Archive for March 31, 2021
A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF HOW PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS REFUTE “WESTERN REALITY”
0EPILOGUE:
This reportage on philosophical investigations into the meaning of our everyday ‘reality’ as we try to establish it through language reaffirms the findings of Mach, Nietzsche and Bohm, … as well as Poincaré, Wittgenstein, Schroedinger and others. There is much commonality in these findings but also significant differences.
Disagreements over ‘what is reality’ abound and different cultures deal with this differently since, for example, while WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS believe that there reality is ‘in common’ and thus DEBATE over ‘who has the best understanding of reality’, the resolution of which is established by the tongue-in-cheek principle of Lafontaine; ‘La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure’ (the understanding of the strongest is always the best). In the EAST, the indigenous aboriginal culture employs the ‘learning circle’ wherein participants share their unique personal sense-experiences of reality such that the ‘take-away’ for circle participants is an ineffable-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT ‘relational’ understanding, even though the shared ‘inputs’ are effable-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT.
What ‘comes through’ generally is that in society at large, we tend to DIVIDE on the basis of understanding reality in one or more of three manners; REDUCTIONISM, HOLISM and TRANSFORMATION.
REDUCTIONISM (conservatism) is an understanding of reality based on belief in male-assertive LOCAL AUTHORING of actions and developments as if ‘from a single point of light’ (or ‘particle’). HOLISM (liberalism) is an understanding of reality based on belief in female-inductive LOCAL AUTHORING of actions and developments as if from a social collective. TRANSFORMATION is based on NONLOCAL AUTHORLESS emergence.
For example, the REDUCTIONIST/conservative will see the HURRICANE as AUTHORING a male-assertive stirring up of the ATMOSPHERE while the HOLIST/liberal will see the ATMOSPHERE as AUTHORING a female-inductive stirring up of the HURRICANE. Both of these options imply LOCAL AUTHORING and both are EFFABLE by way of NAMING-and-GRAMMAR (the ‘DOUBLE ERROR’ cited by Nietzsche).
TRANSFORMATION, on the other hand, is NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT and thus INEFFABLE, although it is the Wave-field reality aka the Tao which is everywhere-at-the-same-time, which is the nature of WAVE-FIELD. The COMBINED implication of the EARTH EXTRUDING new (volcano-effusing) materials and the EARTH SUBDUCTING established CRUST is TRANSFORMATION. That is, the coniunctio oppositorum of the MALE ASSERTIVE EXTRUSION and the FEMALE INDUCTIVE SEDUCTION is TRANSFORMATION wherein there is no longer any need for the notion of an AUTHOR. Instead of the EARTH EXTRUDING-and-the-EARTH-SUBDUCTING, these two imply an AUTHORLESS, androgynous EARTHING in the Wave-field.
The notion of ‘AN EARTH’ as the androgynous coincidentia opporitorum involving AUTHORING of both EXTRUSION and SUBDUCTION gives way to the AUTHORLESS phenomenon of a purely relational EARTHING or PLANETING in the Wave-field. This EARTHING is NOT a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF, … i.e. it is NEITHER a MALE-EXTRUDING THING-IN-ITSELF NOR A FEMALE SUBDUCTING THING-IN-ITSELF but an androgynous THINGLESSNESS without local AUTHORING properties as is the nature of Wave-field forms.
UNDERSTANDING THINGLESSNESS is by way of UNDERSTANDING HOLOGRAPHIC REALITY where ‘everything is in flux’.
UNDERSTANDING the INEFFABLE is one thing, but SHARING what we understand is another thing, and in order to develop language to support sharing of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT, the INEFFABLE reality must be ‘compromised’ in one way or another (the male-assertive REDUCTIONIST compromise where ‘the HURRICANE is AUTHORING the stirring up of the ATMOSPHERE or the female-inductive HOLIST compromise where ‘the ATMOSPHERE is AUTHORING the stirring up of the HURRICANE.
In both cases, there is the psychological impression of LOCAL AUTHORING of action and development. We use language to impose this psychological SPLIT by virtue of language being incapable of directly capturing TRANSFORMATION and thus forcing the REDUCTIONIST and HOLIST splitting so that some of us speak in terms that ‘the TOWN is AUTHORING its own GROWTH and development (the male-assertive-reductionist local authoring view), … while others are speaking in terms of ‘the LANDSCAPE is AUTHORING the development of TOWNS’ (the female-inductive-holist local authoring view). DOES the TOWN author, by assertive action, the inflating and filling in of the LANDSCAPE’ in the manner of the male organ in the female receptacle, or does the LANDSCAPE author, by seduction, the emergence and expansion of the TOWN in the manner of the female organ that induces the swelling and growth of the male insertion? Is the seductive CUNTRY the primary agency or is the asserting TOWN the primary agency?
Evidently, language is not sufficiently equipped for capturing what is REALLY going on which imposes a danger to our psychological well-being insofar as our language-based constructions of reality are falling short on either the male assertive (reductionist) side of expression or on the female inductive (holistic) side of expression.
Physics, being a language-based form of knowledge-sharing has an exposure with regard to the limitations of language (such as being able to capture and share representations ONLY in a reductionist (conservative) or holist (liberal) fashion, the reality of TRANSFORMATION being NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT and thus INEFFABLE (beyond language’s representation capability). BUT MEANWHILE, WE ARE NOT “UNAWARE” OF THIS SHORTFALL OF LANGUAGE BECAUSE OUR SENSE-EXPERIENCE INFORMS US THROUGH ‘CHOICELESS AWARENESS’. This means that our SENSE-EXPERIENCE-INFORMED PSYCHOLOGICAL AWARENESS is more deeply informing than our intellectual-language-articulable RATIONAL KNOWING. This means that our psyche has comprehending capability that extends beyond the reach of language-stimulated intellection.
The science of psychology is auxiliary to physics. The two mutually support one another, and it is only when they are united that a complete science is formed. From our standpoint, the antithesis of subject and object, in the ordinary sense, does not exist.” — Ernst Mach. ‘The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical,
No-one ever said that language was capable of fully capturing our sense-experience and such would seem intuitively to be out of the question, so that reducing sense-experience to language-based expression will inevitably involve ‘drop-out’. This leaves us with an exposure to schizophrenia, as pointed out by Bohm since the reduction of sense-experience to language splits into the two options of REDUCTIONISM (conservatism) and HOLISM (liberalism) available through spoken and written language communications.
PSYCHOLOGICALLY, we can make that intuitive leap from the bipolar opposites of male-assertive authoring and female-inductive authoring to AUTHORLESS TRANSFORMATION, as where we see the EARTH AUTHORING male-assertive EXTRUSIONS and the EARTH AUTHORING female-subductive INTRUSIONS, this coniunctio oppositorum, INTUITIVELY comprising the one NON-AUTHOR driven dynamic of TRANSFORMATION in which EARTHING is an included relational dynamic rather than a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF.
BUT IF WE ‘BALK’ and fail to make the intuitive leap, we are condemned to that schism which divides reductionists/conservatives and holists/liberals into POLAR OPPOSING CAMPS with their interminable-because-innately-unresolvable polarizing disagreements, and for those who don’t like to fight with their brothers and sisters, this schism can be ‘swallowed’ into one’s own psychological ‘internals’ as in ‘BIPOLAR DISORDER’ and “SCHIZOPHRENIA’. The way out for those so afflicted, beyond switching to an EASTERN culture, is to restore the natural primacy of sense-experience of inclusion in relational TRANSFORMATION, over language-based rational intellection.
* * * END OF EPILOGUE * * *
There are many philosophical investigations that point to how screwed up our popular WESTERN CULTURE conceptualization of reality is, and there is a CONSISTENCY to them. By ‘them’ I include the philosophical investigations of Mach, Nietzsche, Bohm, Poincaré, Wittgenstein, Schroedinger and others. I would include Einstein in this but with the proviso that Einstein and Mach disagreed over ‘the existence of particles’ or ‘atoms’, an abstraction that is preserved in the present day ‘consensus version’ of Modern physics by probability theory (wave-particle duality). See footnote [1].
Now you may be thinking, how is he going to write a BRIEF account of ‘reality’ after having introduced such a complex idea as arguments over Wave-particle duality and the probability theory ‘solution’ contested by Mach, which as Mach pointed out, leads to the need to UNIFY physics and psychology. How much explanation is THAT going to take?
My approach in this note is to point to how these different views manifest in our psychological impressions of reality in terms of either FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE (the Wave-field view) and FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO (the Particle view) and to our WESTERN CULTURE historical architecting of language with a BUILT-IN FIGURE-and-GROUND-AS-TWO …”REALITY ARCHITECTURE”.
If we can see how this can SPLIT us into TWO DIFFERENT CAMPS, which we might call EAST and WEST (recall that Bohm acknowledges that indigenous aboriginal languages preserve the UNDIVIDED WHOLENESS of sense-experience reality as in the FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE view of reality.
AND, NO, THIS REALLY “IS NOT” DIFFICULT STUFF! because we know how to employ either/both of these approaches to comprehending reality as the following SIMPLE EXAMPLE shows;
[EAST] In the relational language architectures such as indigenous aboriginal cultures where FIGURE-and-GROUND-is-ONE, … we say that “THERE IS TOWNING IN THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE” which accommodates reality where everything is in flux, consistent with Modern physics.
[WEST] In our WESTERN CULTURE binary logical EITHER matter OR space language architecture, the same sense-experience is reported as THE TOWN IS GROWING LARGER AND MORE POPULOUS AND PRODUCTIVE.
NOTA BENE! THERE IS A “DOUBLE ERROR” in the [WEST] language based representation of reality. The DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR is what stimulates the psyche’s construction of LOCAL AUTHORING of actions and developments. This is of KEY IMPORTANCE in understanding the difference between the language-based REALITY CONSTRUCTIONS of WEST and EAST. — THERE IS NO “DOUBLE ERROR” in the [EAST] presentation of the same sense experience phenomenon.
One more thing to keep in mind is that this brings forth TWO types of LOGIC and we are using LOGIC in language to construct REPRESENTATIONS OF “REALITY”. The EAST’s linguistic REPRESENTATION OF REALITY employs the BOTH/AND LOGIC of the INCLUDED medium wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE while the WEST’s linguistic REPRESENTATION OF REALITY employs the EITHER/OR LOGIC of the EXCLUDED medium wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO.
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