Archive for March 18, 2021
OUR WESTERN CULTURE SORCERY-based SUBSTITUTE REALITY
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AUTHOR’S PREFACE: Language that has a dependency on the abstract voyeur viewable concept of LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES is ‘not up to the task’ of capturing the REALITY of an all-including transforming relational continuum wherein everything is in flux.
Engineering a language based scheme for REPRESENTING a reality that is in continual flux, involves some ‘trickery’. The ‘bootstrapping’ approach described by Wittgenstein is to use the notional ‘existence’ of ‘local things’ to establish a web of relations among, whereupon the purely relational web will be the ‘take-away’ and the ‘things-in-themselves’ disposable expedients;
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. (“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”),
–Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The thing-based illustration e.g. of the TOWN that is GROWING with its many streets and buildings ‘under construction’ is a PICTURABLE CARTOON which we could flesh out with STICK-FIGURE WORKERS and RESIDENTS or with a high resolution DOCUMENTARY FILM. The narration accompanying the CARTOON can describe, in great detail, the construction activity including the importation of construction materials, the quarrying of sand and gravel for concrete, the smelting of iron ore for steel beams, the logging and milling of trees for lumber, the hiring and training of construction workforce, etc. etc.
However convincing a ‘reality’ captured in this documentary, because of its VOYEUR representation mode, it can never move beyond its CARTOON status in that ‘what is going on’ it is always ‘out there in front of us’ and the workers always seem to be moving around as if they are ‘free things-in-themselves’ driven by their internal instructions, as informed by some ‘master plan’ or some previously acquired skills.
AT SOME DEPTH WITHIN OURSELVES, we INTUITIVELY understand that this CARTOON activity we picture as ‘going on out in front of us’ is contributory to the constructing of an intellectual SUBSTITUTE REALITY that liberates the CARTOON characters from the transforming relational continuum, and re-establishes them as LOGICAL OBJECTS participating in a VISIBLE CONSTRUCTION DYNAMIC.
SUCH PSYCHE-INFORMING CARTOONS play the same role as ‘LOGICAL PROPOSITIONS’ in Wittgenstein’s above comments. In other words, these CARTOONS are NOT to be taken literally; “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.”
The high resolution filming of the construction of the TOWN is one of those THROW AWAY LADDERS. The indigenous aboriginal people whose sense-experience is of inclusion in the transforming landscape, ‘see’ (intuit) ‘the TOWN’ as a TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE, and NOT as some ‘LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF’ accorded ‘its own local BEING’ thanks to the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR of Standard Average European language constructions.
In our sense-experience reality, THERE IS NO “LOCAL TOWN THAT IS GROWING”, … THERE IS ONLY “TOWNING IN THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE” (i.e. in the transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka the Tao). The MENTAL PICTURE of THE TOWN THAT IS GROWING is a VOYEUR VIEWABLE CARTOON that is not qualified as a SUBSTITUTE for the REALITY of TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE.
WATCH OUT! THE POINT IS THAT DIFFERENT language architectures induce intellectual understanding of sense-experience reality in different ways! THE CARTOON reality where we “SEE” ant-like workers swarming over the new TOWN-SITE and CONSTRUCTING the NEW TOWN is a CARTOON-like visual presentation, as could be captured in a DOCUMENTARY FILM, that gives us the impression that the TOWN is ‘under construction’ and is GROWING LARGER and MORE POPULOUS as the new dwellings become OCCUPIED.
Since the REAL REALITY (sense-experience reality) is that of TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE, the CARTOON in which workers and residents are continually constructing new edifices and GROWING the LOCAL TOWN is a PICTURE-supported SUBSTITUTE REALITY that is INTELLECTUAL ABSTRACTION (hence ‘CARTOON’) that is NOT SENSE-EXPERIENCE SUPPORTED.
In WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT SOCIETY, because the language architecture gives a foundational role to the abstract concept of LOCAL SOURCING of actions and development, by way of the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR, the CARTOON representations made thus available support the fabrication of a SUBSTITUTE REALITY which is LOCAL SORCERY based. No matter how convincing the documentary film footage of the CONSTRUCTION of the NEW TOWN, it remains, in ESSENCE, a CARTOON which is hijacking, in the psyche, and SUBSTITUTING FOR, the REAL REALITY of the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE (i.e. the transforming relational continuum).
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. –-Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations.
We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have become STUCK within the ‘simplified’ SUBSTITUTE REALITY of our own making; i.e. the TOOL of CARTOON based RE-presentation of reality has (as Emerson observes) ‘run away with the workman’). As in indigenous aboriginal languages and as in Bohm’s ‘Rheomode’ language, there is no TOWN, there is only TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE. The concept of ‘the TOWN that is GROWING’ is an artifact of the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR, a CARTOON.
* * * END OF AUTHOR’S PREFACE * * *
The TURNING POINT for the WEST was RIGHT HERE where those who were influential in architecting our SAE (standard average Euopean) languages encountered the challenge to architecting language posed by our inclusion in a reality that is in continual flux;
It is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round, since thus the laws of mechanics are expressible in a much simpler language.— Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Ch. VII Relative Motion and Absolute Motion
Once we design a language that makes a BINARY LOGICAL separation of the FIGURE from the GROUND we are on our way to CONSTRUCTION OF A SUBSTITUTE REALITY which is much SIMPLER than the reality of our sense-experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.
We use ‘language’ to reduce our visual sensing of relational forms-in-the-flow to CARTOONS wherein the FIGURE is seemingly (thanks to NAMING and GRAMMAR, liberated from the GROUND. These CARTOONS can ‘hold us captive’ so that we cannot ‘find our way back’ to our natural sense of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum, but remain captives of a CARTOON world;
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. –-Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations.
The SIMPLIFIER in our WESTERN CULTURE SAE language architecture is the injection of the abstract concept of SORCERY or in more euphemistic terms, LOCAL AUTHORING of actions and developments by way of (as Nietzsche has pointed out), the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR. SORCERY is the accessory to the NAMING and GRAMMAR based CARTOONING of reality.
Once we say ‘the earth turns round’, we hammer into the mind, BINARY LOGIC as the basis of our spoken (language-captured) SUBSTITUTE REALITY. This WESTERN CULTURE spoken, or written, language-based REPRESENTATION of reality departs from our sense-experience reality once we choose the path of ‘more convenient’ representation wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND are TWO instead of ONE. This split-up clears the way for a CARTOON like RE-PRESENTATION of our FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE sense-experience reality. When we say ‘the TOWN is GROWING, we PICTURE the TOWN as a CARTOON THING that is GROWING.
Note that “the convenience” in the statement; “It is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round” is the convenience of SUBSTITUTING a figure-and-ground-as-TWO CARTOON wherein (the EARTH and SPACE are RE-PRESENTED as TWO distinguishable ontological entities,.
In this case, the FIGURE-as-a thing-in-itself and the containing SPACE as a thing-in-itself), … are abstractions we SUBSTITUTE for the figure-and-ground-as-ONE NON-PICTURE-REPRESENTIBLE REALITY (such a ‘picture’ would have to continue unbounded in spacetime).. A local picturable piece of reality is a CARTOON that is NOT REALITY (e.g. the CARTOON of Robin Hood removing grain from the King’s granary is NOT REALITY.
This NON-PICTURE-REPRESENTIBLE FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE reality is our basic sense-experience reality as understood through Modern physics and in indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and ADVAITA Vedanta. Talking about it is beyond the scope of BINARY LOGIC and we instead need Quantum logic, the BOTH/AND logic of the INCLUDED medium as can be intuited from the finding that;
the elementary particles of matter are also, in their essence, nothing else than condensations of the electromagnetic field— Einstein, ‘Ether and the Theory of Relativity’
Since the relationship between matter and field requires the BOTH/AND logic of the INCLUDED medium and this is the general case in nature, it is misleading to construct representations of reality in FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO CARTOON terms. Another way of saying this is that when we use FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO representation, we are constructing representations of a CARTOON-like SUBSTITUTE REALITY. The proposition ‘The TOWN is GROWING’ is an example of this CARTOON-like SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO.
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