Archive for March, 2019
THE PSYCHOSIS CALLED ‘WESTERN CULTURE’: A PRACTICAL ANTIDOTE
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The intellectual-social dynamic of Western culture has fallen prey to the aberrant practice of employing language-and-grammar based ‘logic of the EXCLUDED middle’ to intellectually construct an INVENTED REALITY that serves as Western culture’s ‘operative realty’. ‘INVENTED REALITY’ linguistically-intellectually over-writes’ and ‘occludes our EXPERIENTIAL REALITY of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum as described with the logic of the INCLUDED middle. So, instead of being inspired as ‘Robin Hoods’ who throw ourselves into the cultivating/sustaining of relational balance and harmony, we Western culture adherents become ‘intellectual JUDGES committed to‘PROGRESS‘ in the linear, binary logical terms of ‘feeding/growing good’ while starving/shrinking ‘bad’.
‘Progress’ is a word that ‘tips us off’ to the psychosis that is built into Western culture. The concept of ‘progress’ (linear time based trend towards more-good-less-bad) is supported within a ‘house of cards’ manner by what Nietzsche terms ‘the double error’ of imputing ‘reality’ to name-instantiated things-in-themselves (first error), … with powers of sourcing actions and developments (second error which extends the first error in a Pinocchio’s nose-like extension). There is no ‘progress’ and no ‘things-in-themselves with powers of sourcing actions and developments’ in a transforming relational continuum, the world or our actual relational experience which we ‘know’ even in our pre-lingual experiential understanding as infants, a prelingual understanding that is purely topological relations based [1].
‘Progress’ has been exposed as a sham by systems scientists who refer to it a ‘suboptimization’. Given that we live in a transforming relational continuum, belief in the possibility of suboptimization is ‘psychosis’ since it is impossible to isolate, within a transforming relational continuum, some ‘thing-in-itself’ There are none! That is; ‘things-in-themselves’ are the intellectual artifact of hanging ‘names’ on relational forms in the flow). A ‘human being’, … an ‘independent nation’, … a ‘corporation’ are cases in point; i.e. we ‘name them’ and the intellectual/psychological effect of naming them imputes persisting ‘thing-in-itself being’ to them, whether the named thing is a nation, a person or a corporation.
‘Progress’ is psychologically invoked by language and grammar that employs the double-error abstractions of name-instantiated things-in-themselves, notionally endowed with powers of sourcing actions and developments together with the abstraction of ‘time’ as a linear progression from ‘past’ to ‘future’. The abstract double error combo together with the abstraction of ‘linear time’ is put together in language and grammar packages to stimulate in the intellect, the psychological impression of self-sourced intention-driven change.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INTENTION-DRIVEN CHANGE IN THE REALITY OF OUR ACTUAL EXPERIENCE OF INCLUSION IN A TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM.
There is, however, the INVENTED REALITY that we put together with language and grammar that develops along a notional axis of ‘time’ from past to future. Using language and grammar constructs such as ‘Katrina is growing larger and stronger’, … ‘Katrina is ravaging New Orleans’, … ‘Katrina is weakening and dissipating’, … we can intellectually analyze and REDUCE sensations [As in Mach’s ‘Analysis of Sensations’] so that we can express them in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ with notional powers of sourcing actions and developments. (more…)
Developing Awareness of the INVENTED REALITY of Western Culture
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SYNOPSIS:
Experiential reality, as understood by the indigenous aboriginal, and/or by the ‘indigenous aboriginal within each of us’, is inherently ‘relational’ and thus very different from the intellectual-cognitive ‘being’-based reality understood by the Western culture adherent, the latter’s ‘sense of self’ being re-engineered by the intellect to incorporate the ‘double error’ described by Nietzsche; i.e. the abstract ‘reality’ that is in terms of name-instantiated things-in-themselves, notionally with ‘their own local powers of sourcing actions and developments’; a sense of ‘self’ also known as ‘the ego’.
The pre-acculturation centre of organismic understanding is topological (relational in a manner that is independent of the abstract notion of name-instantiated things-in-themselves’) as described by F. David Peat in Mathematics and the Language of Nature‘;
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. According to this argument, the very first operations exist at a pre-conscious level [i.e. ‘pre-intellectualizing’ level in the conscious and intuitive infant] so that the more fundamental a logical operation happens to be, the earlier it was developed by the infant and the deeper it has become buried in the mind.” – F. David Peat,
It is therefore possible for Western culture acculturated individuals to ‘escape’ from the psychosis-inducing influence of double-error based abstraction, which is language-and-grammar (intellect) based, by re-developing direct access to natural relational understanding that has been ‘covered over’ and buried by our Western culture acculturation, to restore the relational mode of understanding to its natural primacy, and thus escape from the psychosis-laden Western culture with its ‘double-error’ based INVENTED REALITY.
Our desire to restore ‘relational reality’ to its natural primacy tends to have been ‘buried’, in Western culture adherents, by one’s imagined ‘role-play’ within the INVENTED REALITY that may be delivering an ego-inflating (double-error based) sense of ‘independent being’ with powers of ‘sourcing actions and developments’.
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PROLOGUE: Exploring the essentials of ‘reality’, linguistically, as I am doing here, is limited by the ‘limitations’ of language. The language based scheme of ‘constructing impressions of reality that prevails in Western culture; i.e. the language scheme which authors Western culture INVENTED REALITY, employs the ‘double error’ (Nietzsche) wherein relational forms are given psychological/intellectual representation by (Error 1) ‘naming’ to impute ‘persisting being’, and (Error 2) ‘compounding’ Error 1 by imputing the power of sourcing actions and developments to the naming-instantiated ‘things-in-themselves’.
This intellectual, language and grammar based Western INVENTED REALITY has, by way of ‘acculturation’ during our early development from infancy, served as an intellectual ‘operative reality’ that sits over top of and occludes the natural reality of our sensory experience. That is, the natural reality of our pre-lingual relational (topological) experience that precedes name-instantiated intellectual conceptualizing is ‘covered over’ or occluded by language-and-grammar based intellectual constructions (INVENTED REALITY).
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. According to this argument, the very first operations exist at a pre-conscious level [i.e. ‘pre-intellectualizing’ level in the conscious and intuitive infant] so that the more fundamental a logical operation happens to be, the earlier it was developed by the infant and the deeper it has become buried in the mind.” – F. David Peat, ‘Mathematics and the Language of Nature’ (referring to Piaget).
The radical departure from the inherent primacy of relational experience over the reduction, to language and grammar based intellectually constructed abstraction that serves as ‘reality’ is characteristic of Western culture. By contrast, indigenous aboriginal cultures have developed language, and a method of using language, that does not ‘over-ride’ the inherent ‘relational’ nature of our experience; i.e. ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (all my relations) is an indigenous aboriginal expression that reminds one that ‘everything is related’ so that the relational dynamic as implied by constructing a web of relations is understood as the primary reality, while the named forms used to weave the relational web are expedients that can be forgotten once the relational understanding is gained. Wittgenstein has also described this process although Western culture’s mainstream mode of INVENTING REALITY treats the abstract language and grammar constructions in terms of ‘things-in-themselves with powers of sourcing actions and developments’ … as the ‘operative reality’
6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
7.0 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
(Wittgenstein’s final two propositions in ‘Tractatus Logico Philosophicus)
Wittgenstein’s approach in using language is to get beyond ‘things-in-themselves’ as implied by ‘naming’, to get to purely implicit, relational understanding. This expedient employing of naming forms (which imputes explicit thing-in-itself representation) as an expedient to get to purely relational representation is ‘built in’ to the indigenous aboriginal languages, and into modern physics representations and is termed ‘bootstrapping’;
[Geoffrey Chew]: “when you formulate a question, you have to have some basic concepts that you are accepting in order to formulate the question. But in the bootstrap approach, where the whole system represents a network of relationships without any firm foundation, the description of our subject can be begun at a great variety of different places. There isn’t any clear starting point. And the way our theory has developed in the last few years, we quite typically don’t know what questions to ask. We use consistency as the guide, and each increase in the consistency suggests something that is incomplete, but it rarely takes the form of a well-defined question. We are going beyond the whole questionandanswer framework.”
So, as newborns of any culture, we sense relations; i.e. we ‘are’ relational forms in a transforming relational continuum.
Depending on which culture we are raised in, we learn languages that we can use to REDUCE our relational experience to linguistically expressible conceptualizations. This is where the division has emerged between indigenous aboriginal cultures, whose languages preserve the natural primacy of relational reality (mitakuye oyasin), and Western culture adherents whose languages equip them for ‘speaking with forked tongue’. For example, English language allows one to (a) construct a reality wherein the ‘boil’ sources the ‘flow’ (the behaviours of the individuals are the source of the behaviour of the collective), and/or (b) construct a reality wherein the ‘flow’ sources the ‘boil’ (the behaviour of the collective is the source of the behaviours of the individuals). One bad applies spoils the whole barrel ‘works’ but so does ‘it takes a whole community to raise a child’.
This ‘forked tongue’ confusion in Western culture not only ‘divides the social collective’ (into ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’), it is at the origin of ‘The Divided Self’. For example, we may attribute the source of our successes to ‘our self’ and the source of our ‘failures’ to the circumstances in which we are situationally included, or should it be ‘the other way around’?. Which is the real source?
The more basic issue here, which is not present in indigenous aboriginal cultures, Buddhism/Taoism or Advaita Vedanta, is in assuming the ‘reality’ of a ‘source’. While Newtonian physics made use of the abstraction of ‘force’ as a ‘source’ of actions and developments, Newton borrowed this from the realm of the ‘occult’.
“It is sometimes stated that Newtonian space, time, and matter are sensed by everyone intuitively, whereupon relativity is cited as showing how mathematical analysis can prove intuition wrong. This, besides being unfair to intuition, is an attempt to answer offhand question (1) put at the outset of this paper, to answer which this research was undertaken. Presentation of the findings now nears its end, and I think the answer is clear. The offhand answer, laying the blame upon intuition for our slowness in discovering mysteries of the Cosmos, such as relativity, is the wrong one. The right answer is: Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are receipts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them.” – Benjamin Whorf, ‘The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language’
Included in the Newtonian physics package of concepts is the ‘sourcing force’ which has no place in the relational transformation of modern physics, except as a language and grammar based abstraction; i.e. F=ma describes how a mass is accelerated by an applied force. The ‘bouble error’ operates beneath this by first supposing the existence of a name-instantiated thing-in-itself notionally with powers of sourcing actions and developments. If this double error were true, Newtonian physics can elaborate on it and ’embellish’ our understanding, in spite of it being abstraction based on ‘the double error’ from the get-go. For example, man’s ego has us see our ‘self’ as the ‘source’ of actions and developments and Newtonian physics does not question the ‘double error’ in the reasoned proposition we Western culture adherents make, for example, the reasoning that if Fred carries a 200 pound object up a flight of stairs to a 10 foot higher elevation, in 5 seconds, ‘the power he generates’ in the process will be (200 x 10)/5 =400 foot-pounds per second (1 horsepower is 550 foot pounds per second).
What is REALLY going on, is relational transformation in which the man is included; i.e. the man is a relational form in the transforming relational continuum. To employ language and grammar to concoct the cognitive (intellectual-conceptual) impression that the man ‘generates’ (i.e. ‘sources’) action and development is the ‘double error’ that Nietzsche alerts us to (i.e. the name-instantiating of a notional thing-in-itself, notionally with powers of sourcing actions and developments).
The reality of our actual relational experience is of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum. WE ARE NOT ‘INDEPENDENT BEINGS’ WITH POWERS OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS! THAT IS THE DOUBLE ERROR! That is, it is cognitive misconception facilitated by Western culture style language and grammar. Of course, it is possible for a social collective (such as the Europeans who came to live in the same space and mix with indigenous aboriginals) to persist in employing the ‘double error based INVENTED REALITY’ as THEIR operative reality, even while interspersed within indigenous aboriginal culture adherents who continue to understanding ‘reality’ in a purely relational (mitakuye oyasin) sense.
The reality of the non-indigenous Western culture adherents is the ‘INVENTED REALITY’ in which the ‘double error’ based understanding prevails; i.e. the Western culture adherent sees himself as an ‘independent being’ with his own powers of sourcing actions and developments. His cultural belief in INVENTED REALITY makes him egotistical in that he will claim to be the ‘source’ of ‘productive developments’, while his ‘forked tongue’ capability will have him attribute the ‘sourcing’ of ‘destructive developments’ to others or to the collective which he sees as ‘split apart’ from himself.
Meanwhile, the INVENTED REALITY is language and grammar constructed abstraction based on the ‘double error’; i.e. the use of ‘naming’ to psychologically create notional ‘things’-in-themselves’, notionally with powers of sourcing actions and developments; i.e. there is no such thing as ‘sourcing’ in the real world of our relational experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum. As Whorf stated in his above-cited comment, the abstract concepts of Newtonian science come from language and not from our experience-based intuitions of the reality we experience inclusion in.
In the INVENTED REALITY that Western man employs as the ‘operative reality’, he refers to the skyscrapers, the highways and the air transportation systems ‘he has sourced with his ingenuity’ as ‘improvements’ on the ‘raw land’. But that is intellectual self-deception of the ‘double error’ type. The only possible dynamic in the reality of our actual relational experience within the transforming relational dynamic is ‘transformation’ (as with transforming relational forms in the transforming relational continuum).
We are all included in ‘relational transformation’; i.e. we are all transient forms within the transforming relational continuum, but, thanks to language and grammar, we are able to use a ‘double error’ to reduce the transforming relational continuum, conceptually (psychologically) to terms of notional (name-instantiated) things-in-themselves, notionally with the powers of sourcing actions and developments. For example, the ‘first error’ allows us to name the relational form in the transforming relational continuum ‘Katrina’ (the hurricane) to impute to a swirling in the transforming continuum ‘persisting thing-in-itself existence’ (‘the psychological effect of ‘naming’), and concatenating with this the ‘second error’ of imputing the power of sourcing actions and developments to the thing-in-itself we just created with ‘naming’). We Western culture adherents then proceed with employing the double-error-based ‘INVENTED REALITY’ as our ‘operative reality’. We enthusiastically claim authorship of positively perceived ‘sorcery’ while vehemently denying responsibility for negatively perceived ‘sorcery’. Of course, in the reality of our actual relational experience, ‘sourcery’ does not exist, there is only relational transformation. Of course, ‘the reality of our actual relational experience’ is not the operative reality of Western culture. The operative reality of Western culture is the INVENTED REALITY where ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ (‘angels’ and ‘devils’) doe exist, thanks to the ‘double error’ wherein we use naming to impute persisting ‘thing-in-itself being’ to relational forms and psychologically embellish this by endowing the ‘things-in-themselves’ with notional powers of sourcing actions and developments.
A cross comparison of Western culture patterns of understanding reality with indigenous aboriginal patterns of understanding reality may elucidate on the psychosis cultivating propensities of Western culture and the relational stability cultivating propensities of indigenous aboriginal cultures.
Example of Western culture pattern of understanding reality;
“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.” – R. D. Laing, author of ‘The Divided Self’
The ‘double error’ of Western culture gives the individual the impression she is an ‘independently-existing thing-in-herself’ endowed with powers of sourcing actions and developments. This is the source of the ‘divided self’ which occludes the topological understanding of the relational self of our early development (infancy) as a boil in the flow where the ‘self-other’ division is ‘appearance’.
Example of modern physics and indigenous aboriginal culture patterns of understanding reality;
A few months before his death, Bohm met with a number of Algonkian speakers and was struck by the perfect bridge between their language and worldview and his own exploratory philosophy. What to Bohm had been major breakthroughs in human thought — quantum theory, relativity, his implicate order and rheomode – were part of the everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, Mic Maq, Cree and Ojibwaj.” – F. David Peat, ‘Blackfoot Physics’
The Western culture INVENTED REALITY would have our intellectualizing mind picture ourselves as ‘independent beings’ strolling through a ‘habitat’ that is intrinsically separate from inhabitants such as ourselves, so that such language-and-grammar stimulated psychological impressions of ‘reality’ eclipse and occlude our relational experience based sense of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum. We then see ourselves as independently-existing ‘sorcerers’ of actions and developments, no longer as relational forms in the transforming relational continuum.
Such a distorted ‘Divided Self’ impression of reality comes to us by way of language and grammar which empowers the intellect to take control and demote relational experience based intuition from its natural precedence. Thus, language is a kind of nemesis of Western culture acculturated man, since it is a tool which gives us the psychological capability of dividing ourselves out of the transforming relational continuum and recapturing ourselves (psychologically) as ‘independent beings’ with our own powers of sourcing actions and developments; whereby; the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine.
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As has been discussed elsewhere in this ‘series’ on how Western culture cultivates aberrance in the social dynamic, those ‘miner’s canaries’ that cannot let go of their intuitive grasp of the essentially ‘relational’ basis of reality, and who ‘have trouble’ with ‘walking the talk’ of the ‘double error’ wherein they must understand themselves as ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves with their own innate powers of sourcing actions and developments (i.e. where they are forced to ‘grow an ego’), this breeds schizophrenia aka ‘the divided self’ since the ‘natural self’ is NOT separate from the world one is situationally included in. This natural relational understanding is the ‘norm’ in indigenous aboriginal culture as it is in modern physics, however, it is seen as ‘illness’ in Western culture where the ‘divided self’ is the ‘norm’. The divided self is the Western culture ‘norm’ that is deemed ‘mentally healthy’ yet in the case of the relationally sensitive, such ‘culturally-correct’ role-play as a ‘Western culture normal’ can bring on psychosis, the Western culture treatment for which is to restore the individual to the culturally accepted aberrant state that is the source of her psychosis. While the alternative to restoring the overall dysfunctional Western culture collective to a natural relational equilibrium is an ideal (but impractical-in-the-short-term) goal, the recovery of the sensitive ‘miner’s canary’ from psychosis brought on by the stress of immersion in Western psychosis-inducing culture can be approached by;
(a) immersion within an empathic circle of others, as in ‘rehabilitation’ where ‘recovery’ is facilitated. However, ‘recovery’ is seen in the Western culture as something which is undergone by the individual, whereas, the ‘recovery’ is in fact the recover of the relational social environment that the ‘miner’s canary’ has been moved into. Western culture, following the recovery perceived as the ‘repairing of the individual’ when the ‘recovery’ is the repairing of the social relational ambiance the individual is included in, encourages the ‘healed individual’ to return to the psychosis-inducing Western cultural dynamic that is the real source of the psychosis, whereupon the descent into yet another bout of psychosis ensues. In other words, what needs to be remediated to avoid psychosis is the social environment the ‘miner’s canary’ is situationally included in, rather than something within the miner’s canary.
(b) re-situation within a social-relational environment that is not heavily invested in Western psychosis-inducing (double error based) social dynamics. For example, in social environments where mutual caring/empathy is in primacy over competition or corporate objectives infused with belief in the individual/organization/nation in the double error sense of a name-instantiated thing-in-itself, noitionally with the powers of sourcing actions and developments. A point to remember is that the double error manifests within organizations that cultivate ‘double-error’ based beliefs such as ‘individualism’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘corporatism’.
The ‘double error’ that is foundational to Western culture INVENTED REALITY is intrinsically tied to ‘ego’; i.e. in social collectives that would have one see oneself as an independently existing thing-in-oneself with powers of sourcing actions and developments, ego rules, whereas in empathic relational collectives ‘inspiration’ is in a natural precedence over ‘ego’; i.e. Ego is a swelled head, inspiration is a full heart’ and avoidance of ‘double error’ based psychosis requires situating oneself within a relational dynamic that ‘runs on inspiration first’, ‘ego second’. To invert this natural order is to let the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine. In other words, the individual in the reality of modern physics, indigenous aboriginal culture, Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, is innately ‘relaitonal, without ‘independent being’ and without ‘powers of sourcing actions and developments’, … such abstract conceptualizations being the produce of language and grammar supported only by the calculations of the intellect, and not supported by the experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.
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Unless one is born into and/or raised in an indigenous aboriginal and/or Buddhist/Taoist or Advaita Vedanta culture, it is not easy to assimilate the full ‘meaning’ of the understanding that we Western culture adherents have psychologically entrapped ourselves in an INVENTED REALITY. I have continually explored and written about the INVENTED REALITY since it has been the source of rising psychological aberrance in our Western society that manifests in mass murders, psychological imbalances, political divisions and other abnormalities that we Western culture adherents have taken to be ‘the norm’;
“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.” – R. D. Laing, author of ‘The Divided Self’
Laing endorsed the similar views of anthropologist Jules Henry, author of ‘Culture Against Man’ whose philosophical investigations, like my own, suggest that Western culture is fomenting conflict within itself, as also in Nietzsche’s ‘double error’ (the use of language (naming)) to invent ‘things-in-themselves’ with the notional powers of sourcing actions and developments).
Western Culture Breeds Psychosis: – How to Indemnify Oneself
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Western Culture Breeds Psychosis: Here’s How to Indemnify Oneself.
FIRST, THE BASIC SOURCE OF CONFUSION: If you have been diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, you will know that the Western culture treats this as an ‘abnormality SOURCED within YOU’ rather than as an ‘abnormality’ ’SOURCED within the aberrant dynamics of the culture you are situationally included in’.
The hidden, Western culture-inbuilt ‘crazy-maker’ or ‘source of psychosis’ is the belief in “reality” as constituted by notional “things-in-themselves notionally endowed with powers of sourcing actions and developments”. This language and grammar-abstraction-based ‘INVENTED REALITY’ is by no means the equivalent of the relational reality of our actual experience as understood in modern physics and indigenous aboriginal and Taoist cultures.
The ‘Western culture’ way of thinking derives from letting intellectual impressions from language and grammar ‘over-ride’ our relational experience-based (and modern physics affirmed) understanding of humans etc. as relational forms in a transforming relational continuum. This ‘intellectual over-ride’ derives from applying ‘naming’ (which implies ‘fixed and persisting existence’) to transient relational forms in the flow, so as to conjure up a cognitive impression of ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves’.
Grammar complements and extends’ the illusion of the ‘thing-in-itself’ by notionally endowing the name-instantiated things-in-themselves with notional powers of sourcing actions and developments. Western culture thus uses language and grammar in this way to INVENT REALITY for intellectual/cognitive deployment as the ‘operative reality’. This INVENTED REALITY ‘eclipses’ and ‘occludes’ (‘wallpapers over’) the relational reality of our sensory experience of inclusion within the relational continuum, a non-locally contained sensory experience that eludes capture in terms of language’s explicit and local ‘constructions’.
Western Culture ‘Reality’: —A Belief in Sorcery
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‘REALITY’ …. What is it?
INTRODUCTION:
Ernst Mach, in ‘The Analysis of Sensations’ exposed how Western culture makes use of two ‘orthogonal’ impressions of ‘reality’ as associates with (a) Physics (classical/Newtonian), and (b) Psychology. This essay explores how these two modes of ‘reality’ relate to one another in the manner of the ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ parts of a ‘complex variable’; i.e. physics + i*psychology. The respective ‘realities’ that form from PHYSICS and PSYCHOLOGY derive from the manner IN WHICH WE POSE QUESTIONS.
PHYSICS QUESTIONS are formulated by assuming that the reality is ‘CAUSALLY SOURCED’ by the actions of material things-in-themselves (the psychological artifact of ‘naming’ relational forms in the flow [the transforming relational continuum]). E.g. “The rotten apple is the CAUSAL SOURCE of the corrupting of the barrel of apples.
PSYCHOLOGY QUESTIONS are formulated by assuming that reality is ‘RELATIONALLY SOURCED’ through the senses; i.e. the ‘sourcing’ is NOT dependent on notional ‘things-in-themselves’ abstractly fabricated by ‘naming’ relational forms in the flow; the sourcing is instead coming from the relational influence of the collective one is included in; E.g. “It takes a whole community to raise a child”. That is, the child’s development is not simply inside-outwardly sources as in PHYSICS and ‘genetics’.
‘Reality’ in the Agatha Christie thriller is all about asking questions in the PHYSICS manner where unfolding developments are assumed to be CAUSALLY SOURCED. The investigation ENDS once the ‘source’ that lies at the very beginning of a causal chain of events has been discovered.
‘Reality’ in the Victor Hugo novel ‘Les Miserables’ as also in the classic ‘Robin Hood’, are all about how the tensions of relational disparities are the INDUCTIVE SOURCE of developments, which are nevertheless explored by a line of questioning that seeks to discover the CAUSAL SOURCE to what would, INSTEAD, be more fully understood ‘RELATIONALLY’ (PSYCHOLOGICALLY)’; i.e. nature is innately balance-seeking.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE plays an important role in how we formulate questions; i.e. languages that reduce relational forms to notional ‘independent things-in-themselves’ offer different forms of ‘traction’ in posing questions. For example, indigenous aboriginal languages preserve the relational nature of reality, by employing a web of relations (naming is only an intermediate step for alluding to an inherently relational reality’. Modern physics reaffirms this as in the ‘Surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ (Geoffrey Chew and John Wheeler). By the same token, Wittgenstein, in his final two propositions in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, speaks of employing a web of relations as a ‘ladder’ to induce a relational understanding that lies innately BEYOND the explicit language instantiated ‘things-in-themselves’ animated by grammar, to imply it.
What comes out of this abstract system of language-instantiated (i.e. ‘naming-instantiated’) EXPLICIT things-in-themselves with grammar instantiated “powers of sorcery of actions and developments” is an INVENTED REALITY that serves Western culture as an OPERATIVE REALITY. The ‘REALITY’ of our sensory experience, as Mach points out in ‘The Analysis of Sensations’ is relational and it runs deeper than the abstract ‘INVENTED REALITY’.
As Western culture language and grammar users, we are intrigued by, as in an Agatha Christie mystery, the manner in which a cleverly constructed web of questioning can ‘home in on the ‘truth’, in a PHYSICS BASED CAUSAL SENSE, where the climax and end-point of the inquiry lies in the exposing of the CAUSAL SOURCE of the EVENT whose ‘SOURCING’ is ‘IN QUESTION’. But who says that there should be a causal ‘source’ that is ‘responsible’ for some or other emergent development?
THIS EXPECTATION DERIVES FROM THE MANNER IN WHICH WE USE LANGUAGE TO FORMULATE ‘QUESTIONS’. THIS IS THE ‘PHYSICS’ BASED APPROACH TO FORMULATING QUESTIONS AS DIFFERENTIATED FROM THE ‘PSYCHOLOGY’ BASED APPROACH TO FORMULATING QUESTIONS.
WHAT IS INTENDED BY ‘PHYSICS’ IS ‘NEWTONIAN PHYSICS’ since modern physics understands emerging phenomena as innately relational in origin; e.g;
PSYCHOLOGY, on the other hand, as in Mach’s ‘Analysis of Sensations’, understands ‘reality’ in IMPLICIT terms of relational influence. INQUIRY IN THIS PSYCHOLOGY ORIENTED VIEW opens the way into an infinite web of relations, as in the case of moving deeper into the question of ‘sourcing’ of the child’s behaviour. Meanwhile, in PHYSICS, by having ‘named the child’ (i.e. by having named the relational form in the transforming relational continuum) and thus having notionally imputed ‘thing-in-itself existence to him, there now exists a notional EXPLICIT, locally anchored JUMPSTART SOURCE for actions and developments; … at least this is so in the language and grammar interpreting mind. How do we reconcile these very different understandings of ‘reality’; i.e. the EXPLICIT reality of PHYSICS and IMPLICIT reality of PSYCHOLOGY?
“In the book ‘Causality and Chance in Modern Physics’ Bohm 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 a complete list of all the causes that contributed to Lincoln’s death would have to include all of the events that led to the development of the gun, all of the factors that caused Booth to want to kill Lincoln, all of the steps in the evolution of the human race that allowed for the development of a hand capable of holding a gun, and so on, and so on. Bohm conceded that most of the time one could ignore the vast cascade of causes that had led to any given effect, but he still felt it was important for scientists to remember that no single cause-and-effect relationship was ever really separate from the universe as a whole.” –The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality: Michael Talbot:
Clearly, WE HAVE TWO OPTIONS FOR HOW WE CAN UNDERSTAND “REALITY”, … “PHYSICS” (Newtonian), and “PSYCHOLOGY”.
As it turns out, WHICH type of understanding of reality we get, is determined by the type of questions we pose.
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 – Mach
In the Agatha Christie ‘Whodunnit’, our ‘detective inquiry’ aims to ‘detect’ and ‘unveil’ the wellspring or ‘jumpstart SOURCE’ of a notable action or development. The excitement and tensions build as the reader follows the ‘detective’ in his quest to ‘detect the SOURCE’ of an action or development in question. This is the REALITY OF PHYSICS and it is just ONE WAY OF POSING QUESTIONS, where the reader/listener tends to ‘lock-in’ to the trail of investigation and discovery that aims to ‘dis-cover’ the SOURCE of the ACTION OR DEVELOPMENT ‘IN QUESTION’.
The quest of discovering the ultimate EXPLICIT JUMPSTART SOURCE of an event or development is central to the investigations of PHYSICS. It is like searching for ‘the source of the Nile’. English is one of those languages that captures relational reality in the abstract terms of name-instantiated ‘things-in-themselves’ and their grammar-imputed ‘actions and developments’. Such language and grammar delivers an ‘INVENTED REALITY’ that does not arise in relational languages wherein ‘reality’ is purely relational. ‘Dances with Wolves’ is exemplary of linguistic portrayals of reality that ‘bottom out’ in webs of relations as in the ‘Surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’. In this approach, one employs language for articulating a purely relational reality based on IMPLICIT SOURCING.
The reality arising from the QUESTIONS POSED BY PHYSICS assumes the reality of ‘material things-in-themselves’ with the notional powers of ‘sourcing actions and developments’ as in the Agatha Christie thriller. The reality arising from the QUESTIONS POSED BY PSYCHOLOGY assumes the inherent primacy of RELATIONS over the notional existence of ‘THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES’ WITH THE NOTIONAL (GRAMMAR-GIVEN) POWERS OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS. The suggestion of ‘sourcing’ is operative in the ‘reality’ formulations of both PHYSICS and PSYCHOLOGY, however, the SOURCING is EXPLICIT IN PHYSICS AND IMPLICIT IN PSYCHOLOGY,
Agatha Christie’s way of posing questions induced us to follow her in a PHYSICS like quest to discover an EXPLICIT SOURCE. Victor Hugo’s way of posing questions took our inquiry into a deeper level; i.e. it did not stop with PHYSICS’ EXPLICIT SOURCE as a response to the question ‘who stole the loaf of bread’ (Jean Valjean), … but without even considering such abstraction (based on notional things-in-themselves with notional powers of sourcing actions and developments), but homed in on the deeper level of understanding in terms of relational imbalances; i.e. the IMPLICIT SOURCE.
As Mach has pointed out, even though, in Western culture, people are DIVIDED in their conceptualizing of ‘reality’ in terms of …. ‘nature’ (explicit sourcing) of PHYSICS, or, …. ‘nurture’ (implicit sourcing) of PSYCHOLOGY, there is no need to employ the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third. Instead, we can employ the AND/AND logic of the included third which is also referred to as ‘quantum logic’ by Stéphane Lupasco;
“To every phenomenon or element or logical event whatsoever, and accordingly to the judgment which thinks of it, the proposition which expresses it, to the sign which symbolizes it must always be associated, structurally and functionally, a logical antiphenomenon, or anti-element or anti-event and therefore a contradictory judgment, proposition or sign in such a fashion that the former can only be potentialized by the actualization of the latter, but not disappear such that either could be self-sufficient in an independent and therefore rigorous non-contradiction – as in all logic, classical or otherwise, that is based on an absoluteness of the principle of non-contradiction.”
The point half-way between actualization and potentialization is a point of maximum antagonism or ‘contradiction’ from which, in the case of complex phenomena, a T-state (T for “tiers inclus”, included third term) emerges, which is capable of resolving the contradiction (or ‘counter-action‘), at another, higher level of reality. “ – Lupasco, Stéphane., Le principe d’antagonisme et la logique de l’énergie, 1951.
[see also; ‘Stéphane Lupasco et le tiers inclus. De la physique quantique à l’ontologie’, by Basarab Nicolescu]
Thus, in Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’, THE DIVIDED SELF associates with the optional BELIEF in these two different levels of reality, where the IMPLICIT (RELATIONAL) REALITY OF PSYCHOLOGY AND THE EXPLICIT (RATIONAL) REALITY OF PHYSICS seem to be on a collision course. As Mach points out, the conflict arises by way of posing this question to ourselves, as regards the true nature of the sourcing of actions and developments [whether EXPLICITLY AS IN PHYSICS, or whether IMPLICITLY as in PSYCHOLOGY]. Mach, in ‘The Analysis of Sensation’ points to the false premise underlying both. The false premises are termed the ‘double error’ by Nietzsche, … (1) the name-instantiating of notional ‘independent beings with (2) the notional powers of sourcing actions and developments’. These errors are resolved by ‘going beyond language and grammar’ and understanding the dynamics of ‘reality’ in terms of the transforming relational continuum we share inclusion in.
* * * END OF INTRODUCTION * * *
Here’s a ‘simple representation’ of the understanding of ‘reality’ [a representation common to Mach, Bohm, Nietzsche et al] that I have been working on. It is ‘simple’ to present, but maybe ‘not so simple’ to open oneself up to accepting as ‘a reality’ that is more ‘real’ than our current ‘operative version’ of reality.
Ernst Mach’s ‘Analysis of sensations’ is ‘right on target, in my view, and supports a whole raft of philosophical investigations, such as those by Nietzsche, Bohm, Wittgenstein
Philosophers of ‘physics’ such as Erich Jantsch have a very similar understanding of ‘reality’ as Ernst Mach (as in Mach’s ‘Analysis of Sensations’), and have described ‘reality’ in term of ‘three levels’. Later philosophers such as Jantsch have an advantage in the means of expressing the same thing as Mach, since Mach’s writings preceded holography (theory in 1948 by Dennis Gabor, demonstration with lasers in mid 1960’s, Nobel prize for Gabor in 1971). That is, the concept of reality of images being included within an energized space (not as separate entities’ but as flow-features or ‘appearances’ within a transforming relational continuum was not easily conceivable by Western culture adherents who use vision of ‘naming-reified relational forms out there in front of us’ as the basis for our ‘Invented Reality’.
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