ways in which certain assumptions about reality are implicit in the structure of language itself, and how language guides the attention of speakers towards certain phenomena in the world which risk becoming overemphasized while leaving other phenomena at risk of being overlooked.” — Wikipedia

it should be clear that the sort of linguistic idealization in European languages; i.e. the reducing of ‘dynamics’ to terms of ‘what things-in-themselves-do’ fits right into the fact that speakers of these languages focus on ‘doing stuff’ out of the context of the physical reality that “The dynaics 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.” [Mach's principle].

focusing solely on ‘doing stuff’ is why the habitat is going to hell. as Mcluhan says, the real physical dynamics are the transformation of the relational space we all share inclusion in. this physical reality fact doesn’t even show up on the radar screen of the capitalist enterprise that is focused on ‘making things happen’, ‘getting things done’. for all practical purposes, our European language mesmerizes us into believing that ‘dynamics’ can really be reduced to ‘what things do’. if it was good enough for newton, it was good enough for us. except that it wasn’t good enough for newton. he put ‘user beware’ not only in the ‘author’s prologue’ to Principia, he put it in the summarizing scholium as well. the english language clearly had an architecture that reduced dynamics to ‘what things-in-themselves do’ prior to newton coming up with ‘local force’ in conjunction with cartesian coordinates to make the same reduction, but science was given a huge boost by working on the same simplified view of dynamics. newton warns, … ‘look, you guys, this here’s a neat way of idealizing dynamics and putting them in a form to make time-based predictions, but i had to leave out all the ‘relational spatial’ stuff, the spatial harmonies and interdependent connectedness in the celestial dynamics, so it’s really only a system for describing ‘what’s already in place and persisting’ like the planets in their orbits. this stops radically short of addressing how everything seems to be participating in a continuing relational-spatial transformation.’

ok, few people listened to the warnings of the turtle island aboriginals that we should ‘tread lightly’ because ‘since we are included in the relational space of nature, what we do conditions the space we do it in. we can’t just assume that we are doing our stuff in a big infinite box where the inhabitants are disconnected [independently-existing] causal agents that roam around and interact, the sum total of whose ‘doing of deeds’ adds up to the ‘world dynamic’.

the reason that ‘humanity is killing us’ as philosophers like neyrat say ['biopolitics of catastrophe'] is for the very reason that we, as a culture [our authoritarian governments and our institutions] actually ‘believe’ that physical dynamics can be realistically rendered in ‘doer-deed constructs’ [linguistic idealization] such as ‘the earth rotates’. hello! it is not ‘the earth’ that is doing the rotating and more than it is the hurricane-pinwheel doing the rotating’. that is just ‘linguistic idealization’ that, like whorf says, has us ‘forget’ about the physical reality, which is that the pinwheeling storm-cell dynamic IS THE ATMOSPHERIC FLOW EXPRESSING ITSELF. i.e. the ‘subject’ that we need to associate the animative sourcing of the turning pinwheel, is the atmospheric flow and the celestial dynamics including solar irradiance etc.

we don’t ‘tread lightly’ in our actions within the transforming relational space we share inclusion in, which really does ‘hurt us if we hurt it’, because our language structures deliver mental models in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves-do’ as if they/we do it in an absolute fixed, empty and infinite operating theatre [euclidian space].

Permalink Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 01/24/2013 – 06:51.

What about the use of art or

What about the use of art or symbols as communication?

Permalink Submitted by emile on Thu, 01/24/2013 – 20:19.

What about the use of art or

What about the use of art or symbols as communication?

Not only Sapir but also McLuhan pointed out that the symbols we use in our phonetic language have no meaning in themselves, so, symbols used in this way, as stand-alone lego parts that take on meaning in ‘constructions’, keep our minds in the realm of ‘linear time constructions’. I don’t know whether a word starting in L O is going to finish as LOVE or LOATHING and so it is for sentences and paragraphs and entire books [the ending may invert everything said to ‘date’] that are written in phonetic language. ‘Sign language’, as used by aboriginals, does not put you into the linear time realm, but puts your mind into the spatial-relational realm. The skull and crossbones elicits thoughts of death in association with whatever it appears on. That is, it, itself elicits in the viewer a zillion possible relational situations that happen in physical reality. The word masa ‘ytaka is one and the same Hopi word for multiple english words ‘airplane’, ‘dragon-fly’, ‘aviator’; i.e. the word-symbology in the Hopi language ‘communicates’ in terms of relational-spatial context rather than in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what they do in a linear-time causal sequence’ .

So the main issue is whether the symbol-based communications keeps us in the linear time construction realm (rationality, which implies intention or ‘doer-deed events’) versus letting us into the spatial-relational [timeless] realm. The two animated gifs signal the difference, the point source transmitter (jumpstarting causal agent) ʘ implies start and stop cycles while the ‘eternal return’ of the resonance form ҈ implies pure relationality as in a continually transforming relational space.

People living in a culture that has institutionalized linear time based constructions aka ‘rationality’ become frightened by the prospects of letting their mind roam beyond ‘rationality’ into the timeless realm of ‘relationality’. They ‘don’t want to go there’ because the whole rational structure they are grounding their thoughts in starts to shiver and shake, like the support timbers in a mine shaft that is about to cave in. Duality melts into non-duality like a Salvador Dali clock etc. etc.

In the timeless world, space is ‘ONE’ relationally transforming thing and we, as forms that gather and are regathered within in it are ‘space expressing itself’;

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

“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” — David Bohm

The following is an excerpt from conversation between David Bohm and Renée Weber, philosophy professor at Rutgers University, on why the multidimensional medium of space [the plenum] is capable of unfolding the forms we experience in the sensual three-dimensional [plus ‘time’] world.

“Weber: So space is more fundamental and more real than the objects in it. Applying your theory to time, we would have to say that the interval between the moments is the real.

Bohm: It could be considered to be that. But see, if we take the view that the space is what is real, then I think that we have to say that the measure of space is not what is real. The measure of space is what matter provides. So space goes beyond the measure of space. It’s the same with time. If we want to say that the interval is real, then the measure of time cannot be taken as fundamental. Therefore we are already outside of what we ordinarily would call time. But rather, if we have silence and “emptiness,” it does not have the measure either of space or of time. Now in that silence there may appear something which is a little ripple which has that measure. But if we thought that the little ripple was all that there is and that the space between was nothing, of no significance, then we would have the usual view of fragmentation.”

So, to come back to symbols and language and rationality and spatial relationality and tie it all together;

1. Out of the transforming relational spatial continuum [plenum] we select out an ‘event’ so that we are able to ‘discuss’ it, … thanks to ‘language’ and ‘symbols’.

2. Let the event be an aboriginal ‘anarcha-indigenist’ shooting a soldier in a standoff where the aboriginal is defending a sacred forest or an ancestral burial ground.

3. As Nietzsche points out, our SAE language will do this by artificially deconstructing the event “the scenario-that-we-are-considering-in-itself” that we would like to split out and reduce to “the scenario-in-itself”, leaving colonizing history out of it.

4. A person could ‘discuss this’ non-discursively via sign-language [symbolic] gestures by making the barrel of a pistol with his finger and hand and making sounds that sounded like the ‘pew pew pew’ of fired shots, then moving opposite and ‘playing’ the victim and collapsing to symbolically portray dying.

5. In the European language RE-rendering, we use language to SYNTHETICALLY CREATE a notional ‘being-in-itself’ that has the internal capability of jumpstarting his own behaviour; i.e. a language that delivers such constructs as ‘he did it’.

6. The aboriginal ‘takes it for natural’, as Nietzsche and Bohm would, that he is ‘the universe expressing itself’; i.e. he is not ‘where the buck starts and stops’ as the source of the result. The source of the ‘result’ (the physically real story continues with one less participant in the web-of-relations) is, in the mind of the aboriginal, the relational web of social context that he is uniquely situationally included in.

7. ‘Restorative justice’, which seeks to restore balance and harmony within a relational web of social context is natural to the aboriginal’s view of dynamics. ‘Retributive justice’ which sees the ‘causal agent’ as the full and sole jumpstart causal source of the result, follows directly from the European language construct; i.e. ‘he did it’, which splits the relational-spatial unfolding out of the continuum and RE-renders it in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do in time’. In such European language constructs, events ‘unfold in time’ and are seen in a linear time succession as in frames in a video film sequence which portray characters doing stuff ‘in the space out there in front of us’ [could be on another planet and sometimes is, in the films].

8. As McLuhan has observed, our phonetic alphabet based language allows us to RE-render dynamics in ‘visual space’ terms, which takes us [psychologically] out of ‘acoustic space’ cognition, although ‘acoustic space’ is ‘everywhere at the same time, like gravity’; i.e. it is a relational spatial continuum, where the continuum that we are included in is the source of our sensory experience, and we can’t reduce our inclusional experience to something ‘that is out there in front of us’, such as ‘what things-in-themselves are doing by way of a linear time-based succession of actions’.

* * *

So, ‘symbols’ can ‘communicate’ to us in two different ways; by way of ‘rationality’ where ‘context’ is constructed over linear time by ‘content’ or by way of immediate ‘relational context’. If John used European language to say to Mary; ‘I ….. love…. Jane’, her rational cognition has to work like a computer CPU cranking out the solution to a problem, and if she forms her conclusion and runs off in tears, she will miss hearing, ‘… but… I … love… you … more…. than … I … have … ever … loved… anyone.” Instead of ‘spelling it out’, John could have walked over to Mary and given her a love-filled embrace that she had never felt the likes of in her life. Mary would ‘get the message’.

Obviously, as a parent, we can convince our children BOTH (a) that they can develop their own identity as something that jumpstarts out of themselves, where they are to understand themselves as ‘things-in-themselves’ defined by ‘what they do’; i.e. by their intentions and causal achievements, … AND (b) that they are ‘the universe expressing itself’ so that their development and behaviour derives from the relational web of environmental/social context they are, and will always be, uniquely situationally included in.

While the aboriginal languages and grammar, which give time-less renderings, emphasize (b) over (a), the European languages which give time-basd renderings emphasize (a) over (b) which then ‘short-circuits’ access to (b).

In ‘The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha)’, Miguel de Cervantes satirizes how a man jumps out of his sense of self as a portal by which ‘the universe/community expresses itself’ and chooses to define himself by his own actions. Like a George W. Bush who sits at the controls of immense power but only briefly, his rationality seeks to achieve greatness for himself with the powers he has in hand; i.e. he is not going to be cheated out of his opportunity to greatness by having the bad luck to live in uneventful times, times without ‘purpose’.

Liberating himself of any trace of a definition of himself associated with his being a portal through which the universe/society is expressing itself, he sets out putting his rational intent to achieve greatness in top priority [ (a) over (b)], fitting the facts together so as to furnish himself with the opportunity he needs to ‘achieve greatness’; i.e. the decadent windmill that is darkly hiding a cache of WMDs that threatens not only Dulcinea, the beauty in the world, but the entire world, … a threat whose vanquishing will establish his greatness for all time, as a single branch in an Aristotelian linear-causal logic tree is wont to do.

The establishing, artificially, of seats of supreme authoritarian power is already the artefact of seeing the world in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do in linear time succession’; i.e. leader-follower organizing falls directly from deconstructing the relational continuum into a [time-based] sequence of doer-deed events, … the incumbent that is put in the driver’s seat with all the levers and knobs controlling the mighty machine right there in front of him, is likely to ask himself ‘what should i do with all this power at my fingertips’. That is, he is likely to think in (a) over (b) mode since that is characteristic in Western society, and according to Whorf and others, our European language and grammar play no small part in shaping our view of self and other in this way.

The downside of putting (a) over (b), of course, is that one cannot realistically ‘disconnect’ ‘what people do’ from ‘how the habitat is conditioned by what people do’, and how the conditioned habitat can condition ‘what people do’ [Mach’s principle and Bohm’s et al view of ‘how the world works’]. E.g;

“Britain’s former MI5 chief harshly criticized (July 21, 2010) the 2003 invasion of Iraq, saying Tuesday that her spy agency warned that Saddam Hussein had no known links to Al Qaeda, that Iraq posed little threat, and that so many in a generation of British Muslims had been radicalized by the action. … Ms. Manningham-Buller’s statements to Britain’s Chilcot Inquiry panel, which is investigating the country’s involvement in the Iraq war, are seen as a dramatic criticism of the testimony former Prime Minister Tony Blair [Sancho Panza] gave to the panel earlier this year supporting the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

The ‘proof’ that rationality, deriving from European language constructs, or in other words from ‘pure being-based symbols’ that are seen as ‘their own jumpstart-causal-authors-of-results’ is everywhere in the institutions of our globally dominating Western culture. At the very core of a community is its sense of ‘justice’ and in Western societies the standard is ‘retributive justice’ which accepts as ‘truth’ ‘rational concepts’ such as ‘he did it’, as if an event, rather than emerging from a relational web of social context [an understanding that leads to restorative justice], is instead seen as rooted fully and solely in the locally originating, internal process driven and directed behaviour of a notional ‘subject being’ or ‘local, independently-existing thing-in-itself’.

finally, i would suggest that exploring answers to your question;

What about the use of art or symbols as communication?

leads inevitably to the figure-and-ground ‘gestalt psychology’ of Mach and McLuhan; i.e. questions of whether the symbols, as used, put our minds into the ‘dualist frame’ of visual space where we see the world as if it is ‘out there in front of us’ and in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves are doing in a linear-in-time based succession of doer-deed actions,… or into the non-dualist non-frame [sense of relational-spatial inclusion] of acoustic space where we understand ourselves as portals through which the world is expressing itself; i.e. where we are continually invited to ‘rise to the situation’ within the transforming relational spatial-plenum, that we are uniquely, situationally included in.

The globally predominating worldview, the one which has been institutionalized in authoritarianism and its cohort institution, ‘retributive justice’, follows from using symbols in such a fashion as puts us into ‘rational’ (a) over (b) mode.

This gives us the ‘Don Quixote Disconnect’ where we understand ourselves as being a ‘thing-in-itself’ defined by ‘what it does’, in other words, a disconnect that allows our ego to hijack our self as the portal through which ‘the universe expresses itself’;

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

Permalink Submitted by emile on Wed, 01/23/2013 – 18:29.

The topologies of . ҈ . and . ʘ .

 The topology of . ҈ .

 The topology of . ʘ .

Permalink Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 01/25/2013 – 00:51.

Very informative! Further

Very informative! Further reading or resources??

Permalink Submitted by emile on Fri, 01/25/2013 – 05:33.

new

There’s lots of reading ‘on

There’s lots of reading ‘on it’ that’s been out there for a couple of millennia (e.g. since Heraclitus) but there’s two problems with what’s out there; the first is that it tends to be mono-disciplinary, and the second is that the individual disciplines have gate-keepers that keep squelching it. That ‘works’ because the disciplines fragment our understanding of natural phenomena so that within the disciplines [within the particular fragment], the logic of fragmentation ‘rules’.

Some philosophers have pointed out that in order to ‘get’ the non-dualist view, you have to look ‘across the disciplines’ and that’s ok, but most of the ‘experts’ in the world [who are the gatekeepers of what’s legitimate and what’s not] are only ‘experts’ in ‘their discipline’. So, Richard Dawkins and his cronies are able to defend the orthodox view of biological evolution against Nietzsche’s anti-Darwinism because they have risen to the top of the discipline and are the ‘high-priests’, the supreme authorities. You can’t make it in evolutionary biology if you don’t accept Darwinism you’ll be ‘expelled’ if you go against it. They even made a film on the topic called ‘Expelled’ but they screwed it up by confusing the alternative with ‘religious views’ (‘Creationism’ and ‘Intelligent Design). Nietzsche’s anti-Darwinism wasn’t based on ‘religion’, it was based on ‘non-dualism’; i.e. Nietzsche was on the same page with Mach, Bohm, Poincaré, Schroedinger, understanding the basic world dynamic in terms of a transforming relational spatial-plenum, and Nietzsche did attack all across the various disciplines; he attached mainstream science in general, saying it was anthropomorphism based on human ego. That’s clear from his quote that cited from ‘Twilight of the Idols’. He was saying anything that was contradictory to the view of the physical world of Mach and Bohm et al, … but he had the guts to go after all the disciplines and point out that they were all infected with the same ‘delusion’ of ‘dualism’. That’s why he remains one of the most influential philosophers of all time, because people suspect he was right, and he was. Of course trying to explain non-dualism in a non-mysticism based way is not easy. But, in my view, he did a great job.

So, here’s my recommendations for reading in various disciplines wherein, in each case, the guy with the non-dualist views is ‘squelched’ by the dualist gatekeepers in each discipline. In other words, lots of us have already read some of the works of these ‘heretics’ but if you ever want to discuss their views, holding them to be legitimate, you get comments like;

Also, Mach was a complete crank who denied atomic theory and relativity long past the point at which they had been proven true

These are the ‘A’ students in physics and they get A’s because they subscribe to the orthodox view in physics; i.e. the orthodox view certainly doesn’t buy into ‘non-duality’ of Mach, Bohm, Schroedinger, Poincaré. And they are naturally confident that they ‘know their stuff’ better than the run of the mill student of physics, because the full support of their teachers.

This happens in all the disciplines because every discipline in the sciences is ‘dualist’ and you will be ‘kicked out of the church of orthodox science’ as Mach claimed he was, if you don’t subscribe to ‘dualism’, the notion that matter and space, ‘habitat’ and ‘inhabitant’ are ‘mutually exclusive’. That is what it is all about in all of the disciplines. The ‘A’ students in each discipline are out there policing the crowd when they are not getting stroked by their high priests.

In biology, not only Nietzsche, who was not really a biologist (does this matter in the realm of basic philosophical assumptions?), but also Lamarck, Rolph, Roux and Rüdimeyer were all non-dualists; i.e. they did not split ‘evolution’ into two parts, the ‘organic realm’ and ‘the inorganic realm’. They viewed ‘evolution’ in terms of the transformation of relational space; i.e. something that operated on the ‘whole thing’, the ‘plenum’. As you know, the orthodox view is that each species, those forms that we split out by language; i.e. by word-labelling and word-defining them, are ‘really’ separate things, ‘local, independently-existing material systems’. This is a total ‘crock’ but if want an ‘A’ you are going to have to go with it, and therefore you are going to have to go with all those bullshit inventions to give logical consistency to dualism, the notion that organic forms are local, independently existing material systems with their own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour.

Hey, if we can do it for hurricane Katrina, and cover over the physical reality that Katrina is ‘the-relational-space-she-is-included-in-expressing-itself’, then we can do it for anything that looks like it has ‘its own development’ and ‘its own behaviour’. And that’s what we do, and Nietzsche says, we get that from our ‘ego-view’ of ourselves, which is burned into our brains over and over again by our language; ‘I produced those crops’ etc. etc.

How many of those bullshit concepts are we asked to believe in; ‘genes that determine the development of the ‘independent’ organism’, ‘the brain’ as the jumpstart source of consciousness and the director of behaviour, … and it should be made clear right up front that ‘non-dualists’ do not argue with these ‘pictures’, they argue that these pictures are foreground views based on the notion that ‘space is empty’. They are saying that space is not empty, space is full, so that these foreground forms are resonance features that we use our European language to ‘subjectize’ so that we don’t have to explain them as ‘ripples in the relational spatial plenum’ but we can instead impute these forms, these flow-features in the flow, to have their own local jumpstarting powers of driving and directing their own development and behaviour, … hence ‘Katrina, the hurricane’ we portray in the same manner as our ego portrays ourselves, as local, independently-existing form with our own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour. ‘Dualism’, the absolute [Aristotelian logic of the excluded third] separation of ‘inhabitant’ from ‘habitat’, is foundational to our orthodox sciences, to all the scientific disciplines. Don’t think for a moment that Mach, Bohm, Schroedinger, Poincaré buy into this, … but their philosophical views don’t count. They are all excellent sciences in the sense of orthodox dualist science but they didn’t believe that ‘orthodox science’ equated to ‘physical reality’. As Mach said;

“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

that was mach saying that, not me, and the highlighting was mach’s, not mine, but you heard what was said about Mach, which might well have been said by a physicist of the stature in his discipline of Dawkins, in his discipline of evolutionary biology [Dawkins would do it with a bit more sophistication in his snarkery];

Also, Mach was a complete crank who denied atomic theory and relativity long past the point at which they had been proven true

so, for the reading list of the non-dualists in each discipline whose views are being de-legitimized by the high priests of the discipline.

Linguistics: Sapir, Whorf, Dan (Moonhawk) Alford (MIT). Sorry, Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff don’t make the cut. They are amongst the high priests of their dualist discipline. As Moonhawk says, Chomsky was the lead assassin in what Moonhawk calls ‘The Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax’; i.e. the successful attempt to build a strawman in place of Whorf’s hypothesis of ‘linguistic relativity’ and demolish the strawman, claiming to have demolished Whorf’s hypothesis.

See also Dan Alford’s connecting with F. David Peat (co-author with David Bohm).

Again, this is a case of the ‘dualists’ putting down the ‘non-dualist’ views. In this case, the non-dualists are the aboriginals whose language does not infuse ‘linear time’ into its mental models, and Whorf is saying that the aboriginal language ‘passes’ non-dualism while the SAE language reject it.

Biology: Well, lots of biologists have been ‘expelled’ from biology because their research suggested that ‘dualism’ could not possibly explain what their research was showing them (e.g. stem cell research, etc.) and that non-dualism as in Lamarckism was [which conflicts with Darwinism] was a ‘fit’ for their findings. The basic finding that redefines the concept of a ‘cell’ as a local system-in-itself which ‘knows how to reproduce’, wherein the cell nucleus is the ‘brain’ behind the reproduction process, is ‘epigenetics’ and the ‘epigenome’ which show that the cell is really something whose internal inside-outward asserting processes and ‘outside-inward environmental influences are in continual conjugate relation; the cell thus does not jumpstart its own cell-reproduction processes so it does not have to have within it ‘the knowledge’ of how to reconstruct both halves of a cut-in-half planarian back into full organisms. ‘epigenesis’ is the ‘new science’ that acknowledges that environmental conditions orchestrate, from the outside-inward, through cell ‘receptors’ what the cell’s ‘effectors’ need to do. As Bruce Lipton observes, the ‘cell’ can no longer be seen as a ‘unit of being’ but must instead be seen as a ‘unit of perception’ its development is the environment expressing itself.

Now, Lipton is a bit of a ‘loose cannon’ in my view but he is on the right track and that is, that he sees biology through non-dualist lenses while orthodox biology continues to insist on the ‘dualist’ lenses and excommunicates its heretics like Lipton who say things ‘in public’ like the following, in ‘The New Biology’ ;

As is described by Nijhout, genes are “not self-emergent,” that is genes can not turn themselves on or off. If genes can’t control their own expression, how can they control the behavior of the cell? Nijhout further emphasizes that genes are regulated by “environmental signals.” Consequently, it is the environment that controls gene expression. Rather than endorsing the Primacy of DNA, we must acknowledge the Primacy of the Environment!

‘Epigenetics’ is now being used for cancer treatments etc. but it is still ‘fringe stuff’ but because it works, it is being used and you can even see reports on it on ‘Nova’ but that still doesn’t make it ‘mainstream’.
Medicine: Here we have a whole successful field of non-orthodox [non-dualist] medicine known as Oriental medicine and ‘holistic medicine’ which claims that ‘health’ is defined by one’s outside-inward orchestrating — inside-outward asserting dynamics. Yes, you got it. the same view as in epigenetics, and the same view as in Lamarckism and Nietzsche’s anti-Darwinism [Nietzsche’s view of evolution was that it was the conjugation of outside-inward endosmosis and inside-outward exosmosis, and it applied to everything in the universe, as Lamarck had said; i.e. it was the outside-inward influence of ‘les fluides incontenables’ and the inside-outward influence of ‘les fluides contenables’; i.e. the outside-inward influence of ‘the fluids that can contain but which cannot themselves be contained’ such as electricity and magnetism, gravity, thermal flow, in conjunction with the inside-outward influence of regular mineral saturated fluids.

This relates to both biology and medicine and you can read Lamarck’s ‘Recherches sur L’Organisation des Corps Vivans’ online in French. It was never translated into English because the dominant English speaking scientific world was hardline ‘dualist’ and they picked up on one thing that Lamarck had said about a giraffe’s stretching its neck and that such experience within a lifetime was assimilated by its next generation. Lamarck may have the last laugh because this possibility of intra-life-time experience being ‘passed’ on is being confirmed in ‘the new science of epigenetics’.

Meanwhile, for a modern day geneticist and biophysicist’s non-dualist heresy, one can look up Mae Wan Ho, a well-respected scientist who had to quit mainstream biology because of her anti-darwinist views, and started up the ‘Institute for Science in Society’. Mae says;

So I went into biochemistry thinking I would find the answer there. But it was very dull because biochemistry then was about cutting up and grinding up everything, separating, purifying. Nothing to tell you about what life is about.

Biology as a whole was studying dead, pinned specimens. There was nothing that answered the question, what is biological organization? What makes organisms tick? What is being alive? I especially detested neo-Darwinism because it was the most mind-numbing theory that purports to explain anything and everything by “selective advantage”, competition and selective advantage.

I spent a lot of time criticizing neo-Darwinism until I got bored. What neo-Darwinism leaves out is the whole of chemistry, physics, and mathematics, all science in fact. You don’t even need any physiology or developmental biology if everything can be explained in terms of selective advantage and a gene for any and every character, real or imaginary.

Mae is also a signatory to ‘A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism’, but if you look that up on rational Wiki, you will see that she is being smeared with the charge of coming from ‘Creationism’ and ‘Intelligent Design’ [religion], which she is not. At least rational Wiki allows objections posted on their articles and in this case there is one posted that says;

We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged. There is scientific dissent from Darwinism. It deserves to be heard.

Justice: Those who are heaving into ‘restorative justice’ are non-dualists; i.e. they hold the view that the inhabitant’s behaviour is NOT independent of the habitat’s or community’s behaviour. This is just common sense, but our Western dualist Justice system would have us believe that that the behaviour of an individual derives fully and solely from the interior of the individual, and it therefore formulates ‘laws of individual behaviour’ while remaining blind to how crony groups can condition the habitat so as to screw individuals who are not in the crony group (and their families and children) to the point that they can put up with the INJUSTICE no more and lash out against the crony collectives who are protected by the police because the dualist view of Western Justice is blind to non-dualist ‘Mach’s principle effects’; “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’.

You can read Kay Pranis’ books on restorative justice ‘Peacemaking Circles’ etc. and you will find the aboriginal non-dualist view as the grounding principles.

Politics: Well this one is easy. Western politics is the epitome of the dualist view, which as i have been writing about here, is the foundation of ‘authoritarianism’, so there is plenty of reading material expressing ‘anti-authoritarian’ views, but not all of is ‘non-dualist’. For non-dualism one has to go the Zapatistas and to ‘decolonizing’ initiatives, which takes you into governance systems based on non-dualist ‘restorative justice’, as already mentioned.

Let’s see now; so far, Physics, Philosophy, Linguistics [key], Biology, Medicine, Justice, and Politics have been mentioned as all having within them a conflict between ‘dualist’ and ‘non-dualist’ views, with the dualist views common to all scientific disciplines continuing to hold on to the ‘gate-keeping’ power, but in all cases, ‘beginning to lose ground’.

There’s also ‘Anthropology’ and you can see how that has the conflict through Franz Boas, Sapir and Whorf, and there’s ‘economics’ and you can see the conflict in Frédéric Neyrat’s Biopolitics of Catastrophe (economics related);

“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.” — Frédéric Neyrat, ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’

And then there’s “History” where Howard Zinn gets into it ‘implicitly’ in ‘A People’s History of the United States’, where he points out that ‘executioners’ and ‘victims’ have polar opposite irreconcilable views on history. This is termed a ‘starkly dualist’ representation but Zinn is saying that one can’t split it apart into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ and says that perspectives in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ are bogus.

“The deaths caused by the Allies were less, but still so massive as to throw doubt on the justice of a war that includes such acts.’. It becomes quite apparent that Zinn simply does not view war as the fault of one people as compared to other people, but the fault of man kind as a whole.”

McLuhan would say that instead of looking at what the two war machines do, we should look at how our relations with one another and the habitat are transformed. Zinn is implying the same thing by showing how historical perspective in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ is ‘illusion’. That is, he is speaking in the terms of ‘restorative justice’ wherein the behaviours of individuals [states and/or humans] must be understood as deriving from the relational web of social context the individuals are included in.

To sum-up, … ‘united we stand, divided we fall’. The non-dualist views [we are all capable of both and it is matter of whether we put dualism over non-dualism or non-dualism over dualism] don’t ‘build’ because of our public acceptance of fragmenting ‘how the world works’ into separate dualist ‘disciplines’ [this fragmentation is self-similar to the fragmentation in the dualist view] and putting faith into the ‘high priests’ of each discipline so that ‘non-dualism’ is always a bridesmaid and never a bride. The ‘non-dualist scientists’ are not going to change the views of those whose respect and rewards and sense of self derives from their status within a discipline. This is a tremendous ‘lock-in’ to dualism.

As the arguments between the non-dualist physicists with the dualist physicists have shown, … physical phenomena can always be described in terms of ‘linguistic idealization’ which reduces the ‘transforming relational spatial-plenum’ to dynamics constituted in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do in time’.

But the ‘incompleteness’ of dualist science shows up in the fact that while science can describe very accurately ‘what things in themselves do’, dualist science cannot even ‘touch’ how the space we all share inclusion in is transformed in conjugate relation to ‘what things do’. There is no ‘conjugate relation’ between ‘what things do’ and the space that we are included in, in dualist science because dualist science uses the assumption of absolute space as a measuring frame for ‘what things-in-themselves do’. That’s the whole non-dualist point, the measurements themselves, which are in ‘absolute space’ and ‘absolute time’ are ‘not physical reality’. In Bohm’s terms, ‘the little ripples’ are what we measure but they are not the physical reality, the physical reality is the transforming relational spatial-plenum in which the ripples emerge;

“Weber: So space is more fundamental and more real than the objects in it. Applying your theory to time, we would have to say that the interval between the moments is the real.

Bohm: It could be considered to be that. But see, if we take the view that the space is what is real, then I think that we have to say that the measure of space is not what is real. The measure of space is what matter provides. So space goes beyond the measure of space. It’s the same with time. If we want to say that the interval is real, then the measure of time cannot be taken as fundamental. Therefore we are already outside of what we ordinarily would call time. But rather, if we have silence and “emptiness,” it does not have the measure either of space or of time. Now in that silence there may appear something which is a little ripple which has that measure. But if we thought that the little ripple was all that there is and that the space between was nothing, of no significance, then we would have the usual view of fragmentation.”

What has been discussed by Whorf and Alford et al, applies to language in general, including the languages of science;

“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 we are waiting for is when the ‘riff-raff’ like ourselves no longer believes the high priests of science in all these disciplines because they are all ‘dualist’. its not that it is not useful to model Katrina using linguistic idealization that endows subjecthood on her. It is very useful in the sense of ‘predicting in time’ ‘what notional things-in-themselves do’ or ‘may soon do’ etc., … but such prediction obscures the more comprehensive non-dualist reality that the storm-cell is ‘the relational space that it is included in, ‘expressing itself’. Katrina is a response to differential concentrating of thermal energy in the flowing, relational space of the atmosphere, her behaviour does not jumpstart out of her notional ‘local self’, the notional aspect which comes from our European language, as Nietzsche, Whorf et al have observed. Storm cells are manifestations of the non-duality in Mach’s principles wherein the ‘inhabitant cells’ and the ‘habitat’ are not ‘mutually exclusive, but mutually inclusive’. to say that the cells are ‘things-in-themselves’ is ‘all talk’, … all ‘European language talk’. You can say that to an aboriginal ‘individual’ as well, but not to an egotist member of the Church of Dualism aka Western Authoritarian, Retributive Justice-imposing society.

coincidentia oppositorum

The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one. -Heraclitus

καὶ ἐκ πάντων ἓν καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα

The problem of the ‘one and the many’ has been around since the earliest records of humans reflecting on their ‘human condition’.   The strife that goes on within us fuels our quest to reconcile the strife within us.  Every ‘coincidentia oppositorum’; one and many, love and hate, evil and goodness, creative-urge and destructive-urge, the outer and the inner, objectivity and subjectivity, … cry out for some, … ‘mediation?’

‘Psychotherapy’ has become a popular approach to addressing inner-outer strife and much has been written about the ‘search for wholeness’, by, for example, the Jungian concept of the sacred union of anima with animus aka ‘individuation’.  Individuation is the process by which our outer reality and our inner reality are brought into balance.

This approach presumes … “the reality of the psyche whereby all things are perceived through the psyche and that this is the only reality we know of.  As Suzanne Gieser observes in ‘The Innermost Kernel’, Jung did not take this to mean that reality is in itself psychic or intra-mental, but “was convinced that there is an objective reality that causes the sensory impression and the dream, but how this reality is constituted is something on which we can only speculate.”

The psychotherapeutic process is operationalized by ‘talk’ (language and thought) yet we know that language and thought are already ‘contaminated’ with culture-specific concepts woven into the very architecture (grammar) of language groups such as the ‘Standard Average European’ (SAE) languages, which, like a Trojan horse, carry in very different fundamental assumptions about ‘reality’ than do Native American aboriginal languages.

“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously  built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”  – Edward Sapir

The question arises, then, since language comes into subjective dreams and imaginings (the inner world dynamic) as well as into objective, reasoned discourse about ‘what is going on out there’ (the outer world dynamic), whether the psychotherapeutic process has ‘all of the fish that it needs in its net’? [or are the hidden influences of different language group architectures slipping out of the investigative net?]

This essay explores the embedded ‘spin’ that language itself brings in to the ‘search for wholeness’ (into the process of ‘mediation’? or ‘bringing into balance’? of inner and outer worlds) and whether the language-born ‘Trojan horse input’ gets to be dealt with or not in the psychotherapeutic process.

* * *

Science [mainstream/newtonian] and the SAE languages group are co-conspirators in forcing our mental models of ‘dynamics’ into terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, as if this action ‘takes place’ within some inconsequential space; i.e. a space that is itself passive and non-participating, leaving the animative sourcing of ‘dynamics’ fully and solely up to the material inhabitants of the space.  This is the familiar Western cultural choice of space as ‘absolute’, ‘fixed’, ‘empty’ [where not occupied by a material inhabitant] and infinite; i.e. ‘Euclidian’.  The notional ‘local, independently-existing material objects/organisms/systems’ that we see as being the basis for ‘dynamics’ in this ‘outer reality’, are imputed by us to have ‘identity’, a property of ‘selfhood’ that persists; i.e. is not merely a relational nexus of influences as is the continually transforming form in a fluid-dynamical world (a world of interdependent connectedness where form-sourcing influence is ‘everywhere-at-the-same-time’, as is the nature of ‘fields’; e.g. the gravity field, the electromagnetic field (thermal energy fields) etc.).

‘Aboriginal science’, as F. David Peat (‘Blackfoot Physics’) refers to this alternative view of ‘dynamics’ in terms of forms understood as relational nexa in a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum (space is here seen as a Unum of fullness, … the fullness of interdependent connectedness as in ‘field’).  ‘Change’ in this ‘version of outer reality’ is in terms of transforming spatial-relations.  There is no such thing as ‘identity’ in a relational space (e.g. non-euclidian space) and there is no such thing as ‘linear time’.  ‘Change’ is NOT understood as something that acts on a ‘form’ with ‘persisting identity’ over the course of ‘time’ (from ‘beginning’ to ‘end’).  ‘Change’ is instead understood as deriving from the continually shifting, purely relational ‘nexus’ of influences as in a ‘convection cell’.

For example, a ‘hurricane’ has the visual appearance of a ‘thing-in-itself’ [an ‘identity’-possessing material system], however, it is a purely relational flow-feature in the flow of the atmosphere where air flow topology is circular or ‘toroidal’ (doughnut-shaped) falling into a ‘sink-hole’ at the top and fountaining forth from a ‘source-hole’ at the bottom.  The sink and the source are a ‘coincidentia oppositorum that are, in this case, NOT ‘linearly opposed’, but ‘resolving their opposition’ by ambiguating the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’.  That is, that which is ‘outside’ is, at the same time, ‘inside’.   Another way of saying this is that the observer would first have to notional endow the hurricane with ‘selfhood’ or ‘identity’ as a basis for talking about ‘the inside’ and ‘outside’ [of ‘the’ hurricane].  As the relational nexus of fluid influences, such convecting cells have no intrinsic outer-world ‘selfhood’ other than in the mental construct of the observer and his language since the convecting cells is not a ‘thing-in-itself’ but a pattern of resonance in the purely relational flow-space plenum.  The observer is free to ‘hang a word-label on it’; i.e. to give it ‘identity’ — ‘Katrina’, for example — but as John Stuart Mill observes, this is not the case where we are deducing ‘being’ from the physical phenomena, but rather the case of imposing ‘being’; i.e. “every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the existence of the object defined”.

The resonantly repeating, purely relational flow-lines burn a picture of a persisting form in our psyche and on this basis we impose ‘selfhood’ or ‘identity’ on it, at which point our SAE language facilitates our treating is as a ‘subject’ that is capable of its own development and behaviour.  ‘Hurricanes’, resonance features in a flow that derive from the nexus of non-local, non-visible, non-material relation (fluid-dynamical) influences, once the OBSERVER cloaks in language-based ‘identity’, can be treated as a ‘subject’ that now notional jumpstarts ‘its own’ development and behaviour.  In this ‘language game’ we ‘personify’ ‘Katrina’ and say that ‘she’; … grows in size’, ‘strengthens’, ‘feeds on thermal energy from warm waters’, ‘heads north’, ‘ravages New Orleans’, ‘dissipates’.   As Nietzsche observes, we impose our own ego-based sense of self to synthetically deconstruct fluid phenomena, reducing them to doer-deed constructs; e.g. ‘lightning flashes’.  Poincaré makes the same point using the example ‘the earth rotates’ [the earth is not the ‘doer of the deed’, the dynamics of the relational space the earth is included in, is the animative source of the rotational dynamic].

The point is that the language we use assumes ‘identity’ where ‘identity’ is not a supportable assumption.  It is an ‘imposition’ that comes from the game of capturing our sensory experiencing with the tool of language.  The SAE language group likes to capture our sensory experiencing of dynamics in ‘subject-attribute’ or ‘doer-deed’ form viz. ‘the sun rises’.  Our sensory experience is that we are included within a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum, but our SAE language gives us the capability of capturing such experience in observer-dis-including constructs; i.e. in terms of ‘what notional things-in-themselves are doing’.  Of this deceptive, language based game of reducing relational dynamics to subject-driven dynamics, Nietzsche has this to say;

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] … our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “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’ 484

In the modern physics [Machean] world view that is the ‘outer reality’ component of the Jungian model of the psyche, there is no such thing as ‘identity’ or ‘persisting selfhood’ that belongs to a form, since all forms are the nexa of relational influences in an inherently interdependent connectedness.  This is the ecosystemic view or ‘web-of-life’ view of the aboriginal culture which their ‘thing-in-itself eschewing’ oral language tradition allows them to capture, without having to make the reduction of dynamics, as in the SAE language group, to the reduced doer-deed, subject-attribute terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.

In a transforming relational spatial-plenum; … the dynamic world as understood in modern physics wherein “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 inhabitants”, ‘identity’ does not come into it.  As in the example of Katrina, ‘identity’ is something we use language to impose ‘over top of’ resonance features in the relational flow, WHICH SHIFTS OUR ATTENTION AWAY FROM THE ‘DYNAMIC’ UNDERSTOOD AS AN OVERALL, flow-form-filled TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL SPATIAL-PLENUM; i.e. where the forms are artefacts of the ‘universe/plenum expressing itself’.  That is, we use ‘identity’-imposing language to notionally ‘short-circuit’ the ‘physically actual’ animative sourcing of the dynamics [which is coming from the transforming relational spatial-plenum], and to impute the animative sourcing as instead, jumpstarting from the interior of these notional ‘identities’ or ‘selfhoods’, language-based space-uncluttering, local, independently-existing things-in-themselves.

‘Identity’ has no place in a transforming relational spatial-plenum, and without ‘identity’ we can no longer speak of ‘development’ and ‘behaviour’ in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, but are obliged to stick with the pre-lingual understanding of our sensory experience; i.e. of inclusion in a transforming relational space.  There is no basis for hypothesizing the existence of ‘things-in-themselves’ in such a space;

“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

As Mach and Poincaré suggest, the basis for imposing ‘identity’ in the form of ‘things-in-themselves’ that in turn leads to dynamics understood as ‘what things-in-themselves do’, is ‘convenience’ as in ‘economy of thought’ and ‘ease of discourse’.

With this in mind, is ‘individuation’ still definable in terms of bringing the inner world of the psyche into balance with the outer world of the psyche?   That is, is there not a question as to what constitutes the ‘outer world of the psyche’ since it appears that different language architectures yield different ‘renderings’ or ‘RE-presentations’ of the ‘outer world’.

Example: The colonizer culture’s dispute with the indigenous aboriginal culture over ‘colonization’.

According to the colonizer’s language based rendering of ‘colonization’, the colonizers ‘discovered’ America, moved from Europe to America, brought ‘civilization’ [including science and technology] to America and in short, constructed a wonderful new world in America.’.

According to the indigenous aboriginal language based rendering of ‘colonization’, Turtle Island was always there and the colonizer’s ‘discovery’ was a revision to their own condition of relative ignorance.  Furthermore, there is no such thing as ‘construction’ without ‘destruction’ since these two are a ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ in that one cannot construct a city without, at the same time, destroying a forest.  In the transforming relational spatial-plenum understanding of dynamics, construction [creation] and destruction are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of ‘transformation’.  In the aboriginal tradition of understanding ‘outer reality’, all inhabitants of the transforming relational world-space are strands in a common web-of-life; i.e. everyone is included in an interdependent relational-spatial connectedness.  There is no place in this version of ‘outer reality’ for dynamics in the over-simplified ‘identity’-based terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.  The colonizers are hallucinating if they ‘really believe’ that they can split apart the ‘constructive things they do’ from the ‘destructive things they do’.

McLuhan makes the same point with his example of how the Western colonizer culture understands the dynamics of machines; i.e. ‘relational transformation’ is the ‘physical reality’ while ‘doer-deed achievement’ is a psychological reduction to the ‘creative’ pole of the ‘creating-destroying’ coincidentia oppositorum.

 

“Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. — Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media’

Our experience informs us that the world we live in is a ‘different place’ when we introduce machines/technologies into it.  As Mach’s principle captures this; “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’.”  In beginning work on the Cadillac factory, farm workers are being pulled off the farm, leaving farmers in the lurch, the new supply roads to serve the factory are leaving old highways abandoned and the mom-and-pop business on them in bankruptcy, the influx of sophisticated engineers, experts and managers are stealing the sweethearts of the farmboys and small town icons who were ‘ruling the roost’.  In other words, there was already a transforming relational space/medium ‘in place’ and the ‘change’ associated with the notion of ‘moving a new mechanical doer of deeds capability’ into place, is, in physical reality accomplished by transforming the relational space that is already ‘in place’.  The ‘transforming medium is the message’.  Dynamics seen in term of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ is a language-based abstraction.  The same applies to the notion of ‘moving a new mechanical doer of deed capability’ into place as constituted by the flow European colonizers form Europe to Turtle Island; i.e. this amounts to, in physical reality, transformation of the relational space of the earth’s ecosphere.

Nietzsche echoes McLuhan’s point; i.e. that the dynamics of our physical experience are not in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ but are in terms of relational transformation of the spatial medium.  That is, the ecosphere, which included the atmosphere, is dynamical in the same ‘relational’ sense as the atmosphere.  It stays the same size while new forms gather and old forms are regathered within it; ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are a ‘coincidentia oppositorum’; i.e. they are conjugate phases of the one relational dynamic of ‘transformation’.  Storm-cells [resonance-based relational features] are continually gathered and being re-gathered, nothing is lost, it is instead ‘relationally re-arranged’.  What is ‘lost’ are the observer-created ‘identities’ we impose on the relational nexa or flow-forms.  As Nietzsche 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

Where did we get the ‘identity-based’ or ‘being-based’ ‘doer-deed’ version of dynamics.  What is the ‘Trojan horse’ in our SAE language architecture that invokes it in our Western culture renderings of ‘outer reality’?  Evidently, according to Nietzsche, the Trojan horse is nothing other than our own ‘ego’;

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

To tie this ‘point’ back to how it might impact our quest for bringing our outer and inner realities into attunement;

Both our inner reality [dreams etc.] and our outer reality [our rendering of the world dynamic] are evidently shaped in different ways by different language architectures.  The dreams of a colonizer of constructing a new city won’t be seen in a ‘one-sided’ manner where ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are split into two different processes by language, … not in the dreams of the aboriginal whose language comprehends creation and destruction as conjugate aspects of relational-spatial transformation.  The Navajo will dream of gathering mud into adobe mounds, transforming the web of spatial relations he sees himself as being woven into.  The Hopi Kiva and the Haida longhouse are understood as manifestations of the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation.  One speaks the words ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (we are all related) as one enters or leaves the sweat-lodge, to affirm the conjugate relation [coincidentia oppositorum] of outer and inner.

“The emergence of humanity is the stating point of Hopi mythology and the Kiva is the point where people first emerge from darkness to light. The circle motif represents what the Hopi call the sipapu; the womb or the place of emergence. When we emerged from underworld, the shadow side emerged with us. The figures in gray represent the unhealed side of humanity, which must be purified in order to find the middle place.” – Museum of Northern Arizona

It is common for people of the SAE language group to divide on a ‘pro-development’ [‘We want to ‘improve the land’ to create a wonderful new city in this savage wilderness’], – ‘anti-development’ [‘We want to preserve this wonderful natural environment and protect it from destruction by commerical development] basis.  This associates directly with the architecture of SAE languages which split apart ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ by implying that dynamics are ‘foreground’ and transpire by way of ‘what things-in-themselves do, which can be EITHER ‘creative’ OR ‘destructive’.  This leads to a ‘false dichotomy’ in which, blinding ourselves to the actual physical dynamic of relational transformation, we compel ourselves to factor how much of our dynamic is ‘constructive’ and how much is ‘destructive’.  Aboriginals, meanwhile, as in the Kiva/Longhouse example, do not jumpstart their activities from a quest of either ‘pure construction’ or ‘pure destruction’, but rather to act upon relational balances and harmonies; i.e. to see themselves as ‘agents of transformation’ rather than as ‘authors of creative achievement’ or ‘authors of destruction’.

‘Agents of transformation’ do not put primary focus on ‘the results of causal actions’, they orient to how the continuing transformation of the relational space they share inclusion in, will be influenced by their actions,… looking five generations out.   They are not like owner of the Cadillac factory, in the earlier example, who is focussed intently on constructing and operationalizing the factor, out of the context of the transforming of relations in the hostspace [letting it ‘flap like a loose sheet in the breeze’].  As many different entrepreneurs move into the same space intent on each ‘doing their stuff’, the ‘warp’ that results in the continuing transformation of the relational space, such as it unfolds, is referred to as ‘progress’ and the Western capitalist culture says courageously or foolishly, ‘bring it on’.

John Locke’s concern, back in the late 17^th century, about the ‘unravelling of community’ due to the invention of money and thus ‘paid wages’ that split ‘workers’ out of aware participation in relational transformation, and made them over into non-transformation-aware agents of one-sided mechanical constructions [which manifests in this sum of odds and bods of unintended transformative effects called ‘progress’], would appear to have even more deeply at the bottom of it, the language based splitting apart of ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’.

That is to say, it is one thing to set up a plain and simple incentive of profit in the notional one-sided dynamics of  ‘moving a new mechanical doer of deeds capability’ into place, but quite another to actually accept in one’s mental rendering of ‘outer world reality’ that the coincidentia oppositorum of ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ can be dealt with using Aristotelian EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third, when in the ‘reality of our physical experience’ they need to be understood using BOTH/AND logic of the included third.  The latter BOTH/AND logic acknowledges Mach’s principle; the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation, in the relational topology exemplified by the relational flow-form in the relational flow [e.g. the hurricane in the atmosphere].

As it is, the aboriginal needs psychotherapy due to his having to live in a nutty society dominated by SAE language group types who believe in an ‘outer reality’ wherein ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are two separate processes which can be undertaken ‘one at a time’.  Simultaneous, psychotherapy is needed by member of the SAE language group who are troubled by conflict between their actions that assume that ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ can be achieved separately, and the increasingly troublesome involuntary residue called ‘progress’, the most prominent agents of which are being targeted for bombs [unabomber] and ‘kneecapping’ [by anarcho-primitives].

Does this situation not suggest that ‘language based influences’ that are ‘upstream’ from the models of the psyche and which are impacting the ‘renderings’ of ‘outer reality’ [worldview] and ‘inner reality’ [dreams etc.], and that since language is used ‘innocently’ in psychotherapeutic inquiry [without attending to Trojan horse infection exposure coming from not including this ‘tool of inquiry’ in the ‘inquiry’], there may be a continual re-infection of conflict into the ‘psyche’ by way of the conversations with oneself, mirrored back by the psychotherapist, that are healing motivated?

* * *

Moving on from this brief ‘sketch’ of the potential issue wherein ‘language’ can be a source of psychical conflict that does not show up as a fish in the net of psychotherapeutic healing attempts, but instead participates in the manner of pathogens on the unwashed hands of both psychotherapist-intervener and patient that they are both unaware of.

Part II.

An alternative view of ‘individuation’ as arises directly from the language and [BOTH/AND] logic [of the included third] of Machean physics.

We want to somehow solve or ‘overcome/transcend’ the strife of the opposites.  The topologies of modern physics give us a clue how this might be done.  Understanding ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ as conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of ‘transformation’ enables us, when we become stuck down at the level of the conflict, to rise above it.    The physics of Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré, David Bohm, Erwin Schrödinger and the ‘relational theorists’ suggest that the world is a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum.  In such a worldview, ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ do not exist as separate processes; instead, they are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of ‘transformation’.

As mentioned and repeated to ‘refresh’ this discussion thread, Nietzsche captures this understanding as follows;

“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

This ‘Heraclitean [everything is in a relational-spatial flux] foundation’ is important in that it does away with the notions of ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ as ‘separate processes’.  In the transforming of the relational spatial-plenum, ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of ‘transformation’.   This matches our physical experience; e.g. if we want to ‘construct a house’, we have to, at the same time, ‘destroy some forest’.  We commonly, ‘mentally’, get around this by thinking in terms that we shall build our house ‘outside the forest’ as if space was an unbounded emptiness, and we could ‘PUT OUR CREATION’ in an ‘unoccupied space’.  But, the physical reality is that ‘forest’ is just a language based idealization we use that implies an ‘EITHER/OR’ distinction between ‘forest’ and ‘non-forest’ when it is, in physical reality, ‘all the same space’ that is variegated, relational form wise, as in a fluid dynamic [a transforming relational spatial-plenum] in our visual sensing of it.   In this latter understanding, a BOTH/AND distinction applies between the ‘forest’ and ‘non-forest’.  In fuzzy logic, this is termed [Bart Kosko], the ‘yin-yang equation’, A = Not.A.  That is, the convection cell, A is included in F, the flow-space and in fact A is an ‘appearance’ or ‘relational pattern’ [resonance feature] within F.  That which is Not.A is also in F since F is the entire space or ‘spatial-plenum’, therefore, since A = F and Not.A = F, A = Not.A, … or A is BOTH A AND Not.A.   The old ‘nature-nurture’ dichotomy is thus a ‘false dichotomy’ since ‘nature [genesis] = nurture [epigenesis or ‘environmental shaping influence].

We come around again to two ways of handling ‘coincidentia oppositori’; the familiar way as in our SAE language group where we use EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third, or the less familiar way as in the indigenous Turtle Island aboriginal language group where we use BOTH/AND logic of the included third.  Using the former logic, our rendering of ‘outer reality’ would break apart ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ into two separate processes, as it would with ‘growth’ and ‘decline’, ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ etc.  Using the latter logic is required if the space is a relational space such as the space on the surface of a sphere.  That is, if one draws a circle on a sphere, that circle defines two conjugate areas at the same time, so in terms of ‘circle dynamics’ (e.g. growth or shrinkage), it is impossible to split apart the growth of the circle from shrinkage of the conjugate circle.   Only by the observer ignoring the conjugate relation could one isolate ‘growth’ from ‘shrinkage’.  Of course, if the circle was in a flat plane, which implies infinite space, the growth in the circle could be understood as a separate process.  That’s why the common ‘newtonian’ or ‘cartesian’ view is sometimes described as the flatspace view.  In the flatspace, view, coincidentia oppositori are handled with EITHER/OR logic.  This sort of influence on ‘inner and outer reality’ was alluded to in the 1884 classic, ‘Flatland’ by E. A. Abbott.

Moving on to our sense of our ‘inhabitant’ – ‘habitat’ relation, we once again have this same choice, which divides the aboriginal culture and language group from the SAE culture and language group; i.e. the former treat this coincidentia oppositorum using BOTH/AND logic while the latter treat of it using EITHER/OR logic.

The ‘split-apartness’ of ‘self’ and ‘other’, is reinforced by the different impressions coming to us from visual sensing [visual sensing gives us an individual-person-al perspective because of our unique, situational inclusion within the space].  For example, if we ‘were a hurricane’ or ‘storm cell’, when we look out, we cannot see ‘around the world’ so our view is the ‘flatspace view’ which seems to extend out to ‘infinity’ since the ‘finiteness’ of spherical space derives from the fact that it wraps over and around the sphere, and ‘back into itself’.  The storm-cells in this space are like a matrix of springs that never ‘end’ because they wrap over and back around into themselves.  If we put some stress into one, the entire web experiences the stress or stress pulse (sproing!).

So, if we ‘were one of these springs’ our visual sensing of ‘outer reality’ would be of ‘flatspace’ where if we rolled a ball away from ourselves, it would go outwards forever.  But our sensing of inertia/accelerations (sproings) would be attuning to ‘everywhere at the same time’ as is the case in the ‘gravity field’; i.e. it is everywhere at the same time.  Our intuition would be that if we rolled a ball directly outward, it would roll over the horizon, disappear, and eventually come up and hit us from behind.

Historically, this split between visual sensing of ‘what’s going on out there’ and inertial sensing of outside-inward — inside-outward dynamics [compression – divergence] did indeed confuse and trouble the rendering of ‘outer reality’ [habitat] and the individual’s [inhabitant’s] ‘inner-reality’ relationship with it.  While we now understand that if we dump garbage off the stern of our boat and sail off in a straight line distancing ourselves from it, it will re-emerge coming over the horizon towards us, approaching our bow, we haven’t made any changes to our SAE language group.  The fact is, that our language, and the language of mainstream science, is architected more for a fit with our visual sensing than with our inertial outside-inward — inside-outward conjugate relational sensing.  This leads to ambiguity in what we mean by ‘perception’.  Do we mean ‘visual sensing’ of what is going on ‘out there’ or ‘feeling sensing’ of how what is going on out there is engaging with what is going on in here’.   This ambiguity in ‘what perception is’ led to a public debate between Henri Poincaré and Bertrand Russell which was never resolved [they ‘agreed to disagree].

“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’

These issues of ‘perception’ impinge, by way of language, on our inner reality and our outer reality.  That is, our ‘visual perception’ is constrained by ‘line of sight’ with emphasis on ‘LINE’ while our ‘feeling perception’ allows us to engage with ‘everywhere at the same time’ [our capacity for ‘inertial guidance’ allows us to engage with the universe-plenum or the gravity field which is ‘everywhere at the same time’.].

This becomes particularly important in regard to our ‘sense of self and other’ and how we ‘render them’ in our ‘inner reality’ and ‘outer reality’; i.e. in our experiencing of physical reality, our sensing of gravity is given to all in common, while our visual sensing is given to each individual in particular due to his unique situational inclusion in the spatial-plenum.  In the view where we feel inclusion in a field that is ‘everywhere at the same time’, we have the sense we are … ‘the universe expressing itself’.  The influence/s that ‘source our development and behaviour’, in this view, are non-local, non-visible and non-material, as is the nature of influence in a transforming relational space as modern physics has determined, is the best way to describe the world we live in.  In this view, we are in common with everything; i.e. ‘we are ONE with everything’;

The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one. -Heraclitus

As Mach says, and he seems to imply a model of psyche that differs from that of Jung, although I do not wish to get into that at this point as it will detract from this thread, which is to investigate how language impinges on our sense of self-other relationship;

“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’

In this view, our visualizing powers are ‘psychical’ while our inclusional/inertial feeling powers are ‘physical’.  This point is also articulated by Nietzsche who calls visual subjects ‘total Fiktion’ and ‘stupidity’ [since they synthetically break dynamical phenomena up into doer-deed events], Poincaré who calls visual identities ‘nonsense’ [since they imply that space is absolute], and Schrödinger, who calls visual objects ‘schaumkommen’ or ‘appearances’ [since they are resonance features within the energy-charged relational spatial-plenum].  The Vedantic belief, cited by Schrödinger, is that the visual object based world is Maya, ‘illusion’.

To bring out more clearly why these philosophers are ‘calling the bluff’ of what our visual sensing tends to contribute to our ‘outer reality’, recall your own experience in being ‘in stormy conditions’ [here the sense of inclusion is strong, from the inertial/accelerational feeling] and then you see ‘it’, … a wall cloud with a descending ‘funnel’.  The more the funnel descends and ‘takes shape’, the more you have the sense that ‘something else is out there with me in this common space’.  Pretty soon, the moving tubular body breaks out of the transforming relational spatial-plenum and dominates the visual field of observation.  The ‘dynamic figure’ break out of its imprisonment in the ‘dynamic ground’ and, now liberated, becomes a very threatening ‘subject’ or ‘doer-of-deeds’.  The ‘dynamic ground’ has now receded into the background of our awareness and is now, essentially ‘gone’.  It is not ‘gone’ in a physical reality sense, it is merely ‘gone’ from our psychical focus, from the renderings in our ‘outer reality’.   That is, as we watch ‘IT’ move, the transforming relational space our outside-inward — inside-outward inertial feeling informs us we are included in is now a forgotten concept.  ‘IT’ is captured in an ominous word, ‘tornado’!!!   We ‘know it’ by its reputation [i.e. through linguistic discourse], even though this may be the first time we have ever personally ‘seen one’.  Tornadoes are ‘doers of deeds’, they are ‘killers’, … we have all ‘heard the stories’ of the ‘deeds they have done’.  Lightning strikes, … tornadoes strike.

So why are we so convinced there is something ‘there’?  If we are watching a convection cell take on form, we can see that ‘it’ derives from non-local, non-visible, non-material influence, as all flow-features do.  How come we started off experiencing a kind of ‘sailboater experience of inclusion in a turbulent flow’, … and soon became so riveted to a visual image that only two objects remained in an otherwise, ‘of-no-particular consequence space’, ‘it’ and ‘me’, ‘my self’ and ‘the other’.   ‘It’ is now ‘local, visible, material’ whereas my understanding of fluid dynamics is that ‘it’ is, in physical reality, an ‘appearance’ or resonance feature that derives from a nexus of ‘non-local, non-visible, non-material’ influence [purely relational influence], a ‘spirit’ [the universe expressing itself] that has now taken on ‘a body of its own’.

This ‘subjectizing’ of forms that are understood in modern Machean physics and in the Turtle Island Aboriginal language group [TIA language group], as ‘relational nexa’ in the flow-plenum, and in mainstream western science and the SAE language group as ‘identities’ or ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour, ‘shows up as’ different senses of ‘justice’ in these respective language groups.

Example: A ‘protestor’ that blocks a railway line

SAE language group Justice: The SAE judge sees railway-blockers, consistent with biological sciences, as ‘local, independently-existing material systems whose behaviours jumpstart from their internal processes, the power-drive coming from biochemical and biophysical processes, and the steerage/direction coming from the knowledge and purpose-directed intellection in a ‘central processing unit’ aka ‘brain’. Since this behaviour originates fully and solely within the notional ‘independently-existing individual’, the court need look no further than the interior of the individual to explain the ‘animative sourcing’ of the railway-blocking behaviour. The court need therefore only establish that the individual accused of this railway blocking is indeed the doer of the deed, and from that point refer to the law, formulated in terms of allowable and prohibited, locally jumpstarting actions of independent individuals, for the particular violations of the law associated with the railblocking actions and the prescribed punishments.

TIA language group Justice: The ‘restorative justice’ judge sees all people and their behaviours as ‘the relational dynamics of the universe/community expressing itself’, in much the same [relational] manner as in the relational dynamics of the atmosphere and the storm-cells that develop therein. The [relational dynamic of the] community is therefore ultimately responsible for the dissonant acts that emerge within the community, such as railway-blocking. The notion of the individual as a ‘local independently-existing material system with its own locally originating behaviour’ is nonsense, in this restorative justice view. Instead, the dynamics of the inhabitants are understood as being conditioned by the dynamics of the habitat [‘community dynamics’] at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are being conditioned by the dynamics of the inhabitants [Mach’s principle describing the physically real dynamics of our sensory experience, in modern physics terms].

The animative sourcing of the railway-blocking behaviour is understood as deriving from the relational dynamics of community in the same sense that the animative sourcing of an earthquake is understood as deriving from tensions within the relational dynamics of the spherical geospace/habitat. While an ‘offender’ and ‘victim’ are identified that correspond, topologically, to the two rock bodies that engage in the earthquake ‘rumble’, the animative sourcing is understood to derive from the relational dynamics they are included in and NOT as jumpstarting from ‘local causal agencies’ or notional ‘independently-existing material systems’. A ‘peace-making circle’ process is initiated that represents the relational community, including the ‘offender’ and ‘victim’, with the goal of restoring balance and harmony in the relational dynamics of the community, the mother-source of the dissonance. Conflict that appears from superficial inquiry to arise from linear, polar opposition between ‘offender’ and ‘victim’ is thus understood more comprehensively/realistically as a circular process that transpires within the relational body of the community/habitat, as with all processes in nature. In the restorative justice view, conflict is understood as NATURAL fuelling for the continuing transformation of the relational dynamics of community/habitat, and not as a ‘disturbance’ that disrupts the operations of a fixed, non-transforming, ‘mechanistic’, ‘what things-in-themselves-do-over-time’ based community dynamic. To allow a mechanical justice process based on fixed laws to deal directly with ‘offenders’ seen as independent causal agents with self-jumpstarting behaviours, without letting community engage with its own, natural transformation-fuelling dissonance, is dysfunctional, in the view of restorative justice.

“Circle sentencing [restorative justice] fundamentally shifts the focus in searching for solutions from symptoms to causes. The discussion in circles, unlike courts, does not isolate the criminal act from the social, economic and family environment fostering crime. Further, unlike courts, the circle focus extends beyond the offender to include the interests and concerns and circumstances of offenders, their families, the victim and the community.”
— Justice Barry Stuart of the Yukon Territorial Court

Currently, TIA language group ‘restorative justice’ is seen as a viable candidate for replacing ‘Western SAE language group justice’ on a global basis. This returns the sourcing of community transformation to the community, taking it out of the hands of a supreme central authority with adjunct law-making and enforcing machinery.

These two views of ‘justice’ imply two very different understandings of the ‘self-other’ coincidentia oppositorum; i.e. in the TIA language group, it is handled with BOTH/AND logic of the included third, while in the SAE language group, it is handled with EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third.

Schrödinger makes an analogy with Vedantic belief, equating the EITHER/OR logical view of self with ‘Atman and the BOTH/AND logical view of self with ‘Brahman’ [the individual is understood as ‘the universe expressing itself’].

“In Christian terminology to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference [see extended quote below at {2}] is not the closest a biologist can get to proving also their God and immortality at one stroke. In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN upheld in (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).” – Erwin Schrödinger, ‘What is Life’

What then, is always putting me back into my small Atman shell?  Could it be ‘vision’?  Could it be ‘visual perspective’?   Could it be my loss of touch with inertial/accelerational inclusion in the fields that are ‘everywhere at the same time’?  Could it be the SAE language architecture whose flatspace visual constructs are concretizings of my own ‘ego’?

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

In my view, it makes sense that visual sensing [which inherently delivers ‘flatspace’ renderings of ‘outer reality’] combined with our SAE language group architecture psychologically ‘splits us out of the common transforming relational spatial-plenum’ and notionally ‘subjectizes us’, reduces and traps us in a localized, independently-existing ‘ego’; i.e. constrains us to our Atman, our personal self, our separate body-self that we psychologically ‘take out of touch’ with our Brahman-self, our physical, phenomenologically real, self-originating, non-local, non-visible, non-material ‘spirit’.

The aboriginal psyche, as mentioned, is very conflicted in the modern era by the experience of forced living within a culture whose institutions, including Justice, acknowledge only the local, personal self [the ‘apparition’], and denies the natural primacy of the Brahman-self, our physical, phenomenologically real, relational, non-local, non-visible, non-material ‘spirit’ self.

This ‘denial’ of our ‘spirit-self’ that modern physics insists is the primary reality concerning the nature of the self, is showing up by way of ‘progress’.  ‘Progress’ arises from our psychological disconnecting of ‘construction’ and ‘deconstruction’ and our corresponding one-sided emphasis on ‘construction’, ignoring that the physical reality is ‘transformation’, the conjugate relation of ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’.  ‘Progress’ is thus a measure of the effect of operating in a ‘de-spiritualized’, ego-directed manner.

Evidently, there is an ‘aboriginal psyche’ in each of us, and we are increasingly intuiting that we are the bus that we are passengers on, and that ‘Progress’, ultimate Progress, is our destination.  This would come when ‘the one-and-many’ come fully together according to the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third; i.e. as the perfect machine.

Unlike the ‘one-and-many’ according to the BOTH/AND logic of the included third, where the energy-charged relational spatial-plenum is the mother habitat of all inhabitants, and where organization is by way of outside-inward — inside-outward feeling experience, the ‘one-and-many’ according to the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third can only gather together on the basis of human reason based on visual perception; i.e. on the basis of reason and judgement in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves are doing’.

In other words, ‘Progress’ is where we humans continue to perfect our own organizing out of the context of the full eco-diversity of the relational space we share inclusion in, and ‘ultimate Progress’ is where we do this to the max.

Of course, if the coincidentia oppositorum of self-other is as Machean physics says it is, and thus it must be treated of in the BOTH/AND logic of the included third, then Frédéric Neyrat’s observation is on target;

“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.” — Frédéric Neyrat,  ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’

* * *

NOTES:

{1}   “In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “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’ 484

“Continual transition does not allow us to speak of “individuals,” etc; the “number” of beings is itself in flux. We would say nothing of time and know nothing of motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we see stationary forms beside transitory flow. The same applies to cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of “empty space” we should certainly not have acquired the conception of space. The principle of identity has behind it the “appearance” that it refers to the same things. A world in a state of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be “comprehended” or “known”; only to the extent that the “comprehending” and “knowing” intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, fabricated out of nothing but appearances but become firm to the extent that this kind of appearance has preserved life–only to this extent is there anything like “knowledge”; i. e., a matching of earlier and more recent errors with one another.” – Nietzsche, Will to Power, 520 (1885)

“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’

“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

“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

{2}  Excerpt from ‘What is Life’ by Erwin Schrödinger;

Epilogue

On Determinism and Free Will

As a reward for the serious trouble I have taken to expound the purely scientific aspects of our problem sine ira et studio, I beg leave to add my own, necessarily subjective, view of the philosophical implications. According to the evidence put forward in the preceding pages the space-time events in the body of a living being which correspond to the activity of its mind, to its self conscious or any other actions, are (considering also their complex structure and the accepted statistical explanation of physico-chemistry) if not strictly deterministic at any rate statistico-deterministic. To the physicist I wish to emphasize that in my opinion, and contrary to the opinion upheld in some quarters, quantum indeterminacy plays no biologically relevant role in them, except perhaps by enhancing their purely accidental character in such events as meiosis, natural and X-rayinduced mutation and so on -and this is in any case obvious and well  recognized.

For the sake of argument, let me regard this as a fact, as I believe every unbiased biologist would, if there were not the well-known, unpleasant feeling about ‘declaring oneself to be a pure mechanism’. For it is deemed to contradict Free Will as in warranted by direct introspection. But immediate experiences in themselves, however various and disparate they be, are logically incapable of contradicting each other. So let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises:

(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.

(ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.

The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I –I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’ –am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature. Within a cultural milieu (Kulturkreis) where certain conceptions (which once had or still have a wider meaning amongst other peoples) have been limited and specialized, it is daring to give to this conclusion the simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving also their God and immortality at one stroke. In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN upheld in (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God). To Western ideology the thought has remained a stranger, in spite of Schopenhauer and others who stood for it and in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other’s eyes, become  aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one – not merely similar or identical; but they, as a rule, are emotionally too busy to indulge in clear thinking, which respect they very  much resemble the mystic. Allow me a few further comments. Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Even in the pathological cases of split  consciousness or double personality the two persons alternate, they are never manifest simultaneously. In a dream we do perform several characters at the same time, but not indiscriminately: we are one of them; in him we act and speak directly, while we often eagerly await answer or response of another person, unaware of the fact that it is we who control his movements and his speech just as much as our own. How does the idea of plurality (so emphatically opposed by the Upanishad writers) arise at all? Consciousness finds itself intimately connected with, and dependent on, the physical state of a limited region of matter, the body. (Consider the changes of mind during the development of the body, at puberty, ageing, dotage, etc., or consider the effects of fever intoxication, narcosis, lesion of the brain and so on.) Now there is a great plurality of similar bodies. Hence the pluralization of consciousnesses or minds seems a very suggestive hypothesis. Probably all simple, ingenuous people, as well as the great majority of Western philosophers, have accepted it. It leads almost immediately to the invention of souls, as many as there are bodies, and to the question whether they are mortal as the body is or whether they are immortal and capable of existing by themselves. The former alternative is distasteful while the latter frankly forgets, ignores or disowns the fact upon which the plurality hypothesis rests. Much sillier questions have been asked: Do animals also have souls? It has even been questioned whether women, or only men, have souls. Such consequences, even if only tentative, must make us suspicious of the plurality hypothesis, which is common to all official Western creeds. Are we not inclining to much greater nonsense, if in discarding their gross superstitions we retain their naive idea of plurality of souls, but ‘remedy’ it by declaring the souls to be perishable, to be annihilated with the respective bodies? The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of less is never which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and Even in the that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different personality aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAJA); 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.

{3} Sapir, Whorf and Poincare [on language]

“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously  built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”  – Edward Sapir

Benjamin Whorf published three articles in the MIT Technology Review titled “Science and Linguistics”, “Linguistics as an Exact Science” and “Language and Logic”. He was also invited to contribute an article to a theosophical journal, Theosophist, published in Madras, India, for which he wrote “Language, Mind and Reality”. In these final pieces he offered a critique of Western science in which he suggested that non-European languages often referred to physical phenomena in ways that more directly reflected aspects of reality than many European languages, and that science ought to pay attention to the effects of linguistic categorization in its efforts to describe the physical world. He particularly criticized the Indo-European languages for promoting a mistaken essentialist world view, which had been disproved by advances in the sciences, whereas he suggested that other languages dedicated more attention to processes and dynamics rather than stable essences. Whorf argued that paying attention to how other physical phenomena are described in the study of linguistics could make valuable contributions to science by pointing out the ways in which certain assumptions about reality are implicit in the structure of language itself, and how language guides the attention of speakers towards certain phenomena in the world which risk becoming overemphasized while leaving other phenomena at risk of being overlooked.”

“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

We ARE the SCARP that we are toppling down.

The warrior spirit in each of us that seeks to defend the vulnerable deserves respect, but I am not so certain of career militarists. Continuation of strife is continuation of their employment and status.  Churchill’s hard military mind supported the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended the 1914-18 WWI; a ‘Carthaginian peace’ that would ‘bully’ and abuse a new generation of innocents, and so obviously infuse them with anger and hunger for vengeance that cartoons in the newpapers of the time were predicting another war when German newborns reached that age of majority; 1918 + 21 = 1939.

The ‘winners’ of WWII get to write the history and the way it is told suggests that the pathogenic forces of aggression ‘jumpstarted’ from Nazi politicians led by Hitler.

Is this not a ‘confused attribution’ of causality and culpability?  What sense does it make to simply ‘ignore’ the historical conditioning of the German people by years of alienation and bullying, to the point that they were a ticking time bomb, and then to claim that their aggression jumpstarted from Hitler and the Nazis?  Were Churchill and other militarist politicians like him ‘free of blame’?  It is said that Churchill was a prophet because he always insisted, in the years coming up to WWII that the Germans couldn’t be trusted and that they would inevitably have to be ‘dealt with’ again.  Sounds too much like the ‘career militarism’ that keeps Europe and the world in a continual state of war, doesn’t it?  Of course, Churchill went from prophet to saviour and ‘winner’s history’ presents what happened, as we present things in court in our Western justice system, as if the community is innocent, righteous and beyond reproach, and that criminal aggression jumpstarts from the internal ‘intention’ [allegedly twisted intellect and purpose] of the errant brother.

Our experience and intuition scream out to us that WWII has ‘deeper roots’ than Hitler and the Nazi’s, roots that lead back to the bully alliance of France, Britain and others, so why do we ‘write it up’ as if ‘it all started with the rantings of this guy, Adolf Hitler’?

What is the reason for this CONFUSED ATTRIBUTION of causality and culpability?

Two philosophers have notified us of two reasons which are not ‘independent’ of one and the other.  Friedrich Nietzsche shows us how our Western civilization psychological habit is to reduce every dynamic event to ‘doer-deed’ architecture while Henri Poincaré shows us how our Western scientific-thinking habit is to reduce every dynamic event to local-in-space-and-time causal sourcing [local jumpstarting].

Since our experience is of living within a continually transforming relational space and since modern physics affirms this inherently continuous, relational experience, on what basis would we not affirm it in our intellectual treatment of it?  Nietzsche explains the psychological habit in terms of its appeal to ego, while Poincaré explains the scientific-thinking habit in terms of the convenience of simplicity that is embodied in ‘what science is’.  As Ernst Mach observed;

“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

Nietzsche’s point about the ‘ego’ claiming ‘I did it’, ‘this outcome/result jumpstarted from me’, ‘I am the cause of this effect’, he elaborates as follows;

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “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’ 484

“Our bad habit of taking a mnemonic, an abbreviative formula, to be an entity, finally as a cause, e.g., to say of lightning “it flashes.” Or the little word “I.” To make a kind of perspective in seeing the cause of seeing: that was what happened in the invention of the “subject,” the “I”!  —Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 548

Evidently, we build this psychological habit into our language; e.g. the origin of ‘lightning’ is the historical conditioning of the relational spatial-plenum, but we can bring the phenomenon into the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of absolute space and absolute time simply by saying ‘lightning just flashed’, in the manner of ‘the gun just fired’, erasing the historical development of the phenomenon, the gradual buildup of static electricity through wind and friction and other dynamics.  It is like saying ‘the fifth skier crossing the same mountain slope ‘caused’ the avalanche; i.e. are we to jumpstart cause and effect from that local ‘here’ and ‘now’ [space and time] and ignore the historical development that is, ‘realistically’, the physical ‘cause’ of the ‘effect’?

Attributing the ‘cause’ of the avalanche-effect is a ‘logical’ rather than ‘physical’ attribution.  Physically, there is a matrix of relations [‘friction’] that develop that hold the piling snow in place which at some point become non-sustainable.  The wind, vibrations in the ground and the disturbance/pressure of the first four skiers were weakening that relational matrix, so the ‘physical phenomenal’ story does not start from the fifth skier.  But when the mother of two children who were playing in the snow below, pulls their lifeless bodies out of the avalanche rubble, she is not interested in doing post-doctorate research that will fully elucidate on the ‘cause’ of this result.

As she looks back up the trail of disturbed snow left by the avalanche, she sees the fifth skier in the red ski jackets and blue ski-pants standing right there at the top of the avalanche delta, and he is obviously ‘the one responsible’ for this terrible result, and this knowledge brings ‘closure’ to what has happened, that is more solid and more final than esoteric? discussion in terms of infinite cause as in a relational continuum [1], such as maintained by David Bohm and others.

This attribution is ‘logical’ but ‘confused’ and it happens all the time.  It can happen to a man who is just installed as the fifth CEO of a commercial corporation [or the fifth president of a nation] who suddenly finds himself sitting at the top of the delta from which a cascading cause is seen to jumpstart which ‘could be good’, … ‘could be bad’.

Obvious, the historical preconditioning of the relational space that a dynamic behaviour transpires within is of essential relevance to what unfolds.  It is absurd, from a physical phenomenological point of view, to ignore the historical preconditioning of the relational space and to insist that the cause of the outcome, good or bad,  jumpstarts from the ‘causal agent’ who ‘right now’ sits at the top of delta of cascading cause.

To reward or punish the alleged ‘causal agent’ on this sort of basis of ‘attribution’ of ‘causality/culpability’ is a very ‘confused’ behaviour.

But we, Western civilization, have institutionalized this confusion in our systems of governance, commerce and justice.

WE ARE THE “SOCIETY OF CONFUSED ATTRIBUTION, REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS” (‘SCARP’), and we are right now on an ever-steepening, slippery slope of our own making.

As Nietzsche points out, it is our ego, our ‘powerboater’ [as contrasted with ‘sailboater’] sense of who we are, that insists that we are the one, the point, where the buck starts and stops, for whatever unfolds at the base of the delta whose upper apex we occupy.  It is this kind of jumpstarted causal logic that earns the fifth CEO of Enron etc. the big bucks.  After stroking one’s ego and banking the big bucks, it is difficult to back out of this causal logic when there is disaster at the base of the delta.

But as Poincaré points out, it is our scientific thinking, that similarly ignores historical preconditioning in establishing ‘causal attribution’, and we ignore it because it simplifies our ‘calculations’;

 “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.

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.” —Henri Poincaré,  ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics.

Evidently, science, also, has chosen to ignore the historical preconditioning of the relational space that dynamics transpire within, in deducing cause-and-effect relations, and the reason is given openly and explicitly; i.e. it is for simplifying convenience;

“instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation”.

Newton’s insight into gravity was that ‘gravity was everywhere at the same time’ and thus every material body was moving under the simultaneous mutual influence of every body [including itself], but this was mathematically ‘intractable’, so Newton had to impute a ‘jumpstarting source’ [the analogue of ‘ego’] to every point in the abstract absolute space reference frame, and this ‘jumpstarting source’, he called ‘force’.  By calculating the ‘local jumpstarting force’ at whatever location was needed, based on the distribution of masses in space, one could ‘make an end run’ around the so-called ‘three body problem’, the impossibility of solving for the motion of a particular body when it was a participant in three-or-more bodies moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence.

How could this be?  How could one use mathematical trickery [calculating a vector force field in absolute Euclidian reference space] to get a solution that was mathematically impossible to get?

As Poincaré observes, there is a simplification here in that the historical preconditioning of the relational space is ignored, and “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.”

But the dynamics of nature are full of physical phenomena that ‘build and release’, like a relational matrix of springs, some of which are charging while others are discharging.  In the case of ‘lightning’, the relational electric charges slowly build and ultimately release, and when we make the assumption that ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’, we capture the lightning in the difference between two successive frames, and say ‘lightning flashes’, without “ studying directly the whole succession of phenomena”.  We do the same for ‘avalanches’; i.e. we make believe that ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’ and so we do not see the critical weakening of the relational matrix constituting the ‘friction’ that holds the heavy load of snow on the slope due to the rumbling of the SUV at the base of slope driven by the mother bringing her children up to the base of the slope to play in the snow.

We are the SCARP!

If you blow up your paper lunch bag and pop it with a loud bang, are you the cause of the man near you going berserk; i.e. the man with ‘shell-shock’ aka ‘PTSD’?  Depends on whether you assume, or not, that ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’, or whether one should instead be “studying directly the whole succession of phenomena”, including the historical conditioning of the individual that went berserk, which would open the door to ‘other causes’ that would by and by dilute the paper bag popper’s role in the affair.

If someone rolled a power-keg down a rocky slope and on bouncing down and hitting its 17^th rock, it detonated, would the newspapers show a picture of the fairly innocuous looking 17^th rock and headline; “Innocuous rock causes massive explosion!” or would they look ‘upstream’ into the ‘whole succession of phenomena’ for the cause, i.e. at the dynamics gave rise to the ‘explosive device’.  If you ask the ‘scientist’, he will say something like; “the explosion was caused by the intense compression of the explosive material in the keg, due to deformation of the keg arising from the particular manner in which it collided with the rock.

In the case of the person going berserk, the scientist will  assume that ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’ and address the ‘rage’ that is captured in the difference between two observation frames [as in video recording].  The scientist will orient to what happens from the moment the bag is popped; i.e. the popping triggers fear and rage that…  “occurs when oxytocin, vasopressin, and corticotropin-releasing hormone are rapidly released from the hypothalamus. This results in the pituitary gland producing and releasing large amounts of the adrenocorticotropic hormone, which causes the adrenal cortex to release corticosteroids. This chain reaction occurs when faced with a threatening situation”.

Similarly, if a woman has been historically preconditioned by sexual abuse, an unintentional brushing of her breast may trigger fear and rage associated with its being perceived to be a threatening situation.  It may be the innocuous 17^th rock that detonates this emotional explosion.

Now don’t go away, there is much more to this story; like how our Western SCARP habit of ‘banishing the female aspect’ in dynamics comes about. Hint: it is closely related to what has just been discussed.

This ‘trapping filter’ of looking for explanations of physical phenomena by taking ‘space’ and ‘time’ difference and assuming that ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’ puts us in the mental habit wherein we expect ‘cause’ to be ‘positive’.  For example, supposing you are monitoring temperatures and in some interval between present and the immediate past, we see a rise in temperature and begin to search for a causal agency that is responsible.   Chances are, we are going to look at everything else that is going on at the same time and try to find a ‘deviation’ in some or other physical dynamic that correlates with this rise in temperature.

But it could be that the cause is ‘negative’; e.g. an ice sheet that has been lowering the temperature for a long while has finally melted so the temperature depressing influence, having ceased, is the source of the apparent ‘rise’ in temperature [it is only a ‘rise’ in the sense of a decline of a temperature-depressing influence rooted in the remote past].

This ‘negative cause’ where ‘something that was there and has now gone away’ is responsible for a change in the system, opens up a whole new way of understanding ‘cause’.   For example, the following comments of Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel prize in Medicine for Vitamin C;

“Mr X has a lack of vitamin C and contracts a cold. The cold leads to pneumonia. Mr X dies and his body is taken to the mortuary…not with the diagnosis “lack of vitamin C”, but with the diagnosis “pneumonia”. This does not matter for him any more, but matters for the rest of mankind, which is mislead in its thinking and judgement about vitamins.”—Dr Albert Szent-Györgyi  [Note: there are roughly 200 different bacterial and viral exposures that can ‘cause pneumonia’ and ‘death by pneumonia.]

“Last year I collected a rather unfortunate personal experience. I broke down with pneumonia which I could not shake off for months, until I discovered that the quantities of ascorbic acid which I took (one gram daily) had become insufficient at my age (84 years). When I went up from one gram to eight, my troubles were over.”

How many rocks might be the ‘cause’ of explosion of the power keg as it tumbles down the slope?

How many balloon bursters, bag-poppers and backfiring vehicles might the ‘cause’ of the panic attack in the PTSD/shell-shock sufferer?

How many skiers and vehicle drivers might be the ‘cause’ of the avalanche?

How many innocuous unintended touchings might be the ‘cause’ of fear and rage in the person historically preconditioned by sexual abuse?

In all of these examples, it is possible for ‘cause’ to have a ‘negative sign’ and to derive from the historical preconditioning of the relational space the alleged ‘positive causal agent’ shares inclusion in.

The innocuous 17^th rock ‘causes’ the power keg explosion IFF one assumes that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’

The bang noise makers ‘cause’ the panic attack in the PTSD shell-shock sufferer IFF one assumes that;  ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’

The 5^th skier ‘causes’ the avalanche IFF one assumes that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’

The innocuous unintended touching ‘causes’ the negative fear and rage experience in the sexually abused person IFF one assumes that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’

And, of course, the innocuous [under normal conditions] bacterium or virus ‘causes’ pneumonia IFF one assumes that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’

This simplification of convenience, the assumption that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’ has become such a routine unquestioned habit with us, the SCARP, that we have become the SCARP [the society of confused attributions, rewards and punishments].

There is more, still, to be gleaned from inquiry into these inverted ‘negative sign causalities’ where ‘something that goes away’ is the source of what we perceive as a ‘positive happening’ due to our ‘difference-taking’ observations.   That is, how do we know, if something like temperature goes from ‘lower to higher’, whether it is due to an adding to the heat that was formerly there, or to ceasing a heat-removing process that was formerly there?  The relative equilibrium in temperature derives from many processes working, at the same time, in both the heat-adding and heat-removing direction, and the observed ‘difference’ could be due to ‘positive cause’ or ‘negative cause’; i.e. to the dynamics of the ‘operator’ or to the dynamics of the ‘operand’.

When vitamin C is taken away on the ‘operand’ side, but not until then, the conditioned relational space opens up for the bacterium-operator to spring into action.  The proliferation of bacteria is much easier to ‘see’ than the conditioning of the relational space associated with the decline/deficiency of vitamin C.   But of course, that is why there is more investment in bacteria-killing pharmaceuticals than in vitamins [which can come through healthy diet].

These ‘two types of causality, positive and negative’, can be further investigated by way of a thought experiment.  Picture a man’s living space like an obstacle course that he is running and that we are monitoring as ‘outsiders’.  We know that he has to ‘get up in the morning, light the fire, clean and dry his clothes, make his coffee and his breakfast, shovel the snow off the porch and away from the barn door, hitch up the horses and wagon, ride into the forest, fell some trees, de-branch and load them on the wagon, drive to the market, sell the wood and return home [and care for the horses etc. etc.] and run the obstacle course again the next day and the next.

We are measuring his positively-caused results in terms of the number of logs he produces and sells at the market.  Starting from ‘effect’ or ‘result’, the graph of logs produced, by-and-by we see the curve bump upwards to double what it was.  Our first thought is likely to be in terms of him having found a way to increase his production.  Perhaps he has traded his axe and saw in for a chainsaw or traded his horse and wagon in for a four-wheel drive truck and thus amplified his positive causal powers.  But the causal agency could also be negative; e.g. it could be that his girlfriend has moved in with him and is clearing away the obstacles of clothes cleaning, coffee and breakfast making; i.e. the negative cause of opening up of the relational living space and making it more accommodating to his actions is what is causing the production curve to double.  We see yet another rise in the production curve and once again our first thought is that he has found a way to improve his positive causal production.  But it turns out that the weather has changed and the snow shovelling and fire-making have been removed from his obstacle course, so it is once again on the negative causal side; i.e. on the side of ‘opening the way for’ [making the relational space more accommodating for] his positively asserting actions.

As Lao Tzu observed;

 ”Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;

It is the center hole that makes it useful.

Shape clay into a vessel;

It is the space within that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows for a room;

It is the holes which make it useful.

Therefore profit comes from what is there;

Usefulness from what is not there.”

If we measure his production in terms of the money he is paid for his logs, we are thinking of the marketing transaction that takes place [‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’] as captured by a video of his delivery of his log production to a buyer at the market.  The notion that this transaction is the culmination of his positive cause-effect achievement will be the interpretation his ego insists upon.  He may give his girlfriend a small part of ‘his hard-earned money’ [the check will have his name on it] to buy a dress and feel very benevolent and generous as he does so, since he is already giving her a roof over her head and food in her belly.  Meanwhile, the doubling of HIS production was actually due to the ‘negative cause’ associated with her improving of the accommodating quality of the relational space he is operating in.

Just as we said that the increased production of bacteria ‘causes the pneumonia’ IFF one assumes that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’ [ignoring the conditioning of the relational space of the body that was making it more accommodating to the production of bacteria], we can similarly say that the increased production is ‘caused by the logger’ IFF ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’.  Our eye is naturally attracted to the growth in the pile of logs the man is bringing to market, thus to say ‘he has doubled his production’ presents the growth of results in ‘positive causal terms’ and is misleading in the same way as saying; “something has increased the temperature”.  That is, it might instead be the case that “something that was decreasing the temperature has gone away; i.e. my block of ice that was cooling my apartment has finally melted”.

Now, the reader has probably intuited that there is more ground to cover in regard to the notion of the ‘two signs’ of causal agency, particularly if she has read Poincaré’s comments on Euclidian space as a ‘language convention’ which suggests that if we get rid of the Euclidian reference frame based ‘talk’ that is allowing us the ‘polar opposites’ of ‘up’ (positive) and ‘down’ (negative), or male-assert/intrude and female receive/accommodate, we can go all the way to where everything is both transmitting and receiving at the same time [Gabor/quantum communications] like a matrix of springs that wrap over and around the earth and can be charging and discharging at the same time at different wavelengths/periodicities.  This is the ‘holodynamic experience’ and it is arguably, like the Tao, beyond the reach of language.

There is a problem here with respect to how language is architected, in regard to ‘how far language can go’ in delivering complex experience such as described by Sapir and Whorf, and by Bohm and Poincaré;

“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously  built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”  – Edward Sapir

Benjamin Whorf published three articles in the MIT Technology Review titled “Science and Linguistics”, “Linguistics as an Exact Science” and “Language and Logic”. He was also invited to contribute an article to a theosophical journal, Theosophist, published in Madras, India, for which he wrote “Language, Mind and Reality”. In these final pieces he offered a critique of Western science in which he suggested that non-European languages often referred to physical phenomena in ways that more directly reflected aspects of reality than many European languages, and that science ought to pay attention to the effects of linguistic categorization in its efforts to describe the physical world. He particularly criticized the Indo-European languages for promoting a mistaken essentialist world view, which had been disproved by advances in the sciences, whereas he suggested that other languages dedicated more attention to processes and dynamics rather than stable essences. Whorf argued that paying attention to how other physical phenomena are described in the study of linguistics could make valuable contributions to science by pointing out the ways in which certain assumptions about reality are implicit in the structure of language itself, and how language guides the attention of speakers towards certain phenomena in the world which risk becoming overemphasized while leaving other phenomena at risk of being overlooked.”

 

 

“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

This completes the ‘introduction’ to this essay.   Since the described concepts apply generally.  Any physical dynamic available to our experience can be revisited coming from a more critical awareness that acknowledges our SCARP status.

* * *

Mayan Prophecy Update

Up until this point, I have not shared this information with anyone but closest family.   At 11:50 a.m. on December 21^st, I will be amongst a group of people lifted into the heavens, but only briefly so, and when the group is lowered to earth again, we will be descending into a world radically different from the one we left.

That’s if all goes well with the flight taking me from the pacific northwest offshore island boonies to Las Vegas that I am booked on to visit family over the holidays.

When we are primed for spooky stories and mysterious transformations, every little bump in the night tends to be amplified by our senses, making our heart-beat quicken and our goosebumps rise.  That is, prophecies tend to want to self-fulfill.

But that’s not to dismiss the Mayan prophecy.  We really do need a break from clinging to the old formulas which aren’t working, and since everything does move in cycles, we do need some kind of ‘excuse’ to let ourselves ‘let go’ and be liberated from deeply entrenched ruts.

Here’s the ‘change in the wind’ that’s turning my goosebumps on;

The medical establishment has a problem, as all mainstream science does, with its failure to understand phenomena [including illnesses] that arise from ‘deficiencies’.

A lot of people are dying early, unnecessarily, because of listening to medical science, and/or trusting themselves to medical science.  I scarcely need to say that medicine does a lot of good; of course, … but that is not my point.  I am pointing to a particular ‘blindness’ that pervades science in general and medicine in particular, a blindness that is about to be replaced by clear vision of what we have been missing.

The problem I am speaking of is endemic in Western society because of our having assimilated the mainstream way of over-simplified ‘scientific thinking’ that is in terms of ‘what things do’; i.e. in terms of ‘positive agency’.

If you read the history of medical science’s difficulty [huge!] in tuning in to ‘deficiencies’ as the source of illness, one sees acknowledgements of the difficulty, but little philosophical/conceptual analysis.  Here’s one historical observation, from many, of our inability to see causation that arises NOT from positive causal agencies, but from ‘deficiencies’ as with vitamin/dietary deficiencies;

“The evidence from disease would have led sooner to a conception of these food constituents and their functions but for a not unnatural bias in thought.  It is difficult to implant the idea of disease as due to deficiency.  Disease is so generally associated with positive agents — the parasite, the toxin, the materies morbi— that the thought of the pathologist turns naturally to such positive associations and seems to believe with difficulty in causation prefixed by a minus sign.” — Medical Research Committee, Report on the present state of knowledge concerning accessory food factors (vitamines), Special Report No. 38, London, H.M.S.O, 1919.  Cited in ‘The Germ Theory, Beriberi, and the Deficiency Theory of Disease’ by K. Codell Carter  [ negative cause ]

With respect to unnecessary loss of life, consider this one example of where the medical establishment continues to fail to see and understand the ‘deficiency’ side of illness.

In 2007 I started tracking the case of ‘c. difficile’, which kills thousands of people annually by its association with acute colitis, even though there is a very simple remedy [rebalancing the digestive track bacterial flora aka ‘fecal transplant’].   The remedy is still not accepted by the medical establishment so that if you have never heard of it, and you get colitis because your digestive tract bacterial flora is out of balance from taking anti-biotics, you have a very real chance of dying from it.   In fact, 70,000 people have died from it in the U.S., arguably needlessly, over the past five years.  The Center for Disease Control still ‘does not get it’;

 

http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/hai/  (March, 2012).   People getting medical care can catch serious infections called health care-associated infections (HAIs). While most types of HAIs are declining, one – caused by the germ C. difficile* – remains at historically C. difficile causes diarrhea linked to 14,000 American deaths each year  high levels.. Those most at risk are people, especially older adults, who take antibiotics and also get medical care. When a person takes antibiotics, good germs that protect against infection are destroyed for several months. During this time, patients can get sick from C. difficile picked up from contaminated surfaces or spread from a health care provider’s hands. About 25% of C. difficile infections first show symptoms in hospital patients; 75% first show in nursing home patients or in people recently cared for in doctors’ offices and clinics. C. difficile infections cost at least $1 billion in extra health care costs annually.

It’s not that C. difficile is a pathogen, it is that the way that the digestive tract flora is ‘out of balance’ makes it like the tinder dry forest relative to a discarded cigarette butt.

Periodically, every few years a few doctors will do small scale experiments to reconfirm that the remedy works [there is no money or career rewards for working on this as it does not involve money-making pharmaceutical remedies], that it is very simple, and that its success rate is over 90%.  But that still doesn’t mean that the medical establishment will accept and endorse it.

Here are a few quotes extracted from the following March, 2011 Canadian Medical Journal .

Dr. Thomas Louie, head of infectious disease at Calgary’s Foothills Hospital, performed his first fecal transplant in 1996 at the home of a patient who’d been suffering from a C. difficile infection for two years, after an administrator informed him that it couldn’t be done in the hospital. He’s since performed 70 such home treatments, mostly by enema, on a volunteer basis, nights and weekends. “I’m taking the risk myself,” he says

But in 2012, the remedy is still not approved [don’t forget, 14,000 people in the U.S. alone are dying every year from C. difficile associated colitis so that’s roughly 250,000 unnecessary deaths in the U.S. and Canada since 1996];

Meanwhile Burnaby’s Dr. Jeanne Keegan-Henry performed a fecal transplant in 2010 without getting approval from the local health authority, Fraser Health. Keegan-Henry claims the procedure cured the patient of recurrent C. difficile and would now like to offer the treatment more broadly, on compassionate grounds. But her local health authority forbade her from performing another treatment without an approved research proposal. In Canada, hospitals and local health authorities decide whether to take on the risk associated with an experimental treatment.

“At any given time, there are always some people sick in the hospital with C. difficile,” says Keegan-Henry, noting that 40% of patients fail first-line treatment and 40% of remaining patients fail second-line treatment. “Patients have died because they didn’t get access to this procedure.”

But Dr. Andrew Webb, vice president of medicine at Fraser Health, says the evidence isn’t strong enough to support fecal transplants as a rescue therapy. What literature exists comes from nonrandomized case studies, he says. “With these studies, you tend to report the positive and not the negatives. … There’s a rather long list of nasty infections that can be transmitted from bodily fluids.”

Of course, Dr. Louie and others (a tiny minority) using this remedy have taken the precautions to prevent the transmission of disease.  As another researcher says in the same article;

“A review of 100 Scandinavian cases found that fecal bacteriotherapy cured 89% of patients (Anaerobe. 2009;15: 285–90). Dr. Johan Bakken, the review author and a gastroenterologist in Duluth, Minnesota, says the risk of transmitting a contagious agent through fecal bacteriotherapy is merely “theoretical.”

Bakken says there hasn’t been a single reported case of a transmitted infection agent. He also estimates that more than 500 unpublished fecal transplants have occurred, most of those without donor screening because of its high cost. In most sites where fecal transplants are undertaken, donors are a “bed or table contact” of the infected individual, to minimize the risk of disease transmission, Bakken adds.”

This note is not really about ‘C. difficile’, but instead it is about something huge that pervades our society, a certain blindered way of looking at the world that is effecting almost everything, governance, justice, the economy, biological cell research and the concept of evolution, as well as medicine.  That is what I would like to share in this note, whether or not the Mayan prophecy has anything to say about this ‘re-awakening’.

To get straight to the point, the findings of modern physics, since the early 1900s, point to the dynamic physical world of our experience as being a relational continuum that mainstream science has, since Newton, for reasons of simplifying convenience, rendered in the non-relational terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, and this OVER-simplification, pervasively institutionalized in our society, has become the source of major dysfunction.

One example is the ongoing C. difficile fiasco and the centuries of trouble recognizing scurvy and other deficiency related illnesses as researchers looked instead for ‘positive causal pathogens.   The pattern in all of those cases replicates what is currently going on with C. difficile; i.e. a handful of researchers would periodically rediscover that the cause is negative rather than positive, but the establishment always holds out for a positive causal explanation and fails to ratify a negative cause.

[N.B. see current recurrence of ‘a handful of researchers’]

How does this happen?

In order to understand it, and if you have the same experience as me, you will be unable to find this explicitly written down anywhere, you have to deconstruct all of the usually-unquestioned assumptions in our standard scientific-thinking mode of inquiry.  But, knowing the answer, we can abbreviate this for the purpose of this short note, and ask the question; ‘how do we put a negative sign on ‘cause’?’ … as was suggested in the above cited 1919 Medical Report?

“the thought of the pathologist turns naturally to such positive associations and seems to believe with difficulty in causation prefixed by a minus sign.”

Here’s a simple example in the case of ‘warming’.  Supposing you have an apartment block that you are continually monitoring the temperature of.  Occasionally, you notice a sudden rise in temperature and you naturally try to correlate it with what else was going on at that time.  How hot a day was it, was the humidity on that day any different?  Did some of the apartment occupants get together and turn on their own private heaters [i.e. did electrical consumption rise at the same time, or was there the smell of kerosene in the air on that day.  You look at anything and everything that might correlate with the increase in temperature.

You share the story of this investigation with one of the occupants, and he immediately sees the answer.  Three months before the rise in temperature, he had stockpiled ice in his apartment because he wanted a cooler ambient temperature, and the ice had finally all melted on that day that the temperature had, as a result, gone up.   In other words, the rise in temperature was due to something that had happened in the remote past (ice deposition/stockpiling) that had depressed temperatures ever since that time and had finally depleted on the day of the ‘rise in temperature’.  But the investigation had set off with the starting assumption that it is ‘positive’ agencies that will cause rises in temperature, and moreover, positive causal agencies are contemporaneous with the ‘effect’.  After all, that is an assumption that has been built into the ‘design’ of scientific thinking, as the following comment by philosopher of science, Henri Poincaré, shows;

“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.

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.” ---Henri Poincaré,  ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics.

The point is that our investigative model is set up to look for contemporary correlations that identify the causal agent.

Or, more accurately perhaps, our ‘psyche’ has been set up to look for positive causal agency that manifests in contemporary correlations.

For example, it is obvious to the casual observer that the Colorado river has ‘carved out the Grand Canyon.  It is obvious because we know from experience, since playing in the ditch in the rain, that flowing water carves out channels in the dirt.  But how about if we put a drop of ink in the middle of a sheet of paper; by bending the sheet, we can make the drop of water dance and flow all over the sheet and make the same sort of river/tributary flow patterns.  What about the role of uplift and subsidence in the country rock where the Grand Canyon formed, did it make the runoff water dance?  It inevitably did.  It was where the runoff gradients came from in the first place.  We make that ‘disappear’ by imposing an absolute space and absolute time reference/measuring frame over the moving water so that we attribute ALL of the movement of the water to the water, and none to the transforming country rock, the river banks or female receptacle that is making the water dance (come this way, now come this way).   The imposed substitute fixed female space, the Euclidian ‘box’, takes the place of the real physical dynamic female space, and in the process, 100% of the dynamics are attributed to the male positive causal aspect.

Again, the ‘negative causal’ side is the ‘female’ side, the ‘river banks side’ rather than the positively causal river flow [fountainhead] side.  These two influence are in ‘conjugate relation’; i.e. they are not ‘two’ separate influences but dual aspects of the one dynamic of the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum.

How come our psyche seems only to tune to the ‘male’ aspect of the dynamic, the ‘positive, contemporary, causal agency’?  … and blinds us to the ‘female’ aspect of the dynamic, the negative, non-contemporary [historical preconditioning based] causal agency’?

We have to go back to Sapir, Whorf, Poincaré and Nietzsche to the answer to that. Together they are saying that it is ‘language’ that is doing this.  Nietzsche reminds us that we break up an event into doer-deed (subject-predicate) components, as with ‘ego’ that imputes a local ‘I’ to serve as the positive causal author of behaviour, … which PSYCHOLOGICALLY splits us out of our strand-in-the-relational-web physical reality.  Poincaré reminds us that we use the language of absolute space and absolute time [a fixed containing box] that substitutes for the dynamic female aspect;

 

“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

Sapir and Whorf remind us that the Hopi language does not backward continue all dynamics to local subject based starting points like the European languages do, but allows dynamics to be understood in terms of relational transformation.  For example, Hopi acknowledges that group dynamics can be like the relational dynamics in the flow of the freeway [canoes in the flow of the river] where the female opening of space that accommodates movement into it is conjugate to the asserting male movement.  There is only ONE PHYSICAL FLOW-MOVEMENT with conjugate aspects.  The relatively moving participants are continually creating the banks they are themselves flowing through.  The male and female movements cannot be split into two separate parts.  Mach’s principle applies; “the male asserting is giving shape to the female accommodating at the same time as the female accommodating is giving shape to the male asserting.”  The transforming spatial-relations are one dynamic.  The outside observer tends to focus on the ‘positive space’ male aspect as in ‘what things-in-themselves are doing’, ignoring the ‘negative space’ female aspect as in ‘what openings of possibility-to-do’ are unfolding for me?’.   But the included participant is well aware that he needs ‘negative space openings’ to assert into, and he recognizes that the ‘flip side’ of his moving [relative to the others, not to an absolute fixed space reference frame] is the transforming of the negative space that he and others need in order to continue positive asserting  This is the realm of ‘the three+ body problem’ discussed earlier.

Continuing on this same theme of ‘the missing female aspect’, … how would you describe your actions in the morning?  E.g. …‘get out of bed, get washed up, have coffee and breakfast’.  You are the raging river in action.  But what about the bathroom where towels and everything were clean and in place, and what about the coffee and breakfast that was waiting for you; i.e. the accommodating conjugate aspect of your dynamic.  If coffee and breakfast is in the kitchen, you take it in the kitchen, if it is in the dining room, you take it in the dining room.  Is your dynamic not a little bit like the ink drop in the middle of the bending sheet of paper, made to dance by the transforming of the relational space you are moving about in?

How would you INCLUDE that in your giving an account of these dynamics?  What are you leaving out if you are the meteorologist and you say; ‘Hurricane Katrina is heading north toward New Orleans’?  That is a purely male positive causal account.  Aren’t you forgetting that the whole atmosphere is opening and shifting around to accommodate her move, and that it is impossible to split into two separate and distinct parts her ‘inhabitant-dynamic’ and the conjugate ‘habitat-dynamic’?  Furthermore, the whole atmosphere is the primary source of the movement.  The source of the movement could be female, the sun warming the atmosphere and inducing it to dance with itself.  The dynamic does not begin with the storm-cell and ‘its’ actions just because our language is architected so as to infuse doer-deed structure into every relational process/event, as in ‘lightning flashes’, ‘storminess grows and moves’, … to make it appear as if the dynamic is locally launched, which it clearly is not.  As Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’, “the relational dynamic of nature not only inhabits the organizings [organisms], it creates them.  In aboriginal languages this would be; ‘the Organizing of Nature not only inhabits the organizings but creates them.’

The aboriginal languages of Turtle Island (North America) do not assume philosophical dualism by breaking events apart into ‘doer-deed’ topology as European languages do.  That is, our European architecture language based in ‘being’ and ‘dualism’ is causing us to ‘drop out’ the female conjugate of the dynamics and impute all action to male, positive causal agency.

The following three quotes by Sapir, Whorf and Bohm, all point to the same failing in our ‘Standard Average European’

“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously  built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”  – Edward Sapir

Benjamin Whorf published three articles in the MIT Technology Review titled “Science and Linguistics”, “Linguistics as an Exact Science” and “Language and Logic”. He was also invited to contribute an article to a theosophical journal, Theosophist, published in Madras, India, for which he wrote “Language, Mind and Reality”. In these final pieces he offered a critique of Western science in which he suggested that non-European languages often referred to physical phenomena in ways that more directly reflected aspects of reality than many European languages, and that science ought to pay attention to the effects of linguistic categorization in its efforts to describe the physical world. He particularly criticized the Indo-European languages for promoting a mistaken essentialist world view, which had been disproved by advances in the sciences, whereas he suggested that other languages dedicated more attention to processes and dynamics rather than stable essences. Whorf argued that paying attention to how other physical phenomena are described in the study of linguistics could make valuable contributions to science by pointing out the ways in which certain assumptions about reality are implicit in the structure of language itself, and how language guides the attention of speakers towards certain phenomena in the world which risk becoming overemphasized while leaving other phenomena at risk of being overlooked.”

 

“Bohm did note, however, that our (Indo-European) languages tend to be highly noun-oriented and well suited to discussions of concepts and categories. By contrast, quantum theory demands a more process-oriented approach, a verb-based language perhaps that emphasizes flow, movement and constant transformation. (Bohm’s Holomovement – the movement of the whole.)

To this end Bohm developed the notion of a particular language form, the Rheomode, adapted to the discussion of quantum theory and, indeed, to consciousness. It is not clear if Bohm ever considered the Rheomode to have any practical consequences – ie that people would end up speaking it. However, he does appear to have encouraged staff and students at Brockwood Park School, England to experiment with the language. Towards the end of his life Bohm met with Blackfoot and Ojibwaj speakers and discovered that their own family of languages, as well as their process-world view, have much in common with the Rheomode.”

We can further extend this ice-stockpiling example by supposing that the stockpiled ice had CO2 dissolved in it.   The surplus CO2 being liberated from the melting ice would reach a peak at the same time as the warming blip, suggesting that the rising CO2 might have reached some threshold whereby it caused the warming jump.  That is, if one assumed that the cause of the warming was ‘positive’, the rising CO2 would have provided the best correlation to explain it, even though there was no reason to be looking for such a correlation in the first place, given that the change was due to a ‘minus’ [ice deficiency] instead of a ‘positive’.

Evidently, we are looking at a psychological ‘glitch’ that is more general than what occurs in the medical arena;

“The evidence from disease would have led sooner to a conception of these food constituents and their functions but for a not unnatural bias in thought.  It is difficult to implant the idea of disease as due to deficiency.  Disease is so generally associated with positive agents — the parasite, the toxin, the materies morbi— that the thought of the pathologist turns naturally to such positive associations and seems to believe with difficulty in causation prefixed by a minus sign.” — Medical Research Committee, Report on the present state of knowledge concerning accessory food factors (vitamines), Special Report No. 38, London, H.M.S.O, 1919.  Cited in ‘The Germ Theory, Beriberi, and the Deficiency Theory of Disease’ by K. Codell Carter

This ‘blindness’ we’re talking about is not just to do with medicine; it is far more general.

How general is it?

It appears to lie at the source of ‘patriarchy’ in Western civilization, and the tradition of moral judgement based on ‘good and evil’, and the secularized theological concept of sovereigntism, and the hierarchical organizing approach, and philosophical dualism, the habitat-inhabitant, mind-matter split.  That is, it appears to lie at the source of almost all of those understandings that make the aboriginal belief tradition differ from the Western civilization belief tradition.

That is, there is clear evidence showing that ‘it does’.

And Nietzsche has basically explained it already.

To put it succinctly, Newton invented ‘force’ to enable us to re-render dynamics as if they jumpstarted from ‘here’ and ‘now’ [all male positive cause].  Our ego invented ‘intention’ to enable us to re-render our dynamics as if they jumpstarted from ‘here’ and ‘now’ [all male positive cause].  In other words, Newtonian physics is ‘anthropomorphism’ and we have institutionalized it in our globally dominating Western culture-ized society.

Every high school student that studies science, is taught Newton’s laws, but few are taught the philosophical problems that Newton ran into that prevented him from capturing and including in his scientific laws, the full complexity of nature’s dynamics as were coming to him [as come to anyone of us] from his observations and experience.  For example, Newton saw everything in the cosmos as being mutually interdependent, [non-dualist dynamics in which male-positive cause and female-negative cause are dual aspects of the one dynamic of the continual transformation of relational space].

But when Newton tried to capture this in a mathematical formulation, it proved impossible because, while the maths allowed him to explain dynamics in terms of ‘two body interactions’ [implying absolute fixed empty and infinite space], mathematics lacked the capability to capture the motion of three or more bodies moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence.  Newton commented; “an exact solution for three bodies [for the relational web view of dynamics], if I am not mistaken, exceeds the force of any human mind.”

The simplification he was forced to make, which philosophers like Mach and Nietzsche and Schrödinger and Bohm have argued is getting us into trouble, is something we continue to ‘use’ every day, without even thinking about it.

The simplification is this.  While Newton’s insight on the gravitational field was that everything was at the same time influencing everything [as in the aboriginal ‘web-of-life’], there were no mathematics capable of capturing this, so he invented the notion of ‘force’ so that he could break the dynamics down to ‘what things did’ when ‘force’ was applied to them.   But as Nietzsche objected, this is how we like to think of ourselves in our ‘ego’ mode; i.e. we like to think of ourselves as local, independently-existing material things-in-ourselves with our own locally-originating intellect and purpose-directed behaviours.  That is, our ‘intention’ plays the same sort of role as ‘force’; i.e. it allows us to think in terms of the dynamics of ourselves or of an object, as jumpstarting from the thing-in-itself due to a ‘force’ that is either externally applied to it, or internally sourced within in [e.g. ‘intellect and purpose’].   This invention of ‘force’ allows us to artificially ‘break apart’ the interdependent, relational ‘web-of-life’ view, the ‘physical’ reality according to the findings of modern physics, and synthetically ‘re-render’ the essentially ‘relational’ dynamic instead, in the idealized terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what things-in-themselves do within an idealized absolute fixed reference frame [absolute space and absolute time].   There are no such things in the world of our physical experience as ‘absolute space and absolute time’, but we impose these mathematical framing/measuring devices to ‘simplify’ the physical dynamics of our experience, which are inherently relational, as in the aboriginal worldview.

I will say again, for emphasis, that it is the ‘ego’, the local jumpstarting intention that is called Fiktion by Nietzsche, plays a corresponding role [enables the notion of local here and now jumpstarting of behavioural dynamics] to ‘force’ in Newtonian science; i.e. ‘force’ enables the notion of local here and now jumpstarting of dynamics.  And furthermore, that the notion of ‘force’ derived from ‘ego’ making science ‘anthropomorphism’.  As Nietzsche says, we invent this local jumpstarting of behaviour by imposing the doer-deed notion on an event, so that the outcome, we see as being due to the intention of the doer;

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “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’ 484

“Our bad habit of taking a mnemonic, an abbreviative formula, to be an entity, finally as a cause, e.g., to say of lightning “it flashes.” Or the little word “I.” To make a kind of perspective in seeing the cause of seeing: that was what happened in the invention of the “subject,” the “I”!  —Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 548

 

This ‘mechanical’ worldview that sees dynamics in terms of what independent things-in-themselves do in absolute space and time SEEMS to work very well in simple applications, and we have progressively institutionalized it in commerce, justice and governance/management in general, … but it is oversimplification that is hurting us, and this ‘hurt’ is implicitly moving us back towards ‘resilience’ and ‘sustainability’ in our economic activity and towards ‘restorative practice’ in our ‘justice’ maintaining systems.

As Ernst Mach observed, the real, physical space we live in is a space where ‘what we do’ ‘bounces back on us’.  Mach’s principle can be stated;

 “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.”  

That is, the findings of modern science/physics are that our living space is a continually transforming relational space.  This means that the SOURCING of dynamics is non-local, non-visible, and non-material [it is ‘relational’ as in a ‘holodynamic’ or as in the 'everywhere-at-the-same-time' influence of gravity].  But what the common simplification does is to ignore the relational character of our living space and recast dynamics in terms of locally jumpstarting them in the ‘here’ and ‘now’ [in absolute space and absolute time].

This ‘nonlocal’ sourcing of dynamics sounds a bit weird, no?  But what about the ice stockpile that we only noticed when it depleted?  What about if it had been put there by our great grandfather before we were even born [and why not?], and here we were noticing the warming and looking for contemporary positive causal agency IN THE IMMEDIATE PAST!

How about the WWII war veteran with PTSD who goes berserk when someone blows up and pops a paper lunch bag.  Do we look in the immediate past for a positive cause; i.e. the paper-bag popper caused it?  Or do we look in the remote past for a negative cause (a balance deficit), such as the war experience?

What about if someone rolls a powder-keg down a hill and it bumps over a dozen rocks before it at last hits one that detonates it.  Does the ‘headline’ that captures this say; ‘Innocuous looking rock causes huge explosion’?   No, we would likely go back upstream to the people who pushed the keg over the crest of the hill, or to the people who made the explosive ingredients etc.

“In [Bohm’s interpretation of quantum theory] he argued that the way science viewed causality was also much too limited. Most effects were thought of as having only one or several causes. However, Bohm felt that an effect could have an infinite number of causes. For example, if you asked someone what caused Abraham Lincoln’s death, they might answer that it was the bullet in John Wilkes Booth’s gun. But there are many more possibilities, such as the invention of gunpowder, guns and all of the factors that caused Booth to want to kill Lincoln, all of the steps in the supposed evolution of the human race that allowed for the development of a hand capable of holding a gun, and so on, and so on. It is important for scientists to remember that no single cause-and-effect relationship is ever really separate from the universe as a whole.”

The point is once again, Mach’s point which comes directly from our experience; “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.”  The ‘curse of the mummy’ is suggestive of booby traps being set thousands of years ago that reach out to foil today’s tomb robbers.   Such a space [all space, since this is general] is historically preconditioned, so that the cause of the falling obelisk is not simply the male asserting agent in the present that ‘triggers’ it, but the historical preconditioning.

As with C.difficile, if the balance in the relational space is destabilized, then normally innocuous agents can move into unoccupied spaces to consume nurturances and proliferate and be seen as ‘pathogens’.  If society becomes divided into those with overabundance and those impoverished, normally innocuous people can move into unoccupied spaces to consume nurturances and proliferate, and be seen as ‘thieves’.

Now, when would the ‘cause’ of this not be seen with a ‘negative sign’; i.e. in terms of ‘deficiency’?

The reason why is that ‘cause’ has, by the force of European/scientific language architecture, been reduced to purely male positive cause.  Therefore the only thing available to explain why some have more and some have less is positive male cause.    The negative female cause has been eliminated by imposing a notional fixed reference box in place of the female aspect.  Those who fall into a ‘birdsnest on the ground’ or ‘land of milk and honey’ still attribute ‘what they achieve’ to ‘what they achieve’, out of the context of how accommodating the negative female causal aspect was to them.  That’s because we view the actions of the individual as jumpstarting from the individual, as if the individual really was situated within a fixed box such as the absolute space and absolute time reference frame we use to measure his actions.

Conclusions:

We are SCARP,  a Society of Confused Attribution, Rewards, and Punishments.

Our Western culture has a big problem, as does its science, with its failure to acknowledge phenomena that arise from ‘deficiencies’ [and/or 'holodynamic cause', like the influence of gravity which is 'everywhere-at-the-same-time'].

For example, how DO we put a negative sign on ‘cause’?  Like the pathologist, our general habit is to turn to positive associations of cause and we have difficulty in believing in causation “prefixed by a minus sign.”

In the relational space of a fluid dynamic, the dynamic is ‘both signs at the same time’, male-and-female, positive-and-negative, source-and-sink.  We experience these conjugates in the act of breathing and our tendency is to ‘make two dynamics out of the one dynamic’ because one seems to follow the other (exhaling follows inhaling), but our focus in this case is on ‘motion’ and ‘motion’ is downstream from the organizing tension, the ‘spring-loading’ of space in which there is simultaneous ‘loading’ of the springing (conversion of kinetic to potential energy) and ‘unloading’ of the springing (conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy), as in the conjugate relating of the crest and trough of a wave.  We can observe ‘duality’ here even though the physical phenomenon is essentially ‘non-dual’.

The harmonious feeling in an embrace lies in the dynamic unity that comes from, at the same time, asserting and accommodating.  Our actual included-in-relational-space-experience affirms the viewpoint of Heraclitus that ‘opposites’ are only apparent and spring forth from out of each other.  The toroidal flow of the hurricane is ‘polar’ with respect to the dynamic relational topology of sink transforming into source along its central flow-channel, however, this ‘local opposition’ is not ‘foundational’ or absolute but is engendered by the evolutionary tendency in the overall relational space.

Still, given that we, and all ‘local forms’ [cells, atoms, particles, planets, stars] are, like the convection cells in the flow, ‘organizings’ within the ‘Organizing’, the latter being the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum that is engendering ‘organizings’ within itself, the Brahman that not only inhabits but creates its Atmans, how do we ‘talk about this’?  Is it not the Tao-that-cannot-be-told?

Our psychological investigations reveal that Newton invented ‘force’ to enable the re-rendering of dynamics as if they jumpstarted from ‘right here’ and ‘right now’ [all male positive cause], just as our ego invented ‘intention’ to enable us to re-render our dynamics as if they jumpstarted from the ‘right here’ and ‘right now’ of our ‘self’ understood as ‘local being’ [all male positive cause].  In other words, Newtonian physics takes on the appearance, as Nietzsche suggests, of ‘anthropomorphism’ and we have institutionalized this reduction of ‘infinite cause’ to ‘locally jumpstarting all male cause’ as the discursive-traction-giving reformulation of choice in our globally dominating Western culture permeated society.  This fragmentation of the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum into locally jumpstarting male causal agents provides the architecture of our European languages.

One problem.

We have used this language so much and so often to describe ‘what is going on in the world’ in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves are doing in space and time’ (the ‘right here’ and ‘right now’ coordinates of anyone’s personal perspective), that we tend to confuse this fragmented ‘idealization’ for ‘physical reality’.  The physical reality, as modern physics informs us, is not this linguistically fragmented reconstruction, but the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum, the ‘holodynamic’, the ‘Organizing’ which is continually gathering and regathering its diverse multiplicity of ‘organizings’ whose relation to the ‘Organizing’ is topologically analogous to the convecting cell or ‘resonating feature’ in the flow.

Huge pressures have been building in our society that would have us ‘break out’ of this self-imposed psychological reduction of cause to all male, positive cause.  These pressures are arising because we are forgetting that our linguistic reconstruction of the relational space of our experience is a ‘simplification of convenience’ rather than physical reality consistent with our experience, and it is this ‘confusing’ of ‘idealization’ for ‘physical reality’ that is ‘giving us fits’.

In science, we use the language of mathematics which converts the local forms we have assigned word-name-labels to, to absolute existences or ‘identities’.  As John Stuart Mill observes; “Every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the existence of the object defined.”

This issue of whether these things we are giving names to are ‘physically real’ is an issue that divides scientists.  Poincaré observes that mathematicians split into two camps on this; ‘realists’ that believe that these forms that we have named and given notional things-in-themselves local being status to are physically real and exist whether or not there is anybody there to observe, define and assign name-labels to them,  and ‘pragmatist-idealists’ that believe that these named, notional things-in-themselves forms [that the observer psycho-logically breaks out of the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum] are ‘idealizations’ that are useful and perhaps necessary [for rational discourse] but are not to be confused for ‘physical reality’.   The ‘relationists’ [pragmatist-idealists] such as Mach, Poincaré, Nietzsche, Bohm, Schrödinger were, as Mach put it, ‘kicked out of the Church of Physics’ for the heresy of not believing in the absolute physical existence, as local things-in-themselves-beings, of these observer-named-and-defined relational ‘organizings’ within the ‘Organizing’.  Poincaré comments on this psychological division in scientific-thinking minds as follows;

“…the [realists], as I was saying, speak constantly of epistemology; that is, the science of sciences. And it is well understood that this epistemology is completely independent of psychology; that is, that it must teach us what the sciences would be if there were no scientists ; that we must study the sciences, not of course with the supposition that there are no scientists, but at least without the supposition that there are. Thus not only is Nature a reality independent of the physicist who could be tempted to study it, but physics itself is also a reality which would exist even if there were no physicists. This is realism indeed.

 

And why do the pragmatists refuse to permit objects which could not be defined in a finite number of words? It is because they believe that an object exists only when it is conceived by the mind and that an object could not be conceived by the mind independently of a being capable of thinking. There is indeed idealism in that. And since a rational subject is a man, or something which resembles man, and consequently is a finite being, infinity can have no other meaning than the possibility of creating as many finite objects as we wish.

… And then we can make a somewhat peculiar remark. Realists ordinarily adopt the point of view of physics. They affirm the independent existence of material objects or of individual souls, or what they call substances. For them, the world existed before the creation of man, even before the creation of living beings ; it would still exist even if there were no God nor any rational being.

… But the Cantorians are realists even where mathematical entities are concerned. These entities seem to them to have an independent existence; the geometer does not create them, he discovers them. These objects therefore exist so to speak without existing, since they can be reduced to pure essences. But since, by nature, these objects are infinite in number, the partisans of mathematical realism are much more infinitist than the idealists. Infinity to them is no longer a becoming since it exists before the mind which discovers it. Whether they admit or deny it, they must therefore believe in actual infinity.

 — Henri Poincaré, ‘Dernieres Pensées’, Ch. V. ‘Les Mathematiques et la Logique’

The ‘idealists’ are in the position of the so-called ‘denialists’ in todays issues; i.e. their views are of little consequence as the ‘realists’ have ‘elected themselves’ as central authorities and continue to institutionalize practices based on the realist belief system.  It is this predominance of the ‘realist’ belief based system that is the source of SCARP and our non-restorative Justice system that assumes that space is a non-participant in the dynamics of individuals, forcing us to assume that that the behaviour of the individual jumpstarts fully and solely from out of the interior of the individual, so that an outcome, if traced back ‘causally’ to an individual, can be assumed to ‘cul-de-sac’ right there, in the interior of the individual, no matter if the judge and prosecutor and the members of the jury are part of a relational bully-gang that conditions the common living-space/habitat that is at the same time conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants so as to incite acts of violence against the oppressing faction, and hiding this behaviour behind the declared neutrality of the Justice system.  [The ‘restorative justice’ of aboriginal tradition acknowledges the web-of-relations in the community dynamic that makes the notion of locally jumpstarted positive cause impossible, so that ‘justice’ is seen instead as an operational process that cultivates, restores and sustains balance and harmony in the relational web that is ‘community’]

These sorts of pressures as continue to rise in our modern ‘realist’-based SCARP are ‘haunting’ our communities giving us a sense that the time is ripe for ‘something big has to happen’.   The Mayan prophecy is thus a ‘good fit’; i.e. there is a positive correlation between rising dysfunction-tensions that suggest ‘something big has to change’ and the Mayan prophecy that some huge change is about to happen.  We thus find ourselves in the same sort of position as climatologists studying ice cores for cyclic concentrations of CO2 and cycles of global surface warming.  There is a clear correlation but ‘which is causing which’?  Or, rather, what is the sign of the causality, positive or negative?

So, maybe David Bohm is right, that ‘cause’ is not one-sidedly male, and neither is ‘cause’ two-sidedly male-female, at least not in a dualist sense, but is instead infinite-dimensional, as in a holodynamic [fluid-dynamical world] where everything is the cause of everything.  Is it the farmer or the soil, male or female, positive or negative that is producing the crops?  Or is it the sun?  The farmer (imputed male positive cause) gets paid, the soil (female negative cause) gets used.

Lao Tzu had something to say about this;

“Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;

It is the center hole that makes it useful.

Shape clay into a vessel;

It is the space within that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows for a room;

It is the holes which make it useful.

Therefore profit comes from what is there;

Usefulness from what is not there.”

Even though the soil and in general the opening of possibilities in the relational space we are included in ‘orchestrate’ our actions and ‘put us to work’, we are in the habit of giving full credit to ourselves, to our male positive causal actions, for the ‘results’ of ‘cause’.  This dualist notion of ‘all male genesis, no female epigenesis’ is foundational to the free-market/capitalist process.

‘We’ is the voice of the observing, narrator-Judge, who, by claiming to be ‘outside of the goings on he is reporting on’, claims to be a ‘neutral observer’, who says, ‘the farmer raises crops’ [I saw him doing it], ‘the cells reproduce’ [I saw them doing it], ‘the cars move down the freeway’ [I saw them doing it].  But we know, for example, that the cells are organizings within the Organizing of nature rather than local subjects/beings that jumpstart their own assertive behaviours.  The cells are what lie in the middle-place/milieu between the outside-inward orchestrating agency of the receptors and the inside-outward asserting positive agency of the effectors.

The observer-judge who removes himself from the dynamics he is, though he denies it, included in, can no longer ‘feel’ what the participant in the flow of the freeway feels-experiences, that he is included in a three+body dynamic wherein his assertive moving relative to the group, is at the same time, the accommodating opening of relational space allowing his assertive moving.  In other words, it is through his included experience that he understands ‘cause’ in a non-dualist sense.  By accepting his relational negative-causal powers, he can participate in opening up space to dissolve an imminent conflict/collision, and/or operate bully-gang style to selectively close down the ‘accommodating opening’ in the flow that is conjugate to assertive movement.  The observer-judge documenting these goings on, who captures them in the one-sided male-assertive terms of ‘what things-in-themselves are doing’, will, by his choice of language, blind the reader of his judgement/report to the ‘negative causal sourcing’ of what unfolds.   That is, our Justice system officially ‘pretends’ that there is no such thing as ‘negative causal sourcing’.

If the ambulance driver makes it through congested traffic faster than others, should we assume ‘positive cause’; i.e. should we assume that this is due to his causal powers?  Or should we assume ‘negative cause’?  In order to assume ‘negative cause’ we have to acknowledge the physical reality of negative cause, of the female conjugate aspect of dynamics, which at the same time acknowledges the relational nature of space [space is not just infinite emptiness/void that drifts in between the only real things, the local absolute ‘things-in-themselves’ beings].  Any group of people in the flow of the freeway understands that they can use spatial-relations to entrap or liberate selected others, and they understand as well that no evidence of this is left behind in evidence linguistically documented in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.

They can also take pride in their contribution to how many accidents DID NOT HAPPEN that WOULD OTHERWISE HAVE HAPPENED, because of their joint relational-space based capability of opening up accommodating space as and where needed.   Where such accidents have ‘been allowed to happen’, there is no evidence left behind that records how easily it could have been prevented by ‘negative cause’, but those who experienced inclusional participation in that flow, who held the power of negative cause in their ‘collective hands’, would have captured a record of this.  If they had tried to share that with the judge, the judge would likely have said something like; “this court deals in facts, it does not deal in imaginative suppositions.  We are here to determine exactly what happened, and the only way to determine this is to capture what everyone involved in the events leading up to the accident did, and in what way, if any, their actions causally contributed to the outcome”.

This sort of justice system, that deals only in positive cause, is foundational to SCARP, a Society of Confused Attributions, Rewards and Punishments.

As sentient becomings, ‘organizings’ in the grand ‘Organizing’, we might just stand still contemplating what looks like a desert all around us, closing our eyes and reopening them and watching spring bringing the desert alive with us in the middle of it.  Are we like the drop of water in the middle of the bending sheet of paper, pulled this way and that, a dancer in an ocean of ‘negative cause’, … or are we the macho determined stream made of USDA-approved ‘positive cause’ that is going to carve its mark into, and sculpt the landscape it inhabits?  Does man belong to the earth or does the earth belong to man?  Perhaps we need the BOTH/AND logic of the included third to unravel this question; i.e. perhaps, as the non-dualists/relational theorists [Mach, Poincaré, Bohm, Schroedinger] contend, it/we is all one thing, a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum, an Organizing within which we are ‘organizings’.

I, you, she, we.
In the garden of mystic lovers
these are not true distinctions.

—Jelaluddin Rumi

In order to figure this out, moving beyond our predominating SCARP status would be helpful.

* * * * *

Footnote on ‘Politics’

Many if not most of the arguments in the world, and the ‘alignment of behaviour’ [hierarchical organizing] come from observing ‘what things-in-themselves are doing in space and time’, and ‘judging’ ‘what we/they should be doing’ and ‘what we/they should not be doing’.  We could not make these judgements without making ‘causal attributions’ as to what the ‘results’ of the behaviours in question are, or are likely to be, and we ‘reward’ and ‘punish’ on this basis which leads to relative value rankings of different courses of action.

In the secular realm which governs ‘what is and is not legal’, [going beyond the religious/spiritual realm wherein one decides ‘what is and what is not moral’], causal attributions can become difficult because of the complexity of technology.  To further complicate things, scientists and technologists disagree on many issues.  This has been leading, increasingly, to a techno-social Darwinism as described by evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin;

“It is one of the contradictions of a democratic society in a highly advanced technological world, … to make rational political decisions, you have to have a knowledge which is accessible only to a very few people.”  [Lewontin continues by noting;] “that different people have different interests, and therefore the struggle is not a moral one, it’s a political one.  It’s always a political one, and that’s the most important thing you have to recognize… that you may be struggling to make the world go in one direction, … [while] somebody else is struggling to make it go in another direction, and the question is; who has power?  And if there’s a differential in power, and if you haven’t got it and they have, then you have to do something to gain power, which is to organize. “  – Richard Lewontin

I certainly don’t agree with Lewontin that this is the way it has to be.  For starters, this scenario is cast entirely in terms of ‘positive cause’ and is therefore in the realm of ‘idealization’ rather than in the realm of ‘physical reality’.

Furthermore, Lewontin is describing a ‘fault-intolerant’ system due to the fact that these ‘rational political decisions’ [based on dubious and controversial scientific theories] are being made within massively powerful hierarchical systems that make decisions affecting everyone on earth, based on a majority vote within those sovereign states with the most powerful and advanced technological infrastructures on earth.  All around the world, at the same time, there are initiatives that seek to restore ‘local sustainability’ and to cultivate and sustain harmony and balance, that have up until the present been rendered impossible due to increasingly centralized regulated direction.

While popular bandwagons like ‘anthropogenic global warming’ (AGW) seek to move this techno-political power to global scale regulation and enforcement, the forces of devolution of techno-political decision-making are going on at the same time.  If one finds merit in the discussion in the body of this essay, it will become apparent that the ‘positively signed’ causal attributions in AGW suffer from the faults that have been discussed.  Purely positively-signed causal agency DOES NOT EXIST IN THE PHYSICAL, NATURAL WORLD.

In the earlier discussion of the excluded observer-judge, it was evident that the logical, linguistic documentation in terms of ‘what things in-themselves were doing’ captured the dynamics in purely ‘positive causal’ terms, and failed to acknowledge the ‘negative cause’ conjugate aspect which ‘left no physical record’, but which was responsible for ‘what didn’t happen’ in such a manner as to cultivate and sustain balance and harmony in the flow.  It was pointed out that the experience of the participants is where the understanding comes in, of ‘negative cause’ as the conjugate of ‘positive cause’.

Thus, in moving the planning and direction of ‘what things do’ up a vertical hierarchy so that directions can be cascaded down, since only those at the ‘ground level’ are inclusionally experiencing participants, the only thing that CAN BE PORTED UPWARDS from where the rubber meets the road is ‘positive cause’.  Dynamic behaviours directed by instructions encoded in terms of ‘positive cause’ are like ‘robot/machine behaviours’; they are ‘literal’ translations in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.  As such, they are missing the source of resilience that associates with ‘negative cause’ [where it is in conjugate relation with ‘positive cause’; i.e. in physically real dynamics, rather than in dynamics as documented in ‘positive cause only’ terms by an ‘excluded observer-judge’].  The splitting apart of ‘authority/direction’ from ‘responsibility/implementation’, as is commonly done in large scale vertical hierarchical organizations thus creates the potential for great dysfunction by its tendency to convert naturally ‘organic’ dynamics rich in negative cause influence, to ‘programmable machinery’ operating in pure ‘positive cause’ assertive mode.

This effect continues to intensify with advances in communications; i.e. the SCARP continues to steepen.

* * * * * * *

causality, culpability and connectedness

Author’s Prologue: This essay speaks to general dysfunction in the world arising from the values and beliefs of a now globally dominant Western civilization.  A science-fostered aberrant belief in the ‘here and now’, aka ‘being’, as the ‘source’ of dynamical behaviour lies at the heart of this dysfunction.  But, as scientist-philosophers such as Ernst Mach and Erwin Schrödinger have shared, our Atman [here-and-now ‘self’] is our Brahman [our everywhere-and-always ‘self’].

Yes, it is useful and perhaps necessary to personify a hurricane (e.g. ‘Katrina’) and speak in terms of this ‘local being’, the Atman-hurricane; its ‘birth’, its ‘development’ and intensification/strengthening, its ‘movements’ and its ‘assertive actions’ such as the ‘wreaking of destruction in New Orleans’, and of its dissipation and demise.   But it was never not the Brahman-hurricane, the dimple in the continually transforming spatial plenum, the dimple that could not help but be ‘one with everything’, informed by everything in the universe and spokesman for everything in the universe.  The universe expresses itself through a diverse multiplicity of such ‘spokes-agents’.  Mainstream science and Western civilization (it’s ‘secular’ operative values and beliefs) like to pretend that the Atman world, the ‘here and now’ in terms of ‘local thing-in-themselves beings’ and ‘what they do’ is ‘all there is’.   This implies locally arising (‘here-and-now’ in space and time) behavioural dynamics.

The corollary that we can identify the ultimate causal source of a ‘result’ establishes the conditions for ‘moral judgement’ of individual cause-effect behaviour that Western style criminal justice systems are built on.  This essay is to show (by lifting the hood that covers our collection of no-longer questioned historically accumulated assumptions that shape the lenses we now observe/interpret the world through) that ‘cause-and-effect’, based on the notion of a ‘here-and-now’ that it arises out of, is a logic-fabricated illusion; it is Schrödinger’s ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’), Nietzsche’s ‘Fiktion’, and the Vedic’s ‘Maya’.   The intent of this essay, is not to ‘do away’ with the ‘illusion’ of, for example, the ‘Atman-hurricane called Katrina’, but to restore to its natural primacy, its Brahman aspect so that we can understand it in the larger, natural context of an ‘organizing’ amongst many ‘organizings’ within the all-pervasive Organizing-known-as-Nature.   To paraphrase Emerson in ‘The Method of Nature’; “The Organizing not only inhabits the ‘organizings’, it creates them.”

When the transcendent Brahman-self is restored to our view of physical dynamics, as relativity and quantum physics insist it must, so that we can understand Atman-selves (‘things-in-themselves that act/interact in the here-and-now) in physically realistic context, our understandings and values shift towards those of the indigenous aboriginal peoples of Turtle Island, and our sense of ‘justice’ rises above ‘reward and punishment’ based on ‘moral judgement of good versus evil behaviour’ to ‘cultivating and sustaining harmony in the relational web/space of community’ where Mitakuye oyasin prevails.

* * *

The concept of ‘cause-and-effect’ is the mainstay of Western Criminal justice.  Meanwhile, basic flaws in this ‘over-simplistic’ concept have been clearly identified in scientific investigations of the past century; e.g. in ‘chaos theory’, and in relativity and quantum physics.  This essay aims to share insight on how misconceptions of ‘cause-effect- relations can impact interpretations of ‘culpability’ in the criminal justice system and in its investigative approach.

The action, ‘X’ of disposing of a stubbed but not totally extinguished cigarette butt in a forested environment, … in perhaps 99 out of 100 of such instances, will ‘cause no effect’ other than to ‘litter’ the forest floor.  When, on the 100^th instance, the result is ‘Y’, the igniting of a forest fire, we say that this act, ‘X’,  of disposing of a stubbed but not totally extinguished cigarette butt ‘caused’ ‘Y’, the forest fire.

But was it ‘really’ the action, ‘X’, that ‘caused’ the result, ‘Y’?  In the overall data set, we have 99 ‘false positives’ where X did not cause the result Y, and one positive in which X did cause the result Y.

In medical science, we have the situation where exposure to the normally innocuous bacterium ‘clostridium difficile’ or ‘c. difficile’ correlates with the person coming down with acute colitis which can lead to death.  Medical researchers say that c. difficile is responsible for thousands of deaths, every year, in hospitals around the world.  In association with these cases, ‘c. difficile’ has been described as a ‘superbug’ [anti-biotics resistant drug] that is ‘virulent’ and ‘lethal’.   Meanwhile, the ‘false positives’ to exposures to c. difficile abound; i.e. only people who have been on courses of anti-biotics which have ‘unbalanced’ their digestive tract flora [destabilizing the healthy-state balanced spectrum of about 500 different strains of ‘pro-biotic’ bacteria] furnish the conditions in their bodies that facilitate a disproportionate proliferation of c. difficile bacteria.

Antoine Béchamp [Iconic French medical researcher, 1816-1908] and Louis Pasteur (on his deathbed) concluded that the proliferation of bacteria that we call a ‘pathogen’ is the ‘result’ or ‘symptom’ of the illness (the unbalancing of the body) rather than ‘the cause’ of the illness.

Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel laureate in Medicine (1937, Vitamin C), interpreted viral and bacterial infections to be the ‘result’ of imbalances in the body (dietary deficiencies);

In one of his last texts Albert Szent-Györgyi mentions a personal experience: “Last year I collected a rather unfortunate personal experience. I broke down with pneumonia which I could not shake off for months, until I discovered that the quantities of ascorbic acid which I took (one gram daily) had become insufficient at my age (84 years). When I went up from one gram to eight, my troubles were over.” [Note: In the 1940s, Dr. Frederick Klenner, a specialist in chest diseases, successfully cured 41 cases of viral pneumonia using high doses of vitamin C. He published his extensive findings in the February 1948 issue of the Journal of Southern Medicine and Surgery.]

There continues to be controversy within medical research over this basic issue as to whether to focus on ‘causal pathogenic agents’ and to attack them with pharmaceuticals, or whether to focus on the pre-conditioning of the body that may be making an ‘innocent bacterium’ appear to be a ‘causal pathogen’.  The former approach has overwhelmingly dominated over the latter.

The ambiguity as to whether the ‘result’, ‘Y’, derives from the ‘non-X’ (pre-conditioning of the ‘experimental unit’) or ‘is caused by’ ‘X’ (actions that are applied by some operative agent to the experimental unit), has been called ‘the fundamental dilemma of causality’, or Rubin causality;

“The fundamental dilemma of causality, according to Rubin, is that, if we use an experimental unit (a bacterium, e.g. ) to show that “X causes Y,” we cannot use that same unit to show that some “non-X does not cause Y.” We solve this dilemma [statistically] by assuming that all units are more or less the same.”

Thus, in the case of the ‘epidemic of c. difficile infections’ in hospitals, ‘c. difficile’ is described as the leading superbug in many hospitals, “a virulent and lethal pathogen”;

“As many as 2000 patients may have died in Quebec in 2003– 2004 during an outbreak of Clostridium difficile, which the majority of those patients contracted in hospital.” —Dr. Jacques Pépin, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke

But, wait a minute!   Can we realistically point to ‘c. difficile’ as the CAUSE, X of ‘Y’, the 2000 deaths, in view of all the ‘false positives’; i.e. many people who are exposed to c. difficile and are living in natural symbiosis with it, are not negatively impacted.

“Clostridium difficile colitis is a major complication of antibiotic therapy. Antibiotics cause a reduction in bacteria that normally reside in the colon. If an antibiotic-treated patient ingests C. difficile bacteria, this organism may proliferate in the colon because it is resistant to most antibiotics and because it does not have to compete with the normal bacteria for nutrients. If the C. difficile organism has the gene for toxin production, the toxin can produce a colitis.” — John S. Fordtran, M.D., Baylor University Medical Center

“This is really an opportunistic infection,” Dr. Karl Kabasele, the CBC’s medical specialist, explains. “When you are healthy and all is going well, you have benign helpful bacteria in your intestines and when you take antibiotics, or when you are sick, that flora gets disrupted, and things like C. difficile can take over and they multiply and create a toxin and that is where the symptoms come from.”

“It’s about antibiotic use and how we help keep antibiotic use as low as we can while still giving the patients who need antibiotics the right antibiotics. — Dr. Allison McGeer, director of infection control at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital.

In a general population of experimental units (people), the X (c. difficile exposure) is most often NOT the cause of Y (colitis and death); i.e. there are many ‘false positives’ associated with the exposure to (ingestion of) c. difficile.   Evidently, the non-X that is causing ‘Y’ is the historical pre-conditioning of the experimental unit.

As a researcher equipped with the standard scientific investigation tools charged with discovering the cause of colitis, you would be likely to identify ‘c. difficile’ as the ‘pathogen’ holding the smoking gun, and not as an innocent family of bears demolishing the contents of your larder because you inadvertently left it open for them.

There is a problem here, as Albert Szent-Györgyi point out;

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.”“…What kills science in this country now, (is) that you must tell in advance what you will find, and what you will do exactly, and what you will spend your money on. And if you knew it all, then you wouldn’t need to do it. … And so you cannot have (any) new discoveries.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of Vitamin C and its effects.

That is, if the researcher starts out from a ‘negative effect’, Y, such as colitis in search of the causal agent, X, that is responsible for it, this implies the assumption that ‘all experimental units are the same’.  [i.e. it implies that all larders are the same and thus the injury (Y) to the larder must be due to the pathogenic bears (X), except that all larders are not the same, some are continually occupied by natural household members and thus closed to entry by bears.]

If one gathers data starting from X, rather than starting from Y, one would find that ‘c. difficile’ is most often innocent/innocuous.  Similarly the cold virus is most often innocuous, as Szent-Györgyi observes;

“Mr X has a lack of vitamin C and contracts a cold. The cold leads to pneumonia. Mr X dies and his body is taken to the mortuary…not with the diagnosis “lack of vitamin C”, but with the diagnosis “pneumonia”. This does not matter for him any more, but matters for the rest of mankind, which is mislead in its thinking and judgement about vitamins.”—Dr Albert Szent-Györgyi  [Note: there are roughly 200 different bacterial and viral exposures that can ‘cause pneumonia’ and ‘death by pneumonia.]

And, of course, the ‘X’ of disposing of a stubbed cigarette butt is most often innocuous (a ‘false positive’).

If one starts with the ‘X’ actions such as ‘personal exposure to c. difficile’, ‘personal exposure to a cold virus’, ‘forest exposure to a stubbed cigarette butt’, there are many ‘false positives’, perhaps 1000 to 1, in regard to those ‘X’ actions NOT CAUSING ‘Y’.

However, if we start our investigations from the ‘Y’ side, asking “what has caused these negative outcomes, ‘Y’, we eliminate all of the false positives from such a data set and we come up with close to 100% consistency that ‘X causes Y’.

Had we started from ‘X’, we would have concluded that the instances of ‘Y’ were the result of ‘non-X’; i.e. the historical conditioning of the experimental units (the unbalancing, by antibiotics of the digestive tract flora), (the acidic condition of the blood-based cell processes due to lack of ascorbic acid that makes the blood alkaline), and the sun, wind and lack of groundwater induced transforming of the forest into a hair trigger incendiary device).

Thus, the ‘cause’ is not the actions, ‘X’, but the ‘non-X’ pre-conditioning of the experimental units.  In other words, the test for causality that “all experimental units are more or less the same” does not hold, although IT APPEARS TO HOLD if we start our investigations from the ‘Y’ side of the ‘cause-effect relation’.

The problem that arises with starting one’s investigation ‘from the Y – side’ has shown up in two more contentious examples that will be briefly mentioned here; disputes over whether HIV ‘causes’ AIDS and whether anthropogenic CO² ‘causes’ global warming (AGW).

In the case of HIV and AIDS, the suggestion is that there is a historical preconditioning in the ‘experimental unit’ that can produce both Y (HIV+) and Y (AIDS); i.e. where both of these Ys are due to a non-X that associates with the historical preconditioning of the experimental units.

“In 2008, Professor Luc Montagnier, after having been awarded the Nobel Prize, stated: “We can be exposed to HIV many times without being chronically infected. Our immune system will get rid of the virus within a few weeks, if you have a good immune system, thus reversing the long-assumed cause-effect relationship between HIV and AIDS whereby HIV inevitably brings on AIDS. Therefore, HIV infection itself reflects an already deficient immune system; it is the immunodeficiency that causes chronic HIV infection and not vice versa, as commonly believed. Finally, a review in 2009 demonstrated that HIV has been present in humans since at least the early 19OOs, thus definitely ruling out the possibility that it could have been responsible for a syndrome that appeared only at the beginning of the 1980s.  Quite obviously, if HIV caused AIDS, then AIDS should have been observed in earlier periods, when the hygienic and nutritional

conditions of human populations were much worse than in the 1980s (i.e. during the two world wars and the depression in between). The very fact that AIDS was never described before the 1980s despite the persistent presence of HIV in  humans, clearly demonstrates that HIV cannot be the cause of AIDS.”

 — M. Ruggiero, T. Punzi, G. Morucci, S. Pacini, University of Firenze, Italy

In the case of anthropogenic global warming, we make the usual scientific assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’, and on this basis investigators look for correlations between rising global surface temperatures and contemporaneous fluctuations in other measured physical parameters such as the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  The conclusion of AGW investigators is that X (rising CO2 concentrations due to human sourced internal combustion engine etc. emissions) ‘causes’ Y (rising global temperatures).

The possibility of a non-X associated with the historical preconditioning of the experimental unit (the earth) is not considered in AGW.

Imagine the case of a local system or a system in which outside influences are known and/or hold constant, such as an apartment building in a region of constant temperature such as in the tropics.  Investigators are charged with monitoring the temperature in the circulating air in the building along with all manner of other physical measurements such as the component gases in the air, the humidity, the pollution, the hours sunshine, the precipitation, the wind velocities and temperatures etc. etc., … all the while looking for correlations across the measured influences so that any deviation in the temperature can be correlated with the various measured influences.   If ice rinks were installed on the unused 3^rd, 5^th and 7^th floors of the building, each with a thickness of ice in feet matching the floor number, as each rink finally melted, its cooling effect would cease and an upward deviation would register on the monitored temperature curve.  Three such increases will appear on the temperature curve [many more in the case of the earth].

The standard scientific assumption, a convenient, simplifying assumption, is that the present depends only on the immediate past, … will in this case be violated, since the present, in this case, is being directly influenced from the remote past.  If a correlation ‘is’ found between one of the contemporaneous monitored influences that suggests a ‘cause-and-effect’ explanation of the deviation in the temperature curve, it must necessarily be spurious since X causes Y does not apply in this case, the Y being due to a non-X; i.e. the historical preconditioning of the experimental unit.  This standard scientific ‘simplification of convenience’ that obscures the role of a ‘non-X’ historical conditioning of the experimental unit is discussed by Henri Poincaré as follows;

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.

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.

 — Henri Poincaré, Extract from ‘Science and Hypothesis, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics’

To given an example, in the field of social dynamics, of how an investigation that, by starting from the Y (effect) side, can bias an investigative dataset, consider the case of an old-folks home where some of the residents suffer from periodic bouts of confusion and depression, possibly due to some ‘X’ dynamics going on in the home.  The families of the residents pressure for an investigation and start from ‘the Y side’ to learn more about all those who are having these bouts of negative experience.

They find that all of the troubled patients have in common the same male nurse (amongst several) that is giving them physical checks (blood pressure etc.) and giving them their doctor prescribed pills and injections etc.  The conjecture as to how this nurse is causing their confusion includes his being a different race, his poor command of English which may be confusing the aging residents who see him, and a general feeling of distrust on important topics such as whether he is giving them the right pills etc.   While the ‘cause’ cannot be unambiguously determined, it is clear that it derives from the male nurse in some way or other, since there is a 100% correlation between the Y effected patients and that particular male nurse.  He is therefore deemed culpable for their distress and is about to be dismissed.

Another investigator starts his investigation ‘from the ‘X’ side’ and notices that the same actions of the male nurse cause no problems at all with the others (the majority) of people who he is attending to [i.e. the ‘false positives’ outnumber the ‘positives’].   One of the ‘false positives’ offers that the male nurse does have an annoying, but playful, habit of ‘blowing up and popping his paper lunch bags’.  The investigator reviews the medical records of all of the residents that are being attended to by this particular male nurse and finds that all of those who are suffering the negative ‘Y’ experience being attributed to him are war veterans that have the condition known as ‘shell-shock’ (PTSD).

The investigative data set of the second investigator who started from the ‘X’ side included the ‘false positives’ while the investigative data set of the first investigator who started from the ‘Y’ side excluded the false positives.  If we review, once again, ‘Rubin causality’;

“The fundamental dilemma of causality, according to Rubin, is that, if we use an experimental unit (a bacterium, e.g. ) to show that “X causes Y,” we cannot use that same unit to show that some “non-X does not cause Y.” We solve this dilemma [statistically] by assuming that all units are more or less the same.”

… we see that there is an unresolvable ambiguity as to X causing Y if we investigate only those experimental units who have the negative Y experience.  Using Albert Szent-Györgyi’s argument, if we examine all those who have died of respiratory system failure (pneumonia), we will identify the presence of a pathogen ‘holding the smoking gun’ but the false positives, those people who were exposed to the same pathogens which caused them no negative ‘Y’ results, will be missing from the data set.  Thus 1,000 cases investigated starting from the ‘Y’ side will furnish a data set in which, in all 1,000 case, a bacterial or viral ‘pathogen’ can be identified as ‘the cause of respiratory system failure’ and ‘death’.

Had the investigation commenced on the X side, it would have generated a data set in which the ‘false positives’ far outnumbers the ‘positives’; i.e. many more people, when exposed to those same bacteria and viruses held to be the pathogenic agents that caused the negative results ‘Y’, would be unaffected by them.  The conclusion would then have to be that ‘not all experimental units are the same’, therefore the hypothesis that ‘X causes Y’ cannot be confirmed.

Criminal Justice Use of the ‘X causes Y’ Investigative Approach

While an astute scientific investigator such as and Albert Szent-Györgyi will commence his investigation from the ‘X’ side, the criminal justice agencies typically start their investigations from the ‘Y’ side; i.e. they investigate ‘negative results’, ‘Y’, and, starting from these, attempt to discover the causal agency, ‘X’.

In the case of the aging residents of the home for the elderly, where a number of residents were suffering negative ‘Y’ results, the common approach in a criminal justice type investigation would be to gather together these ‘cases’ and search for an ‘X’ that was causally responsible.   By definition, the data set developed in this fashion would necessarily be excluding ‘false positives’ since ‘false positives’ are those cases where the ‘experimental units’ do not suffer the negative ‘Y’ effects when exposed to the ‘X’ actions.

For example, if a physiotherapist were accused of ‘inappropriate touching’ [which qualifies as the criminal offence of sexual assault] and the criminal justice investigation commenced with a police appeal to the public for anyone experiencing the negative ‘Y’ effect to come forward and lay sexual assault charges, the data set developed in this manner would exclude ‘false positives’ and so present a consistent 100% correlation between X and Y.   The possibility that a ‘non-X’ was responsible for ‘Y’ such as arises when all experimental units are not the same; e.g. where an action that is innocuous to most experimental units ‘ignites’ a preconditioning within a subset of the experimental units will not show up in a data set that is developed from the ‘Y-side’ investigation, which includes only those experimental units that share the common ‘preconditioning’.

Y-side investigation of forest fires (the ‘Y’ result ‘is’ the forest fire) may show a 100% correlation between disposal of stubbed out [but unextinguished] cigarette butts and the forest fires, and would lead a criminal investigation to conclude that the ‘cause’ of the forest fire (Y) was the action of disposing of unextinguished cigarette butts, in all cases.  The false positives would not show up in such an investigation and responsibility for causing the fire would be attributed to the action X and to the author of that action.

Y-side investigation of avalanches (the ‘Y’ result ‘is’ the avalanche) may show a 100% correlation between skier or snowmobile traversing on a heavily snow-laden mountain slope, and the avalanche, and could lead [but likely would not] to a criminal investigation to conclude that the ‘cause’ of the avalanche (Y) was the action of skier or snowmobile traversing of the heavily snow-laden mountain slope, in all cases.  The false positives would not show up in such an investigation and responsibility for causing the avalanche would be attributed to the action X and thus to the author of that action.

The case of the avalanche differs from the forest fire, in that the five other people that disposed of unextinguished cigarettes in the same forest, where no negative ‘Y’ result transpired are never seen and never part of the dataset, whereas if those other five people who traversed the same slope before the negative ‘Y’ result transpired, it is impossible to exclude the ‘false positives’ from the data set, which weaken the progression from a ‘correlation’ between ‘X’ and ‘Y’ to a ‘causal relation’ between ‘X’ and ‘Y’, as is more readily achieved in the case of the cigarette butt disposal ‘X’ and the forest fire ‘Y’ where a large number of cigarette butts could have been disposed of in the same way without any associated negative ‘Y’ result.  The invisibility of these ‘false positives’ and thus their ‘exclusion’ from the investigative data set, sets the stage for the conclusion that the action ‘X’ caused the negative result ‘Y’, and therefore that the result ‘Y’ was not due to a ‘non-X’ such as a preconditioning of the experimental unit.

Logically, there is no difference between investigating the result ‘Y’ where the bodies of children are being pulled out of the snow pile moraine of the avalanche, that leads back to the smoking gun holder, the skier under who’s skis the avalanche commence, and holding the skier to be responsible for the actions ‘X’ which caused the result ‘Y’, … and investigating the result ‘Y’ where the bodies of children are being pulled out of burning homes caught up in the forest fire, that leads back to the smoking gun holder, the smoker around whose unextinguished cigarette butt the forest fire commenced, and holding the smoker responsible for the actions ‘X’ which caused the result ‘Y’.

In both cases, the same normally innocuous actions ‘X’ had unfortunate encounters with atypical preconditioned ‘experimental units’, and rather than the ‘X’ actions ending up as ‘false positives’, their encounter with different-than-usual ‘experimental units’ [the ‘non-X’ source of ‘Y’] produced the negative ‘Y’ results.

It is the exclusion of the false positives that results from investigations that commence from the ‘Y’ side, that open the door to the psychological impression that ‘X’ causes ‘Y’.

Criminal Intent

Because of the ‘fundamental dilemma’ of causality (Rubin), establishing ‘cause’ is ambiguous because of the problem of establishing that ‘all experimental units are the same’.  Clearly, the act of giving a child a peanut-nut butter sandwich is innocuous enough, but such an innocuous can nevertheless be lethal to some ‘experimental units’.  If the author of the action knew that he was causing harm to the experimental unit, this would be very different from the case where his action proceeded in his unawareness of the harm it could do.  The male nurse’s action of popping his paper lunch bags also falls into this category.

In a criminal justice investigation, then, in those cases where the negative result ‘Y’ cannot be said to be the result of the actions ‘X’ due to the large number of ‘false positives’ associated with these same actions, and where the result ‘Y’ derives from the ‘non-X’ of the precondition of the experimental unit, … the causal relation of the actions ‘X’ to the result ‘Y’ do not stand up.  That is, the action of supplying the peanut-butter sandwich, ‘X’, is not the ‘cause’ of the result ‘Y’, the death of the person who consumes it, per Rubin’s principle.  Therefore, the criminal justice process would have to establish ‘intent’ on the part of the person to ‘do harm’, rather than to rely on the now-defunct cause-effect relation between the actions ‘X’ and the result ‘Y’ due to the abundance of ‘false positives’.

As already mentioned, criminal justice investigative processes typically commence from the ‘Y-side’ and thus tend to produce investigative data sets that exclude potential ‘false positives’ and thus exclude the possibility that a precondition in the experimental unit may be a ‘non-X’ that sources the result ‘Y’, rather than the actions ‘X’ in themselves.

For example, if a physiotherapist ‘didn’t worry too much’ or ‘didn’t take sufficient care’ to give a wide enough margin to female genitalia [i.e. his hands might go anywhere they needed to go to get the job done in the case of a practice dummy], there might be no negative result ‘Y’ in most cases (e.g. 99,950 such sessions), while in a very small minority of those sessions (e.g. 50 sessions involving 23 experimental units/persons), the negative ‘Y’ experiences may have turned up in a criminal justice investigation that commenced from the ‘Y-side’.  The investigative data set developed by the criminal justice system would typically exclude the ‘false positives’, however, an investigative data set starting from the ‘X-side’ could include an abundance or predominance of ‘false positives’.

In such a case, the proposition of ‘X’ causes ‘Y’ does not hold up; e.g. giving children peanut-butter sandwiches, in most cases, does not cause sickness and/or death.  In administering ‘justice’ then, one would have to establish ‘intent’ to proceed with actions ‘X’, knowing them to be harmful to the experimental unit because of the particular constitution or precondition of the experimental unit and not due to the actions ‘X’ in themselves.  If the experimental unit has a pre-condition or ‘non-X’ that ignites the negative result ‘Y’ in them, that the author of the actions ‘X’ is unaware of, since the simple ‘causal relation’ of ‘X’ causes ‘Y’ does not hold water due to ‘false positives’, an injustice would result from going ahead, using a ‘Y-side’ investigative dataset that excluded false positives, and assuming a causal relation between the actions ‘X’ and the result ‘Y’.

Only in the case where the author of the non-causal actions ‘X’ INTENTIONALLY/ AWARELY ignited the negative result ‘Y’ due to the ‘non-X’ of a precondition in the ‘atypical’ experimental unit, would there be reasonable cause to hold the author of the non-causal actions ‘X’ responsible for negative result ‘Y’.

The ‘misuse’ of the concept of ‘cause-and-effect’ seems to be not ‘uncommon’ in our society, as in the testimony of Albert Szent-Györgyi and others.  It crops up in physics in the reconciling of relativity and quantum physics with Newtonian physics.  The general form of the issue is; ‘in considering the result of the action of an operator on an operand or ‘recipient’ of an action, should one attribute the result entirely to the operator or allow that the result derives in some part from the recipient of the action?’  This is not as easily resolved at it appears that it might be at first glance, as it bottoms out in the long-standing split between philosophical ‘dualism’ versus ‘non-dualism’.  In the biological sciences, the organism was long seen as being genetically determined, but modern biologically sees outside-inward shaping influence of ‘epigenesis’ as working in conjugate relation with inside-outward acting ‘genesis’.  The biological cell, rather being seen as a local, material ‘machine-like’ system [a ‘unit of being’] is being seen, instead, as the conjugation of outside-inward orchestrating ‘signals from the environment’ acting through cell ‘receptors’ and inside-outward assertive reproductive actions managed by cell ‘effectors’, re-casting the cell as a ‘unit of perception’ of the transforming relational space it is included in.

* * *  End * * *

Summarizing Scholium:

In the above essay, the point is brought forth that we run into the ambiguity that, when an operator X acts upon something or someone [an ‘experimental unit’] and this action is followed by some event Y, although we are inclined to say that ‘X causes Y’, it may be that the experimental unit that X acts upon has undergone ‘historical conditioning’ so that it is not the operator’s action X that is responsible for the result Y, but the ‘historical conditioning’ in the experimental unit.

The ambiguity arises from the fact that our science-conditioned thinking has us reduce everything to the ‘here and now’ and to assume that the ‘here and now’ is ‘reality’.

The ‘here and now’ IS NOT PHYSICAL REALITY, it is an abstract psychical reality.  The world and everything in it is continually undergoing ‘historical conditioning’ [as in Mach’s principle] which I refer to as ‘historical PRE-conditioning’ simply to reference this conditioning, which is part of the continually transforming relational space we all share inclusion in, to the ‘here and now’ staging ground which we say is where cause-effect events jumpstart out of.

Imagine for a moment that we are all whorl-in-the-flow-like ‘organizings’ within the ONE continually transforming relational-spatial ‘Organizing’.  This happens to be the physical phenomenal understanding of the world coming from modern physics.  Now, … there is no place in ‘physical reality’ for ‘local beings’ with their own locally jumpstarting behaviours, in such a worldview, wherein ‘thingless-connectedness’  prevails.  But such a world does accommodate ‘organizings’ within the Unum of the overall Organizing and this is where Mach’s principle comes from; “The dynamics of the organizings/inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the Organizing/habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the Organizing/habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the ‘organizings’”.

Now, we already have a physical model for this and its called ‘fluid-flow’ and/or ‘wave dynamics’, the stuff that Schrödinger worked on that led to his development of ‘quantum wave dynamics’, which is our prevailing ‘model’ of the physical universe, and suggests that there is no such thing as ‘matter’ per se, but only resonances in the wavefield or whorls in the flow.  Since these whorls are visible and tangible as ‘local forms’, it is very tempting, from the point of view of ‘economy of thought’ [to Mach, science IS economy of thought], to anoint these forms as ‘local, independently-existing beings’ or ‘things-in-themselves’.  This forces us, at the same time, to give them a ‘place to live’ and the place we come up with is ‘absolute space and absolute time’; i.e. a notional box of infinite x,y,z, t dimensions that we can use as a grid to reference their changing shapes [as these things-in-themselves form and develop] and their movements.  While our unilaterally declaring these forms to be ‘things-in-themselves’ does away with the ‘thinglessness’ of quantum relational space, our imposing of a notional absolute space and absolute time reference framing does away with the ‘connectedness’ property of relational space.

Psychologically, we use these conventions of absolute space and absolute time to reduce the Organizing, which our experience informs us is going on ‘everywhere at the same time’, in the sense of a gravity field or electromagnetic or thermal field, to the ‘here and now’ where dynamic events ‘locally jumpstart’’ [we think of events as originating from a ‘local point/source’ in space and in time].

We formalize this using ‘science’ and ‘mathematics’ as Poincaré describes in this excerpt from ‘Science and Hypothesis’;

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.

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.

 — Henri Poincaré, Extract from ‘Science and Hypothesis, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics’

Psychologically, this reduction of dynamics from ‘everywhere-at-the-same-time Organizing’ to ‘here and now local events in terms of what things-in-themselves are doing in absolute space and absolute time’, while it may seem far-fetched, slowly becomes accepted without question, the more that one uses it.    Thus your ‘piece of property’ starts to seem like a ‘real thing’ because it is legally/logically described as such and we all talk about it as if it is such, and we buy and sell properties as if they were ‘things-in-themselves’.  But the physically reality is that they are inextricably included in the everywhere-at-the-same-time Organizing, and we can’t stop volcanic dust from the other side of the world from dusting our property, and we can’t stop atmosphere from delivering water to it, and we can’t stop the sun and clouds in combination from delivering too little or too much solar irradiance to it, because ‘it’ is not physically real.  ‘It’, this notional locally existing ‘thing-in-itself’ is an abstract concept that is radically unlike the physical reality of our experience.  We make the same mistake, of imputing ‘reality’ to ‘logical plots of land’ at the scale of the sovereign state.  This belief in the reality of local things is a religious/theological belief, it does not come from our physical experience;

 “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic structure.” (Bartelson, Jens. A Genealogy of Sovereignty 1995)

“State sovereignty “is a ‘religion’ and a faith.” … “The skillfully drawn borders that cartographers have provided for us are … spiritual and philosophical abstractions representative of a form of quasi-belief. They are … not detached maps of reality as proponents would have us believe. These geographies reflect an ardent desire to make (or impose) sovereignty a physical reality as natural as the mountains, rivers and lakes…. “.” – Lombardi, Mark Owen. “Third-World Problem-Solving and the ‘Religion’ of Sovereignty: Trends and Prospects.”

[quotes cited by Peter D'Errico, law professor emeritus, University of Massachusetts in 'Native American Sovereignty: Now you see it, now you don't'

In the body of the essay, we come back time and again, in each of the cases, to the notion that instead of X causing Y, the source of Y was the non-X associated with the ‘historical conditioning of the experimental unit, rather than the actions X perpetrated by a notional local thing-in-itself’, notionally equipped with ‘its own locally originating, internal process driven and directed behaviour.

The suggestion that is begging for us to pick up on it, is that ‘dynamics’ in the general case, are NOT coming from cause-and-effect transactions, but are instead coming from ‘historical conditioning’.  Who ‘IS NOT’ undergoing ‘historical conditioning’?  The baby does not mind having its genitals touched, he/she may smile and giggle.   But if you touch the genitals of an adult, whether accidentally or intentionally, while some may still smile and giggle, others may get very angry.  We then say that they are no longer ‘innocent’ or that they have undergone ‘socialization’ [historical conditioning] by being included in a web of social relations.

The suggestion arises that the ‘web of social relations’ may be ‘more fundamental’ than the ‘things included in the web’ [i.e. the ‘Organizing’ may be ‘more fundamental’ than the ‘organizings’ in the ‘Organizing’]

If we return to the forest fire example, supposing there is continuously smouldering peat-bed in the forest [underground peat-bed fires can go on for years] and its actions, X, go on for months without ‘causing’ any Y (forest fire) but after some months of hot, dry summer, the same actions of the peat-bed, X ‘cause’ Y (forest fire).   If we start from Y and look for X, we will find the peat-bed holding the smoking gun and we will say that ‘the peat-bed did it’.  But since the actions of the peat-bed X associated with a long string of false positives, it does not make sense to say that ‘the peat-bed did it’.  Instead, we can say that Y was due to a non-X, the historical preconditioning of the experimental unit (the forest).  In fact, we can go farther than this and accuse our own logic of deceiving us, since there are no solid grounds for applying the logic of the excluded third to separate the ‘peat-bed’ from the ‘forest-space’ and give them two separate identities.  We could instead use the logic of the ‘included’ third which would have us see the ‘peat-bed’ and the ‘forest/trees’ as different aspects of the same relational space, since Mach’s principle would seem to hold wherein ‘The dynamics of the peat-bed etc. are conditioning the dynamics of the forested space at the same time as the dynamics of the forested space are conditioning the dynamics of the peat-bed etc.’.

In other words, our whole ‘X causes Y’ case depends on our using the ‘EITHER/OR’ logic of the excluded third. so that we can consider the causal agent and the experimental unit as mutually exclusive entities.  Or, in still other words, the notion that ‘X causes Y’ is a philosophical ‘dualism’ based notion, whereas the scientific worldview of Mach, Schroedinger etc. wherein space is relational, constitutes philosophical non-dualism, which requires the BOTH/AND logic of the included third.

Returning to our example of the baby/person being touched, … what is innocence?  If we remove ‘socialization’ it is not as if there is ‘nothing left’ as in ‘nihilism’.  The babies/persons are still ‘organizings’ within the ‘Organizing’.  The same is true for the sovereign state.  If everyone in the world agreed that it was counter-productive to sustain the common belief in the local existence/being of the sovereign states, the relational space of the physical world would remain since ‘states are not real’; … “They are … not detached maps of reality as proponents would have us believe. These geographies reflect an ardent desire to make (or impose) sovereignty a physical reality as natural as the mountains, rivers and lakes….”

But how easy it comes to us to speak of states as ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what they do’, as if such language defined ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what they do’ were ‘real’.  They are no more, no less real than the Atmen-self of hurricane Katrina.  The infra-red detection by satellites, of billions of people in the spherical space that wraps over and around on the surface of the earth will not show ‘nationality’, but within the overall relational spatial flow of these bright dots, we can observe patterns, such as the patterns of flow during early colonization, and the formation of whorls of beehive like activity, a behive we might call the U.S. and another we might call Canada, and Mexico etc.  But as with hurricane Katrina, for us to jump from our observation of patterns in the unbounded physical relational flow to notional ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘how they are developing’ and ‘what they are doing’, has us leaving the world of physical reality and entering into a new linguistic and logical abstraction based ‘pseudo-reality’.

In the physical reality, the diverse multiplicity of ‘organizings’ in the ‘Organizing’ are relationally interdependent via the mediating role of the common relational space they are share inclusion in.  In other words, in this physical reality, Mach’s principle prevails; “The dynamics of the organizings [inhabitants] are conditioning the dynamics of the Organizing [habitat] at the same time as the dynamics of the Organizing [habitat] are conditioning the dynamics of the organizings [inhabitants].”

But in the pseudo-reality where dynamics jumpstart out of the ‘here-and-now’ and are understood in the synthetic [language-and-logic-abstracted] terms of ‘what things-in-themselves-do-in-space-and-time’, we ignore the innate physical interdependence of these dynamic forms [organizings in the relational-spatial Organizing] via the mediating role of the relational spatial-plenum or physical ‘web-of-life’ they share inclusion in.

Since there is no way to extricate the behaviour of an individual ‘organizing’ aka ‘human’ from the dynamics of the Organizing he/she is included in, the applying of moral laws to individual behaviours makes no sense.  That is, there is no such thing as ‘individual behaviour’ taken out of the context of collective behaviour.  Individual behaviour in-its-own-right is ‘abstraction’.  The physical behaviour  of individual ‘organizings’ is innately interdependent by way of their common inclusion in the relational spatial Organizing, as given by Mach’s principle.

‘Culpability’ of an individual collapses with the collapse of ‘causality’.  If the storm cell known as Katrina is guilty of the destruction of New Orleans, so too are all of her brother and sister storm-cells or ‘organizings’ within the common Organizing of the relational space of the atmosphere.  It will not do to pull Katrina out on her own and label her the offender and New Orleans the ‘victim’ as in ‘her X (wild blowing) has caused Y (physical injury to New Orleans).  The logic of the excluded third that is needed by our psyche to do this, violates our understanding that there is just ONE Organizing with many organizings within it; i.e. the logic of the included third, instead, applies.

If we want to go with the physical reality of our experience rather than the abstractions that come from reducing ‘everywhere at the same time’ to ‘the local here and now’, we have to rise above morality, architected as it is for application to the abstract notion of ‘the behaviour of an individual in its own right’.  There is no such thing, in our physical experience, as ‘the behaviour of an individual in its own right’ because the individual is an ‘organizing’ that shares, with other ‘organizings’, inclusion in a common mediating medium, the dynamic unitary Organizing of the relational spatial-plenum.

Our concept of ‘justice’, if we suspend our belief in the pseudo-reality that forms from imposing ‘the metaphysics of absolute space and absolute time’, then moves toward reconciliation with the physical ‘resonance-based’ ‘architecture’ of relational space, which is where the indigenous aboriginals peoples have taken it.  In this case, the thingless-connectedness or innate interdependence within the relational space continuum is acknowledged, wherein the ‘individual organizings’ are included in the relational-spatial Organizing, as in the ‘strands-in-the-web-of-life’ metaphor of the indigenous beliefs tradition.   In this worldview, we must all assume responsibility for conflicts that emerge.  We can no longer assume that ‘actions arise on their own’ out of the notional ‘here and now’.

The ‘peacemaking circles’ of the ancient peoples of Turtle Island/North America precipitate from this understanding.  The circle is based on story-telling rather than debate and orients to the restoring of balance and harmony within an innately interdependent relational space.  It has been producing astonishing results for millennia for those who participate in it.

The slow times of the Dalit drivers

Yes,  I AM asserting that ‘it makes sense’ to describe Western civilization as a CULT whose social behaviours are distinguished by its members having a ‘core belief’ that ‘time’ is something ‘real’.

No, this is not an esoteric argument and if you bear with me for just a moment, you can see clearly how it relates to that ‘something different’ about the now-globally-dominant Western civilization as compared with, for example, aboriginal cultures.

And yes, I do believe that this ‘issue’ is relevant to almost everything we see happening on daily news broadcasts and in our everyday lives and thus that we should be bringing it into our discussions on ‘the issues of our times’, and if we do not, we will be unable to understand these issues ‘in depth’.

How does this ‘belief in time’ reduce to some common terms that can give anyone of us ‘traction’ to talk about it?

An ‘easy entrée’ is to compare Western justice with aboriginal justice [restorative justice], as follows;  [see also this critique of the physics community as sampled in Morgan Freeman's narrated Through the Wormhole production: Is Time Real?']

1. Western justice orients to the concept of ‘the behaviour of an individual [human, nation, or corporation etc.] and the JUDGEMENT of whether the individual’s behaviour is compliant with ‘moral’ and/or ‘legal’ standards of behaviour, as determined by the full community/collective.

2. Aboriginal justice [restorative justice], because it assumes that we are each strands in a relational web, orients to resolving conflicts that arise within the relational web.  The full community must take responsibility for ‘restoring balance and harmony’, and there is thus no assumption that ‘individual behaviour’ can be isolated and judged.  There is thus, for example, no possibility for a ‘majority’ or ‘powerful minority’, through a web of relations, to monopolize the land or the flow or resources so as to put a great tension on ‘the less powerful’ who may be starving or in some way disopportunized/disenfranchized to act in an unlawful manner and to be sentenced and punished for it while other members of the collective, because their individual behaviours are not breaking any laws [laws which assume that individual behaviours can be isolated], continue, with impunity, to contribute to dissonance in the social dynamic.

1. and 2. differ in the following way; (1.) does not include ‘space’ as a participant in the social dynamic while (2.) does include space as a participant.   The concept of a relational web has ‘space’ built into it.   The dynamics of a relational web can be expressed by ‘Mach’s principle’; “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”.    The dynamic social space forming from a web of relations can nurture a strand in the web or bully a strand in the web by purely ‘relational means’.   If you are in the flow of the freeway traffic, it is ‘relative movements’ that open up space that enables one’s assertive actions, or that close it down.   Individual behaviour is thus a lesser view of dynamics than the relational web of dynamics, the outside-inward accommodating property of which, orchestrates the inside-outward asserting actions of the individuals.  It is easily possible, for example, for a group of drivers, working together relationally, to ‘disopportunize’ [stifle, squelch, suffocate, shrivel-on-the-vine] the assertive behaviours of selected individuals, or to hyper-opportunize [amplify, nurture, inflate, turbocharge] the assertive behaviours of selected individuals.   If a ‘Dalit’  ‘untouchable’) wants to filter through a crowd to get to the fresh-water spring, he may find it harder going than the rest.  India has over 160 million ‘Dalits’;

“India’s Untouchables are relegated to the lowest jobs, and live in constant fear of being publicly humiliated, paraded naked, beaten, and raped with impunity by upper-caste Hindus seeking to keep them in their place. Merely walking through an upper-caste neighborhood is a life-threatening offense.

Nearly 90 percent of all the poor Indians and 95 percent of all the illiterate Indians are Dalits, according to figures presented at the International Dalit Conference that took place May 16 to 18 (2003) in Vancouver, Canada.” — National Geographic News

The general point is that we live in a relational space where ‘what we do’ is not the whole story; i.e. how outside-inward opening of relational possibilities accommodate the unfolding of our assertive actions is entirely ‘missed’ if we ‘start from’ an assessment of our ‘assertive actions’.  In crowd dynamics and in the dynamics of the flow of the freeway, the dynamics are ‘relational’ in the sense that the flow in the channels is, at the same time, the channel banks.  This is the general case in the universe, and it is described by Mach’s principle.

The implication is that ‘space is relational’ and it is impossible to isolate the behaviour of an individual that transpires in a relational space.   The behaviour of a Dalit cannot be isolated from the dynamics of the relational space the Dalit is included in, the ‘dynamics of the relational space’ [habitat] are being ‘conditioned by the dynamics of the inhabitants [included upper castes] at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are being conditioning by the dynamics of the relational space [habitat].

This example is sufficient to establish the general point; i.e. the Western culture’s world view is in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these things-in-themselves do IN SPACE AND TIME’.

Question:  Could we capture a busy day in the flow of a freeway using GPSs to record the space and time coordinates of each vehicle, and then use those recordings to program the behaviours of those same vehicles and reproduce the exact same flow?

Answer:  Yes and No.  There is nothing in a dataset that records ‘what things do IN SPACE AND TIME’, that explains why it took Dalits longer on average to cover the same ground as upper castes.  That is, the more comprehensive view of dynamics is NOT in terms of ‘what things do in space and time’ but in terms of THE TRANSFORMATION OF SPATIAL RELATIONS, as given by Mach’s principle.  ‘Time’ does not enter into it’.

Western justice is based on ‘what things do in space and time’ while aboriginal justice [restorative justice] sees ‘dynamics’ in the more comprehensive view of ‘the transformation of spatial relations’.

Aboriginal justice [restorative justice] uses the more comprehensive understanding of ‘dynamics’ as ‘the continual transformation of relational space’; i.e. there are no such things in the physical world of our experience as ‘absolute space’ and ‘absolute time’.

“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

The point is that our experience is of living in a continually transforming relational space.  However, rational thought and mainstream science reduces the complicatedness of expressing dynamics in relational terms, by imposing an absolute space and absolute time ‘measuring reference frame’ on the world.   Once we impose an absolute space frame, since this portrays forms in terms of absolute locations in this absolute space, we are then forced to impose another measuring reference frame, ABSOLUTE TIME, to capture changes in the form and changes in the location of the form [i.e. we no longer see the world dynamic in terms of a continually transforming relational space aka a ‘holodynamic’].   ‘Absolute space’ and ‘absolute time’ are not ‘real’ in the sense of ‘physical’, they are ‘conventions’ which we invent in order to simplify our scientific description of the world;

“Space is another framework we impose upon the world” . . . ” . . . here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws; but let us clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature.” . . . “Euclidian geometry is . . . the simplest, . . . just as the polynomial of the first degree is simpler than a polynomial of the second degree.” . . . “the space revealed to us by our senses is absolutely different from the space of geometry.” . . . Henri Poincaré,  ’Science and Hypothesis’.”

‘Space is not Euclidian’ … “Space is a participant in physical phenomena” … “Space not only conditions the behaviour of inert masses, but is also conditioned in its state by them.”, … “the recognition of the fact that ‘empty space’ in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, compelling us to describe its state by ten functions (the gravitation potentials g(μ,ν), has, I think finally disposed of the view that space is physically empty.”…”Relativity forces us to analyze the role played by geometry in the description of the physical world.” . . . “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” —Albert Einstein.

‘Science’ is not directly describing ‘nature’, it is equipping us with some convenient-to-us principles, laws and models.  As Mach says;

“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

Conclusion: There is no such thing as ‘absolute space’ and ‘absolute time’.  These two ‘conventions’ are abstractions we employ to simplify the manner in which we capture, express and share our observations of the world dynamic.  The space of our experience is a continually transforming relational space.

[[N.B. At this point, it is likely to be useful to the firm capture and retention of this conclusion by reading the highlighted text in the short Appendix of quotes by Julian Barbour from his book ‘The End of Time’ , at the bottom of this page]].

Corollary: Western civilization’s habit of reducing the dynamics of our experience; i.e. of our inclusion within a continually transforming relational space, … to terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these things in themselves do OVER TIME’ opens the way for us to assume that the behaviour of an individual is fully and solely his own behaviour.  In other words, the time it takes a Dalit to get from downtown New Delhi to the airport is commonly seen as depending on nothing other than the Dalit’s own behaviour [his 'own' 'movement in time'].  Science portrays humans and all biological organisms as ‘local, independently-existing things-in-themselves with their own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour’.   This is an absolute space and absolute time based view of development and behaviour, and it ignores Mach’s principle which gives the more comprehensive view of dynamics in terms of the transforming relational space configuration where the spatial relations amongst the participants constitute an outside-inward opening of spatial-possibility that is conjugate to the inside-outward asserting action of the participants.  As in the flow of the crowd, the web of relations is, at the same time, the channel banks and the flow in the channel, and it is a degenerate, reduced special case understanding of such dynamics that we capture in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do over time’ [we use an absolute space and absolute time measuring reference frame to reduce the inherently relational dynamics to these terms].

* * *

Two Different ‘Levels of Reality’ and Two Different ‘Types of Believers’

We can capture the above results in terms of ‘two levels of reality’ which requires ‘two different types of [psycho-] logical operations.

1. The logic of the EXCLUDED middle:  —The logic we use when we view dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do over time’ is ‘the logic of the excluded middle’ which implies ‘self’ – ‘other’ mutual exclusion or ‘unique identity’ of the individual inhabitants [e.g. they could not be ‘individuals’ in the manner of two hurricanes in the common relational space of the atmosphere].  This [psycho-] logic of the excluded middle is the ‘dualist’ view of the dynamic world we live in; e.g.

“The principle of excluded middle, along with its complement, the law of contradiction (the second of the three classic laws of thought), are correlates of the law of identity (the first of these laws). Because the principle of identity intellectually partitions the Universe into exactly two parts: “self” and “other”, it creates a dichotomy wherein the two parts are “mutually exclusive” and “jointly exhaustive”. The principle of contradiction is merely an expression of the mutually exclusive aspect of that dichotomy, and the principle of excluded middle is an expression of its jointly exhaustive aspect.” — Wikipedia

2. The logic of the INCLUDED middle: — The logic we use when we view dynamics in terms of a transforming web of relations is the ‘the logic of the included middle’ which implies ‘self’ – ‘other’ mutual inclusion or ‘interdependently connected identity’ of the individual inhabitants; i.e. by way of Mach’s principle.  As with multiple hurricanes in a common relational flow-space, or multiple vehicles in the relational dynamics of the flow the freeway, the interdependent dynamics associated with being included within a web of relations, the dynamics of the inhabitants/participants in the relational web are in conjugate relation with the dynamics of the relational web.  The dynamics of the individual participants cannot therefore be said to be fully and solely sourced by the individual participants; i.e. the dynamics of the individuals are outside-inwardly orchestrated/shaped by the dynamics of the relational web they are included in.   The dynamics of the participants in the relational web are conditioning the dynamics of the relational web at the same time as the dynamics of the relational web are conditioning the dynamics of the participants in the web.  As in the example of the Dalit, and/or upper caste participant, the intermediation of the relational medium/web can amplify the assertive dynamics of some individuals and attenuate the dynamics of other individuals.   Therefore, the measurement of the dynamics of a single individual in terms of his trajectory in space and time [which uses the psycho- logic of the excluded middle] fails to acknowledge and take into account the outside-inward accommodating [disaccommodating] influence of the relational space [which requires the psycho- logic of the included middle].

Thus, we have open to us ‘two levels of reality’, one given by ‘the logic of the excluded middle’ and another level that transcends and includes the latter that is given by ‘the logic of the included middle’.  These levels associate with quantum physics and are discussed and presented by a number of scientists and philosophers included Basarab Nicolescu, Stéphane Lupasco, Julian Barbour and the ‘relationists’ such as Mach, Nietzsche, Bohm, Schroedinger etc.

Not only do we have available to us these ‘two levels of reality’ which involved two different ways of seeing/understanding dynamics [i.e. (a) in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, and (b) in terms of the continuing transformation of spatial relations], each of them requires a different type of logic [i.e. (a) the view of dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ requires ‘logic of the excluded middle’, and (b) the view of dynamics in terms of ‘the continuing transformation of spatial relations’ requires ‘logic of included middle’], …. BUT, as Poincaré points out, we also have in our society, two types of people/thinkers, ‘realists’ and ‘pragmatist idealists’;

1. realist: — BELIEVES ….  that the reality given by the logic of the excluded middle is ‘the only reality’.  i.e. the ‘realist’ believes that there is only EITHER ‘is’ OR ‘is not’ and that once we establish ‘that which is’ there is no point in further discussing ‘that which is not’.  This establishes our view of the ‘individual’ as a local, independently existing ‘being’ that is discrete and separate from any other ‘individual’.  This is the ‘dualist’ view of mutually excluded ‘self’ and ‘other’.

2. pragmatist-idealist: — ACKNOWLEDGES  ….. the BOTH ‘both/and’ reality of relational space AND the ‘either/or’ reality of absolute space and absolute time.  That is, the pragmatist-idealist acknowledges that the [mainstream scientific] reality given by the logic of the excluded middle is a ‘reality of appearances’ based on objectifying dynamic forms that we subjectively distinguish in the flow of behaviour, that allows us to construct a reality based on ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these things do’.   The pragmatist-idealist acknowledges the utility of this ‘reality of appearances’ but accepts the reality given by the logic of the included middle is the ‘physical reality’ that we can ‘reduce’ by ‘differentiation’ to deliver the former, lesser ‘reality of appearances’.  The reduction is the one we make by ‘differentiating in time’ or ‘taking the time derivative’ of the relational field of sensory data, which yields those forms that persist in time [resonance features] and which eliminates the more transient relations of the flow.  An example is storm-cells in the flow of the atmosphere, but the process is general; i.e. we extract visible forms [resonance-features] from the flow and treat these forms that are ‘local, visible, and material’ as ‘things-in-themselves that enjoy local, independent existence and, if they are biological organisms, notionally impute to them their own locally originating, internal process driven and directed behaviours.

While our society is evidently a mix of ‘realists’ and ‘pragmatist idealists’, it is also evident that our society has institutionalized ‘realism’ and built it into ‘government’, ‘commerce’ and ‘justice’.   As individuals living within this ‘mix’, how we respond to the realist institutions will lead to more or less social friction with others depending on their responses.

One of the key sources of friction lies in the fact that in the ‘realist view’ where one truly believes that the behaviour of the individual is fully and solely deriving from the individual, using moral law to manage the social dynamic; i.e. building a justice system based on moral law, is fully appropriate.  Meanwhile, the ‘pragmatist idealist view’, wherein one believes that the behaviour of the individual cannot be split out from the relational space dynamics, would lead instead to a system of justice in which the community accepted responsibility for the conflicts that arise within it, so that it would be inappropriate to pass absolute judgement on an individual’s behaviour and justice would instead orient firstly to restoring balance and harmony in the community.

Western justice, which has institutionalized ‘realism’ and thus exclusively employs the ‘dualist’ world view and logic of the excluded middle, is ‘purificationist’ in the sense that ‘attenuating bad behaviour or conflict/dissonance in the community dynamic’ is equated to ‘attenuating bad behaving individuals’.

Aboriginal justice [‘restorative justice’], which orients to the more comprehensive view of dynamics in terms of the continuing transformation of relational space, acknowledges the ‘convenience’ of seeing dynamics in ‘dualist’ terms, but is ‘pragmatist-idealist’ and recognizes the ‘dualist’ view as an incomplete, degenerate special case reduction of the more comprehensive view of dynamics in non-dualist terms where there is no way to split apart the dynamics of the individual from the dynamics of the social collective [just as there is no way to split apart the dynamics of the individual storm-cell from the dynamics of the storm-cell collective, due to the mediating role of the relational space they develop within.

To close the loop with the title of this essay; The Western CULT[ivation] of Belief that ‘Time is Real’.

If you are a Dalit in a New Delhi traffic court and the prosecution displays a GPS trajectory [in space and time coordinates] taken from a GPS recording system in your vehicle, points to the many little jiggles in the trajectory, the slow progress and, in general, your substandard driving performance [compared to another trajectory taken from the same flow at the same time], and asks you to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to whether this is, in fact ‘your trajectory’ on the date and time indicated, what are you going to say?  You are now in very much the same position as Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’ where they had a eye-witness account of Jean’s removal of a loaf of bread from a bakery.  When they ‘play back’ YOUR trajectory, they are implying that your behaviour can be separated out from the dynamics in which you were situationally included.  Instead of your behaviour being RELATIVE TO to the dynamic web of relations you were included in, this trajectory of your behaviour that they are showing is relative to ‘space’ and ‘time’ reference framing.   Which is ‘physical reality’?  Physical reality is, of course, the relational space view of dynamics, which comprehends both the outside-inward accommodating/disaccommodating influence on your dynamics together with the inside-outward asserting influence.  The trajectory expressed in terms of the position and motion of an individual is artificial [thanks to the artificial measuring reference frames of absolute space and absolute time]

Taking this further, thinking about the position and motion of one object is artificial. We are part of Mach’s All, and any motion we call our own is just part of a change in the complete universe. What is the reality of the universe? It is that in any instant the objects in it have some relative arrangement.”  — Julian Barber, ‘The End of Time’

In other words, dynamics expressed as ‘what things-in-themselves do over time’ are artificial.   In physical reality, dynamics are in terms of a continually transforming relational space.

Sure, we have institutionalized this ‘artificial’ view of dynamics that is in terms of ‘what things do in time’ but where is that taking us?  The real physical dynamics are in terms of the transforming of relational space.  So in our commercial institutions we present our plans in terms of ‘what we are going to do over time’.  We may show a new housing development.  But the physical reality is instead in terms of the transforming of the relational space we are in; i.e. forests are going to be cut down, fertile soil is going to be paved over, salmon creeks are going to be filled in, wolf dens and eagle nests will be destroyed, fresh water catch basins will be collecting concentrated effluents such as sewage and commercial wastes, the whole ecological web will be transformed, so how does this ‘show up’ in a commercial plan expressed in terms of ‘what things do over time’.  Answer: it doesn’t.  Which is ‘the physical reality’?  It is certainly not in terms of ‘what things do over time’.

Institutionalizing ‘realism’ [dualism] is thus institutionalizing an ‘artificial view of dynamics’ in terms of ‘what things do over time’, and obscuring the physical reality of ‘the transforming of relational space’, the latter being a view of dynamics which ‘time’ does not enter into.

The belief that ‘time is real’, as has been institutionalized in the globally dominant Western culture, is psychologically imposing on us a substitute ‘artificial reality’, a degenerate, over-simplified, ‘what things do over time’ artificial reality, that obscures from our view/understanding, the ‘physical reality’ which is in terms of a TIMELESS, continually transforming relational space, … Mach’s All.

The supporters of the institutionalizing of ‘realism’ [dualism] can thus be viewed as a ‘cult’ of belief, … that ‘time is real’.

* * *

Appendix I: Quotes from Julian Barbour’s ‘The End of Time’

Julian Barbour writes:

“I was born in 1937 and grew up in the village of South Newington in North Oxfordshire, England. As a boy I became very interested in astronomy. For this reason, I decided to study mathematics at Cambridge, after which I commenced a PhD in astrophysics in Munich.  However, at this time I became deeply interested in foundational issues in physics, above all the nature of time. I came to the conclusion that time itself does not exist. If we did not see objects move and things change, we could never say that time passes. Time is nothing but a measure of change. But physics had been developed under the assumption that time exists and flows independently of the objects in the world. I felt this was quite wrong and that physics must be recast on a new timeless foundation.
Since 1963 I have been working on this project and the closely related problem of the origin of inertia. I completed a PhD on the foundations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity at Cologne in 1968 and then decided to become independent, fearing that an academic environment and the associated pressure to publish as many research articles as possible would deflect me from my long-term objectives. For 28 years I supported my family and research by translating Russian scientific journals. This left me free to develop, in collaboration with the Italian Bruno Bertotti, a theory of time and inertia. Another major topic of interest for me has been the implications of this work in quantum cosmology.

I also became very interested in the historical development of ideas about time and motion, the subject of my Absolute or Relative Motion?, Volume 1, The Discovery of Dynamics (now retitled as simply The Discovery of Dynamics and reprinted as a paperback, see writings). In 1996, I retired from my translating work and have since then concentrated entirely on my physics research and on writing. I have summarized my ideas about the non-existence of time for non-specialists in The End of Time, which has been published in hardback (1999) and paperback (2000) in the UK and hardback (2000) in the USA (with paperback to be published fall 2001). Articles about the main ideas in this book were published in The New Scientist in October 1999 and Discover (December 2000). For details about my main publications and ideas in physics, see writings and ideas.

My wife Verena comes from the Black Forest in Germany. We have one son and three daughters.“

“(The Austrian physicist Ernst) Mach was interested in many subjects, especially the nature and methods in science. His philosophical standpoint had points in common with Bishop Berkeley, but even more with the ideas of the great eighteenth-century Scottish empiricist David Hume. Mach insisted that science must deal with genuinely observable things, and this made him deeply suspicious of the concepts of invisible absolute space and time. In 1883 he published a famous history of mechanics containing a trenchant and celebrated critique of these concepts...”

(Barbour: 2000, p. 65)

“(Considering Newton’s bucket argument, Ernst Mach suggested) that it is not (absolute) space but all the matter in the universe, exerting a genuine physical effect, that creates centrifugal force… Mach’s proposal boiled down to the idea that the law of inertia is indeed, as Bishop Berkeley believed, a motion relative to the stars, not space. Mach’s important novelty was that there must be proper physical laws that govern the way distant matter controls the motions around us. Each body in the universe must be exerting an effect that depends on its mass and distance. The (Newton’s) law of inertia will turn out to be a motion relative to some average of all the masses in the universe. For this basic idea, Einstein coined the expression Mach’s principle, by which it is now universally known (though attempts at precise definition vary quite widely).

Mach’s idea suggests that the Newtonian way of thinking about the workings of the universe, which is still deep-rooted, is fundamentally wrong…”

(Barbour: 2000, p. 65)

“It would be much more natural to specify our distances to all objects. They define our position. This conclusion is very natural once we become aware that nothing is fixed. Everything moves relative to everything else.

Taking this further, thinking about the position and motion of one object is artificial. We are part of Mach’s All, and any motion we call our own is just part of a change in the complete universe. What is the reality of the universe? It is that in any instant the objects in it have some relative arrangement.”

(Barbour: 2000, p. 68)

“The proper way to think about motion is that the universe as a whole moves from one ‘place’ to another ‘place’, where ‘place’ means a relative arrangement, or configuration, of the complete universe…

It [the universe] does not move in absolute space, it moves from one configuration to another. The totality of these places is its relative configuration space: Platonia…

… no Sun rises or sets over that landscape to mark the walker’s progress. The Sun, like the moving parts of any clock, is part of the universe. It is part of the walker…

There is nothing outside the universe to time it as it goes from one place to another in Platonia – only some internal change can do that. But just as all markers are on an equal footing for defining position, so are all changes for the purposes of timing…

The history of the universe is the path. Each point on the path is a configuration of the universe. For a three-body universe, each configuration is a triangle. The path is just the triangles – nothing more, nothing less.

With time gone, motion is gone...”  [that is, all ‘motion’ is ‘transformation of relational space’; i.e. it is the 'same space' reconfiguring, continually]

Appendix II: Religion [and Science] and ‘Time’

The worlds 4200 religions have in common that they provide a sense of a ‘greater power’ than man that is larger than and deemed responsible for the simple birth-to-death material/physical experience of man.  Religions impart to man a spiritual aspect to life that transcends the purely temporal and transient material aspect.

Religion and science both derive, historically, from man’s quest to understand himself and the world he lives in, the continuously changing One and the many, ‘Unum’ and ‘pluribus’.  What was the Source of innovation in the world.  Did the Source reside inside of each of the diverse multiplicity of forms in the world, giving them the power to be ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own divine internal sourcing of development and behaviour, … or was the Source immanent in the dynamic Unum of Nature, a rendering/portrayal of Nature imputing that ‘everything is in flux’ (panta rhea, Heraclitus), implying that the multiple forms, such as humans, that keep gathering and being regathered, which appear to be ‘separate things-in-themselves’, are like resonances within the flowing Unum [i.e. like whorls in the flow].

Historical writings show the quest for understanding ‘the One and the many’ split into two different ‘logics’ of relating this duality, and that that split corresponds to the difference between (a) the ‘non-dualist’ logic of the included middle [of forms within flow], and (b) the ‘dualist’ logic of the excluded middle [of things-in-themselves].

In both camps was the idea that the One had to transcend the many and be the source of the many, however, there were two ways to achieve this.  The non-dualist camp was to use the concept of a ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ wherein things that appeared to be opposite to each other were in fact conjugate aspects of one transcendent dynamic [the low notes and high notes in the one dynamic of harmony; i.e. harmony is the One that engenders the low and the high notes].  This SIMULTANEOUS coniunctio of opposites was used to explain the ‘dynamical whole’ and the ‘dynamical parts’ of Nature in ‘neo-platonism’;

“We affirm Nature to be a certain power implanted in things producing like things out of like. For Nature generates, augments and nourishes all things. Wherefore it has in itself the names of all things. … [Nature is] the fruitful parent of all qualities and things. What is therefore Nature? God is Nature, and Nature is God: understand it thus: out of God there arises something next to him. Nature is therefore a certain invisible fire, by which Zoroaster taught that all things were begotten, to whom Heraclitus the Ephesian seems to give consent.” — Proclus’ [neoplatonist] essay on Nature.

In the other ‘dualist’ camp, change was seen as SEQUENTIAL, and this ‘view’ was one in which man ‘took himself out’ of the world and was able to see the world ‘from its very beginning’ [note that there was no ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’ in the SIMULTANEOUS or ‘spatial-relational’ view of change].   The Christian religion exemplifies the dualist view wherein ‘change’ transpires SEQUENTIALLY as in a succession of frames or ‘snapshots’ where the frozen ‘reality’ in each ‘frame’ is regarded as the ‘basic reality’;

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.  And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.  God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” … Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” —Genesis, 1,2, 26

The implication in this ‘dualist’ camp view which sees things in ‘black-and-white’ [‘day-and-night’] terms, is that man has the capacity to look in through ‘God’s eyes’ and see an objective world out there in front of him [otherwise, this passage would make no sense], implying the existence of an absolute space and absolute time frame in which the sequentially-changing world is included in as it continues to change.  God’s words and God’s creative actions render ‘change’ by way of an all-genesis, no epigenesis ‘sequential build’.  That is, in this view of ‘change’ as a ‘creative sequence’, there is only ‘emptiness’ to begin with so there is no ‘outside-inward shaping influence’ [epigenesis]on the inside-outward asserting ‘genesis’.

Not only do religions divide into these two, ‘dualist’ and ‘non-dualist’ camps, but so too does philosophy.  As Nietzsche 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

As mentioned above, in philosophy, the ‘pragmatist idealist’ accepts both of these strains in the manner that a geometer accepts curved space and rectangular space, the one being more complex than the other in the manner that a polynomial of degree two is more complex than a polynomial of degree one.  That is, we can accept, as PHYSICAL REALITY, that hurricanes are ‘dimples’ [relational-space ‘resonance-features’] in a fluid-dynamical continuum [energy-charged spatial-plenum] as in ‘non-dualism’ which requires the ‘logic of the included middle’ [‘coincidentia oppositorum’-capable logic], and we can further accept the UTILITY OF THE SIMPLIFIED ‘IDEALIZATION’, that ‘differentiates’ the non-dualist physical reality, reducing its ‘dimples’ to ‘things-in-themselves’ that we can define and name, allowing us to re-render the physically experienced ‘real-dynamics’ in the idealized ‘lesser terms’ of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what things-in-themselves do’.   This reduction that RE-DEFINES REALITY in the absolutized/idealized terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what they do’ recalls the observation of John Stuart Mill; “every definition implies an axiom; that in which we affirm the existence of the object defined.”

We live in a world where dualism is the globally dominating worldview [i.e. where the logic of the excluded middle prevails].  It is a world where ‘competition’ [‘if you’re not with us you’re against us’] prevails, where ‘construction’ is seen as the ‘real opposite’ to ‘destruction’ [as if we could construct a housing development without destroying forest].  In other words, the worldview presented to us in the media and in educational systems IS IN DENIAL of the world being a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum [the coincidentia oppositorum view of ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’].  In other words, the modern world is world in which ‘realism’ [the belief in dualism as constituting ‘reality’] has been institutionalized in sovereigntism/government, commence and justice.  Understanding of self and the world in pragmatist-idealist terms lies latent in the global populace, held captive by this unnatural inversion which has put the ‘polynomial of degree one’ [the flatspace or absolutist worldview] into primacy over the ‘polynomical of degree two’ [the curved space or ‘relational’ worldview].

In order to reconcile atheist science with these two religious/philosophical camps of ‘non-dualism’ and ‘dualism’, one has to go back to the historical development of science which followed the Western religions in splitting the world into two separate realms; the lifeless mineral/inorganic world of dead material objects and the vivacious organic world of ‘living things-in-themselves’.   This ‘dualism’ was retained in the historical development of science.  Atheist scientists belief in a mysterious ‘life-force’ that resides inside of what we call ‘biological organisms’ to make sense of our having defined them as ‘things-in-themselves’ with ‘their own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour’, … rather than seeing them as ‘dynamic figures’ in the [continually transforming, relational] ‘dynamic ground’.  Atheist science, having committed to this split, had to impute to ‘biological organisms’, a notional, internally resident process called ‘life’.  Atheist science has yet to ‘tie down’ where and what this absolute local centre of directing and organizing Sourcing Process is, but we are asked to trust science because; ‘how else could a thing-in-itself’ have ‘its own locally originating, internally sourced development and behaviour’ without it?  It must be in there!

Of course, atheist science was not prepared, as history shows, to question ‘the existence’ of absolute space and absolute time upon which the very notion of a ‘thing-itself’ depends.  Thus science also split into two camps on this same dualism — non-dualism issue; i.e. Ernst Mach charged that the belief in absolute space and absolute time was belief ungrounded in physical experience, and that science had to ‘let go of this belief’ [the implication was that science had to let go of ‘belief’ in the ‘existence’ of idealized ‘things-in-themselves’ which had been foundational to science since Newton and his professed belief that; “God in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles."].  Mach was ‘rewarded’ for his view, which urged the scientific community to suspend ‘belief’ in the ‘metaphysics of absolute space and absolute time’ by being marginalized as a ‘heretic’’;

“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 belief 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’. See also ‘Ernst Mach leaves the Church of Physics’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Br J Philos Sci (1989) 40 (4): 519-540.))

 

As Julian Barbour observes;

“Mach insisted that science must deal with genuinely observable things, and this made him deeply suspicious of the concepts of invisible absolute space and time. In 1883 he published a famous history of mechanics containing a trenchant and celebrated critique of these concepts.” … “Taking this further, thinking about the position and motion of one object is artificial. We are part of Mach’s All, and any motion we call our own is just part of a change in the complete universe. What is the reality of the universe? It is that in any instant the objects in it have some relative arrangement.”

So, atheist science has to this day retained the concept of ‘local material things-in-themselves’ as enabled by the ‘metaphysics of absolute space and absolute time’, as part of official/legitimate science’s ‘belief system’.  What determines which science is ‘legitimate’ is the informal council of ‘scientist-practitioners’, the ones who decreed that Mach’s so-called ‘scientific ideas’ were ‘outside of legitimate science’.

Of course, Mach was not the only scientist to be declared a ‘heretic’ and be ‘excommunicated’, there have been many others, including Erwin Schroedinger, the developer of quantum wave dynamic theory.   Schroedinger, also, did not believe in the ‘metaphysics of absolute space and absolute time’ and saw ‘space’ as a relational energy-charged continuum’ wherein ‘local material systems’ were resonance features within the continually transforming wave-flow continuum, or,  ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’) rather than ‘real things-in-themselves’.  The latter term being oxymoronic since to be real-and-physical meant being part of the transforming relational space-plenum which is incompatible with ‘thing-in-itselfness’.

In order to protect the notional ‘thing-in-itself’ material systems as foundational in quantum theory, those who sought to do this supported an interpretation of quantum physics in terms of ‘probabilities’.   Imagine that you were trying to ‘tie down’, at the same time, both the ‘position’ and the ‘movement’ of a particle.  Imagine, further, that the particle was a ball bearing in the space on the surface of a giant ball bearing that a bunch of ball bearings were rolling around on.  This is like the example of the vehicles in the flow of the freeway.  For the participants inside this continually transforming configuration, the configuration  is what gives ‘location’ and in order to measure the movement of an individual participant it has to be relative to the transforming relational configuration.  If we ‘freeze-frame’ the configuration we can get the ‘location’ of the individual participant.  And if we unfreeze the configuration we can see the individual participant in motion, but there is no way to, at the same time, both ‘freeze’ and ‘unfreeze’ the configuration.  This is Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’.  That we ‘bump into it’ suggests that the space we live in is ‘relational’ so that the notion of ‘individual motion’ is a non-starter.

To get a better feel for what is ‘going on here’, if one views the video-clip of the ‘Atlantic Hurricanes: 2008 Season’ one sees different, individual hurricanes ‘forming’ and ‘moving’.   We can watch the hurricanes move relative to the frame of the video-screen, but if there were no fixed reference frames, we would have to see the movement of the hurricane relative to the configuration of the relational [fluid-flow] space it is included in, which is continually [relationally] transforming.  The notions of ‘where IT is’ and ‘ITS motion’ collapse, because the implied notion of its ‘thing-in-itself’- as a being’- collapses.  What we are looking at is the ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ of ‘dynamic figure’ in ‘dynamic ground’ as given by 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 why Schroedinger compares this physical phenomenological paradox with ancient Vedic belief in his essay ‘What is life?’.   Where Schroedinger ‘is going’ with this, is that, if we consider ourselves to be a hurricane in the flow, then since we know that we, ourselves are directing the behaviour of our bodies, this ‘we’ that is doing the directing must be ‘Mach’s All’, the entirety of the continually transforming relational space.  In Schroedinger’s words;

“…let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises:

(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.

(ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.

The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I — I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’ — am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature. Within a cultural milieu (Kulturkreis) where certain conceptions (which once had or still have a wider meaning amongst other peoples) have been limited and specialized, it is daring to give to this conclusion the simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke.

In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).”

Ok, everyone, scientists, religion-seekers, is struggling with these same problems of understanding ‘self’ and ‘other’ and whether they should be understood in terms of  the dualist logic of EITHER/OR or in the non-dualist logic of BOTH/AND.  Since the former logic relates to the latter in the manner that curved space [a polynomial of degree two] relates to rectangular/flat space [a polynomial of degree one], two corollary options arise; i.e. if we start with non-dualist BOTH/AND logic, we can see things;

(a) as a ‘pragmatist-idealist’ sees things, making use of BOTH ‘both/and’ logic AND ‘either/or’ logic, or,

(b) as a ‘realist’ sees things, where we start with EITHER/OR logic and after having considered whether we are going to go with EITHER ‘both/and’ logic OR ‘either/or’ logic, we opt for ‘either/or’ logic, at which point [as Parmenides observed], there is no point in further considering ‘both/and’ logic.

Anyhow, to finish the story of how the ‘legitimate science of quantum physics’ [the ‘legimate-ness’ having been determined by the council-of-legitimizing scientists who found against Mach and Schroedinger, and in favour of themselves], preserved the foundational role of the ‘thing-in-itself’ [and thus the foundational role of the metaphysics of absolute space and absolute time], they used the mathematical device of ‘probability’.  So in the case of the ‘electron’ which is notionally a ‘particle’ that is needed to make the notion of an ‘atom’ as a ‘local, material ‘thing-in-itself system’ hang together logically, thought the ‘electron’ could not be ‘isolated’ as a ‘thing-in-itself’ due to the uncertainty principle, the notional, particulate-thing-in-itself ‘electron’ was ‘bookmarked’ by a notional ‘probability cloud’ that implied that the electron was hanging around somewhere in there, like a gravity field or acoustic [wave] field, EVERYWHERE AT THE SAME TIME, and that in the act of measuring it, the ‘probability field’ COLLAPSES, precipitating the notional thing-in-itself electron by the measurement process itself.

This skullduggery on the part of the committee responsible for distinguishing between ‘legitimate science’ and ‘illegitimate science’ [e.g. the science of Ernst Mach and Erwin Schroedinger] did not impress Schroedinger who also opted to ‘quit the Church of Science’, saying;

“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. …”
“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.” … “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.” (Schrödinger E, ‘The Interpretation of Quantum Physics’). … “I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.” (Erwin Schroedinger speaking about the ‘legitimate science’ interpretation of Quantum Physics).

‘Probability’ is the same device that the atheist science of Dawkins and Darwinism deploys to deny and obfuscate outside-inward orchestrating of ‘organizings’ such as ‘the biological organizing’ as a ‘dynamic figure’ in the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum aka ‘dynamic ground’.  That is, the mainstream science model of  ‘a biological organism’ as a ‘thing-in-itself organizATION’ whose development/evolution is due purely and solely, so the story goes, to internal all-genesis-no-epigenesis processes, is ‘too small a story’ to make sense of the historical evidence as to the nature of change.  That is, ‘change’ as a succession of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ actions is a very simple and limited model, that can’t explain change in form that happens in ‘jumps’.  If one sees change as the ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ of outside-inward orchestrating influence and inside-outward asserting influence, then one can explain how it is that a cluster of expanding spherical soap bubbles can suddenly become a matrix of hexagonal cells; i.e. this step-wise evolution of form arises from the ‘coniunctio’ or ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ of outside-inward back-reflecting and inside-outward-asserting influence, as in ‘wave dynamics’.

But, since atheist science, the science of the metaphysics of absolute space and absolute time, insists that space is empty and therefore cannot contribute any outside-inward shaping influence to the ‘change’ process, another device must be invented to ‘fill in the gap’, and what could be better at this, at filling in any gap you like, but ‘random chance’, … ‘it just happened, see!’   ‘from time to time, things just happen’.  This is a wonderful general purpose device for filling in the holes in one’s theory.  This is what is used to keep Darwinism with its one-sided all genesis no epigenesis change architecture ‘hanging together’.  Darwinism postulates that ‘change’ or ‘evolution’ is by way of ‘reproduction with random variation’.  ‘Random variation’ is the same device used by Max Born et all to preserve the notion of an ‘electron-as-thing-in-itself’.   In order to prove it exists, you measure its influence and the probability distribution collapses with the measurement/observation.  It’s like defining something with words [measurements] so at to artificially endow it with ‘thing-in-itself-existence’ as we do in naming a hurricane and measuring its internal pressures and wind velocities.

“Hey son, where did you get those wings.  insects like us have never had wings up to this point in our evolutionary history!”  “Dad, I don’t really know, but they sure fit in well with the air in our natural space and its viscosity and density relative to the physical architecture of my new wing structures.  If that’s what they call a ‘random variation’, it sure is a coincidence as to how it facilitates my relational engaging with the dynamic space we all share inclusion in.  It’s almost as if the space we live in was orchestrating the change in me.”  “Son, its a lucky thing that your ‘random chance variations’ come out so symmetrical and tilting the way they did, otherwise you might have had to fly upside down and backwards and the wings wouldn’t have meshed with your already installed visual and balance sensing equipment.”  “Yes, dad, it almost seems as if our developing of new features constitutes our ‘rising to the occasion’ as participants in a transforming relational space, rather than this development being the ‘further development’ of our existing ‘thing-in-itself’ ‘being’ that powerboats around in an absolute space and absolute time operating theatre, reproducing and hoping for some random chance variations to improve our lineage.”

The device of ‘probability’ or ‘random chance variation’ is a general purpose theory-hole-filler.  It is ‘another metaphysical device’ that goes along with the metaphysics of ‘absolute space’ and ‘absolute time’.  It allows us to continue to use an over-simplistic model of dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ without having to ‘strain our brain’.  As Mach says;

“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

* * *

Summary of this section on Religion [and Science] and ‘Time’:

Throughout the recorded history of man, there has been a struggle to understand the nature and relationship of ‘the One and the many’ and ‘change’ as manifestly transpires therein.

Two views were developed which can be distinguished by their portraying of ‘change’ as (a) simultaneous [as in relational transformation] implying ‘dynamic figure’ and ‘dynamic ground’ as a ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ or ‘non-dualism’, or as (b) sequential [as in a creative succession, as in a sequence of frames in video film footage]  that renders dynamics in the dualist [matter/figure and space/ground binary-opposite] terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.

Two ‘philosophies’ also ‘sprang up’ in regard to the use of these two views; ‘pragmatic idealism’ philosophy that starts with BOTH/AND logic and acknowledges the physical reality of (a) and the utility of using the idealized view of (b) in a support role.

On the other hand, ‘realist’ philosophy starts with EITHER/OR logic and selects (b) as the one and only ‘reality’, rejecting (a) which, to pragmatist-idealists, is the primary [physical] reality.  This has ‘been gone through’ before in history; e.g. the Vedics understood the ‘reality’ of (b) as “Maja”, ‘illusion’ [from sanskrit ‘ma’ ‘ya’ in english ‘not’ ‘that’];

“Maya or Māyā (Sanskrit माया māyā), in Indian religions, has multiple meanings, usually quoted as “illusion”, centered on the fact that we do not experience the environment itself but rather a projection of it, created by us. Māyā is the principal deity that manifests, perpetuates and governs the illusion and dream of duality in the phenomenal Universe. For some mystics, this manifestation is real.Each person, each physical object, from the perspective of eternity, is like a brief, disturbed drop of water from an unbounded ocean. The goal of enlightenment is to understand this—more precisely, to experience this: to see that the distinction between the self and the Universe is a false dichotomy. The distinction between consciousness and physical matter, between mind and body (refer bodymind), is the result of an unenlightened perspective.”  — Wikipedia

The institutionalizing of the ‘realist’ worldview in dualist terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, has been assisted, as discussed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf and Wittgenstein, by the deployment of ‘language architectures’ that support it.  In the nondualist view where ‘becoming’ is the primary physical reality and ‘being’ is the secondary idealized/simplified reality, the noun must at the same time be a verb, as it is in aboriginal languages such as Hopi.

The ‘biological organism’ thus becomes ‘the biological organizing’.  Everywhere we use ‘organizATION’ in our realism based institutions, we should be using ‘organizING’.  This shifts the sourcing of dynamics [e.g. development and behaviour] from exclusively locally originating inside-outward assertive sourcing of development and behaviour to the ‘coincidentia oppositorist’ sourcing of ‘outside-inward orchestrative influence in coniunctio with inside-outward assertive influence’.  This has now been discovered to be the physically actual case in cell biology; i.e. it is now recognized that ‘receptors’ and ‘effectors’ [epigenesis and genesis] are a coincidentia oppositorist non-duality.  As Bruce Lipton observes, the notion of the biological cell as a ‘unit of being’ is now being superseded by the notion of the biological cell as a ‘unit of perception’.  .  In other words, rather than understanding the cell in the dualist terms of a ‘thing-in-itself-organizATION’ that is mutually excluded from its operating-theatre space, the cell-ATHMAN = the cell-BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self)

The wars that are currently going on are based on our having institutionalized ‘realism’ where we totally believe the ‘existence’ of sovereign-state ‘things-in-themselves’ organizATIONs that have their own local ‘thing-in-itself’ behaviours, and ‘compete’ with one another as mutually excluding ‘machines’ rather than acknowledging that all forms in nature are organizINGs in the common relational space we all share inclusion in.

As has been described in this section on Religion [and Science] and ‘Time’, by institutionalizing ‘realism’, we have been institutionalizing ‘illusion’.   All the while that we are focusing on ‘what things are doing’, we are making ourselves oblivious to ‘how we and the relational space we are included in are undergoing continuing transformation.  We are like the colonizers of America who, because they were stuck in the ‘what things-in-themselves do’ mode of understanding dynamics, saw themselves as ‘constructing a wonderful new world in America’ while the indigenous aboriginals, looking at the same dynamics in the same place at the same time, understood what was going on as the destruction of a wonderful established natural world on Turtle Island.   Only by understanding dynamics in terms of a continually transforming relational space can we resolve the ‘false dichotomies’ that inevitably arise from the clash of ‘individual perspectives’ that are in ‘realist/dualist’ terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do in a time-based succession’.  The dynamics of our physical experience are simultaneous and spatial-relational;

 “… thinking about the position and motion of one object is artificial. We are part of Mach’s All, and any motion we call our own is just part of a change in the complete universe. What is the reality of the universe? It is that in any instant the objects in it have some relative arrangement” — Julian Barbour, ‘The End of Time’;

“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’

This is what the ‘learning circle’ of the indigenous aboriginal tradition is there for.  The differing perspectives of individuals, each in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do in a time-based succession’ are innately non-resolvable, like the perspectives of colonizers and the perspectives of the colonized.  The only resolution that is possible is by the ‘principle of Lafontaine’, “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure”.  The aboriginal ‘learning circle’ tradition would be the approach ‘of choice’ to develop understanding of self-and-other, Unum and pluribus, chosen a collection of storm-cells in the atmosphere who are, at the same time, ‘dynamic figures’ and ‘dynamic ground’, Athman and Brahman.

The modern world is now challenged by having globally institutionalized the substituting of dualist illusion for non-dualist physical reality, and being faced with the necessity [if all sorts of unfolding dissonance is to be avoided] of restoring non-dualist physical reality to its natural precedence, a process that some are calling ‘decolonization’.

* * *

Appendix III: Causality and ‘Time’

The core goal of science is ‘generalization’ and the imposing of absolute space and absolute time as reference framing for our observations serves this process, since in a continually transforming relational space, a ‘dynamical All’ or ‘One’ in which the observer is included, the very concept of ‘repetition’ makes no sense.

In order for ‘repetition’ to make sense, we have to split the observer/inhabitant apart from the observed/habitat and then define ‘repetition’ in terms of ‘I have seen this happen before’.  Science thus defines itself as ‘economy of thought’-seeking;

“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 ‘facts’ of science derive from ‘human observations and experiences’, but scientists admit to doing some ‘pre-processing’ to reduce the complexity of our observations and experiences.  For example, if a man throws a stubbed cigarette butt into a forest 100,000 times, nothing remarkable may happen, but on the 100,001 ‘repetition’, the forest may ignite and explode in flames.

There are a few points of note in regard to this.

1. It is convenient for us to say that the man ‘caused the fire’ even though what had changed was ‘the response of the forest/habitat’ rather than ‘the actions of the inhabitant’.

2. If a boy tickles the chest of a female schoolmate while she is lying down, she may smile and giggle.  But on the n+1th repetition, she may ignite and explode in flaming anger or in fear.

3. Scientific thinking of the common type says that the boy ‘caused’ the fiery explosion in the girl and that his ‘tickling fingers’ are the causal agency.  Why is this?

4. Science, in order to achieve an ‘economy of thought’, conveniently assumes that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past, and not

“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.

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.” – Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’

5.  Just as in the case of the forest fire, the historical record of the girl’s inhabitant-habitat experiencing spring-loaded her in such a manner that a certain pattern of experience could now ‘trigger’ an explosive release of tensions within her.  One might say that ‘she had lost her innocence’.

6.  If we model these goings-on using an absolute space and absolute time reference frame as the ‘operating theatre’ and imagining the boy and the girl as ‘things-in-themselves’ interacting within this non-participating space [i.e. re-rendering these dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do in time], then we would say that ‘the boy caused this ‘flare-up’ in the girl.  This is a bit like saying; ‘the soldier caused a great uproar by stepping on the land-mine’.

7. Moral judgement, as psychological experiments establish, is based on empathy for a person or thing that is ‘suffering’.  This is called ‘outcome aversion’.  Based on the negative experience of the recipient of the action [the burning forest or the enflamed woman], the third party will seek to identify the causal agent and proscribe/arrest the behaviours that are presumed to ‘cause’ the negative experience in the recipient of those behaviours.

 

“A dominant view, tracing back at least to Hume (1739), holds that the proscription of harmful behavior is rooted in a concern for the victim‘s distress (Hoffman, M.L. ‘Empathy and moral development, implications for caring and justice’, Pizarro, D.A., ‘Nothing more than feelings: The role of emotions in moral judgment’) that emerges at an early age (Eisenberg-Berg, N., ‘The development of children’s prosocial judgment).  The inhibition of violence depends largely on empathic concern, an affective response that stems from the apprehension of a victim‘s emotional state, and which is congruent with what the victim is feeling or is expected to feel as a consequence of the harmful act  (Batson et al., 1993; Batson,1994). Neuroscientific findings support the existence of empathy by showing similarity in the activation patterns during actual experience and observation in others of a range of emotional states, including pain  (Morrison, Lloyd, di Pellegrino & Roberts, 2004). These activations can be elicited by looking at facial expressions (Carr, Iacoboni, Dubeau, Mazziotta & Lenzi, 2003), bodily expressions (Jackson, Meltzoff & Decety, 2005), as well as by mere imagination of  another‘s experience (Singer et al., 2004; Jackson, Brunet, Meltzoff & Decety, 2006).  Moreover, trait ratings of empathy are correlated with the strength of these activations (Lamm, Batson, &Decety, 2007; Singer et al., 2004). When this initial empathic response is activated, the agent‘s behavior can reflect increased concern for the victim‘s welfare (Batson, 1991). We call this the outcome aversion model: it posits an affective mechanism responsible for proscribing harmful behaviors based on the negative outcomes that they bring about, and is largely motivated by empathic concern for the victims.”  —Excerpt from ‘Act and Impact: Differentiating Affective Contributions to Third-Party Moral Judgment’ by Ivar A. Hannikainen, Ryan M. Miller and Fiery A Cushman.

 

8. There are people that are like spring-loaded walking ‘land-mines’, conditioned by historical experience like the forest, that, if one plugs in the right code, will ignite and explode.  Science, with its ‘economy of thought’-seeking pre-processing of the data/facts, will nevertheless claim that the agent that ‘punched in the correct code’ ‘caused’ the explosion, even though that same code punched into other people or other forests did NOT result in any explosion.

9.  To make the claim that the person that was just doing their normal stuff which normally did not result in any explosions ‘caused’ the fire, boils down to implicitly making the assumption that ‘all people are more or less the same’ or that ‘all forests are more or less the same’.  Only by this assumption will the notional ‘causal sourcing’ of the explosion shift to the ‘triggerer’.  This principle is know as ‘Rubin causality’;

“The fundamental dilemma of causality, according to Rubin, is that, if we use an experimental unit (a bacterium, e.g. ) to show that “X causes Y,” we cannot use that same unit to show that some “non-X does not cause Y.” We solve this dilemma [statistically] by assuming that all units are more or less the same.” – Donald B. Rubin

That is, the operative assumption in establishing causality is that ‘all women’ or ‘all forests’ are more or less the same.  In that way, we establish that the launching of the pyrotechnics does not differ from woman to woman or from forest to forest.  Eg. if some women are ‘more innocent’ or ‘more conspiracy theory prone’ than others, the same action may not or may trigger pyrotechnics in them.  That is, if there is some ‘historical conditioning’ in some women or in some forests that makes these women and/or these forests more or less susceptible to the launching of pyrotechnics, then a focus on the particulars of the dynamics of the alleged ‘causal agency’ is a case of ‘barking up the wrong tree’.  It is like investigating the difference in the actions of three cross-country skiers because it was the third skier that ‘caused’ the avalanche.

10.  In order to understand complex phenomena, one must suspend the convenient simplification wherein we assume that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’ because it is this assumption that blinds us to ‘historical conditioning’ of the recipients of action, that may be more important to what unfolds, than the particulars of the applied actions.

11. Historical conditioning, as used here is spatial-relational [rather than change to a ‘thing’ over ‘time’], as in the spatial relational conditions of wind and weather that dry out a forest and turn it into a bomb waiting to go off, or similarly for historically conditioned mountain slopes and people.  Taking into account this ‘historical conditioning’ is not as convenient in ‘identifying cause’ as forming conclusions based on the assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’, but it is far more ‘realistic’.  Where it leads to is ‘Machean physics’ where dynamics are seen in terms of a continually transforming relational space, rather than the idealized [metaphysics of absolute space and absolute time based] terms of ‘what things in themselves do’ in an absolute space and absolute time framed operating theatre.

12. Psychologists have shown, as mentioned in point 7., that people are ‘outcome averse’.  This means that when they look at the bodies of children being pulled from the snow in the wake of the avalanche, they will look for the ‘smoking gun’ as the target for moral judgement and culpability.  The ‘third skier’ will be identified as the agent that ‘caused’ the avalanche.  This is based on two assumptions (a) that the present depends only on the immediate past, and (b) on ‘Rubin causality’ wherein we assume that all slopes are more or less the same.

13. The general case is that the recipients of action are ‘historically conditioned’ so that ‘the same actions’ applied to different recipients can associate with ‘different outcomes’.  It is therefore not reasonable to conclude that the actions applied to the recipient are the ‘cause’ of those [different] outcomes, since the outcomes are shaped by the historical conditioning of the recipient [of the actions].

14.  The common reference to ‘carelessness’ on the part of the alleged ‘causal agent’, the ‘third skier’ who caused the avalanche that caused the deaths of several children, is not a ‘carelessness in his actions’, but a less than needed thoroughness in discernment of the historical conditioning of the recipients of his actions [the mountain slopes which are ‘not all more or less the same’].  This is generally true, the man who playfully tickles the chest of a female is careless, not in regard to his actions, but in regard to his discerning of the historical conditioning of the recipient of his actions [the women who are ‘not all more or less the same’].

Conclusion:

The habitat that we inhabit is being continually, historically conditioned in a spatial-relational sense.  The sun and winds and climate is capable of developing ‘bombs’ such as ‘tinder-dry forest’ that are waiting to explode, no matter if by lightning, the spark of a chain-saw, the focusing of a convex piece of glass, or by the spark in a stubbed cigarette butt.  To the man in the forest, his actions in disposing of cigarette butts may be ‘more or less the same’ but not all forests are the same.  Mike Barre of McLure, British Columbia [a volunteer fire-fighter], according to his own tally, disposed of 38,000 stubbed cigarette butts in forested area without incident.  However, his 38,001^st stubbed butt disposal triggered the McLure-Barriere fire of 2003 which first headed away from the town of McLure then after a windshift came back and burned down the entire town of McLure.  It was not that Mike Barre’s actions were ‘careless’.  It was instead that Mike Barre’s carelessness was in regard to insufficient discernment of differences in historical conditioning of forest regions; i.e. not all forest regions are the same.

If you are 12, tickling the chest of a female playmate innocently or otherwise may produce smiles and giggles.  This gradually becomes a ‘mine-field’ in regard to different ‘outcomes’ from different friends from exactly the same behaviour.  The outcome where the recipient of the actions launches into pyrotechnics is not the result of the actions per se, but in the historical conditioning of the recipient of the action.  Not only are not all females the same, neither are relationships the same [the white guy does not try using the N word with his black brothers just because he has seen his black brothers use it with one another].

In general, the ‘scientific method’ includes certain assumptions that are rarely questioned parts of the scientific modeling process.  The assumption that it is realistic to model dynamics ‘in time’ is one of those assumptions.  Causality is a concept that is tied to the modeling of dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do in time’.  And as Poincaré observes, in science [mainstream], this includes the assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’.  Therefore, when the children’s bodies are pulled from the avalanche, the parents look uphill and see the third skier ‘whose actions caused the avalanche which killed their children’.   ‘His careless actions killed their children’.

That is not the ‘reality’.  It was not ‘his actions’ that caused the avalanche, it was the historical conditioning of the mountain slope.  His actions were perfectly ok with 99% of mountain slopes.  His carelessness was not in his actions but in his insufficient discernment of the historical conditioning of the slope he was on; i.e. ‘not all slopes are the same’.

Dynamics that unfold, in general, cannot be realistically ‘mapped against time’.  To say that ‘time has more dimensions’, as some physicists are saying, is true in this sense, when one explores how ‘time’ enters into our psychological modeling, it becomes apparent that it plays an ‘economy of thought’ role as described by Poincaré in his above quote; i.e. ni order to simplify our modeling of dynamics, we re-render dynamics in terms of a ‘time derivative’.

 “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’

What goes missing in this ‘time’ based re-rendering of dynamics is the spatial-relational historical conditioning of the habitat [the continual spring-loading of spatial-relations with potential energy at the same time as spring-unloading of kinetic energy into spatial-relations]. In other words, what goes missing is Mach’s view of physical dynamics in terms of the continual transforming of the relational spatial-plenum.

When we use our mental model of ‘what things-in-themselves do over time’ to guide our actions, we blind ourselves to how our actions contribute in the continuing historical conditioning of the dynamic habitat that we share inclusion in, that is the essential reality underlying the dynamics of our physical experience; i.e. our experience is not ‘in time’ but ‘in relational space’.  ‘Time’ is an economy-of-thought-producing device, that allows us to ignore the complexities of living in a historically conditioned [spatial-relationally conditioned] habitat; i.e. it enables us to re-render dynamics in fictive terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do in time’.  But the actions of historically conditioned inhabitants of the habitat do not transpire ‘in time’, they transpire in relational space, per Mach’s principle; “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 habitat.”

Immanent Impetus -Thomas deJong 'Suddenly'

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The dam is about to break [my opinion] that will lead to a radical transformation [reformation?] of Western culture; i.e. it won’t be ‘Western culture’ as we have known it any more.

The ‘breaking point’ is cropping up all over the place and it is topologically [spatial-relationally] the same everywhere.

The ‘breaking point’ is to do with our conceptualizing of where outside space and inside matter meet; i.e. where the membrane of a cell meets the environment it is included in, … and/or where the biosphere-membrane of the earth’s atmosphere meets the openness of the space it is experiencing inclusion in.

A century ago, Ernst Mach, a physicist who was a mentor to Einstein, Poincaré and others who were pioneering ‘relativity’ and ‘quantum physics’, was declaring that these two things, ‘space’ and ‘matter’ were not mutually exclusive, but were different forms of energy in conjugate relation; i.e. ‘the dynamics of space [field-flow] are conditioning the dynamics of matter [atomic activity] at the same time as the dynamics of matter [atomic activity] are conditioning the dynamics of space [field-flow]’.  This is a statement of ‘Mach’s principle’.

Mach’s view has been excluded from performance in the ‘Big Top’ of the cultural mainstream.  But views with Machean topology have multiplied and they have become like a swarm of furry little mice scurrying over and around the canvas of the Big Top and generally threatening to ‘take over’ but the culture is fiercely resisting/denying assimilation of these views.

Bruce Lipton’s struggle, within biology, is just one of the cases where cultural denial of space-matter relativity manifests, and it is an interesting one to explore since the question of the relation of ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ is inextricably implicated, … or more accurately, our understanding of ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ is inextricably implicated.

In Lipton’s discussion, we don’t have to go with his overall interpretation which perhaps cantilevers his core proposition into speculative territory, we can simply examine his core proposition;

As Lipton observes, the cell membrane [includes a] skin-like barrier which separates the external environment from the internal cytoplasm. The membrane includes receptors and effectors which look like olives in a bread and butter sandwich. Receptors are the cell’s ‘sense organs’; when a receptor recognizes and binds to a signal, it responds by changing its conformation.

CONVENTIONAL BIOLOGY STIPULATES THAT RECEPTORS ONLY RESPOND TO “MATTER” (MOLECULES), A BELIEF CONSISTENT WITH THE NEWTONIAN VIEW OF THE UNIVERSE AS A “MATTER MACHINE”.

[With the new views of quantum physics] it can now be recognized that receptors respond to energy signals as well as molecular signals.

“Conventional medicine has consistently ignored research published in its own main-stream scientific journals, research that clearly reveals the regulatory influence that electromagnetic fields have on cell physiology. Pulsed electromagnetic fields have been shown to regulate virtually every cell function, including DNA synthesis, RNA synthesis, protein synthesis, cell division, cell differentiation, morphogenesis and neuroendocrine regulation. These findings are relevant for they acknowledge that biological behavior can be controlled by “invisible” energy forces, …

…Receptors “see” or are “aware” of their environment and effectors create physical responses that translate environmental signals into an appropriate biological behavior. The receptor-effector complex controls behavior, and through its affect upon regulatory proteins, these receptor-effector also control gene expression… The receptor-effector complexes provide the cell with “awareness of the environment through physical sensation,” which by dictionary definition represents perception. Each receptor-effector protein complex collectively constitutes a “unit of perception.”

…When new, heretofore unrecognized, “signals” enter the environment, the cell creates new perception units to respond to them. New perception units require “new” genes for the receptor-effector proteins. The cell’s ability to make new receptors and respond to the new signal with an appropriate survival-oriented response (behavior) is the foundation of evolution. Cells “learn” by making new receptors and integrating them with specific effector proteins. Cellular memory is represented by the “new” genes that code for these proteins. This process enables organisms to survive in ever changing environments.”

This is the core proposition that keeps cropping up and that is trying to get into the mainstream of our thinking.  It is one the furry mice that is scurrying over and around the canvas limits of the Big Top of our cultural mainstream.

Lipton’s description of the building block of evolution being the ‘unit of perception’, a two-sided, Janus-faced thing, is an overlay to Mach’s ‘sensa’; … it is a reconstitution of mind-and-matter as one dynamic with complex structure; i.e. ‘a unit of perception’ that has a ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ component; i.e. the ‘real’ component is the visible, inside-outward production of proteins by the effectors [the ‘genesis’ part] while the ‘imaginary’ component is the invisible, outside-inward influence of the receptors in encoding the effectors [the ‘epigenesis’ part].

No more mind-matter split! [1]

But let’s not get too carried away with all of the Wittgenstein ladder detail of ‘receptors’ and ‘effectors’  and ‘sinks’ and ‘sources’ etc. etc.  These manifestations that we can observe under the microscope [and/or elsewhere] are continually changing, evolving.  There is no longer any solid ground in the sense of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, to look to for the source of the development of this thing that we see as ‘having its own behaviour’.

Sure, we can say and think of it ‘having its own behaviour’ but that thought is trumped in its pseudo-entirety by zooming out and acknowledging that ‘it’ is a continually transforming ‘dimple’ in a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum, in the manner of a storm-cell in the flow of the atmosphere.

If we continue to gaze at a biological cell, it is topologically equivalent to our continuing to gaze at a storm-cell in the atmosphere [to view gathering forms in radar or satellite imagery etc.].  We say that we ‘can see it change’, but THERE IS NO PERSISTING ‘IT’ except in our imagination that would have us impute ‘itness’ to a ‘local’ visual image; i.e. a ‘local’ visual image that is an inference of an underlying relational dynamic that is inherently ‘non-local’, ‘non-visible’ and ‘non-material’, … a ‘local’ visual image that persists due to the fairly long-lasting hanging-together of the underlying relational dynamic.

The underlying dynamic, ‘evolution’, or in other words, ‘the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum’ is not directly visible because it is ‘relational’ as energy transformation is wont to be; i.e. it is non-local, non-visible, and non-material and it MANIFESTS indirectly via forms that gather in its transformational flow, which, when we get right down it it, are ‘units of perception’, … wherein the dynamics of ‘the outside’ in coniunctio with the dynamics of the ‘inside’ become locally visible through the inside-outward assertive dynamical aspect [the visible genesis aspect].  The receptors — embodiments of outside-inward acquiescing influence, and the effectors —embodiments of inside-outward asserting influence, are dual aspects of ‘the unit of perception’ or the ‘sensum’.  Therefore, ‘sensa’ are the basic building blocks of the universe, not molecules, as was Mach’s view.

How could this happen?  How could the dynamics of the outside and the dynamics of the inside, in pushing against each other, generate ‘local being’?

In exploring this, we can inquire into the structure of the tornado or any convecting flow-cell in a fluid flow.  The flow has a toroidal form wherein it receives flow into itself and at the same time sources flow out of itself along an imaginary local axis [the notional ‘axis’ is defined by the centre of the convergence into the sink and divergence out of the source.  The tornado is an automorphic feature of the flow-space it is included in.  The upper ‘sink-hole’ [receptor] and the lower ‘fountain-source’ [effector] are conjugate aspects of the visible automorphism [of the flow].

The automorphism feature is not the ‘local being’ it appears to be.  The map is not the territory and the territory is not what you can see and touch; it is the evolutionary dynamic, the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum which is non-local, non-visible and non-material; i.e. it is the purely relational dynamic that transcends the visibly manifest material dynamics.

The capacity for automorphism immanent in the energy-flow is the source of ‘forms’ that appear to be ‘local’, ‘visible’ and ‘material’, … forms that lend themselves to concretization by a language that is architected to deal with dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.  The tornado, … do you get that, how the letters   t o r n a d o  seem to speak to us of a local being that we can then suffix a linguistic qualifier to ; i.e.  m o v e s , to construct movement in these new terms of the action of a local thing-in-itself-‘being’; i.e. ‘the tornado moves’.  GONE is the understanding of motion in terms of the continuing transformation of the relational spatial-plenum whose automorphist dynamic not only inhabits the form it is engendering but creates it [the form only persists while it is being engendered by the automorphist powers of the flow-plenum it is included in].

The tornado is comprised of a conjugate receptor-effector relational dynamic.  This topology is said by some to be the basic topology of the universe which relates space and matter.  Every apparently local, visible material form is thus a ‘unit of perception’.  We perceive it as a ‘unit’ even though it is an automorphism within the energy-flow.

We see the planet earth as a ‘local unit’ but according to relativity and quantum physics, it is an automorphism within the energy-flow and thus a ‘unit of perception’ which rebel physicists like Mach would diagram as a ‘receptor’ [sink] – ‘effector’ [source] conjugate relation;

As with Receptor-Effector, so with Sink-Source

This is a ‘fractal archetype’ for the structure of the universe.  It is the ‘gyre’ that came to the poet Keats in a vision, and it is the double-torus of physicist Nassim Haramein and others [Haramein is to physics what Lipton is to biology];

As with Sink-Source and Receptor-Effector, so with Double Torus

It is a ‘unit of perception’, it is NOT a ‘unit of being’.   In mainstream science and in our Western culture in general, we have chosen to invent a re-presentation of dynamics wherein use these ‘units of perception’ as if they were ‘things-in-themselves’ and construct a dynamics in terms of these ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what they do’.

It is important to realize that when we conceive of space as a simple ‘container’ populated by ‘things-in-themselves’, we are objectifying visual forms that are ‘units of perception’, and that the world we construct in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ is not ‘the world of our physical experience’ which is inherently relational and unitary, as understood in the sonar ‘holographic’ imaging of the whale or bat, but ‘flattened out’ by the line-of-sight ‘photographic imaging’ of human visual sensing, like a spherical spatial form is flattened out into a mercator projection. [Human line-of-sight visualization uses light intensity and drops out phase information needed for the full holographic voluminiferous-continuum view].

The language we use when re-presenting dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ implies ‘Euclidian space’.  Non-euclidian space [2], which is purely relational so that dynamics in this space can only derive from transformation of spatial relations as there can be no such things as ‘local beings’ in a relational space, … is merely an option for our conceptualizing of ourselves and the world, the most common option because it is the most simple, as Poincaré points out [it is the simplest in the sense that a polynomial of degree one is simpler than a polynomial of degree two].  We don’t have to use Euclidian space as our conceptualizing space, but since our standard language constructs imply it, … if we switch to non-euclidian space aka ‘relational space’, there will be reverse implications on our language constructs.  As Poincaré further says;

“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

Euclidian space is not antecedent to the truths of our real-physical-world experience that we should like to capture and share, but our common constructions of ‘dynamics’ in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ is what gives an artificial sense of concreteness and controllability to the dynamics of world and self (habitat and inhabitant).  If we are to acknowledge our inclusion in a continually transforming relational space, this has implications in reverse in regard to our linguistic constructs that will give a ‘relational representation’ of dynamics.

The only ‘persisting things’ in a relational space are ‘resonance features’ with the ‘tornado topology’ or double-torus topology which are ‘units of perception’ rather than ‘units of being’.

So, for example, as Poincaré says and as he remarked, few people seem to ‘get this’, … it is nonsense to say ‘the earth rotates’.   To illustrate how confusing people found this, he had a public debate with Bertrand Russell on this which was never settled apart from them ‘agreeing to disagree’.  What Poincaré intends is that we are creating a notional ‘fact’ out of mere ‘appearances’ which in a changing environment arise from the relations amongst things, the relational invariant that persists as ‘things’ are continually coming and going like forms in a flow.  For example, after I have gone through how what we call a tornado is an automorphism within a relational energy-flow, a reductive statement of apparent fact such as ‘the tornado moves’ fails to capture the relational nuances of that discussion.

“What difference is there then between the statement of a fact in the rough and the statement of a scientific fact!  The same difference as between the statement of the same crude fact in French and in German.  The scientific statement is the translation of the crude statement into a language which is distinguished above all from the common German or French, because it is spoken by a very much smaller number of people.

The scientific fact is only the crude fact translated into a convenient language.”

The statement of fact such as ‘the tornado moves’ is a nice crisp ‘fact’ that most people would agree on.  But the crispness comes from the notional ‘thing-in-itself being’ of ‘the tornado’ and the implication of ‘it moving’ is that it is located within an absolute fixed, empty and infinite ‘container’ or ‘reference frame’ so that ‘its motion’ and even its ‘change in form’ [development] are ‘measurable’ thanks to our mental understanding of ‘space’ as a fixed reference frame that contains the ‘thing-in-itself-being’ we call a ‘tornado’.

As discussed, we could understand ‘the tornado’ [or ‘human’ or whatever] as a relational feature within the energy-flow; i.e. as a ‘unit of perception’ rather than a ‘unit of being’ in which case we would now understand ‘space’ as a ‘flow’ or ‘continually transforming relational spatial-plenum’, … but at the same time, we would recognize the ‘convenience’ of being able to share our observations and experiences in this simple language of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ based on our mental modeling of ‘space’ as an absolute containing/reference/measuring frame that serves as a ‘theatre of operations’ for the ‘local units of being’.

Now, as Poincaré further writes, and as you can presumably see from this discussion, there are those that equate the convenient, simple RE-presentation of the ‘units of perception’ in the energy-flow in language-based terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ that are growing/developing/dissipating’ in-their-own-right, moving around and interacting  with ‘one’ and ‘other’ all within an absolute containing space that serves as a fixed measurement reference for their absolute location, their absolute motion and their absolute growth, shrinkage, and change in form, so long as they continue to be ‘visible’, … to ‘physical reality’.

Those who believe that such language-based RE-presentations or ‘statements of fact’ equate to ‘physical reality’ he terms ‘realists’.

Those who believe that space is a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum or more simply ‘a flow’ [of transforming energy] but at the same time acknowledge the convenience of linguistically treating ‘units of perception’ as ‘units of being’ [‘things-in-themselves’] he terms ‘pragmatist-idealists’.  By ‘pragmatic idealism’ he means that while we accept in discourse, this RE-presentation of dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves are doing’, we do not limit our understanding to such RE-presentations.

This ‘difference’ has major implications in the way we understand ourselves vis a vis others and the world we live in, and this difference implies two different modes of organization that have come to characterize two different ‘cultures’; i.e. the aboriginal and Western cultures.

The aboriginal culture [a ‘pragmatist-idealist’ culture] understands ‘conflict’ in the community as deriving from the relational web that constitutes community.  ‘Restorative justice’ practices in aboriginal communities do not function via law-based judgements applied to individual [thing-in-itself] behaviour since it is impossible, in the relational space [web-of-life] view, to isolate ‘individual behaviour’ from ‘community behaviour’.  The community therefore ‘assumes responsibility’ for conflicts as arise within it, and does not ‘pass off’ individuals to judgemental machinery that operates on the basis of absolute laws of individual behaviour, as if the relational dynamics of community were in no way influencing individual behaviour.

What is held in question here is ‘what is it that constitutes the physical phenomena of our amazing experience of inclusion in the unfolding of a relational world dynamic?  Is physical reality constituted by the amazing experience of inclusion in the unfolding of a relational world dynamic, or by the reduction of that part that we can visually observe to language that is constrained to RE-presentation in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’?

How could we, in our Western cultural variant, opt for the latter rather than the former as the ‘physical world’?

This ‘takes a bit of exploration/inquiry’, and it helps to go back to the origins of the notion of ‘owned property’ since this notion sets up the ‘disconnect’ between the natural world we live in, and we who live in it; e.g;

“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

This ‘splitting apart’ of the ‘inhabitant’ from the ‘habitat’ and notionally setting up ‘man’, the ‘thing-in-itself inhabitant’,  as possessing his own God-like self-starting behaviour, serves to keep us trapped in a world based on visual images of ourselves and others ‘out there in front of us’ that we impute to be ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own locally originating, internal mind-directed behavours.

In other words, ‘property ownership’ in the disconnecting sense of the land being something separate from us that we can jump on and exploit at our own whim, traps us in the language-based ‘what things-in-themselves do’ based worldview.

Property-occupation in the aboriginal culture sense is very different from ‘property ownership’ in that it is understood in the sense of the baby in the womb.  The womb is where it lives and it is attached to that space and nourished by that space but in no way ‘independent’ of that space or desirous of exploiting that space [the ‘Oedipus complex’ of Western civilization].

The western culture, in its colonizing actions and its treating the land, the living space we are included in, as something separate from ourselves that we can own and exploit as we wish, insofar as we BELIEVE that, makes us into ‘realists’ in the above description, who also believe that we are ‘local, independently-existing things-in-ourselves’ as in Genesis 1:28 whose behaviours are directed from our local, internally resident ‘minds’.

The notion of ‘government’ based on pursuing the ‘common good’ derives, also, from this splitting apart of inhabitant from habitat by way of ‘property ownership’; i.e. ‘pursuing the common good’ is an anthropocentric ideal that is based on man created as a thing-in-itself so that the satisfying of his needs [the ‘common good’] is seen as an optimizing process in its own right, and the role that Western government is architected to fill.  This is evidently the recipe for ‘bio-catastrophe’; e.g;

 “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.” — Frédéric Neyrat,  ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’

Once we elevate our conscious thoughts, our reasoning minds, to absolute status; i.e. to local, behaviour-directorship status, we force ourselves to develop ‘an informed and knowledgeable basis’ from which to direct our behaviour.   This process essentially ‘short-circuits’ our natural ‘let go’ sourcing of behaviour where our inside-outward asserting behaviour is in conjugate relation with the outside-inward orchestrating influence of our situational inclusion in the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum.  But as Heraclitus observed; “The learning of many things does not teach understanding”.

“When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.”

- William James

Real understanding is in not-knowing. All knowing dissolves in not-knowing, and it is in this not-knowing state that there is transformation.

 - Jean Klein

It is this state of not-knowing that we are in connection with the energized flow whose evolving form derives from what Emerson calls ‘the genius [mind] of Nature’ “that both inhabits and creates us”.

We cannot claim our ‘mind’ for ‘our own’ simply on the basis that our visible form, like the tornado, appears to be a local ‘thing-in-itself’ form and to ‘have its own local thing-in-itself’ behaviour.  These forms are ‘units of perception’ and not ‘really’ the ‘units of being’ that we abstractly make them into when we are talking about them.

When we use the words ‘mind’, ‘perception’ and ‘consciousness’, they evidently mean different things to us depending on what assumptions we make about ourselves; e.g. whether we ourselves are a ‘unit of being’ or a ‘unit of perception’.   This ambiguity was the topic of an open disagreement between Henri Poincaré and Bertrand Russell in the Journal `Mind`in 1905;

 ”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’

Since ‘perception’ is at the core of this discussion, it would seem that some exploration of this ambiguity, between ‘perception-as-feeling’ and ‘perception-as-judging’ is in order. Further, our ‘perceptions of other’ are conditioned by ‘our perceptions of self’, so that if we understand ourselves as a ‘unit of being’ rather than a ‘unit of perception’, our perceptions of others will be in terms of defining and measuring them in terms of their local, visible, material ‘being’.

When we bring together our understanding of ourselves as the author of our understanding of others, we get a ‘strange loop’ relationship of the type drawn by M.C. Escher;

A unif of being defining another unit of being

This would appear to describe the ‘judging’ option; i.e. if we believe that ‘who we are’ = a local, visible, material thing-in-itself or ‘unit of being’, then our ‘perception’ of others will seek to define them as ‘local, visible, material’ things in themselves, and to understand their development and behaviour as being internally [inside-outwardly] driven and directed.  This disconnected voyeur view is not simply of ‘other’ by ‘self’, but also of ‘self’ by ‘self’.  In other words, in this view we deem our own behaviour to arise fully and solely from our own interior, making it feasible to have a social system of ‘justice’ wherein we judge the behaviour of ourselves and others relative to a code of behaviours of absolute, local, independently-existing thing-in-themselves individuals; e.g. a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour code.

Now, if instead of believing ourselves to be a ‘unit of being’, we understand ourselves to be a ‘unit of perception’, this once again elicits a ‘strange loop’ but it is no longer a case of one ‘thing-in-itself’ judging and defining a ‘thing-in-itself’.   A ‘unit of perception’ would be the non-manifest ‘feeling’ of the membrane or pure relational potential that stands between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, or rather is the conjugate relation of the habitat-dynamic and the inhabitant dynamic. It would be how one storm-cell NOT sees but feels another storm-cell in the common flow of the atmosphere.  In eastern philosophy, this is described as the pregnant relational nothingness from whence all content forms, ‘sunyata’, context without content and thus the ‘pure feeling’ from whence ‘content’ (rational thought, judgement) emerges.

how a unit-of-perception 'sees' or rather 'feels'

These concepts are not easy to ‘grasp’ since they are not ‘rational’ concepts but such concepts are needed for an understanding that is capable of bridging the gap between the manifest [local, visible, material] and the non-manifest [non-local, non-visible, non-material]; i.e. that acknowledges the purely relational ‘immanent impetus’ that underlies and transcends the manifest ‘what things-in-themselves [units of being] are doing’ material dynamics.

The suggestion here is that the non-rational view wherein ‘nothingness’ or ‘sunyata’, this ‘pregnant middle’ or ‘immanent impetus’ [evolutionary force] is in a natural, transcendent primacy over the rational ‘what things-in-themselves do’ view.  In rational-analytic inquiry, we examine ‘what goes on’ after-the-fact and conveniently RE-present it as if it all proceeded in a forward in time causal progression.  Such RE-presentation is always possible and it makes it look as if what unfolded is ‘predestined’, in the same manner as people tend to think that their ‘genes’ predetermine how their physical being unfolds.  This is the impression one gets when we ‘exclude’ ourselves from participation in evolution and see evolution as something that is ‘happening to us’.  That is, we tend to think; “how will the world dynamic continue to unfold and how will I be affected by it?”   While it is true that we are not in control of what unfolds, it is not as if we have no role in the unfolding; i.e. as a strand in the web of life our dynamics can shake the web in such a manner that resonances may arise.  If one man repeatedly stands and sits in a football arena, it may trigger a wave that wraps around and around the stadium. [3]

Conclusions:

The title of this essay; From ‘Design and Behaviour’ to ‘Intelligent Design and Intelligent Behaviour’ to…?

… draws attention to the ‘figure/ground/gestalt relational issues and the alternative of understanding ‘forms’ in the plural as ‘units of perception’ and/or ‘units of being’.  As ‘units of perception’, ‘cells’ and all ‘forms’, are ‘appearances’ that give us a sense of the ‘local, visible, material’, that we can concretize with language as ‘units of being’ or ‘things-in-themselves’.

That is, the title would have us assume that we are talking about ‘the design and behaviour’ of ‘local entities’.  In the case of forms such as humans and animals and plants as well, the designs of the forms and the behaviours of the forms seem to be the product of an extraordinarily ‘intelligent mind’ [a 'rational' intelligence rather than a purely relational, non-content-focused feeling].

In the plant world, this notion that the plant as a ‘local thing-in-itself’ is the source of its own behaviour implies that there is something in the local plant that is responsible for its behaviour; i.e. the model of a plant as a ‘thing-in-itself’ with ‘its own locally originating behaviour’ implies that there is something local in the plant’s interior that is responsible for its ‘plant behaviour’; i.e. this is the definition of a ‘mind’, the thing inside the local, independently-existing thing-in-itself that is responsible for its behaviour.

Research into plant behaviours such as is presented in David Suzuki’s ‘The Nature of Things’ episode entitled ‘Smarty-Plants: uncovering the secret world of plant behaviour’, leads the researcher into marvelling at the unbelievable intelligence in the relational aspects of plant behaviours.  E.g. how does the daughter plant choose its host plant?  The implication of ‘intelligence’ on the part of the plant derives from our modeling it, in the first place, as a ‘local, independently-existing thing-in-itself’ with its own locally originating, internal process directed behaviour’.   The internal centre of ‘direction’ of its behaviour is not the result of our investigation but is a requirement we ourselves carry into the investigation, and in the case of plants, we not only marvel at the intelligence of this ‘centre of direction’, we are having a hell of a job of imagining where it resides because plants don’t have central nervous systems as animals mostly do [without getting into how chickens can run with their head chopped off, and frogs can local and remove drops of irritants placed on their bodies after their heads are removed].

The fact is, that our DEFINING of a physical form as a ‘thing-in-itself’ forces us to invent a local internal centre of direction of the behaviour of the ‘thing-in-itself’, just as we do likewise to invent local internal centres of direction of development of the thing-in-itself form that we call ‘genes’.

But now we are finding out that ‘genes’ are ‘the memory’ of what has been transpiring, not the source of it;

“Cells “learn” by making new receptors and integrating them with specific effector proteins. Cellular memory is represented by the “new” genes that code for these proteins. This process enables organisms to survive in ever changing environments.” — Bruce Lipton

That is, the receptor-effectors are in conjugate relation, they are ‘units of perception’ that are the ‘current snapshot’ of an essentially relational, evolutionary process much like Lamarck envisaged it wherein the fields [les fluides incontenables] are exciting the matter in the field [les fluides contenables] and what we get to ‘see’ are the ‘material dynamics’ that we RE-present in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ as if ‘they were doing it’.  In fact, the ‘automorphism’ belongs to the ‘flow’ [the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum] rather than to the local, visible, material forms.

What this says is that the continually unfolding relational experiencing that we are tapped into is ‘physical reality’ while our RE-presentation of the visible portion of it based on the ‘units of perception’, in the reduced terms of ‘what things-in-themselves [‘units of being’] do’, is psychical idealization.  This idealized RE-presentation is very useful but it is not the ‘physical reality’ that our experience is tapping into.   But this RE-presentation, when it is confused for ‘physical phenomena’, is the source of incoherence in our relational behaviour; i.e. we start assuming that the behaviour of the individual is coming fully and solely out of its ‘self’, the ‘self’ that we are understanding to be a ‘unit of being’ rather than a ‘unit of perception’.

To begin to explore the individual’s ‘mind’ in searching for the ‘source’ of his/her behaviour is part of the incoherence that ‘realism’ traps us in.  The individual form is a resonance feature in the flow; i.e. a ‘unit of perception’ and NOT a ‘unit of being’ notionally equipped with ‘a mind of its own’ or internal centre-of-direction of its ‘thing-in-itself’ behaviour.

We are ‘units of perception’ in the continuing flow [the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum], NOT ‘units of being’ and it is the ‘mind of Nature’ that not only inhabits but creates us [Emerson].  This alternative understanding [which leads to alternative forms of organization amongst men] effects our understanding ‘fractally’; i.e. everywhere we impute visible forms to imply ‘units of being’, we can impute them to imply  ‘units of perception’.

Evidently, we are in the process of sorting this out, and have been since 500 B.C. in the Western time-based historical view, when the intellectual adventure of Ancient man moved the explanations of the world dynamics ‘from the gods’ who were ‘everywhere at the same time and out of sight’ [like gravity and thermal and acoustic fields], to local visible forms that were imputed to ‘exist absolutely’ as ‘units of being’ rather than as ‘units of perception’, so that we searched ‘inside of them’ for the source of ‘their thing-in-itself’ development and for the source of ‘their thing-in-itself’ behaviour.

Within the thin blue film of the earth’s biosphere we tend to see dynamics in terms of the creation and destruction of ‘units of being’.  However, as Nietzsche and other philosophers have pointed out, in a finite and unbounded relational space, many things appear to be emerging and growing and dissipating and shrinking while the volume of the space remains the same, suggesting that what we are seeing are forms in a transforming energy-charged flow.  This view in terms of transformation of relational space resolves paradoxes related to the splitting apart of ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ such as; ‘The construction of a new housing development is, at the same time, the destruction of a forest’; i.e. ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of relational transformation’.  Relational transformation is something that ‘sneaks up on us’ since our focus in typically on ‘what things-in-themselves are doing’.  As John Lennon says; “Life is something that happens to us while we are busy making other plans”.

In the non-rational realm of feelings, we have this same tendency as with ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’, to split apart that which is transformative; i.e. as units of perception we feel an immanent impetus that we call ‘love’ that gives us positive impetus [attraction] and ‘hate’ that gives us negative impetus [repulsion], however these two apparent opposites can similarly be understood as conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of transformation of ourselves as ‘unit of perception’.  In restorative justice, the hate that defines the parents of the murdered son, for the murderer, can be a powerful agency of transformation if it is allowed to be; i.e. if the there is mutual reconciliation to the point that the murderer becomes like the adopted son of the grieving parents.  Such things do happen and the transformational force is very powerful.   No-one wants to get ‘stuck’ in a situation where they let themselves be defined by their hate.  This is like the old warning of mothers to children when they ‘make a face’ that is offensive, what if they were unable to let go of it?

Whatever dynamics we are observing, we have this option of understanding them, from the dynamics of atoms through to the dynamics of stars and planets, as the activity of ‘units of being’ ['what things-in-themselves are doing'] or as the activity of ‘units of perception’ [flow-features in the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum]. In the former, we see ‘creation/construction/production’ and ‘destruction/demolition/dissipation’ as separate things; e.g. when we are constructing the new housing development we are not at the same time thinking of our destroying of the forest, and that is why John Lennon’s quote rings so true ["Life is something that happens to us while we are busy making other plans].  In the latter, we put ourselves in the purely relational zone that is ‘in the middle of the membrane, the not-yet either outside or inside but the pregnant mediating potential from which both of these spring.   The automorphism of the energy-charged spatial-plenum engenders a tornado as a dynamic figure that dances with its own dynamic parenting ground; these are not two things but conjugate aspects of the continuing transformation of relational space.

In the macro-fractal implementation of this substitution of ‘units of perception’ for ‘units of being’, the thin blue ecosphere-membrane of the earth invites us to understand the earth as a ‘unit of perception’ rather than as a ‘unit of being’.

How this changes our values and organizational dynamics, touched briefly upon herein, is a topic for another day and another essay.

* * *

Footnotes:

[1] The complex signal of Gabor’s ‘Theory of Communications’ which incorporates phase information [that human visual sensing does not use] that enables a holographical or ‘relational space’ view of dynamical behaviour, involves a ‘complex signal’ whose ‘topology’ or spatial-relational structure is similar to the receptor-effector ‘topology’.  In Gabor’s complex signal, the real and imaginary components have a relative phase lag of 90 degrees [the equivalent to multiplication by the square root of minus one or ‘the imaginary unit’].  The understanding of complex signal is what allows the holographic imaging of wavefields as in seismological and medical imaging applications, which make use of the conjugate relation of outside-inward moving and inside-outward moving wave energy [source-sink reciprocity].

[2] Non-euclidian spherical space has the same topological properties as the toroidal flow.  Consider a sphere whose surface space is filled with cars as if there were all in the flow of a spherical-space freeway.  Since there are no fixed reference points, the only reference is the spatial-relational configuration which one is included in.  This is a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum where ‘divergence’ and ‘convergence’ are always in conjugate relation with each other.  That is, ‘divergence’ is assessed by the relative separating of a subset of the inhabitants of this space.  But since the space is finite and unbounded, there can be no ‘growth’ in the space occupied and therefore no ‘net divergence’ or ‘net convergence’.  The ‘appearance’ of divergence/growth and/or convergence/shrinkage is all that we that can impute to the observation.  Similarly, in the spherical space of the earth’s biosphere, so long as it is a finite and unbounded space, ‘creation’ and ‘growth’ and ‘destruction’ and ‘shrinkage’ is impossible in a physical sense, there can only be ‘transformation’ in a relational space.  As Nietzsche said;

 

“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

As Stuart Kaufmann observes from his research into ‘complexity’; “The structure of the organization is also the record of the embodied know-how …”.  We could apply this to the evolutionary dynamics of the ‘receptor-effector’ ‘unit of perception’, and again to the evolving world.  The visibly changing structure we can observe is the record of the embodied learning on the part of the ‘unit of perception’.   The inside-outward mushrooming asserting dynamics of the storm-cell in the atmosphere is in conjugate relation with the non-local, non-visible, non-material [relational] outside-inward informing dynamics of the flow it is included in.  Once again we see dynamic form as a ‘unit of perception’ whose visible organizational structure is the record of its embodied know-how’.  The same is true in the case of the plant; i.e. the organization constituting the plant does not imply an internal source but is instead the record of embodied know-how of the plant understood as a ‘unit of perception’ rather than a ‘unit of being’.

[3] Analytical inquiry delivers to us an RE-presentation of dynamics that are ‘after-the-fact’ and out of context of the relational space influences that shape what is unfolding.  For example, analytical inquiry will extract the trajectory of a driver in the flow of the freeway so that it can be displayed on its own, as if his movements were directed purely and solely from out of his own internal intellection and purpose.  In such a display, the influence of the web of relations that were orchestrating his behaviour are missing, yet these are the physical phenomenon; i.e. the physical phenomenon is NOT captured in the isolated RE-presentation of what the driver, as a ‘thing-in-himself’ was doing.  If, as we move into the flow of life we wait for a gap to open up for us, like the new driver who stops in the onramp and is then paralyzed by fear that ‘the waters of the Red Sea’ may not open for him if he steps into them; i.e. who hesitates because he cannot see his path laid out before him, then we are lost.

As Joseph Campbell says;

 “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” … “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”

as John Lennon says;

“Life is something that happens to us while we are busy making other plans”

and as Goethe says in ‘Faust’

 ”Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back– Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” —John Anster’s free translation of Goethe’s Faust

The coniunctio of inside-outward and outside-inward

Part I Graphical Aids for Exploring the Relation of Conscious [personal] to Unconscious [collective]

The first part of this essay consists of a suite of ‘thought experiments’ supported by graphical ‘thinking-tools’, to ‘set the stage’ for an integrating discussion as to the nature and origins of ‘the conscious’ [personal] and ‘the unconscious’ [collective].  Part II is a written discussion based on dialogue and reflections on how we come to our view of world and self and the relation between two [or, alternatively, how we distinguish the conjugate aspects of 'self/inhabitant' and other/habitat' from the unidynamical world we are included in].

The basic suggestion is that as infants, we have access to an unpartitioned world of transforming spatial-relations; the physical reality of our unconditioned experience.  But as we grow up, we partition the world into local, closed geometric forms or ‘things-in-themselves’ that we ‘know’, and thus we gradually build a ‘known world’ of ‘things-in-themselves’ and a view of the world dynamic in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ and superimpose it OVER TOP of our infant-accessed world of continual spatial-relational transformation [a world of undifferentiated 'self' and 'other'].  Our aware ‘conscious’ attaches to our knowledgeable, language-supported ‘what things-in-themselves do’ mode of understanding while our original newborn access to the thingless-connectedness of continuing spatial-relational transformation falls away out of our aware ‘conscious’ and into ‘unconsciousness’.  ‘The unconscious’, being purely relational and associated with our ‘undifferentiated self’ is a ‘collective unconscious’ while our personal knowledge-based awareness is ‘conscious’ that is personal.  Insofar as we develop a ‘knowledge of self’, early on, we allow self-other conflict to be the fuel of its transformation/evolution.  However, as we spend more time reflecting on who we are and getting to know our ‘self’ better and better, we are exposed to a narcissism wherein we try to hold ‘our self’ constant in the face of self-other conflict [the natural fuel of relational transformation] and then to force ‘others’ to be reciprocally (mis)shaped by the one-way broadcasting of our now rigidly fixed persona.

That is, we encounter problems in our ability to ‘hold back our knowing’, after we have learned so many things, and return to our undifferentiated self’s access to the common transforming relational space we share inclusion in.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;

 - – - Lao Tzu

For example, once we learn how to differentiate things, we start seeing conflict where there was only harmony; i.e. the conflict was the source of the harmony by way of relational transformation.  Conflict elicits transformation that restores harmony.

“They do not understand that what conflicts with itself agrees with itself: there is a harmonia of opposite tensions, as in the bow and lyre.” —Heraclitus

In the absence of any fixed reference points or reference frames, dynamics become purely relational or topological and the concept of ‘being’ or ‘local existence’ is unable to precipitate from the flow.  The ‘boundaries’ that delineate ‘local beings’ are formed from absolute points that cannot exist without an absolute reference frame, implicit or explicit, to give them their absolute sense of ‘location’, as in an ‘x,y,z coordinate’ which implies a reference frame composed of three orthogonal ‘directions’, an absolute three dimensional space of infinite extent.

The object of this first sequence of graphics is to illustrate how ‘our minds’ make the leap from the purely relational ‘becoming’ to absolute ‘being’.

Graphic 1.  — the relationally transforming lithosphere.

Suggestive of the earth's relationally transforming lithosphere

The main point to note is that the transforming sphere is a purely relational dynamic.  We could imagine that it is included within a transforming universe or ‘celestial dynamic’ in the manner of a ‘whorl-in-the-flow’.

We are going to go [mentally] from here to ‘continental drift’ [plate tectonics] and the next step we will take is to notionally add a layer of water over top of this transforming earth-lithosphere.

The combination of transforming lithosphere and transforming hydrosphere is a combination as in a lava lamp; i.e. it consists of two immiscible fluids participating in one dynamic.  That is, the fluids are distinct and separate but not their dynamics.  Like wind and flag, the dynamics of the fluid lithosphere and the dynamics of the oceanic fluid are in simultaneous conjugate relation.

One unidynamical system, two distinct participants, as in 'wind-and-flag'

In the case of the lithosphere, oceanosphere combination, however, the portions the transforming lithosphere that rise up through the oceanosphere appear to be closed forms or ‘island-continents’.  This is where ‘geometry’ comes in as we can use geometric closed forms to impute ‘local being’ to the island continents.  If the thickness of the oceanosphere goes to zero, all we see is the lithosphere and there is just one continent, ‘the lithosphere’.  If the oceanosphere is very thick, we get the world-in-a-drop-of-water effect.  For an oceanosphere thickness that is in the middle [2], we get a plurality of closed geometric forms or ‘island-continents’ which appear to move as the lithosphere transforms.  The convecting currents in the lithosphere give rise to the ‘appearance’ that some continents are moving away from one another and some continents are moving towards one another.

The apparent divergence and convergence of geometric closed forms

It is important to remember that these closed geometric forms we are calling continents are not ‘real things’ [the real physical dynamic is the relationally transforming lithosphere], they are the products of how we mentally process our observations and/or pictorial thoughts.

What is a unidynamic [the transforming relational space of the lithosphere] is converted in our mind, to the dynamics of a plurality of notional local entities that move and interact within a notional absolute, fixed empty and infinite space.   That is, the points and lines of the geometric closed forms depend for their ‘existence’ on an absolute fixed, empty and infinite absolute space reference frame, and their movement in time implies an absolute time frame.

This ‘conversion’ from the topological [spatial-relational] to the mainstream science depiction of dynamics in terms of ‘what-things-in-themselves-do’ is ‘psychological’ and is based on ‘visual appearances’.

Reducing topological dynamics to geometric dynamics

As we look at the movement of the closed geometric form island-continents and see them separating and colliding, our thoughts are in the mainstream scientific/rational realm of ‘what-things-in-themselves do’.  This is the common realm of the ‘knowledge of things’, which this essay will associate with ‘the conscious’ [personal].  What has ‘gone missing’ in this view in terms of a plurality of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these things are doing’ is the ‘unidynamic’ of the transforming relational space.  This ‘unidynamic’ of ‘thingless-connectedness’, we are losing sight of, or rather ‘losing conscious awareness of’, and for this reason, it will be herein terms ‘the unconscious’.

Heraclitus’ following thought takes on evident meaning here;

“They do not understand that what conflicts with itself agrees with itself: there is a harmonia of opposite tensions, as in the bow and lyre.”

“combinations: wholes and not wholes, being like and being different, in tune and out of tune, and from all things one, and from one all things.”

“Unseen harmonia is stronger / better than seen.”

Johannes Kepler makes the same point in ‘Harmonies of the World’ (1619) in regard to celestial dynamics, that although we see things by ‘appearances’ in terms of ‘what a plurality of things-in-themselves do’, a ‘harmony-of-the-whole’ is implicit.

“Now, the ‘harmony-of-the-whole of all the planets contributes more to the perfection of the world than the single harmonies by twos and the pairs of harmonies by the twos of neighbouring planets. For harmony is, so to speak, a volume of unification. A deeper unity yet is presented, when all the planets form a harmony with each another, as when just two at a time harmonize in a bivalent manner. In the interference of these harmonies deriving from the dual harmonic line-ups, which the pairs of planets form with each another, the one or the other must give way (yield), so that the harmony-of-the- whole can prevail.” — Johannes Kepler, Harmonies of the World

The point to be made here is that our visual observation is incomplete and we tend to use ‘geometry’ rather than pure spatial-relational [topology] to mentally construct ‘representations’ in terms of local ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what things do’.  This gives us ‘knowledge’ in these ‘solid terms’ of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.  But as Heraclitus says; ‘the knowledge of many things does not teach understanding’, and our intuition is suggesting an underlying ‘unidynamic’ or underlying ‘harmony’ that makes sense of all the opposition and collision we see in the world.

That is, the ‘drifting continents’ are something we can talk about in a solid fashion.  They are the topics of our conscious awareness.

The implied ‘thingless connectedness’ that underlies and implies continual resolution of the apparent plurality and conflict/opposition, lies below our conscious awareness; i.e. in our ‘unconscious’.

Language plays an important role in bringing the foreground figures out of the dynamic ground and burning them into our conscious awareness by naming and defining them so that they become automatically recognizable to us.  As John Stuart Mill observed;

“every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the existence of the object defined.”

We can imagine that, as a child growing up, each new word we learn to ‘float’ a new local object, the thingless-connectedness of the purely spatial-relational sinks deeper into ‘the unconscious’, and the more convincing becomes the discreteness of ‘being’ of apparently local forms, and more seriously or ‘absolutely’ is ‘collision/conflict’ and ‘abandonment/separation’ taken.

What comes to mind here is the aboriginal view of justice which sees ‘conflict’ NOT in the absolute judgemental terms of ‘offender-victim’, but instead in the relational terms wherein ‘the community is conflicted’ and where the result to restore balance and harmony in the community dynamic.  Absolute judgements in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ is suspended since the transforming relational space of community is seen as the deeper source of the conflict, and not the ‘individual-as-thing-in-itself’; i.e. the child soldier who murders people in his village is not the jumpstart animative sourcing of his murderous behaviour, the continually transforming relational space he is included in is the deeper sourcing.

It is therefore IN RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION that the conflict will be resolved, rather than in purificationist elimination of those judged to be offenders that are creating victims.

We are not ‘islands unto ourselves’ but instead each one of us is in the service of transformation of the relational web we share inclusion in.  Our conflicts with others is necessary experience essential for us to participate in the continuing transformation of the world and the society of humans that resides within it.  Humans are like the continents in this respect, ‘apparitions’ that appear to exist locally and independently but which are forms we are conscious of, rising up and out of the ground of the ‘unconscious’ [the purely relational continuum].

What we are ‘conscious’ of, is our personal perspective.   For example, if everyone around us grows weak and accommodating relative to us, we grow relatively strong and we expand into the space that opens up around us.   This is purely relative so that we can never split out and measure how much of our gaining of size and strength is ours and how much is due to the accommodating reception of those around us.  Nevertheless, we like to give causal attribution to ourselves for gains and losses that we realize.

In the following graphic, we speak of ‘Poland’ as a ‘thing-in-itself’ when it is instead the confluence of many influences at the same time; i.e. a discrete self-other separation is impossible;

Poland as a ‘thing-in-itself’ or relational confluence?

We associate the word ‘Poland’ with a geometric form and we speak about ‘Poland’s changing boundaries’ even though the other states on the ‘other side’ of the boundaries are co-determining the boundary changes.   In fact, in ’tiling’ the space on the surface of a sphere, every tile is simultaneously pushing on every other tile.  How then can we attribute the changing shape of that which arises out of this global confluence of tensions, to the authorial powers of the notional local entity inside of the boundaries?  How can we say that ‘Poland’s borders are changing’?

We can say and think what we want, but in this case, we are losing the global connectedness of the dynamic that we are describing, as we reduce the dynamic to the notion of ‘what a thing-in-itself does’.

In other words, if we think of our self in the same sense as we think of Poland, as the author of our own ‘thing-in-our-self’ dynamics, we lose our sense of global connectedness.

The conflict that we feel, included as we are within a relational web of influence, is what makes us a force for transformation, of ourselves and others.  Relational conflict is the fuel of transformation.  To hold on to our personal identity and to try to impose it on the world would make conflict the source of dissonance and destruction rather than the fuel of relational transformation.

In this view of ‘Poland’s changing borders we can see this general alternative for viewing development and behaviour; (a) in our standard terms of some thing-in-itself with its own locally originating, internal constituents and processes driven behaviour, and (b), as a relational feature that emerges within a transforming web of spatial-relations.  The same choices present themselves for a storm-cell in the relational flow of the atmosphere.  In the (a) sense of self mode, narcissism that freezes the sense of self could be compared to monotheism which does not ‘negotiate’ but expects all to yield to its instructions.

The view in (b) is common to all participants and corresponds with physical reality, while the view in (a) is the personal view and is ‘idealization’ [it is the notional 'figure' that has come seemingly 'come alive' as if its development and behaviour arises in itself].  As Mach says;

“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’

As Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’, Nature’s agency and thus our agency is ‘continuing transformation’;

Nature can only be conceived as existing to a universal and not to a particular end, to a universe of ends, and not to one, — a work of _ecstasy_, to be represented by a circular movement, as intention might be signified by a straight line of definite length. Each effect strengthens every other. There is no revolt in all the kingdoms from the commonweal: no detachment of an individual. Hence the catholic character which makes every leaf an exponent of the world. When we behold the landscape in a poetic spirit, we do not reckon individuals. Nature knows neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable life, which sprouts into forests, and festoons the globe with a garland of grasses and vines.  That no single end may be selected, and nature judged thereby, appears from this, that if man himself be considered as the end, and it be assumed that the final cause of the world is to make holy or wise or beautiful men, we see that it has not succeeded.

Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine.

Part I Summary;

Our visual observing and our language orient to explicitly knowable closed forms.  The more we know and name and define, the more our sense of ‘dynamics’ shifts to these ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these things-in-themselves do’, … and the deeper that the purely spatial-relational or topological sinks beneath the surface of our geometro-dynamical conscious awareness.

Since our personal perspective inverts the direction of our own growth and presents it in an inside-outward driven fashion, we lose our awareness of our inclusion in a common relational web-of-life and imagine instead that we  are moving on our own private trajectory relative to some absolute reference frame.

” One must follow what is common; but although the logos is common most people live as if they had a private understanding of their own.” – Heraclitus

 

Part II: The Conscious [personal] and the Unconscious [collective]

Continuing dialogues and reflections bring me to the following understandings as to how people in our globally dominating ‘Western’ culture ‘commonly think’ about self-and-world in a ‘over-simplified’ way, along with some ideas on how they/we ‘get stuck’ inside a worldview based on ‘appearances’ [subjective perspectives] that are confused for ‘physical reality’. What is implied in this distinction between the world of ‘appearances’ and the world of ‘physical experience’ is the relation between ‘conscious’ [personal] and ‘the unconscious’ [collective].

Language, topology and geometry.

This topic was researched and written up rather well by Henri Poincaré [1], but I haven’t found many people who have explored-and-reflected on his findings vis a vis the issues that are arising in our global social dynamic.

What he said was that we build ‘language games’ based on absolute space and absolute time measures and geometric closed forms [invariable solids of geometry], that are a kind of stand-in for our observations/experiencing of the continuous relationally transforming world we live in.  As ‘realists’ we equate the geometric worldview [falsely] to ‘reality’.   As ‘pragmatist-idealists’ we accept the utility of the geometric worldview but keep in mind that it is ‘idealization’ that should not be confused for ‘physical reality’.  Our predicament is that in our globally dominant Western cultural mode, we have been ‘institutionalizing’ the ‘realist’ view.

1. From topology to geometry.

For example, geology informs us that the earth  behaves as a fluid sphere or spherical fluid, where lithic material is continually inwelling towards the interior of the sphere [subduction] at the same time as it is outwelling towards the exterior of the sphere [extrusion].  The net effect is that the sphere as a whole is ‘relationally transforming’.  A relational view such as this is a ‘topological’ view which ‘trumps’ a ‘geometrical’ view since it does not depend on any of the ‘invariable solids’ of geometry.

The way we mentally handle visual observations now comes into play here since, if we add a layer of ocean water that obscures the lower regions of the transforming lithic sphere, we can then only ‘see’ the emergent portions of the lithosphere which have, in our lifetimes, persisting geometric forms that we define as ‘continents’.  We would only SEE ‘one continent’ if there were no ocean waters at all, and if there were be no continents [only hydrosphere] if there was sufficient ocean waters to cover the highest points on the lithosphere.   The ocean waters level determines the number and shape of the continents.

Our reasoning acknowledges that if the ocean waters were not obscuring our view, we would see the dynamic unity of ONE spatial-relationally transforming fluid lithosphere.  On the other hand, once we mentally ‘fit’ geometric forms to the visible plurality of continents, we interpret this same dynamic in terms of the ‘movement of continents’ [‘continental drift’ or ‘plate tectonics’].

So, while we acknowledge that the real, physical dynamic is in terms of transforming spatial relations, we have this ‘other option’ of representing this motion to ourselves in terms of the movement of fixed geometric forms or, in other words, in terms of ‘what things do’.

Conclusion # 1.  We can reduce ‘relational-spatial’ dynamics to ‘geometric form based dynamics’ [as when we reduce the relational transforming of the lithosphere to the ‘drifting of continents’].  Our CONSCIOUS awareness orients to ‘the movement of things’ [geometric forms] while we let go of our consciousness of the relationally transforming ‘unidynamic’ and thus we could say that our view of dynamics in terms of ‘thingless-connectedness’ sublimates into our UNCONSCIOUS.  In other words, we let go of our consciousness as to how the foreground FIGURES are included in the GROUND and go with a reduced consciousness oriented to the FIGURES as NOTIONAL things-in-themselves, NOTIONALLY with ‘their own dynamics’.

The relationship between the conscious and unconscious as given here favours Wolfgang Pauli’s view over C.G. Jung’s.  i.e;

“Another important issue was the nature of the relationship between conscious and unconscious.  Should they be regarded as mutually exclusive and complementary units, or should consciousness be regarded as a borderline area adjoining the unconscious?  Pauli preferred the first alternative.  A big concern to Pauli was Jung’s tendency to ascribe to the unconscious a sort of consciousness of its own and an almost deterministic developmental ‘program’ that runs its course irrespective of consciousness.” — Suzanne Gieser, ‘The Innermost Kernel: Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics.  Wolfgang Pauli’s Dialogue with C.G. Jung’

That is, the topological [spatial relational] and geometric [thing-in-itself based] views are two different ways of looking at the same thing which are complementary.  In other words, as Schroedinger [author of quantum wave dynamics] argued with Bohr and others, the ‘wave’ view is in a natural primacy over the ‘particle’ view; they are not peer-alternatives but complementary alternatives.

And as Nietzsche argues, the particle-based representation is ‘total Fiktion’ although a useful Fiktion;

“Continual transition does not allow us to speak of “individuals,” etc; the “number” of beings is itself in flux. We would say nothing of time and know nothing of motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we see stationary forms beside transitory flow. The same applies to cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of “empty space” we should certainly not have acquired the conception of space. The principle of identity has behind it the “appearance” that it refers to the same things. A world in a state of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be “comprehended” or “known”; only to the extent that the “comprehending” and “knowing” intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, fabricated out of nothing but appearances but become firm to the extent that this kind of appearance has preserved life–only to this extent is there anything like “knowledge”; i. e., a matching of earlier and more recent errors with one another.” – Nietzsche, Will to Power, 520 (1885)

Nietzsche’s preservation of the conjugate relation of figure with ground is consistent with Mach’s principle of the conjugate relation of space and matter;

“The dynamics of the inhabitants [figures] are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat [ground] at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat [ground] are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants [figures].

[N.B. -‘thingless-connectedness’ is implied when we do printer-plots of images; i.e. it doesn’t matter if we use asterisks, periods, letter ‘o’s or whatever, for the basic things we fashion the forms in the images from, the spatial-relations are the over-riding influence in determining the shape of the forms].

2. From geometry to language.

Our language [and European languages  in general] have a noun-verb grammatical architecture that lends itself to understanding dynamics in terms of ‘things’ [geometric forms] and ‘what things do’ [cause-effect dynamics].  When there is continuous aggregating and dispersing within a fluid flow, the quasi-persisting geometric form of ‘an aggregation’ encourages us to impute ‘thing-in-itselfness’ to them.   For example, a crowd may persist for some hours at a particular location within an exhibition ground as people are continually moving on in to view an exhibit and at the same time moving on out to see other exhibits.  Visually, if we ‘don’t look’ at the individuals that constitute the pattern, we see the ‘crowd’ as an ‘interference feature’ within the flow of people [could be trans-generational even].  But if we ‘look’ at the movement of the individuals as ‘things-in-themselves’ as they head in and like a collection of atoms, materially ‘construct’ the crowd, we see the crowd as a ‘thing-in-itself’.

This is very close to the paradoxical, classic ‘quantum behaviour’ experiment where electrons are sent through two closely spaced slits and strike a target screen.  The pattern on the target screen is physically different depending on whether ‘we look’ at which electrons in the flow go through which slit, or ‘we don’t look’ and merely examine what sort of pattern the flow of electrons makes on the target screen.  In this case, the pattern on the screen that associates with the ‘don’t look’ option includes the ‘interference effects’ [wave interference view] while the pattern on the screen that associates with the ‘look’ option reflects a barrage of particles hitting the target screen and does not manifest ‘interference effects’ [particle collision view].

This threatens to confound the mind, but we can see it also in the ‘systems sciences’ view of Russell Ackoff in his example of a university, which we can view either as a ‘local system in itself’ or as a resonance feature within the nonlocal suprasystem of the community dynamic that it is included in.   As he points out, in-and-back-out-again analytical inquiry is what gives us an understanding in terms of the university as a system in itself whose development and behaviour derives from its internal components and processes.  But the physical reality is the overall ‘suprasystem dynamic’ in which the university is an included ‘subsystem’ and ‘out-and-back-in-again’ ‘synthetical inquiry’ provides the larger context to ‘ground’ our analytical view of the university as a local system in.  Now, if we look at the particular identities of the participants in the university, we see the university as a thing-in-itself rather than as an ‘interference effect’, but if we are looking at the flow of community, we see an interference effect or resonance feature within the flow that is the university.

What’s at play here is whether we choose to put ‘spatial-relations’ [topology] in a primacy over ‘geometry’, … or, … ‘geometry’ in a primacy over ‘spatial-relations’ [topology].

If our observations are orienting to spatial-relational dynamics, we see the university as an ‘interference effect’ or ‘resonance-feature’ in the spatial-relational flow, … and if our observations are orienting to geometric structures, we see the university as a local ‘system-in-itself’ or ‘machine’.
The noun-verb architectural style of European languages lends itself to geometric constructions in terms of ‘things’ and ‘what things do’, so that we start with the components of the university and the processes they engage in and explain the university in these terms [from the inside-outward].  As in (1.) above;

“Our CONSCIOUS awareness orients to ‘the movement of things’ [geometric forms] while we let go of our consciousness of the all-including relationally transforming ‘unidynamic’ and thus we could say that our view of dynamics in terms of ‘thingless-connectedness’ sublimates into our UNCONSCIOUS.”

philosophers such as Alan Watts and linguists such as Benjamin Whorf have explained, Native American languages are far more oriented to ‘spatial-relations’.  One may therefore anticipate that the aspect of our experience that, in the European mind falls away into the ‘unconscious’ so that conscious awareness is dealing only in the ‘what-things-in-themselves do’ representation of dynamics, is continually accessible to the Native American mind and that the two modes of representation can be used to complement one another.  This is strongly suggested by the very different philosophical representations articulated by Native Americans which portray humans as ‘strands in the web-of-life’; i.e. as secondary features within a spatial-relational dynamic that derive from the dynamic rather than being jumpstart producers of the dynamic.

3. From geometry back to topology.

In (1.) and (2.) the discussion was with respect to how we ‘descended’ from topological impression [dynamics understood as spatial-relational transformation/flow] to geometrical representation [dynamics understood as ‘what things-in-themselves-do’], … and how this corresponded to a sublimating of topological understanding in the ‘unconscious’ along with the retention in conscious awareness of a reduced representation of dynamics, this become an effective ‘consciousness’.

This sublimation of topological awareness is discussed by F. David Peat, whose views on the implications of quantum physics findings on our worldview paralleled those of colleague and co-author David Bohm.  His suggestion is that this sublimation of topological understanding into the ‘unconscious’ is associated with ‘learning’ or ‘acculturation’; i.e. it associates with ‘becoming an adult’ and learning the logic of numbers and geometry as the basis of becoming ‘knowledgeable’ about the world.  As a result, our more sophisticated topological mode of awareness/perception is ‘left behind’ in our ‘primal self’ or ‘child persona’.  This has not ‘gone’ but is still inside us but suppressed by our ‘adult’ persona which is more serious and explicit in its representations.

The history of geometry demonstrates the discovery of deeper and more general levels, Euclidian geometry gives way to non-Euclidian, beneath geometry is topology, and topology itself is founded on even more general and beautiful mathematics. The longer a particular topic has been studied, the deeper mathematicians are able to move towards its foundations. But Piaget, pointed out, this historical evolution is a direct reversal of the actual development of concepts of space in the infant. To the young child, the distinction between intersecting and non-intersecting figures is more immediate than between, say, a triangle, square and circle. To the infant’s developing mind, topology comes before geometry. In general, deeper and more fundamental logical operations are developed earlier than more specific rules and applications. The history of mathematics, which is generally taken as a process of moving towards deeper and more general levels of thought, could also be thought of as a process of excavation which attempts to uncover the earliest operations of thought in infancy.” – F. David Peat, ‘Mathematics and the Language of Nature’

We can reconcile this process with Nietzsche’s remarks on the necessity to construct a reality based on ‘appearances’; “A world in a state of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be “comprehended” or “known”; only to the extent that the “comprehending” and “knowing” intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, fabricated out of nothing but appearances…”

That is, the infant’s awareness is in terms of inclusion in a continually transforming relational spatial flow [in pure topological terms] which transcends ‘knowledge’ in the sense that ‘knowledge’ is ‘knowledge of things’.  The infants ‘consciousness’ is what is destined, in European language based acculturation, to fall into the ‘unconscious’ and in the Native American language based acculturation, to become one of two consciously employed complementary modes of understanding the world dynamic, the ‘dynamic ground’ view coming from the topological [spatial-relational] view of dynamics and the ‘dynamic figures’ view coming from the geometric [what-things-in-themselves do] view of dynamics.

The globally dominating European ‘consciousness’ has constructed a popular [commonly accepted] pseudo-reality that strips out the dynamic figures from the dynamic ground and casts aside [into the unconscious] the dynamic ground.  This is becoming an ‘environmental disaster’ since this represents an inversion of the ‘direction’ of sourcing of dynamics.  As with the ‘hurricane’, the sourcing of development and behaviour of the dynamic form derives from the spatial-relational suprasystem dynamic the ‘apparent local form’ is included in.  Once the dynamic form is isolated and imputed to be a local, independent material system, one must come up with a local, internal animative sourcing of its development and behaviour.  The one-sided notion of ‘genesis’ [notional local, self-jumpstarting agents of genesis called ‘genes’ are called into mental service] and ‘central nervous system’ [notional intellectual processing equipment directed by internal purpose]  are concepts that we invent to achieve this inversion of the direction of animative sourcing [to make development and behaviour appear to ‘jumpstart’ from out of the interior of the notional flow-features reduced to [fixed in place as] ‘things-in-themselves’.

Once this pseudo-reality has been mentally constructed in terms of the isolated dynamic figures as ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these dynamic figures do’, the real physical animative sourcing; i.e. the continually transforming relational space, … falls away into the ‘unconscious’.

4. Equipping the ‘things-in-themselves with ‘free will’.

One of the most ‘mentally convincing’ [to the Western civilization-acculturated mind] ‘locks’ that holds in primacy the notion of self as a ‘thing-in-itself’, notionally with its own locally originating internally jumpstarted animative sourcing of behaviour, … is the psychical notion of ‘free will’ and the ability to ‘jumpstart author’ our own choices as to how we behave.  This has resonances of God and his Creation in it, since in the monotheist creation myth, nothing was ‘in place’ prior to the Creation so that God didn’t have to ask anybody else about what he was about to do, nor was there any problem about his new creations fitting into what was already in place since nothing at all was in place at the time of the Creation; i.e. space was absolutely empty, like the mathematical notion of absolute Euclidian space.

Of course, in the case of humans living in a relational space such as the space of the earth’s biosphere on the surface of the sphere of the earth, there can be no ‘creation’ of something new without the destruction of something already established.  That is just another way of saying that ‘dynamics’ in a relational space equate to ‘transformation’ of spatial relations.  For example, if one disperses ants or humans over the surface of a sphere, since the surface of a sphere has no absolute fixed reference points on it, the ‘location’ and/or ‘motion’ of any of those ants or humans can only be assessed relative to the spatial-relational configuration it is included in.  There is no such thing as ‘absolute motion’ [the ‘motion of a thing’] in such a space, there is only relational ‘transform-motion’ or ‘transformation’.

When European colonizers moved from east to west to the Americas, this could be seen as transforming the spatial relations in the biosphere.  But the European mind would see this as Europeans moving within an absolute fixed space reference frame from point A in Europe to point B in the Americas.  The notion of free-will associates with this view.  If they had acknowledged that the world was a spatial-relational dynamic that was continually transforming [and saw themselves as flow-features within that continual transformation] then they would instead see themselves as ‘strands-in-the-relational web’ or ‘co-participants in the transformation of the spatial-relational dynamics they were included in’, as in the Native American world view.

In this spatial-relational inclusional worldview, there is no animative sourcing that jumpstarts from the interior of the self because one is already a flow-feature in the spatial-relational flow, and as such, has an option more like a sailboater than a powerboater; i.e. to derive one’s drive-power and steerage from the flow one is included in, but not to derive one’s drive-power and steerage from one’s own onboard equipment [internal components and processes].

Furthermore, philosophers have noted that the European colonizers believed they were ‘constructing a wonderful new world’ in the Americas while the indigenous aboriginals argued that the colonizers were destroying a wonderful established world in the Americas.  The physical reality was neither of these ‘individual perspectives’, rather that both colonizers and indigenous aboriginals shared inclusion in a transforming relational space.  The aboriginals could easily get to this view as well as to the view in terms of the colonizers destroying what was ‘in place’ with their ‘constructions’.   On the other hand, it appears to have been more difficult for the European colonizers to get to the ‘transformational view’, as evidenced by their impression, written into history books, of ‘progress’ as if their ‘civilized’ way of living represented a linear, forward progression from more ‘primitive’ ways of living in the past.  In this progression-over-time [rather than spatial-relational transformation] way of thinking, the new constructions ‘replaced’ the old established structures.  This view is in spite of the experience that all new structures age and collapse, only to be replaced by more new constructions,… this being more like ‘treading water’ ‘in place’ [i.e. in-place relational transformation within the biosphere-space] than ‘making progress by marching forward in a time-based succession of continual improvements on the past’.

The fact is that the European colonizers’ notion that they/we ‘moved from Europe westward to the Americas’, amounts to a denial that we are all included in a continually transforming relational space.  The colonizers’ view is a group ‘perspective’ based on a ‘sense of self’ as a local, independently existing ‘thing-in-itself’, notionally with its own locally originating, internal process driven and directed behaviour that moves about and interacts within an absolute fixed, empty and infinite space.  It is a God-like ‘sense of self’ in that it isolates the dynamic figure from the dynamic ground and resituates the ‘figure’ of ‘self’ in an absolute space wherein what it does is purely and solely its own self-jumpstarting, self-creative action/accomplishment.  It is a denial that one is included in a relational-spatial dynamic that is common to all; i.e. it is a psyche based rendering of the world and self rather than a grounding in physical reality;

“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’

While the powerboater-style independent agent with ‘free-will’ is a lock-in to the geometric world view in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, the sailboater-style relational agent of relational transformation allows a ‘sense of self’ compatible with the topological world view in terms of inclusion in a continually transforming relational space [the energy-charged spatial-plenum];

It is this notion of ‘free-will’ that supports the ‘powerboater’ sense of self that mentally isolates the dynamic figures from the dynamic ground.  Pre-relativity/pre-quantum physics science also lends this ‘free-will’ to its definition of ‘organism’ and/or ‘cell’, so as to split out the foreground ‘inhabitant’ from its dynamic ground aka ‘habitat’;

 “… 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.” — David Bohm, ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’

Conclusion:

The above essay gives an account as to how our globally dominating Western culture sublimates into the ‘unconscious’ its ‘topological’ understanding of world and self in terms of a transforming relational spatial-plenum [all-including spacetime continuum] and elevates to an unnatural singular-primacy in conscious awareness, the ‘geometrical’ understanding of world and self in terms of ‘what-things-in-themselves-do’.

The acculturation or ‘education’ one receives in Western society is one in which ‘knowledge’ is built up to slowly take over or ‘hijack’ natural relational ‘understanding’, rather than simply being developed as a complementary tool.  As Emerson observes in ‘The Method of Nature’; ‘the tool [of knowledge] has run away with the workman.’.

Our sense of ‘free-will’ plays a ‘lock-in’ role that keeps the view of dynamics in the geometric terms of ‘what things-in-themselves-do’ in its unnatural singular-precedence over the topological view in terms of the continuing transformation of relational space.   As Mach notes, ‘free-will’ is a contrivance of the psyche which equates, in his terms, to ‘ego’.  If one is able to suspend the ego, which is tied to individual ‘thing-in-itself’ perspective, and accept that other perspectives are equally possibly [as in the ‘learning circle’ of the aboriginal tradition], then one can allow the topological view to resurface from its banishment in the ‘unconscious’.

* * *

[1] “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

[2] “For an oceanosphere thickness that is in the middle”.   If one looks at the yin/yang symbol at the top of the essay, one is reminded here that we have two views going on at the same time, the inside-outward view of the asserting material form and the outside-inward view of the world in a drop of water.  Kepler brought up this ‘mix’ of two views in regard to the position of the earth in the solar system and used it as the basis for modeling our psyche;

“But if it is permissible, using the thread of analogy as a guide, to traverse the labyrinths of the mysteries of nature, not ineptly, I think, will someone have argued as follows: The relation of the six spheres to their common centre, thereby the centre of the whole world, is also the same as that of διανοὶα [discussive intellection] to νοῦς [intuitive intellection], according as these faculties are distinguished by Aristotle, Plato, Proclus, and the rest; and the relation of the single planets’ revolutions in place around the sun to the ἀμετᾴθεδον [unvarying] rotation of the sun in the central space of the whole system (concerning which the sun-spots are evidence; this has been demonstrated in the Commentaries on the Movement of Mars) is the same as the relation of τὸ διανοητικὸν to τὸ νοερὸν, that of the manifold discourses of ratiocination to the most simple intellection of the mind. For as the sun rotating into itself moves all the planets by means of the form emitted from itself, so too—as the philosophers teach—mind, by understanding itself and in itself all things, stirs up ratiocinations, and by dispersing and unrolling its simplicity into them, makes everything to be understood. And the movements of the planets around the sun at their centre and the discourses of ratiocinations are so interwoven and bound together that, unless the Earth, our domicile, measured out the annual circle, midway between the other spheres—changing from place to place, from station to station—never would human ratiocination have worked its way to the true intervals of the planets and to the other things dependent from them, never would it have constituted astronomy. (See the Optical Part of Astronomy, Chapter 9.)

On the other hand, in a beautiful correspondence, simplicity of intellection follows upon the stillness of the sun at the centre of the world, in that hitherto we have always worked under the assumption that those solar harmonies of movements are defined neither by the diversity of regions nor by the amplitude of the expanses of the world. As a matter of fact, if any mind observes from the sun those harmonies, that mind is without the assistance afforded by the movement and diverse stations of his abode, by means of which it may string together ratiocinations and discourse necessary for measuring out the planetary intervals. Accordingly, it compares the diurnal movements of each planet, not as they are in their own orbits but as they pass through the angles at the centre of the sun. And so if it has knowledge of the magnitude of the spheres, this knowledge must be present in it a priori, without any toil of ratiocination: but to what extent that is true of human minds and of sublunary nature has been made clear above, from Plato and Proclus.

Under these circumstances, it will not have been surprising if anyone who has been thoroughly warmed by taking a fairly liberal draft from that bowl of Pythagoras which Proclus gives to drink from in the very first verse of the hymn, and who has been made drowsy by the very sweet harmony of the dance of the planets begins to dream (by telling a story he may imitate Plato’s Atlantis and, by dreaming, Cicero’s Scipio): throughout the remaining globes, which follow after from place to place, there have been disseminated discursive or ratiocinative faculties, whereof that one ought assuredly to be judged the most excellent and absolute which is in the middle position among those globes, viz., in man’s earth, while there dwells in the sun simple intellect, πῦρ νοερὸν, or νοῦς, the source, whatsoever it may be, of every harmony.” – Johannes Kepler, ‘Harmonies of the World’

. . .

Outside-inward animated community

I don’t know anyone who does not appreciate the values captured in Paula Underwood’s story [told in her capacity as keeper of the Native American oral tradition], ‘My Father and the Lima Beans’.  It is a very simple story, taking less than three minutes to read.  Meanwhile, the values implicit in this story are virtually opposite to the values in our modern Western society, suggesting to me that Nietzsche was right, there must be a ‘revaluation of all values’.

The rediscovering of holodynamic living implies such a ‘revaluation of values’.  ‘Holodynamic living is the view that comes to us in a ‘relational understanding’ of the world we live in.

Another Native American [Kiowa] author, Scott Momaday, seems to go just as directly to heart of the matter as this excerpt from the life experience of Abel in ‘House Made of Dawn’ captures;

  “… and you just looked around at all the new and beautiful things. And after a while, the trader put some things out on the counter, sacks of flour and sugar, a slab of salt pork, some canned goods, and a little bag full of the hard red candy. And your grandfather took off one of his rings and gave it to the trader. It was a small green stone, set carelessly in thin silver. It was new and it wasn’t worth very much, not all the trader gave for it, anyway. And the trader opened one of the cans, a big can of whole tomatoes, and your grandfather sprinkled sugar on the tomatoes and the two of you ate them right there and drank bottles of sweet red soda pop. And it was getting late and you rode home in the sunset and the whole land was cold and white. And that night your grandfather hammered the strips of silver and told you stories in the firelight. And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow-covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything — where you were little, where you were and had to be.”

What do these two stories have in common?

[see also the five-minute overview of this essay]

There is in both the sense that the individual is ‘in the centre of everything, where we are and have to be’. We are included in an unfolding web of relations that is greater than us, that inspires us continually to ‘rise to the occasion’, to let our potentialities creatively assert in intimate coniunctio with the unfolding world that we are uniquely situationally included in.

Our modern society, the now globally dominating ‘Western civilization’ has inverted this implicit ‘value’. It has shifted the centre of everything to the interior of the individual and sees the individual as a ‘thing-in-itself’ and values the individual on the basis of ‘what this thing-in-itself does’, re-rendering the world view in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.   The ‘community’ is then seen as a ‘Frankenstein’ deliberately constructed from its parts, rather than as a web of relations inspired/induced/orchestrated by the web of relations it is situationally included in.   In this view of community, we must select, reward and respect ‘the best parts’ and make sure that the ‘defective parts’ do not disturb the good work of the superior performers, the ‘pillars’ of our community.  In other words, we must take a purificationist approach to the world we live in.  Our values and sense of ‘justice’ must orient to punishing bad/sinful deeds and rewarding good/God-like deeds, … all in an effort to ‘construct a faultless/perfect community’ which, like the Virgin Mary’s child will be conceived by a divine force coming through her centre without interference from natural worldly desires.

In the Native American myth, this continuously unfolding spatial web-of-relations that each of us is uniquely, situationally in the centre of, ‘where she is and has to be’, is the sensory source of inspiration, orchestration, rising to the occasion, epigenetic development of body and character, and shaper of behaviour.  It is this outside-inward inspiration in coniunctio with inside-outward blossoming of assertive potentialities that constitutes the world as a dynamic unity.  How could a flower ‘grow’ without being teased into its beautiful becoming by sun, rain, fresh air and nurturing soil?  How much value do we discard/ignore by saying that the flower ‘grows’ in the sense that something in its interior is the source of its ‘growth’?

Our scientific viewing lenses reduce dynamics in the world to ‘what things-in-themselves do’ as if from their internal components and processes.

But, our experience suggests that we live in a continually transforming relational space where the ‘spatial-relations’ are in a natural precedence over the ‘material things’ which are continually gathering and being re-gathered in the relational flow.  Johannes Kepler, in ‘Harmonies of the World’ (1619) claimed that the most profound/divine aspect of the celestial dynamic was in the overall harmony of the web of relations, which the ‘local harmonies’ of planets by twos [e.g. earth and sun] deferred to.  His model that the planets ‘moved in elliptical orbits around the sun’ [a two-body view of dynamics], being an obvious flatspace or Euclidian planar-geometry view of dynamics, was merely a descriptive expedient not to be confused with the ineffable harmony of the whole, the ‘holodynamic’ ‘harmonies of the world’ which lay innately beyond his three ‘laws of motion’.

Rediscovering relational living involves a revaluation of values.

The community harmony in the ‘Lima Beans’ story transcends the behaviours of the participants; i.e. the community dynamic in relational terms pulls and teases their behaviours out of them, pulling on them to ‘rise to the occasion’ and allow potentialities to blossom forth that they didn’t know could arise within them and which never would have but for the orchestrating pull of the relational space they were uniquely, situationally included in.  Of course, if the implicit need in the relational dynamic could have been better matched by the action of an individual with six arms instead of two, that is not going to happen, but the orchestration of three people with two arms each is a possibility, and when three people rise to the occasion and pitch in together to meet some need in the unfolding spatial dynamics they share inclusion in, a sense of camaraderie and brotherhood arise with it that warms the heart, that is something to be ‘valued’.

The invention of money and wages and the concept of ‘paid labour’ have ‘inverted’ the natural order of things by modeling dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’. The ‘corporation’ is a ‘Frankenstein community’ constructed from notional ‘things-in-themselves’ or ‘commodity parts’ and ‘what they do’.  We are raising our children to become ‘commodity parts’ that will ‘slot in’ to ‘Frankenstein communities’ called corporations, which are slowly but surely replacing natural community.  In fact, communities are now ‘incorporating’ so as to view and manage themselves in a centre-driven manner.  This is the inverse of the community in the Lima Beans story, and the corporation does not have the same values; i.e. the corporation sees the community dynamic as intentionally managed from its own centre, driven and directed by its own internal intellect and purpose like the biological sciences ‘machine’ view of an organism/flower.

The biological sciences ‘flower’ is a ‘Frankenstein flower’, that notionally develops and behaves as determined by its internal components and processes, directed out of an implied ‘internal centre’.  That is all that is possible in science since science views all dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.  When science talks about flowers pushing forth from the soil and sunflowers in a field full of sunflowers all turning to orient to the changing position of the sun, do you think that science is going to credit the relational space we live in as the orchestrating influence?  No way, science will without exception explain such phenomena AVOIDING all outside-inward influence and notionally attributing the source of the behaviour to the internal components and processes of the notional ‘thing-in-itself’; e.g. the concept of heliotropism sticks firmly with the ‘what things-in-themselves do’ model and resists the notion that space is relational [i.e. that the continually transforming dynamics of relational space are in a natural precedence over the development and behaviour of those things that gather and are regathered with in it.]

“Tracking the sun is properly known as heliotropism. It is a temporary change in the orientation of plant parts in relation to the position of the sun (or other light source). Heliotropism is accomplished by differential swelling and contraction of cells and can be reversed by changing the position of the lightsource.”

The view is expressed in the ‘what things-in-themselves do’ terms that ‘the sun moves and then the flower follows’, ‘the sun warms and then the seed sprouts’ etc.  Machean physics, like the Native American worldview see these dynamics as ‘one’; i.e. in the very different terms of the transformation of spatial-relations rather than in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ as measured within a notional absolute space and absolute time reference frame.  That is, to say ‘the sun shines’ or ‘the sun warms’ is the ‘double error’ that Nietzsche speaks of.  This warming or shining is the sun, it is the sensation [a basic element or ‘sensa’ in Mach’s terms].  Sure there is a bright body in the sky that we associate with the warming we feel, but by the same toke, there is an eye and a rotating pinwheel in the sky [the eye of the hurricane] that we associate with the rains and wind we feel, but that doesn’t mean that the warmth and or the wind ‘jumpstarts’ from out of the centre of these local features in the sky.

These VISUALLY ‘local’ features are themselves included in a larger spatial-relational dynamic and it is this larger dynamic that we too are not only included in, but are gathered into who we are in.  We have no justification in our natural experience to make this arbitrary splitting out of visible features and declaring them to be ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own local internal jumpstart-authored development and behaviour.  These features that we notionally split out from the continuing transforming relational space and which we declare to be ‘things-in-themselves’ with ‘their own internal component and process jumpstart authoring of their development and behaviour’, insofar as their ‘thing-in-itselfness’, are artefacts of the unrestricted activity of the mind.  While we impose these artefacts on our ‘what things do’ mental modeling of dynamics, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature.

The ‘values-nostalgia’ that is aroused in us in reading Paula Underwood’s ‘My Father and the Lima Beans’ is for our lost valuing of the sacred harmonies of the relational space we live in, the orphic force of the evolving universe that calls to us individually and collectively to rise to the occasion and become what we can become, to participate in singing and dancing the world into existence, to take our place in the unfolding natural scheme of things.

But no, our civilized values have been realigned to this view of dynamics as always coming out of some material centre, be it on the scale of the notional ‘Big Bang’, or on the scale of the human organism, the flower even, the people as cogs in the Frankenstein machinery of modern community.  We have invested our values in ‘what things-in-themselves do’, how much ‘knowledge’ and/or ‘know-how’ they have acquired and deploy.  We are replacing communities with ‘corporations’ and our values are such that we encourage and educate our children to acquire such knowledge as can give them a high ‘thing-in-itself’ performance rating which is the value that our society judges, rewards and pays respect to.  These values stem from what people as ‘things-in-themselves’ are now.  This is what we see behind the daughter’s initial choosing of the members of her community in the Lima Bean story.  But her father reminds her that ‘what we are’ as seen when we scrutinize others or ourselves with a crow-like gaze, as if we can be assessed as ‘things-in-ourselves’, does not inform us of that other view of who we are as participants in a collective ‘rising to the occasion’, where the opening of possibilities in the unfolding web of relations that unites us inspires and orchestrates the blossoming of our unseen potentialities, ‘unseen’ because they do not exist ‘in us’ as ‘things-in-ourselves’ out of the context of the relationally defined orchestrating receptacle that pulls them into being.   The situation engenders the heroism whether of the individual or the collective.  It is our distorted worldview that sees all dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ that inverts the attribution and re-situates the animative sourcing back in the interior of the ‘things-in-themselves’.

When we see heroism we tend to point to a person and say; ‘you are a hero’, as if ‘heroism’ were an animative sourcing that resides within the individual and wakes up and goes to work every once in a while.  Many accused of ‘being a hero’ will reject this saying that ‘the orchestrating influence of the web of spatial relations I was situated in animated by behaviour.  The situation was the primary author of ‘heroism’, not me.  Anyone would have done the same had they found themselves in this situation.’

As Nietzsche observes, what we experience as stimulus, we commonly confuse for ‘will’. The stimulus arises within us to stop the enfant being swept down the raging river and we let our behaviour be orchestrated by this stimulus.  But afterwards, people will say that it was our ‘desire’ to save the child that was the animating author of our behaviour, and ‘desire’ is something we commonly translate as ‘intellectual intention/will’.  In this same manner, sexual stimulus thus becomes translated into ‘sexual desire’ and from there into a ‘will’ to have sexual intercourse.  From this line of thinking, a natural stimulus becomes seen as something sinful since civilized people as ‘things-in-themselves’ operate out of their own internal intellection and purpose.

The Virgin Mary could not still be a Christian religious icon if her conceiving of Jesus had flowed from natural stimulus.  In Christian belief, natural stimulus must be rejected and replaced by centre-of-self initiated spiritual-informed intellectual intention/will.  This is not only a devaluing of the influence of natural stimulus, it is the assigning of negative value to it.  Our civilized values instead go to our intellectually jumpstarted and theologically approved ‘will’, and it is from such a value system that the development of community becomes deliberate and mechanical and our reward become attached to ‘superior performance/achievement’ in this modeling of community as a ‘thing-in-itself’ driven and directed from out of its own internal components and processes.

Nature calls to us, its web of spatial-relations open up stimulating possibilities that we sense.  As Mach says, the ‘sensa’ are neither wholly ours nor wholly ‘out there’; i.e. the ‘sensa’ are the basic elements of physical reality.  They signal our outer-inner, habitat-inhabitant ‘conjugate relation’ as in Mach’s principle: “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning [stimulating] the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning [stimulating] the dynamics of the habitat”.  The sensa are both psychical and physical at the same time.

In a relational space, the orchestrating influence that would have us ‘rise to the situation’ is the ‘physical reality’ but once we accept that we are ‘things-in-ourselves’, we must relegate ‘the call of nature’ to something ‘psychical’, something ‘in our heads.

One can imagine the confusion that arises in people indoctrinated to regard the real physical pulls on them as ‘in their heads’.  The man that felt the direct stimulus from his inclusion in a relational space, to pull the infant from the raging river, doesn’t have that much of a problem when people tell him that his action was sourced in his head, from a latent heroic will that was awakened.  But what if the direct stimulus led to sexual intercourse with an underage girl?  This time, the confusing of stimulus with ‘will’ is going to create social problems for him.  The problem I am referring to is not to do with the potential problem of girls having sex too young.  Many do, and in many cases there is no problem.  It is instead with the belief that his actions were driven and directed by his internal will, as is our habitual scientific/Western cultural interpretation of dynamics; i.e. always in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.

There is a reason why it strikes our funny-bone when we hear of the man who was asked how he pleaded when he comes before the judge for having sex with underage girls and he responds: ‘I plead insanity, your honour, I’m just crazy about that stuff’.

Is the ‘stimulus’ real/physical as Machean physics says, or is it ‘in our heads’?

Psychology imputes these stimuli to be ‘in our heads’ rather than ‘real/physical’.  Thus we get a whole new schema to try to explain things, in the wake of having assumed the local, independent existence of ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own internal process [intellect and purpose] driven and directed behaviours.  That is, we can no longer treat sexual stimulus as real/physical after we have ‘set up’ dynamic forms such as ourselves as machines that ‘sense, interpret, decide and act’.  This scientific model of ourselves conjures up concepts such as ‘temptation’; e.g. the ‘idea’ of having sex with a young girl, a desire or will that is ‘acted upon’ by the individual understood as a sensing-responding machine whose actions are mediated by intellect and purpose.

Make no mistake, this is the same inversion of mental model that occurs in the notion of ‘community’ in the Lima Beans story.  The orchestrating pull of the relational-spatial situation the people collective are included in, that inspires them to ‘rise to the situation’ is ‘real/physical’ in Machean physics, it is not ‘in-their-heads’.  If they set up their community as a corporation, choosing each of the parts and having a central authority instruct them as to what they should do, we are not just throwing cold water on some ‘team spirit’ they might otherwise have had, we are preventing them from engaging with the real/physical world they are situationally included in, and instead encouraging them to drive their own behaviours out of their heads, as directed by their own intellect and purpose.  The stimulus is real/physical and unfolding from the dynamics of a relational space and not ‘psychological’ as in ‘desire’ as a ‘will’ as ‘psychologists’ would seem to make it.

Carl Jung chose to put everything into the psychological realm rather than accept Mach’s view that space is relational and thus that sensa are physical and psychical at the same time. To top this off, he chose to see the ‘psychological’ as ‘reality’.  As Suzanne Gieser says in ‘The Innermost Kernal: Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics.  Wolfgang Pauli’s dialogue with C.G. Jung’.

“A statement is ‘psychologically true’ in the sense that even it if is clearly not true in an objective sense it tells us about the way the mind functions.  This assumption was not primarily a philosophical viewpoint to Jung but the basis of his way of working with his patients; it was for him the direct route to an insight into their minds.  In his effort to understand and help his patients Jung’s first, and in fact only, concern was to take people’s statements and experience seriously, even if they were contrary to so-called ‘common sense’.  He had this in mind when he elaborated his constructive, or synthetics, method, a method opposed to reductionism and to classic scientific causality.

With the ‘reality of the psyche’ as starting point Jung believed that it was possible to proceed beyond the old conflict between idealism and materialism.  Existence does not have to be reduced to the one or the other if it is realized that reality is, to us, ultimately psychic.  The psyche is the medium, which combines physiological and spiritual information in a psychic fact.  Spirit and matter are only names for the perceived source or place of origin of the mental content. … The mistake that many philosophers have made, says Jung, is that they have identified the human psyche with the spirit, thus made spirit the subject, and matter the object.  Such a one-sided and erroneous division must, like all distortions, eventually be reversed.  Jung therefore saw it as symptomatic that we live in a time when the metaphysics of the spirit is being replaced by the metaphysics of matter.  It is a remarkable state of affairs when psychology is trying to reduce the soul to biochemical processes and movements of electrons, while physics is trying to explain the lack of regularity in the interior of the atom as evidence of spiritual life.

What is special about the position of modern [i.e. Jung’s] psychology, according to Jung, is that it can no longer allow itself to reduce the spiritual to the physical or vice versa.  It has instead to find a new viewpoint, a viewpoint characterized by both-and.  A third viewpoint is needed which can unite the physical and the spiritual explanatory perspective.  This third viewpoint is the reality of the psyche.  Like Kant and James, Jung argues that we cannot know anything about the thing in itself.  The only reality about which we can speak, therefore, is psychic reality and psychological truths.  We cannot reach beyond the psyche.” — Suzanne Gieser, ‘The Innermost Kernal: Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics.  Wolfgang Pauli’s dialogue with C.G. Jung’.

It is, first of all, by accepting this notion of a ‘thing-in-itself’ that we create the ‘split’ between ‘self’ and ‘other’ and/or the world of ideas and the world of matter.  As Mach points out, this split is unnecessary and, therefore, resolving the complications that come with it is unnecessary.

While Mach saw stimuli as a quality of the relational space that we are included flow-features within, psychologists, including Jung, went along with the view of ‘self’ as a ‘thing-in-itself’.  Starting from there, “Jung argues that we cannot know anything about the thing in itself.  The only reality about which we can speak, therefore, is psychic reality and psychological truths.  We cannot reach beyond the psyche.”

The influence that induces the people collective in the Lima Bean story to jointly ‘rise to the occasion’, in Machean physics, is a real physical force [recall that the animating influence associating with the continually transforming relational space is the same animating influence that is gathering/organizing dynamics forms of all types, including humans].  Once one imputes the notion of a ‘thing-in-itself’, however, the behaviour of the thing-in-itself is seen as jumpstarting from out of the centre of the thing-in-itself; i.e. as coming from its instinctive/subconscious intellect and purpose or its conscious intellect and purpose.  This view takes the animating influence out of physical reality and puts it into the realm of ‘spirit’; e.g. ‘team spirit’.   It therefore becomes a ‘problem’ that Jung sets out to resolve; i.e. the ‘spirit’ – ‘matter’ split.

This ‘problem’ does not even exist in the Machean relational space worldview.  Furthermore, psychology, by accepting the notion of ‘thing-in-itselfness’ or ‘being’ or ‘identity’ as part of its ‘reality’, is itself the author of the ‘spirit’ – ‘matter’ split that it then must struggle with and try to resolve.

All these non-local, non-visible, non-material [purely relational] influences that are ‘real/physical’ in Machean physics and in the aboriginal worldview, are swept into the realm of ‘spirit’ and/or ‘psyche’ in the Western view and in Western psychology and thus as forces that derive from the interior of the individual seen as a ‘thing-in-itself’.

In aboriginal justice, as is being re-introduced in general in our society as ‘restorative justice’ and more generally ‘restorative practice’ [e.g. ‘peace-making circles’], the response by the community is to ‘conflict arising’ within the community and no blame is assigned, not even for murder [who is going to blame child soldiers as independently acting ‘things-in-themselves’ apart from the Western justice system or as it is called in restorative justice circles ‘institutionalized vengeance’]?  The influences/stimuli as arise in the relational space we live in are assumed, in the aboriginal worldview, to be ‘real’.  Attractive females walking around half-naked who claim a right to ‘dress as they please’ does not detract from the physical reality of the stimuli that arises in the relational space they share inclusion with men in.  In restorative justice, the community would work together so as to restore, cultivate and sustain balance and harmony in the relational dynamics.  But in Western society, as Nietzsche points out, ‘stimulus’ rather than being accepted as ‘real/physical’ is translated into ‘desire’ and then ‘will’ because that’s the only way one can model behaviour after one has cast the individual as a ‘thing-in-itself’.

In the Western belief system and justice system, therefore, the sexual ‘offences’ are traced back to their notional ‘source’ in the centre of the ‘thing-in-itself’ where ‘the mind’ and its intellect and purpose are purported to be jumpstart animating source of the sexual action [or community-spirited action].   The trail does not lead back any farther than into the ‘psyche’ of the individual.  For example, it does not lead back into the relational dynamics which the participants of the community are included in, as it does in Machean physics and aboriginal restorative justice.  The sexual offender is seen as acting out of his undisciplined-by-moral-values psyche, as a breaker of moral law.  The young girls with skirts up to their labia and nipples poking seductively through transparent blouses have nothing to do with the intellectual decisions of independently-existing things-in-themselves or ‘machines made of meat’ as the biological sciences describe organisms [unless one lives in a Muslim country where the girls may instead be stoned for moral law violations].

In Western justice, sexual offences are dealt with out of the context of the relational dynamics they arise in.  The fox put in with the chickens, if he takes a chicken, is acting out of his own ‘thing-in-itself’ volition/will/psyche.  That is all the scientific model of the organism as ‘thing-in-itself’ allows.  Its true we wouldn’t leave our 13 year-old boys and girls naked in a swimming pool unattended because we know we would have a lot of pregnancies resulting. That is why we designate a ‘legal age’ where prosecutions can commence for ‘having sex with minors’.  The idea is not that we are acknowledging that sexual stimulus is physically real influence that arises in the dynamics of relational space.  No, we continue to maintain that the organism is a ‘thing-in-itself’ whose behaviour jumpstarts from his own internal organs and processes, so that if we track back ‘what he does’, the animative sourcing of it cul-de-sacs in his own interior or ‘psyche’.  We say instead that ‘young people don’t know what they are doing’.   They don’t know ‘the consequences of their actions’.  This makes it appear as if sexual interplay is a random action, rather than being an outside-inward orchestrated action in conjugate relation with inside-outward asserting action as in the relational space of Machian physics.

Then, at the age of 14 or so, these children, if they live in Western civilization, are supposed to cross over the line where they should have received sufficient indoctrination to know ‘good’ from ‘bad’ and to conduct their behaviour accordingly.  At this point, if they exprience a powerful stimulus and cross over some socially specified boundary of behaviour, they are ‘guilty’ of WILLFULLY breaking a moral law.

The thing-in-itself can only operate out of its own internal organs and processes and this we purport it does from infancy throughout its life.  That is our scientific definition of an ‘organism’.  The difference between an ‘animal’ and ‘civilized person’ is a difference that supposedly resides in the ‘internal processes’ of the ‘thing-in-itself’; e.g. in the knowledge, intellection and purpose of the thing-in-itself.  Thus, the child is born an animal and then becomes a civilized person by a process of indoctrination.

Not so in the aboriginal culture.  The person is never a ‘thing-in-itself’ and is born and remains an animal.  It is not seen as acting from out of its own interior but its behaviour is seen as arising from the relational dynamics it is situationally included in, the same relational dynamics as are continually gathering and regathering ‘persons’.  Therefore, the concept of ‘blame’ is alien to ‘aboriginal justice’ and the ‘problem’ is only superficially seen as an ‘offender-victim’ problem.  It is dealt with as a ‘conflict’ that arises in the relational dynamics of community that requires ‘healing’ as in ‘restoring, cultivating and sustaining balance and harmony in those relational dynamics.’

Society, which is globally dominated by the worldview of Western civilization which sees dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, is in the process of working this ‘inversion of values’ into the general social dynamic, converting communities into corporations, and transforming its youth into ‘highly performant contributors’ within community-as-productive-machine.   The outside-inward orchestrating influence of the fertile valley and pioneering settlers is no longer needed since the direction of the dynamic and the values have been inverted.  At the same time, Western civilization’s moral law based system of justice is relentless in attributing the source of conflict to individual behaviour; i.e. to the internal ‘psyche’ of the person-as-thing-in-itself.  This justice system is creating a split between good morally irreproachable rich and powerful people people, on the one hand, and evil morally reproachable poor and impotent people on the other hand, and unlike the aboriginal justice system, not seeing the source of conflict as arising from the relational space dynamics, since the institutionalized model of dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ does not allow such an interpretation.

Today, if a community experiences a rape or a shooting massacre, it looks for answers in the ‘troubled psyche’ of the ‘offending causal agent’.  That is, our tracing back of the animative sourcing of the event that we interpret as an ‘offensive behaviour’ on the part of an ‘offender, cul-de-sacs in the ‘psyche’ of the person involved.   This lets the community dynamic ‘off the hook’ and is thus a recipe for further degeneration in the social dynamic.  On the other hand, the aboriginal view is that the conflict can only arise in the relational dynamics of community since this notional ‘thing-in-itself’ that Western belief systems interpose in their portrait of the world dynamic makes no sense if one acknowledges that one lives within a world of flux; i.e. in a continually transforming relational space, as is the Machean view.

Jung’s claim will be that “We cannot reach beyond the psyche” and that we must therefore ‘heal the psyche’, but Mach’s claim is that we are denying the physical reality of ‘sensa’ and that we are obscuring our real physical experience by confusing the ‘physical’ for the ‘psychical’ and vice versa.

Jung appears to have a problem with Christianity and the moral law approach, and within the [already bogus] model of the ‘thing-in-itself’ that splits the individual into matter and spirit, has intellectually resolved the split using the ‘third viewpoint’; i.e. the both/and reality of the psyche.  The split is resolved but the psyche is not yet healed, and the problem then eludes the pursuer like a snake beneath a rug, where it’s next refuge is ‘the collective unconscious’.

If we could suspend our imposing of ‘being’ as Nietzsche and Mach and others argue we must, we suspend the notion of the individual as a ‘thing-in-itself’ which dissolves the notion of the spirit and matter split, and allows us to acknowledge once again, as aboriginal cultures have never stopped acknowledging, the ‘physical reality’ of ‘sensa’ and the relational nature of space and the forms that gather and are regathered within it.  As with restorative justice and restorative practice, we can understand conflict in the relational dynamics of community as ‘just that’, without having to impose an ‘offender-victim’ interpretation on the conflict, or, if we do, acknowledging that (a) the animating source of the conflict-called-offence does NOT cul-de-sac in the internal psyche of the visually-identified ‘causal agent’, and that (b) the community dynamic is a relational dynamic and is the source of conflict that arises within it; i.e. the community dynamic is NOT constituted by ‘thing-in-themselves’ and ‘what things do’ but is a relational-spatial continuum, obviating the notion that the conflict could be traced to one of these notional ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what they did’.

The child-soldier’s murder of people in his community is an unfolding that does not cul-de-sac in the psyche of the child-murderer.  Such a notion rests dependently on the ‘thing-in-itself’ model of the individual.  The child-soldier and those murdered by the child-soldier are dynamic forms within a continually transforming relational space.  They are among the forms that are continually gathering and regathering in the transforming relational space.  There can be no separation of ‘offender’ and ‘victim’ from the community dynamic they are included in.  The visual schaumkommen (appearances) is to see the ‘offender’ as the animative source of the offensive behaviour just as we see hurricane Katrina as the ‘offender’ that wreaks destruction on New Orleans.

The ‘real/physical’ dynamic is relational; i.e. the continuing transformation of relational space. If we want to understand the dynamics of conflict that we visually observe as dynamic forms in conflict, we must understand the relational dynamics from which they derive which are non-local, non-visible and non-material but PHYSICAL/REAL.  The dynamic forms are made of the transforming relational dynamics they are included in.  To insist on directing our inquiry in through the dynamic form seen as notional ‘thing-in-itself’ and its notional internal ‘psychological’ processes is to ‘lose the trail’ and to end up ‘blaming’ the notional ‘thing-in-itself’ for ‘the murder’ and/or ‘excusing him’ because of ‘his troubled spirit’ or ‘his troubled psyche’.  The work then becomes, after institutionalized vengeance has had its go;  (a) resolve his troubled spirit as in ‘redemption’ [‘Dead Man Walking’] or (b) through a process of psychotherapy, heal his damaged psyche by facilitation the sacred marriage of anima and animus.  Meanwhile, the community is not involved as in aboriginal justice and values, so that the community must be healed one person at a time.

Anarchists and other ‘revolutionaries’ may not have the right model, but they are not prepared to wait for that process to play itself out.  They know that the outbreaks of offensive behaviours in the community do not have an animative source that cul-de-sacs in the psyche of the local, visible, material ‘offender’.  They are prone to simply dividing up the social collective into ‘offenders’ and ‘victims’ in the opposite sense that the justice system does because they too, have stuck themselves with the ‘what things-in-themselves do’ model.

To close the loop with ‘My Father’s Lima Beans’, the ‘values-nostalgia’ that we feel, is in my view, deriving from the loss of our belief in the reality of the outside-inward orchestrating pull that pulls our assertive potentialities into blossom.  We want ourselves and everyone to be able to experience this pull and we feel bad because we, as a culture/civilization, have chosen to ‘pooh-pooh it’ and claim that whatever we feel as ‘things-in-ourselves’ must derive from our interior, from nano-processes within our ‘thing-in-itself-sense’, or from our ‘psyche’.  Thus has our society inverted our values and our view of dynamics, and this leads to a deconstruction of community into a collective of things-in-themselves and a reconstruction of community dynamics by way of the intentional dynamics of a collection of things-in-themselves [an authoritarian hierarchy such as a corporation].  When we see individuals who have not had sufficient exposure to the outside-inward orchestrating force that pulls the bejeezus out of their assertive potentialities and blossoms them out, … being ‘judged’ as they are excluded because of the machine model we now apply to everything, wherein we must make use of the most performant and most perfect things-in-themselves to optimize our community’s production and provide for everyone, we intuit the ‘loss’ in this and have nostalgia for the values of childhood where we were allowed to run about in the natural suction chamber that pulls our assertive potentialities into blossom, and we are not yet being judged and segregated in the purificationist processes of a mechanistic, mechanizing society.

I can understand why we stopped believing in the outside-inward orchestrating pull when it was called ‘spirit’.  It clashed with the scientific model of man wherein every force must derive from material cause.  But the concept of ‘spirit’ was only needed because of our having, in the first place, imposed the concept of ‘thing-in-itself’ on ourselves.  This is what Mach is saying and Nietzsche too and this notion arises naturally in me as well.  The ‘thing-in-itself’ model forces us to think that all of our behaviours have to come in to us through the interior of our thing-in-itself, through our ‘psyche’.  The relational space world view of Mach acknowledges the physical reality of direct outside-inward orchestrating influence [simultaneous with inside-outward asserting action].  This makes sense to me.  It has us suspend judgement in the ‘offender-victim’ topology and see conflict as something which arises in the relational space dynamic which not only sources the behaviour of the inhabitants of the relational space but gathers them in the first place.  Thus, our dealing with conflicts as they arise must attend to the relational dynamic and not simply stop at the superficial ‘offender-victim’ level.  It also allows us to accept as ‘real’ the orchestrating influence that asks us to take our place in the continuously unfolding scheme of things so that our ‘becoming’ can continue to be pulled into us by this influence, and so we don’t give up on it and start thinking that our development has to be forcibly imposed from our centre outwards, ‘willfully’, ‘purposefully’.

As Mach said, the root of this self-inflicting of a ‘thing-in-itself’ model on ourselves can be seen as the ‘figure and ground’ problem.  Instead of understanding the ‘figure’ and the ‘ground’ as two separate things, we can understand them as a conjugate relation in the dynamics of a relational space, as with the hurricane as a dimple in the relational flow of the atmosphere.

To explore what’s involved in this, we need to get into what might be called ‘relational understanding’.

* * *

PART II  A Reading Guide to Relational Understanding

What is ‘relational understanding’?

My writing, for example, is couched in ‘relational understanding’ which differs from ‘rational understanding’ in a manner discussed by Ernst Mach using the metaphor of ‘figure and ground’. Rational understanding is in terms of the dynamics of figures; i.e. it is in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’. Relational understanding acknowledges that figure and ground [matter and space, inhabitant and habitat] are in conjugate relation, as in the case of a hurricane [figure] and the atmospheric flow-space it gathers in [ground]. Mach points out that PHYSICAL REALITY is where “the dynamics of the habitat/ground are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants/figures at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants/figures are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat/ground.” [‘Mach’s principle’].

Our standard way of discussing/understanding dynamics IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION [i.e. not in aboriginal and buddhist and vedic approaches to understanding] is to reduce dynamics to ‘what figures do’ where ‘figures’ are understood as ‘things-in-themselves’. For example, we know that a hurricane is a figure that is in conjugate relation with the atmospheric flow space [ground] that it gathers in [the figure is a ‘dimple in the flow’], but for convenience we impute all of the authorship of the dynamic to the ‘figure’ and we say that; ‘Katrina is intensifying and growing larger; … Katrina is moving north towards the Gulf Coast; … Katrina is wreaking destruction on New Orleans;… Katrina is dissipating.’.

Essentially, our habit or ‘convention’ of convenience is to mentally superimpose an absolute space and time reference frame over the ‘figure’ and describe what the figure does relative to an absolute frame, rather than dealing with the complexity of its being a dynamic ‘dimple’ in the dynamic ground, rather than a ‘thing-in-itself’ in empty space with ‘its own internal process driven and directed development and behaviour.

Since we reduce ourselves and biological organisms in general in this manner, this reduction we build into our language/discourse has a profound influence on how we see ourselves and the world; i.e. it has a profound influence on ‘what is reality’ to us. [This is discussed by Sapir and Whorf and is termed ‘the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’].

That’s the gist of difference between ‘relational understanding’ which acknowledges the conjugate figure/ground relation, and ‘rational understanding’ which reduces dynamics to ‘what things-in-themselves do’.

What may be ‘detected’ in this writing [in the APN website] is that the comments are in terms of ‘relational understanding’ instead of the usual ‘rational understanding’.

One of the ramifications here is that ‘hierarchy’ follows from ‘rational understanding’ or ‘thing-in-itself based understanding’ but not from ‘relational understanding. For example, as soon as one imposes ‘thing-in-itself’ status on ‘figure’ one must assume that its behaviour derives from its own internal processes; i.e. it must have its own ‘internal direction’ or ‘internal management’ of its behaviour. It must have an internal centre of control [management] as well as operational components to achieve behaviour [workers].

In the relational view, for example, the fertile valley [‘land of opportunity’] beckons and someone starts tilling the soil and someone else joins in and starts planting and someone builds some tools for the harvesting and someone else builds a grindstone to make some flour from the grain and a community farming operation ‘gathers’ RELATIONALLY in the general flow of life. The evolutionary drive is a combination of ‘epigenesis’ [outside-inward ground-to-figure orchestration by the opening of spatial possibility] and ‘genesis’ [inside-outward figure-to-ground blossoming of assertive potentialities].

NOW, if we lift out all the little wriggling creatures in this ‘community farming operation’ and hold them up in the air against a blank background we can apply ‘analytical inquiry’ and monitor what each participant is doing and how the multiple participants coordinate their activities to produce farm products. With this ‘description’ in hand, and thanks to the invention of money and wages and the concept of ‘paid labour’, we can install a ‘manager’ to ‘give voice’ to the description of activities, along with a bunch of workers that he can assign to the various tasks and, voila, a factory-farm based on the dynamics of figures, out of the context of the dynamics of ground. We can plunk this factory farm operation down anywhere we like. All that’s needed is a bag of money to purchase a manager and some workers. Of course we did cheat the people out of their own free association and their building of a relation with the land and with one another.

What’s the point? The point is that analytical inquiry or rational intellection orients solely to ‘figures’ out of the context of ‘ground’ and gives a view of dynamics in the one-sided terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’. From the point of view of analytical inquiry or ‘rational understanding’, the ‘community farming operation’ and the ‘factory farm operation’ are identical and produce the same results. But from the point of view of relational understanding, what has gone missing is the relationship between the ‘system’ of the farm operation and the ‘suprasystem’ of fertile valley, seasons, climate etc. the ‘system’ is included in [the ‘systems sciences/Ackoff’ call this ‘synthetical inquiry’]. Furthermore, this relation between suprasystem and system or between dynamic ground and dynamic figures provided the orchestrating/organizing force which, in the factory farming operation is replaced by a ‘manager-worker’ organizing force. There was no ‘boss’ in the community farming operation [there was shared leadership] and everyone was there on their own volition rather than because they were following a trail of money/wages.

Hierarchy and the leader-follower split follows from reduction of relational understanding of dynamics in terms of the conjugate figure-ground relation [physical reality] to rational understanding of dynamics in the convenient but over-simplified one-sided terms of the dynamics of figures.

That’s the story on the ‘two realities’ and the difference between them. Now for the ‘reading list’, but first, a ‘heads-up’ on ‘how to read’ the reading list.

Our approach to understanding when we read discussions on ‘relational space’ by Mach et al is something we don’t usually question, but the fact of the matter is, we normally interpret what we read through ‘rational lenses’, but ‘rational lenses’ are unable to see ‘relational dynamics’ so unless we suspend our rational viewing habit, we won’t even see the relational understanding that is being shared in these writings. My experience is that many people read this stuff but few ‘get it’. For example Bertrand Russell read Poincaré’s ‘Science and Hypothesis’ which is all about ‘relational understanding’ and he didn’t ‘get it’ and they had a public debate which never settled anything and they ‘agreed to disagree’. Poincaré said, for example, that absolute space and absolute time, geometry [that which we use to isolate ‘the dynamics of figures’] are language conventions that we use to simplify our modeling of physical phenomena;

“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

The reading list cited below is in English [or German or French] but these are the worst [least competent] languages for discussing relational understanding. As Benjamin Whorf says;

“English compared to Hopi is like a bludgeon compared to a rapier.” – Benjamin Whorf

A few points to bear in mind if/as one reads the works listed below to keep oneself ‘on track’, taken from the works, are as follows;

(1.) “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

(in other words, we formulate laws in terms of the dynamics of figures and ignore the conjugate figure-ground relation because it allows us to generalize broadly and to predict future states. note that prediction only applies to ‘what things-in-themselves do’ and not to how the space that these things are included in is relationally transformed; i.e. it predicts what happens inside of the nuclear bomb but not how the space the bomb is included in is going to be transformed)

(2.) “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’

(what is ‘given to all in common’ is the transformation of space, and what is ‘in our heads’ is our personal perspective; e.g. if we are a colonizer our perspective is that we are constructing a wonderful new world in America and if we are an aboriginal our perspective is that the colonizer is destroying a wonder forested space on Turtle Island. What is given to all in common is the transforming relational space they are both/all included in).

(3.) “… 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.” — David Bohm

(the ‘true meaning’ of figures can only be understood in the context of the ‘ground’ in which they continually gather and are regathered).

(3.) “Continual transition does not allow us to speak of “individuals,” etc; the “number” of beings is itself in flux. We would say nothing of time and know nothing of motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we see stationary forms beside transitory flow. The same applies to cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of “empty space” we should certainly not have acquired the conception of space. The principle of identity has behind it the “appearance” that it refers to the same things. A world in a state of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be “comprehended” or “known”; only to the extent that the “comprehending” and “knowing” intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, fabricated out of nothing but appearances but become firm to the extent that this kind of appearance has preserved life–only to this extent is there anything like “knowledge”; i. e., a matching of earlier and more recent errors with one another.” – Nietzsche, Will to Power, 520 (1885)

(the dynamic ground, while the primary physical reality, while it can be experienced, cannot be ‘known’ and ‘discussed’ without building the discussion on top of ‘figures’ which are nothing more than ‘appearances’ in a physical sense, like the hurricane in the flow of the atmosphere).

(4.) “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’

(‘being’ is what we impute to the transient dynamic forms that gather in the flow. ‘being’ is an ‘empty fiction’ but as in Nietzsche’s previous statement, it is the basis of ‘knowing’. But as Heraclitus also says; “the knowledge of many things does not teach understanding”.)

(5.) “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

(in order to reduce the flow or ‘dynamic ground’ to a view that is solely in terms of dynamic figures and what they do; i.e. the view of dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, we take a dimple in the flow and give it a name, like ‘Katrina’ and having imputed ‘being’ to this transient feature in the flow, we impute it to be the author of its own dynamic so that the development of the feature in the flow appears to be jumpstarted by this ‘named being’ called ‘Katrina’ as in ‘Katrina is growing and intensifying’, ‘wreaking destruction’ etc. etc. We thus artificially CREATE a local author of an action when that action was coming from a larger action (a whorl within a flow) and was not locally sourced. Our visual observation oriented us to the visible aspect of the feature which was in fact a purely relational ‘resonance structure’ [vapour going round and round LOOKS LIKE a ‘local thing-in-itself’ so why not, for simplicity’s sake, define it as a thing-in-itself and make ‘it’ the author of ‘its own action’?]. As John Stuart Mill observed in this regard; “every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the existence of the object defined”)

(6.) “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

(Nietzsche is saying what Mach has said and what Bohm says in a calmer/cooler way, that the universe is a continually transforming relational [flow-] space but that we get to ‘know it’ by the dynamic forms that emerge within it. The earth’s biosphere persists while a whole diverse succession of ‘forms’ continuously gather and regather within it. Things like human population do not ‘grow’ since the only dynamic in a relational space is transformation [the notion of ‘growth of a thing’ or ‘growth in numbers’ implies an fixed reference frame]. In order for ‘growth’ to occur, the thing ‘growing’ must have a persisting identity of its own. We say that a zone of turbulence on the surface of the earth [a hurricane] ‘grows’ but the calm area around it simultaneously shrinks, which is to say that the physical dynamic is the transforming flow and the ‘growth’ is merely ‘appearance’. The growth of the Emperor’s empire can be defined by the length of the wall around the periphery of the empire that fences out the ‘wilderness’ beyond the wall, but as the empire continues to grow, the wall starts to shrink [after it goes beyond one hemisphere] until the wall may only be a hundred metres long and the wilderness reduced to a small park in the emperor’s ‘back yard’).

(7.) “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.” —Erwin Schroedinger

(Schroedinger is on a rant because scientists wanted to preserve the ‘being’ of the ‘particle’ or ‘figure’ instead of accepting that it is a resonance feature in the dynamics of the ground or ‘energy-charged flow’. They did this by using a probability interpretation of quantum dynamics so as to imply that the particle-as-‘being’ or ‘thing-in-itself’ is there somewhere, we just don’t know ‘where’ until we ‘measure it’ [impose an absolute space and time reference frame] and THEN it is there. Mach’s earlier rant on those same scientists refusal to accept relational space, he expressed thus; “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 belief 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’. See also ‘Ernst Mach leaves the Church of Physics’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Br J Philos Sci (1989) 40 (4): 519-540.))

(8.) “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

(Tasic, like Poincaré, is saying that the standard assumption of ‘identity’ used in Aristotelian logic and in geometry is just a ‘prejudice’ that we impose on the observational data. If the ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ is a fluid [relational] system, as contended by Mach and Bohm etc. then such axioms as underlie the notion of ‘the invariable solids of geometry’ are meaningless, and as Poincaré elaborates on, the serve only as a kind of ‘language game’ that synthetically turns ‘appearances’ into pseudo-reality; “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)

(9.) “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.” – Frédéric Neyrat

(This is one example citation of many where people are picking up on the relational geometry of space and Mach’s principle [figure and ground are in conjugate relation] as is understood in the aboriginal culture, as articulated in the following citation)

(10.) “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.” Script writer using nom-de-plume ‘Chief Seattle’, capturing Northwest Amerindian ‘relational understanding’ aka ‘Mach’s principle’

(As mentioned above, people are generally coming around to the understanding that mainstream science only deals in ‘what things-in-themselves do’ which ignores the conjugate inhabitant-habitat or figure-ground relation. In the relational space we live in, everything that we push out bounces back in some way. The way the habitat-dynamic bounces back on us launders out the particular inhabitant actions that are pushing out; e.g. the storm cells are pushing out into the flow of the atmosphere at the same time as the flow of the atmosphere is pushing into the storm-cells. Space serves as a ‘mediating medium’. If more and more farmers use ‘roundup’ on their ‘round-up ready’ crops then the concentration of ‘roundup’ will continue to build in the habitat and will inevitably influence more change than that which is planned in the simple ‘what things-in-themselves do’ dynamics of figures only view of mainstream science.)

(11.) “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.” – Dan Moonhawk Alford (MIT linguistics researcher)

(Dan Alford supports the view of Benjamin Whorf that our language influences our ‘reality’ and the view that ‘relational’ languages such as Hopi which do not reduce the conjugate figure/ground relation to the one-sided view solely in terms of the dynamics of figures [‘what things-in-themselves do’] deliver a more physically real ‘reality’ to the user of these languages. )

(12.) “Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. — Marshall McLuhan

(McLuhan is implying that everything starts from the medium, from the continually transforming medium or ‘dynamic ground’. This is where we start to build the Cadillac factory, in the continually transforming relational space we all live in. We do not start to build it on a blank sheet of paper or in a blank empty space, the ‘design space’ where all we have to deal with is ‘the dynamics of figures’ or ‘what things-in-themselves do’. The starting point is the continually transforming relational space which is ‘the full package’, ‘all she wrote’. What we are physically doing is modifying the relations in this continually transforming relational space so as to accommodate within it, the factory concept. Meanwhile, the transformation of relations with one another and the habitat is THE REAL PHYSICAL DYNAMIC, as Mach also says. The notion of the factory as a ‘thing-in-itself’ is an empty Fiktion).

(13.) “ The photographic plate preserves for us a picture of a fleeting moment, which perhaps we may make use of over a long time period for measurements, or it transforms a wave-field of heat rays, X rays, or electron rays to a visible image. And yet, important information about the object is missing in a photographic image. This is a problem which has been a key one for Dennis Gabor during his work on information theory. Because the image reproduces only the effect of the intensity of the incident wave-field, not its nature. The other characteristic quantity of the waves, phase, is lost and thereby the three dimensional geometry. The phase depends upon from which direction the wave is coming and how far it has travelled from the object to be imaged. Gabor found the solution to the problem of how one can retain a wave-field with its phase on a photographic plate.” – Erik Ingelstam, in presenting Gabor with his Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971

(Gabor’s theory of communications opened the way for understanding ‘the dynamics of content’ in conjunction with ‘the dynamics of context’; i.e. by way of the conjugate content-context relation. Classical communications theory constrains ‘signal’ to ‘the dynamics of content’ [items of content seen as ‘things-in-themselves’] and is a purificationist scheme that seeks to extract the ‘signal content’ from the ‘noise’ [defined as undesired signal]. Gabor’s theory assumes all signal is good signal and extracts the message from the dynamic field of context by way of spatial relational coherence. There is no dependency in this case on the items of content as ‘things-in-themselves’. In visual applications, this leads to ‘holography’ where the transforming relational wavefield supplies the imagery by way of coherency in phase interference, and there is no dependency on ‘the dynamics of things-in-themselves’. The three dimensional light field [dynamic ground] includes within it the changing/moving forms [dynamic figures]. There is a direct comparison to the communications technique of the aboriginal ‘learning circles’ which deliver their understanding by way of coherency in the relational interference of a diverse multiplicity of observations and experiences, and to classical communications theory where the individual particulars line up and present their accounts one by one to reviewers which use a purificationist process to decide who’s account is most true).

. * * *

Ok, as I say, its important, when reading the following, to suspend our usual ‘reduction’ of the data to terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ or ‘all dynamic figures and no dynamic ground’ which is what mainstream science and ‘rational inquiry’ does. If we fall into that trap, which is hard to avoid because of the noun-verb architecture of our European languages ( “The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.” – Edward Sapir)

The above citations are ‘reminders’ that we have this ‘other choice’ that we are not in the habit of using, to understand the same physical phenomena in ‘relational space’ terms wherein the ‘figures’ and ‘ground’ are in ‘conjugate relation’; i.e. ‘reminders’ that we do not have to reduce our observations and experience to pure and sole terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.

As I mentioned above, the hierarchical organization structure follows directly from the assumption of ‘things-in-themselves’ since if a local system is presented as a ‘thing-in-itself’ then it must have within it its own source of direction (management) and its own operative organs and limbs (workers). Meanwhile, if the ‘local system’ is instead presented as an organ within its ‘suprasystem’, its development and behaviour is then orchestrated by the dynamic ground it is included in, and there is no need for a local ‘supreme central authority’ to jumpstart the local agency of the notional ‘thing-in-itself’. For example, if the U.S. thought of itself as a ‘cell’ or ‘gathering’ within a global flow, its conjugate cell-flow relation would orchestrate its organization as in the nature’s dynamics as in the example of the community farming operation as contrasted with the factory farming operation. However, once the figure in the ground ‘declares itself to be a local, independently existing thing-in-itself with its own internal jumpstarting behaviour’,… then the hierarchical split into ‘leaders and followers’ or ‘management class’ and ‘working class’ follows from there.

Good luck!

Alfred, Taiaiake, ‘Peace, Power and Righteousness’

Bohm, David, ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’

Gabor, Dennis, ‘Theory of Communications’ (1946) (incorporating Pauli’s frequency-time formulation of the uncertainty principle)

Gieser, Suzanne,  ‘The Innermost Kernal: Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics.  Wolfgang Pauli’s dialogue with C.G. Jung’.

Kepler, Johannes, ‘Harmonies of the World’

Mach, Ernst, ‘Analysis of Sensations’, ‘The Science of Mechanics’ (Die Mechanik in ihre Entwicklung Historisch — Kritisch Darstellt), ‘The Guiding Principles of My Scientific Theory of Knowledge’, ‘Ernst Mach leaves the Church of Physics’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Br J Philos Sci (1989) 40 (4): 519-540.

McLuhan, Marshall, ‘Understanding Media’, Global Village

Momaday, Scott, ‘House Made of Dawn’

Neyrat, Frédéric, ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe

Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘Twilight of the Idols’, Will to Power, Beyond Good & Evil

Peat, F. David, ‘Blackfoot Physics’

Poincaré, Henri, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, ‘Science and Method’ [Especially ‘The Relativity of Space’], ‘The Value of Science’, ‘Dernières Pensées’

Schroedinger, Erwin, ‘What is Life’

Seattle, Chief, ‘Letter to President Pearce’

Tasic, Vladimir, ‘Poststructuralism and Deconstruction: A Mathematical History’ (2001)

Underwood, Paula, ‘My Father and the Lima Beans

Whorf, Benjamin, ‘Thought and Reality: Selected Readings’