Comments on Switching from Distribution to Invitation

Why I am switching from ‘distribution lists’ to ‘invitation-pending-interest-lists and concealing email addresses.

In composing ‘distribution lists’ [I have never had any fixed distribution lists],  I start with a particular piece of content and go through my contacts list asking myself the question; ‘might so-and-so be interested in this piece?’ and being perhaps overly generous with the ‘yes’ nods, compose my ‘distribution list’.  I leave the email addresses there in the spirit of openness/trust.

The distribution list was never intended as a “discussion forum” list, although it has on occasion been employed as such, not by myself but by one or more recipients on the list.  This led to a situation where I was expected to be ‘the manager’ of discussions that used the distribution list as a discussion forum list and to impose my judgement on what ‘went too far’ or was ‘in error’ and to otherwise ‘set the record straight’.  Since my research [into peacemaking circles etc.] has made me into an advocate of ‘restorative justice’ whereby one does not impose moral judgement but simply promotes and assists in the restoring of balance and harmony where conflict arises, I was not inclined to put myself into the position of ‘moderator’ of a debating forum.  Having served as a circle keeper, I prefer to use to the ‘power of the circle’ as the mediating influence; i.e. to let each person holding the talking stick speak their piece ‘from their heart’ and not exploit their ‘access to the microphone’ to impose judgements.  Circles are more easily accomplished on a face-to-face basis.

 

This is why; as well as the background given below, that I decided to switch from distribution lists to invitation-pending-interest lists, where the emails sent out include only a link to writing on a particular subject that may be of interest, with a brief description of the subject matter [since the subject matter is only a ‘click’ away].  The invitation lists use Bcc’s that suppress email addresses.

 

My apologies if the distribution list traffic was in any way bothersome to you, and please advise if you would rather not be on any invitation lists.

 

Here is my ‘main story’ that you are invited, pending interest, to read;

 

 

The picture is meant to illustrate the physical reality that we are included in something greater than ourselves; … a relational suprasystem or ‘epigenetic influence’ that inductively actualizes, orchestrates and shapes ‘genetic expression’.   Western scientific thinking culture tends to create semantic realities out of ‘systems’ stoked by humans, making it appear as if humans are ‘improving on nature’.  This continually ‘talked up’ semantic reality has become a de facto ‘operative reality’ and confused with the physical reality of our actual experience.

The Blacksmith is ‘being obsoleted’ by epigenetic influences which are inductively actualizing genetic expression in the form of newly emerging ‘systems’.  The epigenetic ‘change field’ that the Blacksmith is included in is like water to fish.  His focus is to stoke the system he is working in so as to sustain its healthy functioning.

 

* * *

I am trying to articulate and share the whys and how’s of my being at odds with the culture I have grown up in.  

 

“To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is a natural aspiration.  This essay is for others who are uncomfortable with the society we are living in and not ashamed of saying so.” (paraphrasing George Monbiot).

 

The full story of my  issues with the dominant Western world culture goes back to my first day of school in grade One and comprises my passage through a lot of different experiences over the past seventy years.  I am going to leave that for another time.  I would just like to impart with the reader, the core issues, as I understand them, that trouble our culture and society.

 

Communicating what I am trying to communicate is not an easy task.  People have shared with me that, …  “they understand what i am saying” but that it is no big deal and I seem to be making much more out of it than is actually there.

 

Ok, for ME, it IS a big deal.  The understanding that I am trying to share has changed me.  I no longer believe in blaming people for murdering other people or blaming men for raping women or blaming terrorists for beheading people.  In fact, I no longer believe in the concept of ‘human beings’ as the Western culture understands people, which in turn dissolves the traditional view of causation and responsibility.

 

Not only do I NOT believe in the absolute truths of Western mainstream science, I believe that scientific thinking is sourcing a global, collective schizophrenia that has us going to war against evils-out-there without realizing that our own ‘self-righteous purificationism’ is the deeper source of violence we ‘see’ as coming from ‘out there’.  That is, the beliefs that have inspired colonialism which has been waging a war of cultural genocide over indigenous aboriginals and diverse others who resist compliance with the dominating Western world order, are still in place and continuing to do their damage.

 

My refusal to morally judge the murderer and rapist as ‘fully and solely responsible for abhorrent violence is not an ‘anything goes’ attitude as it may appear.   It comes from the same source as Nietzsche’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ philosophy and from indigenous aboriginal “it takes a whole community to raise a murderer” that is the underpinning of ‘restorative justice’.   Restorative justice is an approach to justice that bypasses the establishing of causation and responsibility and goes directly to the business of restoring balance and harmony in the community, involving the erstwhile labelled ‘offenders’ and ‘victims’ in the healing process. Restorative justice acknowledges that while violence/dissonance manifests through particular individuals and does injury to particular individuals, such dissonance is inductively actualized by epigenetic influence immanent in the relational dynamics of community.

 

The dog that is too often kicked, poked, abused, humiliated may become a ‘biter’ and bite even the hand that aims to help it.  Scientific logic will claim that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’ and thus determine that the biting dog is fully and solely responsible for his actions.  But intuition based on experience informs us in nature,”the straw that broke the camel’s back” is characteristic of dynamic phenomena.  When sand is continually added to the crest of a growing sand pile, relational tensions build to a tolerance threshold, at which point a single additional grain of sand will trigger a massive tension-lowering reconfiguration and energy release aka ‘landslide’.

The simple binary models of science fail to capture the physical reality of our actual experience, which includes such unpredictable nonlinear phenomena.  Western justice and forensic science fails to address the physical reality of our actual experience.  Science says;

 

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

 

Of course science is wrong in making this ‘simplifying assumption’ and Western justice and forensic science are likewise wrong.  This is not a new charge being laid on our use of science in society; e.g;

 

“We … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Ernst Mach

 

What is the price we shall pay for building this error-of-over-simplification into our scientific understanding of social-relational dynamics?

 

How about global, collective ‘paranoid schizophrenia?  Because when we are the culture ‘in power’ that launches a war to smoke out and eliminate ‘dogs that bite’ without acknowledging that we ourselves [our colonizing practices] are the source of the humiliation and abuse that turns dogs into biters, we project onto others what originates in ourselves.   More biters, more ‘evil violence’,  more ‘evil violence’, more suspicion and surveillance, more suspicion and surveillance, more humiliation, more humiliation, more conversions to ‘biters’, more ‘biters’, more ‘evil violence’, … and so on in a proverbial ‘vicious circle’ that may continue to intensify, with the ‘good people’ who are pursuing the ‘elimination of evil people’, never acknowledging their own sourcing role.  In 2002, on the first anniverary of 9/11, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien observed, in a nationwide televised speech;

 

“… it is a division in the world that is building up. And I knew that it was the inspiration of it [9/11] … You know, you cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others. And that is what the Western world, not only the Americans, the Western world has to realize, because they are human beings too, and there are long-term consequences if you don’t look hard at the reality in 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. … we’re looked upon as being arrogant, self-satisfied, greedy and with no limits. And the 11th of September is an occasion for me to realize it even more.” – Jean Chrétien  

 

Science has authored a lot of impressive achievements in spite of its ‘cheating’ by substituting simplified problem models that are more easily solved to avoid having to deal with the relational complexity in the physically real world of our actual experience.   For example, surveillance and drone technologies are coming to the point that dissidents can be swiftly located and surgically eliminated without the overheads of ‘hearing relationally complex complaints in court’ and/or negotiating solutions.

 

Here we see science being used to ‘control’ so as to achieve ‘desired outcomes’ (elimination of disturbances).  Here we see how science is engendering externalities that it has not anticipated or addressed because science’s simplified models leave out ‘a lot of complex relational reality’.

 

Biological science models the organism as an ‘independent material thing-in-itself’ with internal process-driven and directed behaviours.  If one of these  organisms is ‘making a disturbance’, it follows (according to science’s simple model) that eliminating the organism will eliminate the source of the disturbance.  However, is one segment of the populace is making ‘biters’ out of another segment of the populace, this implies that behaviours are experientially conditioned through social relations, and thus science’s assumption that behaviour is internally sourced does not hold and therefore the purificationist strategy of eliminating those through whom disturbances manifests [as in Western justice and its forensic science arm] is ‘delusion’ that can lead to ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ in that the source of the disturbances ‘out there’ are deriving from ‘disturbances in here’ that are not being ‘owned up to’ [as in the vicious cycle].

 

There are lots more science-sourced dysfunctions [i.e. dysfunctions-arising from a too-literal belief in science] besides global collective paranoid schizophrenia, that are not on the radar screens of Western cultural collective’s ‘normals’.

 

So, what I am undergoing is a reconceptualizing of ‘people’ (myself included) and ‘the world’.   I am doing this NOT so as to ‘be at peace with a troubled world’, but ‘to be at peace with myself within a troubled world’.

 

While embracing the ethics of restorative justice [restoring of balance and harmony] and understanding that ‘it takes a whole community to raise a ‘biter’’, I will continue to try to squelch violence as I have always had the natural intuition to do.  But where violence happens, I now reject the principles of Western justice and BYPASS the search for ‘causation and responsibility’, going directly to assisting in the restoring of balance and harmony.  I am an advocate of informal and/or formal restorative justice processes that draw those most impacted [culturally labelled as ‘offender’ and ‘victim’] into a ‘healing circle’ that includes a representative cross section of the community.

 

Of course restorative justice will not have a chance to ‘work’ unless the community as well as those directly involved in the harm agree.  Even if ‘we are not there yet’, I am not going back to my culture’s way of imposing moral judgement and retributive punishment.  I don’t believe in ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as appropriate labels to hang on ‘people’, because I don’t believe in ‘people’ as ‘fixed identity things-in-themselves’ as is the view of both religious and scientific realms in the culture I was born into.

 

Behaviour derives from experiential conditioning; i.e. epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression.  We observe ‘the local thing’ and ‘its very non-local behaviour’ How shall we then define a ‘person’, as a ‘thing-in-itself’ with ‘its own internal process driven and directed behaviour’, as science does, … or should we start instead with the experientially conditioned behaviour [e.g. ‘dances with wolves’] and relegate the local, visible, material aspect that science endows with absolute fixed identity, and then further defining it by measuring its local ‘common properties’ and in the process, intellectually stripping it out of its unique ‘cosmic fetalizing’ within the transforming relational continuum.  Measuring the local common properties and internal processes of a ‘biter’ is not going to reveal the source of its biting behaviour.

 

I see ‘people’ as relational forms in a transforming relational continuum; i.e. as ‘inhabitants’ in an ‘inhabitant-habitat non-duality’.  An analogy is the storm-cell-in-the-flow non-duality.  This is at the core of my shift in selfhood ‘out of the culture’, which I hope will emerge clearly in reading this note.

 

I don’t see feel ‘on my own’ in this selfhood shift, I read of it in Nietzsche, Indigenous Aboriginal modes of understanding, and in the modern physics interpretations of Mach, Poincaré, Bohm and Schroedinger, and am trying to share this very nuanced shift in understanding from dualism to non-dualism.

 

In order to improve the long odds against sharing non-dualist views, I would like to try to ‘shake up’ or ‘loosen’ up the reader’s notion of a ‘person’.

 

The following paragraphs between the asterisks concentrate on ‘loosening up the reader’s notion of a ‘person’.

 

* * * * * Performer as Performing * * * * *

 

In the indigenous aboriginal culture, and in the relational interpretation of modern physics, ‘epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression’.  The overall collective inductively actualizes the development of individuals within the collective in a mutually dependent way.  Imagine that the ‘individuals’ in the collective are relational features like ‘storm-cells’ in a common flow.  Everyone is influencing everyone’s development as in an ecosystem;

 

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

 

Consider the expression; “it takes a whole community to raise a child”.  Can you imagine a crowd of people where everyone is a ‘performer’.  As in a collection of jazz musicians, the relational weave of harmonies of the ensemble breeds ‘spaces’ that inductively actualize individual ‘genetic expression’.

 

Social relations in general work like this, but sometimes crony groups form that open up developmental ‘genetic expression’ space for crony members while selectively excluding (starving out) non-members.

 

As in the prior discussion, a shift seems to be called for, towards defining ‘the person’ on the basis of his ‘behaviour’ rather than defining ‘the person’ first and then assuming that his behaviour can be understood by understanding ‘him’.   If we recorded on individual tracks, the behaviour of each musician in a jazz ensemble, should we attribute the virtuoso solo of an individual player to that player, as if he were ‘fully and solely responsible for his own behaviour’?   Or should we acknowledge that “epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression?”   That is, should we acknowledge that the soloist’s dynamic and the ensemble dynamic are a ‘non-duality’?

 

There are no ‘performers’ in this ensemble, there are only ‘performings’.   The interdependent relational dynamics of the ensemble ‘bootstrap’ the development of  individual behaviours; i.e. there are no fixed identity things-in-themselves ‘that perform’,  there are only ‘performings’; i.e. no nouns, only verbs.

 

The Western culture’s scientific understanding of dynamics is ‘upside down’.  Everything is about ‘performers’ aka ‘causal agents’ and ‘their actions and results’, as if the world dynamic arises from a plethora of local, material things-in-themselves [atoms, molecules, bodies, cells, organisms, planets etc.] and their actions and results as they operate and interact in an intellectually-contrived absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame that serves as imagined ‘theatre of operations’.  This is noun-and-verb language-and-culture based ‘semantic reality’ that is nothing like the physical reality of our actual experience.  It is a pseudo reality based on common belief in common symbols and definitions.  Sovereign states ‘really exist’ FOR the subjects of the Empire; i.e. the colonizing settlers that make the associated authoritarian structures ‘work’ by ‘believing’ in them [“When we dream together, it’s reality”].

Such a reality is not the physical reality of natural experience [as we can see in animals that ignore state boundaries] but a semantic reality that comes about by agreeing to believe in a certain set of symbols and definitions; i.e. it is a ‘semantic reality’ that, by agreement, becomes ‘the operative reality’ used to direct individual and collective behaviours [with the help of regulatory and enforcement agencies].

 

So, there is another way to understand people and self wherein we put relational behaviour in a natural precedence over fixed identity things-in-themselves; i.e. where individuals are like storm-cells in a flow, manifesting behaviours that are inductively actualized by the epigenetic field of influence they are included in.  Because we have ‘language’ .  We attach a noun-label to the local visible aspect of the storm-cell hovering around its implied ‘centre’, but of course, the cell is much more than the local visible form; i.e. its roots are the transforming relational flow-continuum, and its ‘cosmic fetalizing’ is intrinsically entangled with other relational forms in the flow, kind of like the ‘strand-in-the-web-of-life’ metaphor of the indigenous aboriginal worldview, and the relational view of modern physics.

 

“By the principle of Occam’s razor, physicists and philosophers prefer ideas that can explain the same phenomena with the fewest assumptions. In this case you can construct a perfectly valid theory by positing the existence of certain relations without additionally assuming individual things. So proponents of ontic structural realism say we might as well dispense with things and assume that the world is made of [relational-spatial] structures, or nets of relations.” – Meinard Kuhlmann, ‘What is Real’, Scientific American, August 2013

 

Modern physics encourages us to see a relational form (e.g. human) in terms of ‘inhabitant-habitat non-duality’ [Mach’s principle].  Nietzsche’s ‘endosmosis-exosmosis non-duality’ and Lamarck’s ‘epigenetic-genetic non-duality’ also point towards the same interpretation of the basic nature of ‘What is Real’.

 

Over and over again, our experience affirms that ‘epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression’.

 

In the WWII era, the question arose, concerning Hitler and Churchill; ‘does the man make the times? [are natural born powerful men the fountainheads of influence over the collective], … or ‘do the times make the man?’ [do the ambient conditions aka epigenetic influence inductively actualize and shape genetic expression that manifests in leadership figures].   Without a whole nation of Germans who grew up humiliated by their European neighbours and abused by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, it there would never have been a Hitler and a Churchill.

 

In other words, epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression.  This does not equate to the dualist proposition ‘the man makes the times’ since it is a non-dual expression [the man is included in the times].  The storm-cell and the flow are a non-duality.  The behaviour of Germans and the behaviour of the global collective are a non-duality.  The behaviour of Hitler and the behaviour of the German people are a non-duality.

 

The comedic performer taps the stored energy in life-experience based relational tensions that are felt within the people in the audience, and by short-circuiting and collapsing these tensions, harvests a huge release of energy.  This huge energy release is not ‘caused’ by the ‘performer’, any more than a skier has the power to ‘cause’ avalanches.   The concept of ‘causation and responsibility’ become bankrupt here.

 

The basic causal model of Western science is flawed [it turns ‘reality’ on its head] since ‘epigenetic influence’, which is inductively actualizing ‘genetic expression’, ‘goes missing’, leaving the ‘genetic expressions’ [‘performers’] on their own in a notional empty space to take credit for everything.  ‘Genetic expressions’ are not self-starting, they are epigenetically actualized;

 

“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 New Biology’

 

 

What Lipton is describing is genetic-epigenetic non-duality as with storm-cell-in-flow.  It is only noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammar that reduces everything to scientific dualism as in being-based cause-and-effect.

 

The Western scientific model of human as an ‘independent, material, ‘thing-in-itself’ is a semantic construction encouraged by man’s ego which has man see himself as a God-like fountainhead of his own actions and results, separate from nature and intended by God to subdue nature and improve it for the benefit of human life.  This Biblical theme has been embodied in the Western concept of property ownership;

 

“God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man, … to subdue the earth; i.e., improve it for the benefit of life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour.  He that in obedience to this commandment of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him” – John Locke, 1690.

 

Over and over again, we see how Western traditional beliefs have depicted man as being superior to nature, and nature depicted as a nasty wild place in need of domestication/improvement.  For the non-Western man who sees nature as ‘the all’ (Brahman) and himself as included within ‘the all’ (Atman), the unnatural splitting apart of man and nature is akin to schizophrenia.  Instead of his habitat-inhabitant, Brahman-Atman self being ‘one’, he splits himself off from his own larger self, the epigenetic influence that is inductively actualizing his smaller ego-self.  Nietzsche refers to these, in Thus Spake Zarathustra as the ‘big sagacity natural Self’ and the ‘little sagacity ego-self’.

 

Science strips this down to NOTHING BUT the ‘little sagacity ego-self’; i.e. the ‘genetic expression’ without the epigenetic inductive actualizing influence.

 

In other words, it is our Western habit of viewing the world through scientific dualist lenses that has us give credit to the performer for ‘causing’ the eruption of laughter or violence etc. even though such release derives from relational tensions within the collective.  The eruption is not coming from the performer’s ‘material’; i.e. a comedian cannot get the same huge reaction from telling the same joke twice just as the skier cannot trigger the same huge avalanche from making the same traverse twice; i.e. the collapse of relational tensions are the source of what we attribute to the ‘performing’, not the other way round.  Performers search for the ‘hot button’ or ‘G-spot’ to collapse the relational tensions, and the audience will train them how to do this.    This is true for the farmer and his harvest, also; i.e. to say that ‘the farmer produces wheat’ is the same over-simplification as in scientific dualism that results from ignoring the primary role of epigenetic influence and the upside-down imputing of causation and responsibility to the ‘genetic expression’.

 

The whole popular ‘reality structure’ of being-driven competition and winners and losers is built on the back of erasing the primary role of epigenetic influence within an epigenetic-genetic non-duality.

 

In my research into ‘exceptionally performing teams’ in the early nineties, it became evident that ‘backing off fixed thing-in-itself identity’ of the team opened the way to a ‘non-duality’ operating mode wherein the team allowed its inside-outward operations [genetic expression] to be inductively actualized, orchestrated and shaped by the dynamics of the relational matrix it was included in [customers, suppliers, service contractors, families, host community etc.].    The behaviour of the team was no longer fully and solely attributable to the team-as-a-thing-in-itself but was experientially conditioned [inductively actualized] by the dynamic relational matrix [epigenetic influence] the team was included in.

 

As in the case of ‘biters’, the scientific dualist practice of attributing actions and results to notional local-things-in-themselves with their own ‘internal-process-driven-and-directed-behaviours’ is too simple relative to the physical reality of our actual relational experience.  One could no longer speak of the team being a ‘winner’ or a ‘loser’ because there no longer was ‘a team’ with a behaviour attributable to it, its behaviour was inextricably tied up in the behaviours of other teams in the interdependent relational matrix they all shared inclusion in.   People nevertheless said; ‘the team did exceptionally well’ because it had a visible presence; i.e. the material forms that were the team members.  However, there was no longer a ‘team behaviour’ that could be attributed to the team.  The team had become like the ‘biter’ in that its behaviour was being conditioned by the dynamics of the relational matrix it was included in.   The ‘biter’ got blamed for being the fully and solely responsible source of his behaviour.  So it was with the exceptionally performing teams, not because it was true, it wasn’t.  But because it was convenient in that it delivered ‘economy of thought’ [Mach] to speak as if it were fully and solely responsible for its own actions and results.  The physical reality of the team’s actual experience was sufficiently relationally complex as to make it impossible to articulate what was really going on; i.e. ‘epigenetic influence inductively actualizing, orchestrating and shaping genetic expression’.

 

This point of letting the identity of the “performer” flex to “performing” to allow the understanding of individual-collective non-duality as the prevailing dynamic is key.  It has come up in my research into “exceptionally performing teams”.  It comes up in Ackoff’s “every system is included in a relational suprasystem”.  It comes up in contrasting the narratives “Robinson Crusoe” and “Suzanne de la Pacifique”.  In all of these cases there is a question as to whether it is appropriate to describe the primary animating agency as coming from ‘inhabitant’ or ‘habitat’ All of the evidence I have explored from my own life experience and pre-interpretation evidence shared by others, is that “epigenetic influence inductively actualizes individual genetic expression’.   The ensemble performance inductively actualizes, orchestrates and shapes the solo performance.  The fertile valley trains the farmer like the fertile crowd trains the jokester.  The avalanche of produce; aka ‘the harvest’,  is not ‘caused’ by the farmer and neither is the avalanche of laughter ‘caused’ by the comedic performer.

 

In unlocking our beady-eyed focus on the ‘performer’ as the ‘source’ of his actions/results, and seeing in his place an epigenetic-genetic non-dual ‘performing’, we fundamentally blur ‘who is responsible for what’, as might be expected in the modern physics view of the world as given only once, as a transforming relational continuum.  The ethic of the exceptionally performing teams was; ‘who cares?  If we are all doing well’; i.e. we don’t need to establish causal responsibilities and besides, its impossible to determine causal responsibility in an interdependent relational matrix.  It’s the impossibility known as ‘the three body problem’ [impossibility of solving for the separate contributions of three or more bodies moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence], of which Newton said;

 

“An exact solution to the problem of three bodies exceeds, if I am not mistaken, the force of any human mind.” – Isaac Newton

 

But there is one more big thing to share here, and it concerns how we have become blind to how we are shooting ourselves in the foot, and not seeing our error [of going with scientific dualism and thus blinding ourselves to the non-dualism of our physical experience].

To illustrate this is to attempt to resolve two different views whose difference is highly nuanced.

 

It may be approached directly through Russell Ackoff’s point that every system is included in a relational suprasystem.  Ackoff gives the example of the ‘university’ as the system and the community as the relational suprasystem.  By analytical inquiry we can explain the system (university) by dividing it up into components and processes and explaining how these components and processes come together to comprise the ‘system’ and ‘its’ dynamics.

 

What is missing in this view, is the reality before the university was ever called ‘a university’, it was a mere twinkle in the eye of community, an undefined need that inductively actualized and orchestrated genetic expression in terms of the collection of books and scholars and the taking in of teachers.  Ackoff’s point is that this relational suprasystem has not gone way; i.e. it is still the primary animating influence of the genetic expression we are now calling ‘the university’ which we understand as a ‘system-in-itself’ understandable in terms of its internal components [faculties, departments, physical plant, campus] and processes.  Since the epigenetic influence that is inductively actualizing the sustained genetic expression [the system called university] is the primary reality, it is essential in Ackoff’s systems view, to ‘ground analytical inquiry in synthetical inquiry’ [how community need [relational suprasystem dynamic] opens up a docking station that induces the construction and plugging in of the system]

 

Now for those working ‘inside the system’, the epigenetic influence is like water to a fish; i.e. there is no awareness of it since the focus is on stoking the engines of the system.  Thus it may happen that the system of university goes into decline, there will be much analysis of the components and processes, which will, indeed, show symptoms of decline of some sort which ‘can be treated’, … but the deeper source of the decline will be coming from changing need in the relational suprasystem [the primary reality].

 

The system and suprasystem are a non-duality, as in the inhabitant-habitat non-duality of Mach’s principle.  As with the storm-cell in the flow, we give the inhabitant [the system] a fixed identity anchored by a name-label based on its local, visible, material appearance.  The word ‘Katrina’ is not the thing [“the map is not the territory”] since ‘the thing’ a the local, visible part of an relational suprasystem-system non-duality [inhabitant-habitat non-duality].

 

To bring in another example, there is a water-to-fish unawareness of the telegraph operator or lineman and all those involved in stoking the engines of telegraphy systems, as to changes in the epigenetic influence [community need] that inductively actualizes such ‘genetic expression’ [the telegraphy system].   If telegraphy systems get sick and systems start dying off, investigators will speak of illness within the particular systems (not sufficiently competitive etc.) and find symptoms within their various components and processes that can be blamed for the decline, however, epigenetic influence inductively actualizes ‘creative potentials’ that manifest as ‘genetic expression’; i.e. the functioning system.  The functioning system is ‘schaumkommen’ or ‘appearances’ and is NOT the primary reality, but a ‘semantic reality’ that we employ as an ‘operative reality’.  That is, even though the physical process involved is relational transformation that includes storm and self and all, our noun-and-verb language-and-grammar treats ‘storm-systems’ as if they were ‘things-in-themselves’, just like us [anthropomorphism] and we build these into ‘semantic reality’ constructions that personify the ‘genetic expression’ aspect of inhabitant-habitat non-dual features; “Katrina is growing larger and more powerful”, … Katrina is headed for the Gulf Coast”, … “Katrina is thrashing New Orleans”, …

 

Now, if  you enlarge this way of looking at things so as to cover the earth, thinking of the 193 sovereign states as ‘systems’ and the global community dynamic as the relational suprasystem and therefore as the epigenetic influence that is inductively actualizing genetic expression in the form of national ‘systems’.   The citizens of each nation may think of their nation as a ‘system’ and think of their own activities as stoking the engine of the nation and helping to keep it fully functioning, but all of these 193 systems are included in a ‘real’ global relational suprasystem that is the inductive actualizing influence that is sourcing these ‘genetic expressions’.  Immanent in the global social relational dynamic was the need for something, some form of order and organization, and sovereigntism was the answer [refer to the Hobbesian view of ‘the state of nature’].

 

In all of these cases, while we assign ‘fixed identity’ to ‘systems’ by way of scientific analytical inquiry that breaks them down into components and processes and makes LOGICAL SENSE of them in this way, there are no fixed identities in a transforming relational continuum so that the world of ‘fixed identity’ systems is not a physically real world but a ‘semantic reality’ that rests on the back of a collective of ‘believers’ that agree to believing in the ‘existence’ of a group of key concepts, definitions and terms that create a sustainable semantic reality.

 

The ‘fixed identity performer’ aka ‘the system’ [the imposing of ‘being’] is a convenient conceptual device that allows us to depict the world dynamic in terms of ‘what things do’ when the physical reality of our actual experience is that epigenetic influence inductively actualizes a ‘performing’, to which we then apply language and grammar to depict as a fixed identity ‘performer’ that is evidently running the operation in the reverse direction.  This semantic contrivance notionally infuses God-like animating power in the ‘performer’ and, within the being-based semantically reality so constructed, removes [from semantic reality] all trace of the physically real and primary  and experienced epigenetic influence [only a void ‘absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame as notional ‘operating theatre’ remains within the semantic reality depiction].  This makes it seem as if the Hobbesian world is ‘the reality’ wherein humans are in charge of the world dynamic and responsible for its ‘improvement’, rather than being included in something greater than themselves.

 

The telegraph operator and lineman consider themselves ‘performers’ with explicitly defined actions that result in ‘the telegraphy system’[ it is sometimes said that Western culture types ‘become our positions’], however, the relational suprasystem they are included in, whose need induced the development of telegraphy, is continually transforming and inducing new ‘performers’ and so at the same time, continually obsoleting all fixed identities, making it evident that the ‘system’ (‘telegraphy’ in this example) while it is composed of seemingly fixed-identity, local, visible, material components and processes, is NOT THE PHYSICAL REALITY, .. the physical reality is the epigenetic influence that is inductively actualizing the ‘genetic expression’, or, more accurately, … the physical reality is the epigenetic-genetic non-duality

 

In this view, the local, visible, material ‘systems’ are ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’), as Shroedinger notes, and it is only word-labels/names we give them, that allow us to construct a pseudo ‘semantic reality’ based on our agreement to accept the words, such as ‘Poland’ or ‘telegraphy’ on face value.  After continuing acceptance of the word sets and the semantic reality narratives, we become ‘at home’ with using this pseudo-‘semantic reality’ as our ‘operative reality.

 

In this ‘shaking up’ or ‘loosening’ of the reader’s notion of a person or ‘system’, we now see the person as a ‘performing’ rather than as a ‘performer’, … a ‘performing’ that is inductively actualized by the relational dynamic [epigenetic field influence] she is included in.  The ‘telegraph operator’ is now the result of the relational suprasystem rather than a ‘source’ of the system.  The ‘Oklahoma farmer’ is now the result of the relational suprasystem (climate and soil suprasystem inspired growth dynamic etc.) rather than the source of the farm system dynamic, and in all cases, these ‘fixed identity performers’ we have semantically created and are using to ‘construct a semantic reality’, are more realistically seen as ‘performings’ inductively actualized by the epigenetic field of influence they are included in.

 

In continually [generation after generation] ‘talking up’ this type of ‘semantic reality’, the epigenetic influence that is continually ‘obsoleting us’, the ‘something greater than ourselves’ that we are included in, becomes like water to fish, and our fixed-identity semantic reality becomes a substitute ‘operative reality’ even as our sensual experience remains rooted in the physical reality of our actual experience.

 

Our Hobbesian view of ourselves as ‘improvers of nature’ with God-like jumpstart powers of genetic expression continues on largely unabated as is apparent in, for example, the First Nations Truth & Reconciliation initiative [Canada], anchored as it still is, in questions of property ownership.

 

* * * * * Performer as Performing * * * * *

 

Understanding “Semantic Reality” and how it Differs from Physically Experienced Reality

 

Even if ‘the world is given only once’, as a transforming relational continuum, as Mach, Bohm, Faraday, Schroedinger, Einstein would have it, language gives us the intellectual power to separate out forms [e.g. storm-cells] and activities [e.g. blacksmithing etc.] into ‘systems/things-in-themselves’.  So, instead of understanding these forms and activities according to their relations with other forms and activities within the plenum, we measure or assess their local properties as if they were things-in-themselves, which gives us a way of thinking of them as ‘things-in-themselves’.  We use language in this manner to construct ‘semantic realities’ based on ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what things do’ as if in an operating theatre [absolute space and absolute time] that is independent of the independent things residing, operating and interacting within it.

 

For example, if we are monitoring the weather, what we experience is inclusion in the weather-plenum and if we see a storm-cell ‘form’ in front of us, our experience-based intuition informs us that the cell is a ‘genetic expression’ that is being inductively actualized by epigenetic influence immanent in the weather-plenum.  If there are three storm-cells, we can tag them with ‘fixed identities’ and call them Katrina, Ivan and Frances.  This is where our mind starts to drift away from our experience-based intuition since noun-and-verb structures allow us to animate these three relational form, inextricably entangled in one another’s mutual influence, by virtue of being inductively actualized genetic expressions with in the weather-plenum, and coupled through the plenum the varying heat flows from ocean currents and solar irradiance.

Because our intellect is free to do it, we can use language to personify these forms and RE-present them, free from their inextricable relational entanglements, as ‘independent beings’, … like … ‘us’!?   As Nietzsche points out, seeing ourselves as ‘independent beings’ is an ‘ego-thing’ wherein we imagine ourselves as an ‘independent being’ animated by ‘our own free will’;

“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’

Instead of three storm-cells, we might imagine three dogs, one of which is a ‘biter’. In relational terms, ‘it takes a whole community to ‘raise a biter’, implying that it is unrealistic to understand individuals as ‘things-in-themselves’, the way that Western science and Western justice formally oblige themselves to do.

 

Ego and semantics are pulling us towards the ‘thing-in-itself’ view while our experience-based inquiry into nature is pulling us towards the view in which “relations are all there is” (as in ‘field’ as primary influence) and material forms are then understood as relational nexa within the unbounded transforming relational plenum.  In other words ‘field’ is all there is, … ‘matter’ and ‘material forms’ are secondary.

 

“… the division into matter and field is, after the recognition of the equivalence of mass and energy, something artificial and not clearly defined. Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? What impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space. We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. In this way a new philosophical background could be created. Its final aim would be the explanation of all events in nature by structure laws valid always and everywhere. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone. There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality.” — Einstein and Infeld, ‘Evolution of Physics’

Reducing relational forms to ‘independent entities/systems’ hearkens back to Western religious beliefs; e.g.

 

“Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.

1731 Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.

1732 As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning. This freedom characterizes properly human acts. It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach.” – Vatican Archives, The Catholic Catechism.

Noun-and-verb ‘Semantic reality’ is an idealized, being-based pseudo-reality which is convenient for logical discourse, but which departs radically from the relational physical reality of our actual experience.

What it does is to construct a new, non-relational, being-based logical reality based on ‘genetic expressions’ without acknowledging their epigenetic-genetic non-dual nature.  This is like discarding their Brahman or Great-Spirit aspect from which they derive their power and steerage, and notionally outfitting their local, visual, material aspect with its own God-like powers of jumpstart creation, as Nietzsche describes in the above quote.

 

Semantic reality thus represents a total inversion of the dominant direction of physical phenomena, from outside-inward epigenetic inductive actualizing of genetic expression, … to portraying those genetic expressions as self-starting, inside-outward-asserting causal agents.   Instead of understanding space as an energy-charged relational plenum populated by epigenetic-genetic non-dualities [like storm-cells in flow], ‘semantic reality’ would have us understand the in-effect operating theatre as an empty absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame inhabited by independently existing material causal agents.

Just as the logical action to eliminate Saddam was ‘successful’ [although it engendered unintended ‘externalities’ such as the rise of ISIS], there are many scientifically thought out actions that are ‘successful’ but which are engendering unintended ‘externalities’.

“Progress” is an impression that comes from humans achieving scientifically architected logical successes within ‘semantic reality’.  What the hell is really going on, nobody knows, because the real physical world we are operating in is relational rather than a void filled with disconnected logical elements.

“Progress” signals to us that ‘we are in control’ and that we are capable of using science and logic to make our lives so much better [what do we mean ‘we’?] and to overcome all of our difficulties.  It is an Hobbesian illusion come true.

But not so fast.  All this good stuff that makes logic and us logicians Gods, only happens inside ‘semantic reality’ which is a world filled with being-based logical elements that [we] have the power to create and/or destroy.  What is going on in the physical reality of our actual experience is something else since our logic-based interventions, to be physically implemented, must transpire in a relational space, engendering all sorts of ‘externalities’ that are unanticipated and unaddressed by science and logic.  That is, there is a radical gap between the ‘reality’ of our intellect aka ‘semantic reality’ and the physical reality of our actual experiencing of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum.  As Bohm points out, this gap is the source of ‘incoherence’.

This incoherence was not encountered by indigenous aboriginals since their language architectures are relational rather than being-based.  As has been pointed out by anthropologists, the only people who ‘got science’ were those with Indo-European/scientific ‘being-based’ language architectures.

Science is a powerful tool for helping us achieve logical objectives.  The problem is that the ‘operative reality’ that we formulate and accomplish our logical objectives in is a being-based ‘semantic reality’ that is unlike the relational physical reality of our actual experience, the latter being far too relationally complex to specify.

 

Science can cure our headache with a pharmaceutical drug but not without engendering a mess of unaddressed externalities in the process.  Such logical propositions as ‘DDT kills mosquitoes’ and ‘drones kill rebels’ can be proven true but what else they do, when applied in a relational world where everything is mutually influencing everything, goes unaddressed.  Science has its own way of looking at the world, and it is in this scientific way of looking at the world that progress is achieved, not in the physical reality of our actual experience.

The certainty of being-based science has great appeal.  My issue with it is that this certainty comes at the expense of reality.

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” – Albert Einstein

 

 

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

FOOTNOTES:

 

Special Note to those who “suffer from mental illness”.

 

Psychiatrists such as R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, Raymond Cochrane, Peter Breggin, Kelly Brogan, Jill Astbury and anthropologists including Jules Henry and philosophers including Michel Foucault, have argued that emotional distress labelled as ‘mental illness’ is ‘epigenetically induced’.  This agrees with the understandings captured in the above essay, where ‘the organism’ is not a ‘thing-in-itself’ as biological science sees it but a genetic expression inductively actualized and shaped by epigenetic influence within a genetic-epigenetic non-duality.

 

Children grow up accepting what their parents and teachers tell them; i.e. that our society is essentially, ‘a good thing’.  This may be the beginning of a water-to-fish kind of unawareness of how the epigenetic influence of Western society may be inductively actualizing genetic expression termed ‘mental illness’.  Anxieties can continue to build unawarely to the point that symptoms manifest that are most often interpreted as arising from within the individual since biological science models a human as an independently-existing system-in-itself with internal process driven and directed behaviours.  Just as discussed in the case of the system we know as ‘university’, we can always find fault with internal components and processes even though the root-source of the malady is epigenetic influence that is inductively actualizing them.

The most trusting, who tend to accept the ‘correctness’ of the societal dynamic they are situationally included in, are the most likely to experience ‘anxieties’ that ‘come out of the blue’ and which manifest in psychotic episodes or emotional breakdowns of one sort or another.

Meanwhile ‘the jury is more than out’ on the neutrality or innocuousness of Western society; e.g;

 

“When I was sent to a “school” to be “educated,” that meant I was to be hypnotized into the tunnel-reality of my tribe. . . . Every politician knows how to induce hypnosis, and very damned few people on the whole planet know how to dehypnotize themselves. The world is not governed by facts or logic. It is governed by BS (belief systems).” -Robert Anton Wilson

 

“The great perplexity of our time, the churning of our age, is that the youth have sensed — for better or for worse — a great social-historical truth: that just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies: it can be the viciously destructive heroics of Hitler’s Germany or the plain debasing and silly heroics of the acquisition and display of consumer goods, the piling up of money and privileges that now characterizes whole ways of life, capitalist and Soviet.” – Ernest Becker, ‘Denial of Death’

 

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

 

 “The function of education has never been to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them…acquiescence, not originality. …Schools are the central conserving force of the culture. … In order not to fail, most people are willing to believe anything and to care not whether what they are told is true or false.  Only by remaining absurd can one feel free from fear of failure.” – Jules Henry, cultural anthropologist, in ‘Culture Against Man’

 

“It is Henry’s contention that in practice education has never been an instrument to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them. … Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiousity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that. Love is the path through permissiveness to discipline; and through discipline, only too often, to betrayal of self.” – R. D. Laing, psychiatrist and philosopher

For the trusting individual, epigenetic influence with toxic potential may be as unnoticeable or as ‘taken for granted’ as water to a fish, and thus tend to source anxieties that cannot be dealt with because they make their entrance below the radar screen of conscious awareness.

Parents are putting their children into toxic competitive environments where they are ‘encouraged’ by ‘fear of failure’ [Jules Henry] with those labelled ‘less performant’ made to feel as if they are ‘losers’ by contrast of those anointed as ‘winners’.  There is nothing ‘natural’ about this social protocol of categorizing, ranking and labelling individuals.

Instead of addressing the rootsource of the problem and acknowledging the epigenetic source of affective disorders, psychiatrists orient to solving a simpler problem which sees the symptoms as arising from within the ‘independent organism/system’ and its internal components and processes.  By manipulating internal biochemistry, psychiatry can render the individual less sensitive to epigenetic influence.  While this may reduce the potential for psychotic episodes, it may reduce the quality of life for the individual without ever addressing the epigenetic sourcing.

As Jill Astbury writes in ‘Crazy for You’, in interpreting the World Health Organization finding that women are twice as likely to suffer from ‘affective disorders’ [depression, bipolar disorder etc.] as men, what we have going on is an ignoring of sensitive ‘miner’s canaries’ that are sending us signals of an ambient toxicity.

From my observations and to some extent, experiences, it is very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that one’s emotional distress is signalling an internal defectiveness since there is a tendency to see ‘everyone else’ as ‘normal’, as psychiatry tends to do, as it tries to restore ‘abnormals’ to ‘normality’.  The miner’s canaries will thus be given desensitizing drugs to the point that they no longer sense ambient epigenetic toxic potentials.

Those individuals who are ‘diagnosed’ with a problem; i.e. who are told that the problem resides within them, may be headed for a lifetime of drug-taking to reduce their exposure to epigenetic toxic potentials under the guise of maintaining balance in their internal neurotransmitting biochemistry.  In a very crude manner, this may make some sense in that it is easier to address individual symptoms than it is to address the rootsource when the rootsource is a toxic societal dynamic.

I recall a conversation with a psychiatric ward patient who was recovering from her sixth suicide attempt which this time, put her into a two week long coma.  She said; “every time, after a few weeks in here, they say I am cured.  Sure I am cured, for living in a highly empathic society such as the psychiatric ward tends to be, but I am not cured for going back into society which is a rat race made even tougher by my being marked as a defect and a loser.  See, this bus pass is marked ‘handicapped’.  I tried to get off handicapped and go on ordinary welfare even though it was $300. less but they wouldn’t let me.”  She also expressed the view that society was moving in the opposite direction of ‘more empathy’.

Patty’s observations support the view that ‘mental illness’ is an epigenetic syndrome that science is misconstruing as a biological illness.  In fact, the term ‘biological illness’ is a reflection of how ‘out of touch with reality’ that the science of biology continues to be by modeling the ‘organism’ as an ‘independently-existing material ‘system-in-itself’ that resides, operates and interacts with other such ‘independent systems’ within an abstract absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame that is regarded as an ‘operating theatre’.

My understanding/intuition is that epigenetic influence is the source of anxieties and emotional distress that manifests in symptoms such as are labelled ‘depression’, ‘schizophrenia’, ‘bipolar disorder’ etc.

The ‘invisible plague’ as the rise in ‘mental disorders’ has been described, which is in spite of the growth of prescription drug-taking designed to ‘control the individual’s biochemistry’ in lieu of addressing the epigenetic root source, is rising in concert with what Patty and others are observing as a continuing trend of the social dynamic from more empathic to less empathic.

What stands out as potential remedies for these symptoms described as ‘mental disorders’ [which lets the epigenetic toxic potentials of Western society ‘off the hook’] is;

(a) resituating the individual from a less empathic to a more empathic epigenetic field of influence/ambiance.

(b) ‘de-programming’ the individual to remove the delusion, conditioned in them through Western acculturation that ‘societal dynamics’, wherever they drift to, establish ‘what is normal’ while departures from ‘normal’ are regarded as ‘abnormal’, thus the sensitive miner’s canaries that manifest emotional distress from toxic potentials in the epigenetic field of influence they are situated in, are identified as ‘abnormal’ so that medical science attempts to ‘restore them to normality’ which is where ever the societal drift with its toxic epigenetic potentialities happens to be today.

De-programming could involve exposure to such research as in the First Nations Truth & Reconciliation initiative which exposes how well-meaning members of Western society have been the authors of cultural genocide.  This comes from the Hobbesian view of man as ‘independent of nature’ and charged with ‘improving nature’ [wild, chaotic, dangerous and unpredictable nature].  The overtly stated aim of the dominant Western culture in Canada was to ‘kill the Indian in the child’ and ‘save the man’.  Children were stripped from their families in this program, which continued from the early 1880’s to the late 1990’s.

The aim of ‘de-programming’ is not to ‘demonize’ Western society, but as in initiatives to ‘de-colonize and re-indigenize’ settler society, which is to say, to retract this aberrant ethic, mentioned in many of the quotes (e.g. by Laing, Henry etc.) of ‘trying to improve on nature’ instead of freeing children to find their place in nature, as might to captured in terms such as Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Wildgeese’.

(c) Neurofeedback: Neurofeedback is a technique that develops ‘psychological muscles’ where none existed, which is very different from letting psychological muscles atrophy by administering desensitizing drugs.  As in the treatment of panic attacks, neurofeedback develops in the individual, an ability to shift one’s feelings out of the thinking mode where anxiety builds into a thinking mode which is relaxed (Sensorimotor response).  This is not a ‘psychological muscle’ which most of us already have, but it is clearly developable.  From my experience (including helping a friend to ‘train up’ this psychological muscle), it could be likened to getting rid of the monkey of anxiety on your back [which is just like a shadowy presence that you can’t explicitly identify] in the manner that a natural freedom loving wild horse gets rid of a rider that he doesn’t want on his back; i.e. by running through thick brush or between two trees that are just wide enough for him to clear but not the rider on his back.

That is, developing the psychological or ‘brainwave’ muscle (which lies beyond conscious cognition but which can be emotionally experienced) to shift from the brainwave band where anxieties build to the brainwave band where anxieties cannot be supported, is analogous to scraping the monkey of anxiety off your back.  Neurofeedback has had much success in ADHD, panic attacks, depression and elsewhere.   It is ‘in between’ ‘deprogramming’ which is, on the one hand, becoming consciously aware of toxic potentials that have been previously ‘allowed in’ by one’s assumption that swimming in Western society without protection is safe, and on the other hand, ingesting drugs that will dull one’s natural sensibilities so as to accept toxic epigenetic potentials without worrying about them.  Since the toxicity in Western society derives from its insensitive scientific-mechanistic protocols, the effect of such desensitizing drugs is to move the individual more towards dull, machine-like behaviour and to tone down the spiritual and artistic sensations which are highly developed in the ‘miner’s canaries’.

* * *

Western medicine has not changed its basic tactic of meddling with internal systems to address ‘mental illness’ [in denial of the epigenetic origins of emotional distress] since the days of lobotomization which was an attempt to destroy the ‘connections’ which seemed to ‘correlate’ with the symptoms that were construed as ‘mental illness’.  A reminder of where Western psychiatry was then may be useful because the basic model of Western medical science has not changed in its fundamentals; i.e. epigenetic origins of emotional distress are still denied.

 

History

Doctors first began manipulating the brain to calm patients in the late 1880s, when the Swiss physician Gottlieb Burkhardt removed parts of the cortex of the brains of patients with auditory hallucinations and other symptoms of schizophrenia, noting that it made them calm (although one patient died and another committed suicide after the procedure), according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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The Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz is credited with inventing the lobotomy in 1935, for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1949 (later, a movement was started to revoke the prize, unsuccessfully).

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Yale neuroscientist John Fulton and his colleague Carlyle Jacobsen had performed lobotomy-like procedures on chimpanzees in 1935. Moniz and his colleague Almeida Lima performed the first human experiments later that year. The frontal lobes were targeted because of their association with behavior and personality.

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Moniz reported the treatment as a success for patients with conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, panic disorder and mania, according to an article published in 2011 in the Journal of Neurosurgery. But the operations had severe side effects, including increased temperature, vomiting, bladder and bowel incontinence and eye problems, as well apathy, lethargy, and abnormal sensations of hunger, among others. The medical community was initially critical of the procedure, but nevertheless, physicians started using it in countries around the world. 

 * * *

Quotes relevant to this essay;

 

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

 

The dynamics of the inhabitants (storm-cells) are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat (turbulent flow) at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat (turbulent flow) are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants (storm-cells). – Mach’s principle.  That is, everything is simultaneously influencing everything.

 

“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” … “The properties of one mass always include relations to other masses,” … “Every single body of the Universe stands in some definite relations with every other body in the Universe.” Therefore, no object can “be regarded as wholly isolated.” And even in the simplest case, “the neglecting of the rest of the world is impossible.” – Ernst Mach

 

“Space not only conditions the behaviour of inert masses, but is also conditioned in its state by them.” — Einstein

Matter and space are a non-duality.  

 

 

Matter is a condensate of field.  Inhabitant and habitat are a non-duality

 

 

The convenience of invoking ‘being’ equates to the simplifying assumption, in pre-modern mathematical physics, that the present depends only on the immediate past.  If the performing is terrorism, by invoking the simplification that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’ [which is the same as invoking ‘being’], then the present becomes the kick-starter that launches the immediate future.  In indigenous aboriginal languages, the performing would be a performing [an ‘activity’], not a ‘performer that is the cause of the performance’.  The terrorizing would be a terrorizing, not a terrorist that is the cause of terrorist performance.

 

“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.

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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.

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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”

 

These simplifications built into mathematical physics replace the complex relational physically real problem with a simpler problem that will deliver solutions more easily.

 

The ‘error of grammar’ that splits the ‘performing’, into a ‘performer’ and ‘the causal actions of the performer’, … breaks the ‘performing’ out of the ‘genetic-epigenetic’  yin/yang symmetry]. It is this same error that is found in the development of differential calculus where the simplifiction [simplification] is assumed that the ‘present depends only on the immediate past’. 

 

But our experience-based intuition informs us that the entire progressive development of the phenomenon directly impacts the present; e.g. centuries of colonizer oppression have built up relational tensions that can release violently as ‘terrorizings’ in the present.   Meanwhile, scientific reasoning and moral judgement team up to reduce the ‘terrorizing’ to a ‘terrorist’ that is the cause of the terrorist performance, obviating the need to acknowledge the colonizer’s role in the progressive development of the phenomenon.

 

As Nietzsche points out, reason and moral judgement are used together to condemn as we wish without implicating ourselves in the sourcing of a disturbance;

 

“How false is the supposition that an action must depend upon what has preceded it in consciousness ! And morality has been measured in the light of this supposition, as also criminality. . . . The value of an action must be judged by its results, say the utilitarians: to measure it according to its origin involves the impossibility of knowing that origin. But do we know its results ? Five stages ahead, perhaps. Who can tell what an action provokes and sets in motion ? As a stimulus ? As the spark which fires a powder-magazine ? Utilitarians are simpletons —“

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“The re-establishment of “Nature”: an action in itself is quite devoid of value ; the whole question is this: who performed it? One and the same ” crime ” may, in one case, be the greatest privilege, in the other infamy. As a matter of fact, it is the selfishness of the judges which interprets an action (in regard to its author) according as to whether it was useful or harmful to themselves (or in relation to its degree of likeness or unlikeness to them).”— Nietzsche on ‘Morality’ and ‘Herd Behaviour’ in ‘The Will to Power’

 

In the world understood as a transforming-in-the-now relational continuum, there is no past and future, no ‘things-in-themselves’, no ‘fixed identities’, no ‘passage of time’, only ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ in the transforming-in-the-continuing-now.   Epigenetic influence and genetic expression are a non-duality.  Epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression [the yin/yang symmetry].

 

“the dynamics of the storm-cells are conditioning the dynamics of the flow at the same time as the dynamics of the flow are conditioning the dynamics of the storm-cells.

 

The field realm is the primary realm while the visible, material realm is ‘appearances’. This recalls Rumi’s

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I, you, he, she, we.

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In the garden of mystic lovers

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these are not true distinctions.

 

 

 

“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances).” – Erwin Schroedinger

 

“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

 

 

 

As Richard Atleo aka Umeek, a hereditary chief of the Nuu-chah-nulth [Nootka] people, states in his book, ‘Tsawalk’;

 

“The material universe is like an insubstantial shadow of the actual substantial Creator. In this worldview, the highest form of cognition, of consciousness does not occur in the insubstantial shadowlike material realm, but in the realm of creation’s spiritual source’. … The Nuu-chah-nulth saw the material world as a manifestation of the spiritual.” — Umeek

 

Darwin never mentions epigenetic influence, however Lamarck’s model of the living world starts from ‘field’ [les fluides incontenables] that excite (inductively actualize) the genetic expression of biological forms;

 

« Ces autres fluides, qui sont l’eau chargée de gaz dissous ou d’autres matières ténues, l’air atmosphérique que contient l’eau, etc.. je les appellerai fluides contenables, pour les distinguer des fluides subtils, tels que le calorique, la matière électrique, etc.. qu’aucun corps connu ne sauroit contenir. » — Lamarck, ‘Recherches sur l’Organisation des Corps Vivants’

.

In Lamarck’s view, the fields of influence that enveloped and penetrated mineral saturated fluids constituted an epigenetic influence that inductively actualized, orchestrated and shaped ‘genetic expression’.

* * * * *

UPDATE on “Post-Truth” and “Fake News”

 

Abstract: The users of noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammar have constructed a ‘semantic reality’ which is simpler for solving problems.  Instead of honouring the relational physical reality wherein epigenetic influence is inductively actualizing genetic expression, this ‘simpler’ reality starts from ‘genetic expressions’ and portrays the world dynamic ‘in reverse’, as a causal progression jumpstarting from local ‘genetic expressions’ which are notionally endowed with their own internal powers of drive and direction [based on the human ego archetype].  The epigenetic -genetic non-dualism is ignored.  Because there are many different ways of ‘connecting the dots’ in this reverse ‘reconstruction’, two of our current world ‘issues’ arise; (a) the problem of ‘perspectivism’ wherein many different reconstructions can be ‘proven true’, and, (b) the realization that there is no single commonly perceivable ‘truth’ in this reverse reconstruction of the physical reality of our experience.  Pointers are given as to how the relational language and ‘learning circles’ of indigenous peoples avoid these issues.

 

Background: the following short article by Alexis Papazoglou, ‘The Post-Truth Era of Trump is Just What Nietzsche Predicted’

In order to reflect on the following ‘explanation’ of what is going on with the ‘collapse of truth’, one has to prop one’s mind open wider than usual.

What I am describing in this note on what is going on with ‘post-truth’ (the collapse of truth in Western discourse) is an elaboration of Edward Sapir’s finding that;

“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

In this case, I am pointing the finger at ‘being’, aka ‘fixed identity thing-in-itselfhood’ in noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammar, and stating that ‘this is the culprit’ that is responsible for ‘the collapse of truth’ and that we must suspend our infusing of ‘being’ into the semantic realities we are constructing with noun-and-verb language, since our practice of building dependently upon ‘being’ is trapping us in unreal illusion.

 

The following two observations by Nietzsche, on how we fabricate ‘being’ from relational activity are important to this ‘exploration’ into how our use of ‘being’ is leading to the ‘collapse of truth’.

The first of these points out that by a double error of grammar, we (a) impute ‘being’ to a relational activity and (b)relocate the animating source of the activity from ‘epigenetic influence’ that is inductively actualizing the ‘activity’ [the ‘genetic expression induced by epigenetic (field) influence], so that the sourcing power of the development and behaviour of the ‘being’ appears to come from within the ‘being’ rather than from ‘epigenetic influence’ immanent in the energy-charged plenum in which the relational activity is included.   That is, the ‘storming activity’ is a relational activity within the atmospheric flow, but our habit is to reduce the relational activity (which attracts our attention because of the local, visible, tangible ‘form’ of the storming) to a notional ‘independently existing ‘thing-in-itself’ with ‘its own’ internal powers that source its development and behaviour [e.g. … Katrina is growing larger and stronger”, … “Katrina is heading for the Gulf Coast”… etc.]

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

The second of these points is that we use our ‘ego’ as an archetype for ‘independent being’ and apply this archetype to relational forms (activities) in general, which sets up the ‘causal model’ of simple mechanical science.   This anchors our ‘semantic reality construction’ in the dualist split of man and nature as in Genesis 1:28 and as incorporated in Western culture through the dualist Hobbesian/Lockean view of man as ‘separate from nature’ and having the power to ‘improve upon nature’ and thus to own and dominate the land;

 

“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’

 

Sub-conclusions #1: – CERTAINTY:

 

With these two points that Nietzsche makes concerning how we Indo-European/scientific noun-and-verbers infuse ‘being’ into our ‘semantic reality’, we gain the CERTAINTY of causal responsibility for an action and result by being able to attribute an action to an ‘independent being’.  It starts from the ego’s view that when we author an action that has a ‘good result’, we are fully and solely ‘causally responsible’ for that result, and likewise, when someone else authors an action that has a ‘bad result’, they are fully and solely ‘causally responsible’ for that result.  Thus, ‘being’ is the foundation on which Western moral judgement based justice is dependently built.   The certainty that converting relational activities into ‘being’-authored cause-effect actions was acknowledged by religious scholars and priests as providing an efficient way of top-down (God-priest-down) regulating of the social dynamic, as this excerpt from the Catholic doctrine (catechism) illustrates;

“Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.

1731 Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.

1732 As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning. This freedom characterizes properly human acts. It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach.” – Vatican Archives, The Catholic Catechism.

Here we have the Hobbesian/Lockean ‘dualist’ man who is apart from and superior to nature, rather than being included in nature and charged with improving nature [a vile, evil and dangerous space that man must ‘domesticate’, ‘purify’ (drain the swamp)].

Can you imagine how man, inherently NOT in control because he is included in nature, has been ‘driven crazy’ by feeling responsible for what unfolds?  “If I had not let my little Johnny collect shells along the water’s edge, he would never have been swept away by the rogue wave”. “I am to blame for the undeserved early death of my son, woe is me”.  Nietzsche comments on this problem with reason and moral judgement;

“How false is the supposition that an action must depend upon what has preceded it in consciousness ! And morality has been measured in the light of this supposition, as also criminality. . . . The value of an action must be judged by its results, say the utilitarians: to measure it according to its origin involves the impossibility of knowing that origin. But do we know its results ? Five stages ahead, perhaps. Who can tell what an action provokes and sets in motion ? As a stimulus ? As the spark which fires a powder-magazine ? Utilitarians are simpletons —“

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“The re-establishment of “Nature”: an action in itself is quite devoid of value ; the whole question is this: who performed it? One and the same ” crime ” may, in one case, be the greatest privilege, in the other infamy. As a matter of fact, it is the selfishness of the judges which interprets an action (in regard to its author) according as to whether it was useful or harmful to themselves (or in relation to its degree of likeness or unlikeness to them).”— Nietzsche on ‘Morality’ and ‘Herd Behaviour’ in ‘The Will to Power’

 

Clearly, we have some philosophical problems cropping up in our being-based semantic reality constructions.  Nevertheless, being-based semantic reality construction remains the ‘standard’ for rallying Western people around ‘the truth’ and having the public agree on ‘what is real’.  If relational activity had not been doctored with, as it has not been in the relational languages of indigenous aboriginals and in Bohm’s Rheomode and in the E-prime of Bourland et al, then there would be no notion of ‘causal responsibility’ and ‘justice’ would not be by ‘moral judgement’ imposed on ‘beings’ who are, with total CERTAINTY, ‘causally responsible for actions and results’.  ‘Justice’ in the indigenous aboriginal ‘restorative justice’ protocol, goes directly to the restoring of balance and harmony since ‘causality’ can only come from one source when people are included in nature; i.e. from the epigenetic influence that inductively actualizes, orchestrates and shapes ‘genetic expression’ [as in atmospheric flow and storm-cell], and there is NO CERTAINTY AT ALL as to causal source of actions and results.

In modern physics, this same INHERENT UNCERTAINTY shows up in the understanding that ‘relations’ are in a natural precedence over ‘things’;

“By the principle of Occam’s razor, physicists and philosophers prefer ideas that can explain the same phenomena with the fewest assumptions. In this case you can construct a perfectly valid theory by positing the existence of certain relations without additionally assuming individual things. So proponents of ontic structural realism say we might as well dispense with things and assume that the world is made of [relational-spatial] structures, or nets of relations.” – Meinard Kuhlmann, ‘What is Real’, Scientific American, August 2013

This is the non-dualist view of Mach, Poincare, Bohm, Schroedinger where, to paraphrase;  “the world is given only once, as a transforming relational continuum where subject and object are only one”and where “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 other words, it is just as impossible to separate man from nature as it is impossible to separate the storm-cell from the flow it is included in; i.e. the ‘storming’ is a relational activity within the transforming relational continuum.

For the purpose of this ‘post-truth’ discussion, in order to ‘pry open the mind’ to even consider the implications of ‘non-being’-based [purely relational] dynamics, it may be useful to look more closely at ‘our own selfhood’.  We know that a human ‘looks like’ a local, separate, material entity, even if we can’t find an absolute boundary between his inside and the outside world.

Of course, that is also true of a tornado or hurricane.  We see it ‘out there in front of us’ and thus ‘separate from us’, and in fact ‘coming towards us’ in perhaps a threatening way.  Yet our experience-based intuition is also telling us that such forms arise from epigenetic influence that inductively actualizes ‘genetic expression’ as in ‘storming’ and that, as the sailboater well knows, the power that gives drive and direction to the ‘thing-in-the-middle’ is all around the thing-in-the-middle, and while language can lay claim to it with statements such as I moved from A to B, not only the ‘things’ but their ‘locations’ are inherently UNCERTAIN in the case where the physical reality is a transforming relational continuum.

Within a fluid-dynamic, forms and their relative position are mutually dependent so that one cannot be CERTAIN of both at the same time. Words can say that ‘the storm moved from A to B’ but the physical reality only allows for relational transformation of the fluid plenum so that every time the storm steps into the flow, it is not the same flow and neither is it the same storm stepping into the flow [Heraclitus, every’thing’ is in flux].

Finally, if we address the human form, instead of the storming form, we may be more resistant to the suspending of imposing ‘being’.  However, if we consider that we are continually ‘changing’ from conception through early development to maturity then decline and recycling within the transforming relational continuum, … we will note that it is our CONVENTION to impose an absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame around our human so that we can measure the changes in the human ‘over time’.

As modern physics [our own inquiry into ‘what is real’] informs us, to ‘get real’ we have to suspend imposing abstract absolutist measuring/reference framing which has us see ‘change’ as something that happens to ‘local things-in-themselves’ … ‘over time’ … rather than as relational transforming in the continuing now, … and acknowledge what we know about physical reality; i.e. that;

“In nature… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” … “The properties of one mass always include relations to other masses,” … “Every single body of the Universe stands in some definite relations with every other body in the Universe.” Therefore, no object can “be regarded as wholly isolated.” And even in the simplest case, “the neglecting of the rest of the world is impossible.” – Ernst Mach

“Space not only conditions the behaviour of inert masses, but is also conditioned in its state by them.” — Einstein

Matter and space are a non-duality.  Matter is a condensate of field.  Inhabitant and habitat are a non-duality

It is NOT TRUE (‘not real’) that ‘Things Change’ because ‘things’ do not exist, there is only relational activity in a field-based physical reality;

“… the division into matter and field is, after the recognition of the equivalence of mass and energy, something artificial and not clearly defined. Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? What impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space. We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. In this way a new philosophical background could be created. Its final aim would be the explanation of all events in nature by structure laws valid always and everywhere. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone. There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality.” — Einstein and Infeld, ‘Evolution of Physics’

If it is still difficult to ‘see’ the human as a ‘relational complex’ so that we ‘let go of’ our impression of ‘self’ as a local thing-in-itself being, consider, further, the next level of relational activity that we impute ‘being’ to; i.e. ‘the village’ or ‘the community’ or ‘the regime’ or ‘the nation’;

We can start by considering the market activity and the street traffic in an ancient town that has persisted for many generations, the patterns of activities persist even though, like the whirlpool in the stream, there is no ‘thing-in-itself’ there, only things [humans] continually moving on through.  In our mind’s eye, we see the ‘market crowd’ as one big ‘body’ form, if it were a local, visible, material thing-in-itself, even if people are moving into and out of it from all points of the compass to all points of the compass so that the crowd, while it appears ‘stationary’ and ‘persist in its being there’, has no persisting ‘local substance of its own’.  Yet we can make the ‘crowd’ a ‘subject’ and have it inflect verbs, as if it had jumpstart powers of authorship of action and result.   We may speak of ‘the British public’ as if it had a fixed identity, even as the ‘flow-through’ turns from white to brown.

The point is that there are only relational activities in physical reality while ‘things’ are ‘appearances’ so that we are wrong to construct semantic realities based on noun-subjects.  Saddam’s regime is not a fixed identity thing-in-itself but a continuing flow of incoming players and outgoing players, .. yet we speak of ‘eliminating Saddam’s regime’ with a military attack, as if it were a fixed local thing.  Instead it is a huge relationally-extended blur rather than a local thing, just like forms in the flow are inhabitant-habitat non-dualities.

If we drop a large box over a hurricane, enclose it in the box and pull the box with the captive hurricane inside of it, out of and away from the flow, we might expect [to be consistent with our noun-and-verb language] that it will continue to whistle and blow and shake and rattle the walls of the box as we carry it away to dispose of it.  That is, we know how powerful hurricanes can be.  But experience-based intuition will instead have us anticipate that things will go quiet in the box since we ‘have not enclosed the fish in the net’ we gathered in.  The wriggling animus being the epigenetic influence that is inductively actualizing ‘genetic expression’, or as Lamarck calls this animus; les fluides incontenables.

Here we have the basic ‘animating influence in nature’ as something non-local, non-visible and non-tangible [we can’t isolate and measure it in isolation].  Yet we have, with noun-and-verb language-and-grammar, taken that basic animating influence and infused it into semantically invented beings.

To ‘get’ what is going on here, one has to start by acknowledging the full impact of what Nietzsche says about how we make a double error of grammar to convert a relational activity into a ‘being’ plus the God-like power to locally jumpstart behaviour.

What this does, semantically, is to make Hobbesian/Lockean followers out of us all, putting not only ‘man’ but also ‘material objects’ apart from nature and giving them the power to ‘change nature’ [splitting apart subject and object]

The ‘surprise’ you may get here is that … NOTHING that we talk about in our subject-verb-semantic constructs is ‘REAL’.  It ‘sounds real’ but it is just ‘semantic reality’ and not ‘physical reality’.

There is NOTHING in physical reality [a transforming relational continuum] that ‘jumpstarts’ from a subject.  There IS a correspondence between subject-verb constructs and visual forms.  The problem is that ‘subjectizing’ the form [e.g. ‘Katrina’] imputes to it a ‘fixed identity’ and there are no fixed identity things-in-themselves in a flow [transforming relational continuum].  Forms such as ourselves are continually ‘changing’.  They are NOT ‘changing in time’, but as with a storm-cell in the flow [you can’t step into the same river twice] every change in the form simultaneously changes the flow, and vice versa.  In other words, form and flow are a non-duality [‘inhabitant-habitat are a non-duality’].

We are going to pay the price for our dualist semantic splitting apart of the ‘form’ and the ‘flow’ using noun-and-verb constructs by way of the fact that ‘forms’ do not exist, … not as fixed identity entities, not as ‘Katrina’.  This is where Schoedinger is telling us that ‘forms’ are ‘appearances’ or ‘variations in the relational structure of space’.   I am saying that … “there is NO THING THERE” … where the storm is, …  in a particular sense.    As with the storm-cell in the flow, there is something there, and what is there is ‘a relational activity’; i.e. the ‘storming’ that manifests as a form that is continually being ‘re-made’ in its non-dual dynamic with the relational space it is included in.

The animating source of the ‘storming’ is a ‘field’; i.e. ‘epigenetic influence’ that is non-local, non-visible and non-tangible that inductively actualizes the genetic expression [‘the storming’].

Lamarck calls these invisible fields, ‘les fluides incontenables’ that excite the wriggling ‘fluides contenables’, implying that we cannot ‘contain them’ [‘qu’aucun corps connu ne sauroit contenir’], … i.e. that we cannot build a net that will pull them in.  The picture is one in which the fields [‘les fluides incontenables’] ‘excite’ [inductively actualize] the local forms;

« Ces autres fluides, qui sont l’eau chargée de gaz dissous ou d’autres matières ténues, l’air atmosphérique que contient l’eau, etc.. je les appellerai fluides contenables, pour les distinguer des fluides subtils, tels que le calorique, la matière électrique, etc.. qu’aucun corps connu ne sauroit contenir. » — Lamarck, ‘Recherches sur l’Organisation des Corps Vivants’

The point is that the source of animation is the epigenetic influence of the fields and such influence is non-local, non-visible and non-tangible [we can feel it but we can’t grasp it in our fist and contain and measure it].

So, the problem is that we impute ‘fixed identity’ to ‘appearances’ and transfer to them the animating influence that is properly due to ‘epigenetic influence’ that is relational and therefore ‘non-local, non-visible and non-tangible’, … and we proceed to the construction of ‘semantic reality’ on that basis; e.g. in terms of what people and things do as if in an absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame that serves as notional ‘operating theatre’.

This is all very workable and practical for developing a shareable being-based ‘pseudo-reality’ [‘semantic reality’] with the great feature of CERTAINTY in our knowledge of how to act to cause the results that we want, and the danger is that we rarely stop to consider its shortfalls; i.e. in that the CERTAINTY is artificially contrived in the errors of grammar, and how that may get us into trouble as we continue to use this ‘being-based semantic reality’ as our ‘operative reality’ to guide and direct our actions, … as we assume that we can construct actions that will, with certainty, cause desired results, such as the elimination of Saddam’s regime, and more broadly, the apprehension and neutralization of the causal agents responsible for evil actions and results, as in ‘Western moral judgement based justice’.

So, here’s the kicker.  This ‘semantic reality’ that presents the world dynamic in terms of ‘independent things’ and ‘what things do’ is not physical reality, it is just a word-symbol-based RE-presentation that captures ‘appearances’, building on top of them as if they were a solid foundation, missing out on the fact that the physically real dynamic is ‘relational’.

But almost everything Western society ‘talks about’ in its serious scientific, political, economic and social discourse is in these ‘subject-verb’ ‘semantic reality’ terms that we use as our ‘operative reality’ to guide our individual and collective behaviour.

There is no ‘truth’ [no ‘real reality’] in any of our talk about goings-on when we build such talk on the back of noun-and-verb constructs.

So, how has this managed to ‘work out for us’ over the past 2500 years?

Since culture is language, and language, culture, … all of the cultures and subcultures in our society (political, religious, ethnic etc.) ‘make up their own language games’, agreeing on the meaning of words and symbols and definitions.  This is how sovereigntist cultures develop their own ‘semantic operative realities’ that drive and direct their collective behaviours.

In the indigenous aboriginal (traditionalist) culture, there is no ‘buy-in’ to language games that require everyone to believe in the definition of ‘The United States’ as a real, independently-existing thing-in-itself, although there would be ‘buy-in’ to language games that asked for agreement on defining the words ‘Lake Superior’ for what the Ojibwa described as gichi gumi (from Objibwa ‘gichi’ for big, large, great and ‘gumi’ for water, lake, sea) and ‘Lake Michigan’ for what the Ojibwa described as michi gami (from Ojibwa for great water or large lake).

The indigenous aboriginal will therefore become accustomed, in speaking with a colonial settler, to ignore those words and the attached agreed upon meaning that carry important value in the colonial settler culture; e.g. all words that impute Hobbesia/Lockean human status to man and words that imply the independent existence and primacy of ‘the colonizer’s ‘sovereign state’ and its Supreme central authority.

Now, picture this for a dozen different cultures and subcultures employing ‘the same language’ but without ever making clear the different meanings and values assigned to words, as agreed upon within their very different, respective cultures.

 

As Alexis Papazoglou points out in his comments on ‘perspectivism’ in the Nietzsche was right, article  ‘The Post-Truth Era of Trump is Just What Nietzsche Predicted’, people of different cultures may share in a language game by agreeing on many of the meanings and definitions ascribed to words, but opting out of agreement where the words concern the defining values of a culture or subculture, so that differing perspectives are gleaned from one set of words by differing cultures; e.g;

“We all agree certain things are objectively true: Trump’s predecessor as president is Barack Obama, the capital of France is Paris, and so on. But according to perspectivism, we agree on those things not because these propositions are “objectively true,” but by virtue of sharing the same perspective.

When it comes to basic matters, sharing a perspective on the truth is easy – but when it comes to issues such as morality, religion and politics, agreement is much harder to achieve. People occupy different perspectives, seeing the world and themselves in radically different ways. These perspectives are each shaped by the biases, the desires and the interests of those who hold them; they can vary wildly, and therefore so can the way people see the world.

Sub-conclusions #2: – PERSPECTIVISM.  

 

Not only does the noun-and-verb language-and-grammar architecture build in a contrived CERTAINTY that is not found in the physical reality of our actual experience, but it exposes the user collective to a PERSPECTIVISM that allows different people to be extracting very different understandings from the same ‘semantic constructs’ without taking the time to identify and resolve them.  E.g. is an indigenous aboriginal engaging with a settler in English going to stop the settler each time he uses the word ‘The United States’, and say, … “no, no, you can’t keep using a word that implies an ‘independently existing system-in-itself’, there’s no such things in the physically real world of our actual experience”, … or “no, no, you can keep using words that depict men as Hobbesian/Lockean Gods straight out of Genesis 1:28 whose job it is to domesticate, purify and ‘drain the swamp’ that is ‘nature’ with its wild and troublesome ways, … there are no such men.”, … or, “no, no, no, you can’t assume that Saddam Hussein’s regime is causally responsible for ‘its own actions and results’ since it is a relational feature [genetic expression] within the global relational dynamic that is inductively actualized by epigenetic influence.

That is, “it takes a whole global community to raise a troublesome child”.  The appropriate action in this case is to acknowledge that the source of the trouble is relational tensions [epigenetic influence] associated with imbalance [embargos, boycotts?] and to transform relations in the global relational matrix to restore balance and harmony.  This may be difficult to do if there is white supremacist influence that claims entitlement to primary authority in matters of morally judging the behaviours of global participants; i.e. such influence may lead to the persisting application of inappropriate moral judgement, where tracking back causation and responsibility for injurious behaviour ‘dead-ends’ in notional ‘independently-existing sovereign-states-in-themselves’.

Perspectivism is the underpinning of the current sense of the collapsing of truth, as Alexis Papazoglou points out;

“As he [Nietzsche] saw it, once we realise that the idea of an absolute, objective truth is a philosophical hoax, the only alternative is a position called “perspectivism” – the idea there is no one objective way the world is, only perspectives on what the world is like.”

Among these perspectives are the Western CERTAINTY oriented perspectives as in pre-modern-physics ‘scientific perspectives’.

 

 

Sub-conclusions #3: – SCIENCE:

 

Only those cultures with noun-and-verb language-and-grammar architectures ‘got science’.  There is a good reason for this since science uses binary logic which formulates propositions constructed using ‘logical elements’ which are ‘fixed identity things-in-themselves’.  Logic is based on the ‘law of non-contradiction’ which states that a thing, A cannot, at the same time, be B, something other than that which it is.  In mathematical terms, there is no C that A = C and B = C so that A = C = B  so that A = not.A.  Of course, this constraint built into logic, rules out inhabitant-habitat non-duality where the ‘storming’ is, at the same time, the flow it is included in.  In the Vedic terms used for analogy by Schroedinger, Brahman = Atman, “object and subject are only one”.

In a world that is flux, one has to go beyond this overly constraining ‘logic of the excluded third’ to ‘logic of the included third’ (Lupasco, Nicolescu etc.).   There is nothing stopping us from ‘going there’ but science is not only a mathematically rigorous discipline, it is political because scientists are people, and thus where thorny and divisive scientific issues arise, decisions on which ‘side’ to go with bring out political activism.

One might think that scientists could go with BOTH the one AND the other, in the case of non-dualism [relational view] and dualism [being-based view], and while this is theoretically true, entrenched social values come into play; e.g. the CERTAINTY that associates with the being-based dualist paradigm leads directly to moral judgement based retributive justice, supports the assumed ‘reality’ of win/lose competition, gives full and sole attribution to an independently existing causal agent-in-itself, for authorship of his own actions and accomplishments [the ‘full and sole attribution of causation and responsibility’ is very appealing to the ego of those seeing themselves as ‘winners’ and it is an excellent tool for top-down suppression of dissidence].

On the other hand, the non-dualist path erodes all of these just-mentioned ego-stroking benefits to dualism.

Overall, it is evident that users of noun-and-verb language-and-grammar have created a ‘semantic reality’ that is easier to solve problems in; i.e. it delivers ‘economy of thought’ as Mach says, however, this ‘simpler semantic reality’ cuts corners in its representations of reality. In particular, instead of accepting that epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression [inhabitant-habitat non-duality as in storm-cell—flow non-duality], our common, everyday, media affirmed, politician-affirmed ‘semantic reality’ reconstructs physical reality ‘in-reverse’ by reifying genetic expressions and imputing God-like jumpstart powers to them, as derives from the archetype of human ego.  This reverse reconstruction opens the door to many different solutions [‘perspectivism’] and the associated awareness that there is no ‘true reality’

The fact that the scientific semantic reality constructions are fixed identity being-based and therefore ‘disconnected’ from the physical reality of our actual experience perpetuates the problem that the scientific reality in our head, that we are employing as our ‘operative reality’ to direct our actions such as ‘eliminating the Saddam Hussein regime’ [perceiving ‘it’ as a fixed identity thing-in-itself or ‘logical element’ rather than acknowledging it as a relational activity within the global relational activity plenum] remains a problem.  This problem of using logic based semantic realities to construct an operative reality that will guide and direct our actions is what opens the door to unanticipated and unaddressed ‘externalities’ such as the ‘rise of ISIS’.

That which Bohm has termed ‘incoherence’ as arises from the general mismatch between science-approved logic-based actions and the physical reality of our actual experience is continuing source of externalities as in the mismatch between “the colonizers are constructing a wonderful new world in North America” and “the colonizers are destroying a wonderful established world on Turtle Island”.  Logic can be used to affirm the truth of both of these contradictory propositions.

What is missing is that it is impossible, in the non-dualist understanding of nature, to isolate ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ as processes-in-themselves. In the non-dualist understanding, ‘construction and destruction’ are a non-duality known and experienced as ‘relational transformation’.  While it is true that ‘constructing a house in the forest cannot be done without destroying some forest’, it is ‘more true’ that these same dynamics can be more naturally understood as part of the continuing-in-the-now relationally transforming plenum/continuum.

The only reason we break them into two separate things is because we have burnt the bridge inherent in ‘relational tensions’ as the source of ‘genetic expression’.  Relational tensions between colonizers and colonized peoples are the source of periodic eruptions of violence, however, once the fixed identity being is imposed in the construction of semantic reality, those through whom the eruption manifests is depicted as the full and sole causal agency responsible for his actions and their results.  The sourcing trail leading back through violent colonized people to the colonizers who are judging them [colonizers have global control] is dead-ended in the notional ‘fixed identity being’ that forensic science imposes.  Politicians will then fill the gap of the missing animus with the concept of ‘evil’, within a simple ‘good and evil’ narrative that depicts ‘their side’ as the white knights standing on the ground of God-blessed moral righteousness and defending against the forces of darkness and evil.

Philosophers of mathematics within the scientific community understand the arbitrariness of giving binary logic such a fundamenal role in science’s ‘semantic portraits of reality’, which shuts out the social values associated with non-dualism from entering into society at large, since ‘being-based’ ‘science’, ‘reason’ and ‘logic’ are the official validators, in Western socio-political dynamics of ‘what is real’.  Binary logic is used ‘by convention’ and certainly not because ‘nature’, as in the physical reality of our actual experience, is ‘logical’ [Nature is decidedly NOT logical; “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” – Albert Einstein]

Using the logic of fixed identity ‘logical elements’ is not a requirement but a ‘prejudice’;

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

So, with respect to our scientific, rational, logical semantic constructions, … everything we say, everything politicians say, everything the news media says is NOT TRUE, in the sense of matching the physical reality of our actual experience.  Our entire body of Western cultural discourse of the scientific, rational, logical sort, is a contrived ‘semantic reality’ based on superficial visual appearances.

“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 fact that the ‘facts’ reported by various reporting media tend to overlay, cluster and concentrate as if suggesting that ‘the truth’ lies somewhere near the centre of the clustering, is a mistaken notion that is now in the process of collapsing.  There is no one-truth-for-all in a transforming relational continuum. Everyone’s unique experience is ‘true’ and it is different for each of us.  Hence Nietzsche’s suggestion;

“The more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our ‘concept’ of this matter, our ‘objectivity’ be.”

Hence the indigenous aboriginal cultural tradition of the ‘learning circle’ where everyone’s unique experience-based perspective is heard and respectfully listened to, as the talking stick is passed from one to another, precedes by thousands of years, and is right on target with Nietzsche’s suggestion as to how to transcend ‘perspectivism’.

Picture an indigenous aboriginal with his relational language, alongside a member of society employing being-based (non-relational) language, observing a storm-cell forming.  They would both see the same emerging visual form but the indigenous aboriginal would see the flow-plenum as the animating source of the dynamic while the member of Western society would see the storm-cell as the source of its own dynamics [just as Western man’s ego sees himself as the source of his own dynamics, as in the Hobbesian/Lockean view of man who is apart from nature and given by God the job of ‘improving’ on its brutish wild and dangerous aspects].

The indigenous person observing the storm-cell would understand that “the sky is pimpling up more aggressively”, perhaps due to the opening of cloud cover and the increase in solar irradiance or the opening of cool ocean water layers and the surfacing of warm ocean currents while the employers of ‘being-based’ non-relational language would simply understand that “the storm-cell is growing larger and stronger”, as his ego might have him think of his own development, as if he were not “included in a relational dynamic greater than himself” and as if he, in his Hobbsian/Lockean pride, lacked the humility to admit that “Life is something that happens to us while we are busy making other plans” [John Lennon].

Sapir’s comment on language and reality can be understood right here, as can be F. David Peat’s and David’s Bohm’s comments that Algonquin languages capture the relational understanding of physical reality, of modern physics.

“The problem with English is that when it tries to grapple with abstractions and categories it tends to trap the mind into believing that such categories have an equal status with tangible objects. Algonquin languages, being for the ear, deal in vibrations [waves] in which each word is related directly, not only to process of thought, but also to the animating energies of the universe.

… [in modern physics] … It is impossible to separate a phenomenon from the context in which it is observed. Categories no longer exist in the absence of contexts.

Within Indigenous science, context is always important. Nothing is abstract since all things happen within a landscape and by virtue of a web of interrelationships. The tendency to collect things into categories does not exist within the thought and language of, for example, Algonquin speakers.

This leads to a profoundly different way of approaching and thinking about the world. For, in the absence of categories, each thing is mentally experienced on its own merits, and for what it actually is. Rather than indulging in comparison or judgment, Indigenous speakers attempt to enter into relationship with them.

What is needed, Bohm argued in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, is a new sort of language, one based on processes and activity, transformation and change, rather than on the interactions of stable objects. Bohm called this hypothetical language the “rheomode.” It is based primarily on verbs and on grammatical structures deriving from verbs. Such a language, Bohm argued, is perfectly adapted to a reality of enfolding and unfolding matter and thought.

David Bohm had not known when he wrote of that concept that such a language is not just a physicist’s hypothesis. It actually exists. The language of the Algonquin peoples was developed by the ancestors specifically to deal with subtle matters of reality, society, thought, and spirituality.

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’

 

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CONCLUSIONS: – CERTAINTY, PERSPECTIVISM, SCIENCE:

 

I don’t know how to to bring the above three discussions together in a ‘synoptic’ view.  As Wittgenstein said, getting to the synoptic view while using a language that is ‘single-issue-at-a-time’ is like driving over a mountainous landscape on single roads that go from A to B, from B to C, C to D etc. etc. only getting a thin slice of the overall landscape on each investigatory journey.  He recommended continual surveying of the connections as the way to the synoptic view.

I picture the ‘synoptic view’ as the imaging of the 3D hologram from interference patterns printed on a 2D magazine page.  It is something newer and greater that transcends the dimensionality of the methodical investigations that suddenly ‘pops out’ on the basis of ‘coherency’ across the diverse multiplicities of investigations one is bringing into connective confluence.

In this case, Western culture has opted for a fixed-identity ‘being’-based RE-presenting of observations of the world within semantic reality constructions that give ‘certainty’ through a ‘causal model’ where we can attribute full and sole causal responsibility for actions and ‘results’ to particular fixed identity beings.   Western moral judgement based justice is built on top of this ‘certainty’ based.

Confusing the issue is ‘perspectivism’ wherein, while we are all using a common language or ‘playing a common language game’, each player tends to agree with the bulk of the words, symbols and definitions [essential for the language game to work] yet associate their own subcultural definitions and even personal definitions according to their experiential bias.  This leads to a seemingly common rhetoric in the media and by politicians, which would seem to be some more or less accurate conveying of ‘the truth’.   However, when this supposed ‘truth’ is put to the test, it is revealed that ‘truth is a hoax’ [Nietzsche] and that everyone is taking from the language game whatever they personally want to take from it; i.e. everyone has their own perspective that is grounded in their own personal values.  The way to address this is to STOP LOOKING FOR THE TRUTH and accept that there is only personal experience based perspective, and therefore try to listen to the diverse multiplicity of perspectives and bring them into a holographic connective confluence, as in the ‘learning circle’ of the indigenous aboriginal tradition.

Science is a very deceptive player in this overall game.  Science employs binary logic which uses fixed identities for its logical elements.  Therefore science [‘scientific thinking’] has no problem with propositions such as; “Saddam’s regime is the causal source of harmful disturbances”.  And science likewise has no problem with “this drone technology [or etc.] can eliminate the causal sources of harmful disturbances”.  In each case, the causal logic in the propositions is not questioned.  Logic is inherently subjective and incomplete, and this is a huge exposure which has logic-based interventions engendering massive ‘externalities’ which are unanticipated and unaddressed by science; i.e. ‘science never knows what it is doing, exactly’.

It is not that science is not a useful tool, it is instead, as Nietzsche says, that reason, since Socrates and Plato, has been put into an unnatural precedence over intuition.  The logical mission of eliminating the Saddam regime is ‘accomplished’ irrespective of the unanticipated engendering of major ‘externalities’ such as the ‘rise of ISIS’.  The logical mission of eliminating emotional distress [mental disorder] has been successfully accomplished by administering a lobotomy

“The Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz is credited with inventing the lobotomy in 1935, for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1949.  Moniz reported the treatment as a success for patients with conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, panic disorder and mania, according to an article published in 2011 in the Journal of Neurosurgery. But the operations had severe side effects, including increased temperature, vomiting, bladder and bowel incontinence and eye problems, as well apathy, lethargy, and abnormal sensations of hunger, among others.”

Drones are a success in eliminating colonized rebels pushing back against colonizer oppression.  Nuclear bombs are a success by ‘saving lives’ by settling conflicts more quickly. Reason makes use of one-sided binary logic that is inherently subjective and incomplete.  The ‘successful intervention’ to eliminate Saddam’s regime which, in the same fell stroke, spawned the rise of ISIS, is another example very much along the line of the lobotomy, which exposes the inherent subjectivity and incompleteness of logic, and cautions against putting ‘reason’ into an unnatural precedence over intuition.

 

Why am I cherry-picking nasty things about science out of a vast history of wonder scientific achievements?

This recalls a current political disturbance wherein a Canadian senator has asked why Canada’s First Nations Truth and Reconciliation Commission, charged with investigating cultural genocide by way of taking indigenous children from their families and putting them in ‘residential schools’ did not report on all the good works of well-intentioned teachers and others involved, including the positive experiences, in some respects, of many of the indigenous children.

What the Truth and Reconciliation Commission did was to open up space for people to share their experience, as in ‘talking circles’.  Participating in such ‘learning circles’ is itself a way of gaining understanding experientially, intuitively.   The subjective, selective study f [deemed-] exemplary events is an approach for proving what one already knows, as in ‘perspectivism’.

The problem with scientific thinking, in general, is that it is only our hypotheses that we can prove and/or successfully accomplish and these are inherently subjective and over-simplistic (incomplete) relative to the unknowable relational complexity in which we are included as we use these hypotheses to direct our actions.  Our intuition can be our ‘wise counsel’ that oversees our formulating of logical propositions; e.g. ‘DDT kills mosquitoes’ can be proven true but ‘what else it does’ within a relational complex space goes unaddressed by science.  It has to go unaddressed in that such complexity as pertains to a transforming relational continuum is unknowable.

Some people will argue that lobotomies are a good thing since they can resolve depression, schizophrenia, panic disorder and mania.  These people are no longer causing a disturbance in ‘our society’.  Chemical castration was used to ‘cure’ homosexuality in males.  Who can establish the ‘truth’ in these matters?

Perhaps we should conclude, as Nietzsche did, that ‘truth is a hoax’;

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries’ old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.” — Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’

 

The last word, then, I will leave to Henri Poincaré, who saw reason and intuition as a non-duality wherein, within intuition was an immanent epigenetic influence that inductively actualizes genetic expression (logical propositions), affirming Nietzsche’s claim that intuition must be restored to its natural precedence over reason.

“It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent. … Logic, therefore, remains barren unless fertilised by intuition.”- Henri Poincaré

That is pretty much the synoptic view that has been alluded to throughout this essay; i.e. ‘epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression’, and we have remove genetic expression from its fertilizing source and reconstituted it as a ‘thing-in-itself’.

 

 

 

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