An inclusional worldview
Duelling Realities
The life we are reaching out to grasp is the we who are reaching out to grasp it. –R. D. Laing
click here to skip to Part II, ‘Non-Duelling Realities’
Introduction:
It has been suggested by Moonhawk (MIT linguist) and others, that “the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part” is a scam, in the sense that it is built on the error warned of by Ernst Mach, of “regarding the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, as the basis of the real world [of our natural experience]”, … that arises from our noun-and-verb architecture of language.
Bohm also points to the ‘incoherence’ that arises in the real relational world of our natural experience, by our continuing belief in the ‘Western civilization enterprise’ within its binary logical systems of government, commerce and justice; … a ‘what is’ that is denying the ‘what could be’ that is accessible to people who do not fall into the trap that Mach warns of; … “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned”. The latter words are from Friedrich Engels and echo the descriptions of the Iroquois Confederation given also by Thomas Jefferson and others.
My contention is that those philosophers are correct, who identify the ‘flaw’ built into the genomic structure of Western civilization as ‘predicative logic’, … the characterizing of the world dynamic in noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language-and-grammar constructs, … i.e. in the ‘subject-and-predicate’, ‘cause-and-effect actions of notionally ‘independent’ things’, … aka, … ‘science’.
It is not ‘science’ and the predicative logic of ‘scientific thinking, per se’ that is the ‘flaw’ in the genomic structure of Western civilization, it is, as Mach warned, in “regarding the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought [= ‘science’], as the basis of the real world”.
My contention is, further, that those philosophers are correct, who maintain that the physical reality of our natural experience is a transforming relational activity continuum in which relational forms such as ourselves are continually gathering and being re-gathered in the manner of storm-cells in the flow of the atmosphere; … a world that is given only once wherein there are no ‘binaries’ and no split between subject-and-object, observer-and-observed, inhabitant-and-habitat, matter-and-space, …where “the life we are reaching out to grasp is the we who are reaching out to grasp it” (R.D. Laing).
There are two different types of types of logic we can use in generating a reason-based understanding of the world and our relationship with[in] it, and this forces us to pay attention to how these English words that I am streaming in these sentences and paragraphs are being received and processed.
In the flow-based languages of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, there are only two temporal tenses; ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ as befits the relational worldview wherein the inhabitants are included as relational features in a transforming relational activity continuum. The logic that must used in this case is ‘impredicative logic’ which handles the situation wherein;
“[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
Each new thing we define, in this case, implies changes to everything else, so that we cannot add new members to a set of things, without changing all of the other members (redefining the rules of membership in the set of things). One can imagine the earth’s biosphere as being of fixed volume so that the emerging of new things is reciprocally complemented by changes in the things that are there already [an ecosystemic mutually interdependent relation]. Similarly, one can imagine the earth’s atmosphere with a constant sum of thermal/kinetic energy with a number of storm-cells in it, where the emerging of a new storm is reciprocally complemented by energy changes in all the rest.
In the ‘being’ [‘independent object’] and ‘what beings do’ Indo-European/Scientific languages, there are three temporal tenses; ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ and each tense implies the ‘existence’ of an ‘objective world’, so that we have world-1 at time t1 and world-2 at time t2 and etc. etc. In this way of RE-presentation, we can monitor the ‘changes’ in these successive states of the world in space and time. This implies that we, the observer, can get outside of the world to monitor it and that we can measure things in the world (their spatial extension and their location) relative to a notional ‘absolute space reference frame’ and that we can measure the changes of these things in the world (changes in their spatial extension and their location) relative to a notional ‘absolute time reference’ [the so-called ‘fourth dimension’ of Newtonian science or ‘t’ in the x,y,z,t coordinate system].
Thanks to the absolute space and absolute time referencing frame, each new thing we define, in this case, can be defined independently of what is already there, so that we can add new members to a set of things, without changing all of the other members. This is a predicative definition of the thing. If we consider the set of all things we would call a ‘house’, we could add as many new members of this set as we want to, without changing the qualifying member definition. But in the physical reality of our natural experience, we know that ‘constructing a house’ is at the same time ‘destroying some forest/meadow’ and that there really is no ‘absolute space and absolute time reference frame’, so that, according to our experience, we live in a transforming relational activity continuum wherein ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ are like ‘hitting’ and ‘fielding’ in baseball, conjugate [reciprocally complementary] aspects of one dynamic, the dynamic of relational transformation.
The ‘Western civilization enterprise’ grounds itself in ‘science’ and uses the predicative definitions wherein the subject-predicate action “I constructed a house” can be repeated as many times as we like without having to change any definitions. This has us falling into the trap warned of by Mach, wherein we find ourselves; “… regarding the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, as the basis of the real world”. The house builder does not ‘really’ reside in an absolute space and absolute time reference frame; i.e. the physical reality of his natural experience is, according to his experience-based intuition, is affirming Heraclitus;
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus
The Western civilization enterprise, in spite of having fallen into the trap of confusing idealized intellectual RE-presentation for ‘the real world’ and generating incoherence and confusion thereby, continues on, largely by it’s being supported by academia and the education that is ‘infused into’ each newly rising generation.
“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.” – Jules Henry, cultural anthropologist, in ‘Culture Against Man’
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“Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, 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
If it sounds as if I am ‘rejecting science and academia’ in this introduction, let me dispel that impression. As with Poincaré and Mach, … I am rejecting the Western civilization enterprise, for having taken ‘science’ ‘literally’ and employed it as the ‘operative reality’ for its enterprise. In this essay, I discuss the two ‘duelling realities’, the (a) relational reality that puts ‘experience-based intuition’ into a natural precedence over ‘scientific/rational intellection’, and the (b) non-relational ‘being’-based reality that puts ‘scientific/rational intellection’ into an unnatural precedence over ‘experience-based intuition’. Or, in terms of logic, the duelling realities are, in the same respective order, ‘Pragmatist idealization’ [‘science is a useful tool whose idealized representations should not be confused for reality’], and ‘Cantorian realism’ [The absolute truths of logics and mathematics exist in the world prior to our human discovery of them].
Given that the propositions in this essay are ‘on target’, there is no need to ‘take actions’ against ‘the world out there’ to ‘set things straight’ since we talking about ‘switching out the relative precedence’ of two duelling realities as to which one gets to sit at the helm as the ‘operative reality’ and which one plays the supportive tool role. Of course, if there were a general move [it may be underway] towards restoring experience-based intuition [the (a) reality] to its natural precedence over being-based intellection [the (b) reality], then we could look forward to de-emphasis of the role of Western hierarchical institutions and re-emphasis of a social relational dynamic wherein; … “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned”.
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Duelling Realities
I am writing this to suggest to you that we English-speakers [Indo-European/Scientific language speakers] have ‘two realities’ at our disposal, one of which (a) comes through our natural relational experience of being situationally included in a transforming relational activity continuum, … and another reality, (b), which comes through the “intellectual machinery” of noun-and-verb language-and-grammar which we employ “in the representation of the world on the stage of thought” and are prone to “regard as the basis of the real world” in contradiction to the advice of Mach, Emerson, Nietzsche, Poincaré, Bohm, Shroedinger, Whorf, and others;
“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
It’s a bit late for the warning since Western civilization has been building its institutions of government, commerce and justice on this basis, of “regarding noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language-and-grammar constructs employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought… as the basis of the real world”.
There is no doubt in my mind that MIT linguist Dan (Moonhawk) Alford’s suggestion is ‘on target’ in his contending that ‘academia’ is in a state of denial of Whorf’s finding that Western society has been using ‘the wrong reality’ as the guiding reference for the social dynamic, … because …. the ‘intellectual stakes’ have become so large;
“What are these academics so afraid of that they can’t face and contemplate and answer student’s questions about Whorf’s actual text? Why the smoke and mirrors? I suspect that they fear, and rightly so, that the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part, in fact, is at stake; or at least the superior attitude that often accompanies it. It may be a fear that what we’re culturally heir to is ‘just another worldview and its langscapes’ rather than exemplifying, as we tend to want to believe, eternal and universal human logic, which we’re simply ‘better at’ than people who speak other languages outside of the Indo-European language family. As John Lucy says, relativity “challenges assumptions which lie at the heart of much modern social and behavior research — namely its claim to be discovering general laws and to be truly scientific.” – Dan (Moonhawk) Alford
The downsides of this ‘error’ of our society having oriented to ‘the wrong reality’ [the over-simplified, language-based superficial version of reality] are huge. For example, moral judgement based justice has no place in the physical reality of our natural experience. If we had not chosen to put the ‘wrong reality’ in precedence over the physical reality of our natural (relational) experience, our justice would be ‘restorative justice’ and not ‘moral judgement based retributive justice’, and the social dynamics of our society would not be by top-down regulatory control but would be such that; “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned”, … as in societies that opted to keep ‘the other reality’ in precedence as the primary guide to individual and collective behaviour; i.e. the physical reality of our natural experience which is nothing like the intellectual reality of noun-and-verb construct based representations. The ‘path not take’ by Western civilization is implied (not in its particulars but in its general relational social dynamical architecture) by the following;
“To Engels, Morgan’s description of the Iroquois [in Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society and The League of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois] was important because “it gives us the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no state.” Jefferson had also been interested in the Iroquois’ ability to maintain social consensus without a large state apparatus, as had Franklin. Engels described the Iroquoian state in much the same way that American revolutionaries had a century earlier: “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households — still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal — including the women.” — Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders
The Two Realities:
The two realities under review here (along with how they relate to one another), are;
(a) the world seen as ‘a transforming relational activity continuum’ wherein individual ‘things’ form from mutually reciprocal influence, something that can be discussed using a flow-based language with two temporal tenses (earlier and later). This reality has no subject-object splitting and individuals for whom this reality is their primary reality see themselves as sailboaters or surfers within an energy-charged plenum whose development and behaviour derives from the relational dynamics they are situationally included in, as with convection cells in a flow; i.e the flow is an energy-charged relational plenum which engenders relational forms whose actions are continuing the dynamics of the flow-habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the flow-habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the relational forms that ‘inhabit’ it.
(b) the world seen as a collection of local, visible, tangible material objects that reside, operate and interact in a habitat that is ‘independent’ of the dynamics of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it. This ‘habitat’ that serves as a container that is independent of the thing inhabiting it is, ultimately, in our minds, an absolute space and absolute time reference frame. This reality splits apart subject and object, and humans and all organisms are seen as independently-existing ‘powerboaters’ with their own internal powers of authorship of development and behaviour.
According to the views presented in this essay, the ‘forms’ that come to us by way of visual sensing and touching are relational forms in the transforming relational activity continuum (the energy-charged flow that is ‘world given only once’) a world which includes the observer that is looking out into it;
The life we are reaching out to grasp is the we who are reaching out to grasp it. –Laing
“The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.” – Erwin Schroedinger
In the physical reality of our natural experience, we understand that our own dynamics [the dynamics, of we, the inhabitants] are conditioning the dynamics of our habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamic of the ‘inhabitants’ [Mach’s principle].
Language gives us “the intellectual mechanics that give representation to the world on the stage of thought” that we [MIS-] take as the basis of the real world, … as we are presently doing in ‘Western civilization’.
As Dan (Moonhawk) Alford asserts: … “the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part, in fact, is at stake”.
The fallout from this [MIS-]taking our (b) reality for reality and using it as our ‘operative reality’, denies us a society in which; “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials, where all quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. … “, … a ‘restorative justice’ oriented social ordering that arises from keeping in its natural precedence, the physical reality of our natural relational experience.
There is confusion and incoherence in our social dynamic that will continue to grow in the absence of a general social acknowledging that … “the (b) intellectual noun-and-verb, language and grammar RE-PRESENTATIONS of the world, fail to capture the (a) physical reality of our natural experience.
The incoherence arises insofar as we use the (b) reality as the ‘operative reality’ to guide our individual and collective behaviour due to a gap between the changes that we actually experience in association with an ‘action’ and the ‘result’ that we desire and expect to bring about with the ‘action’. For example, the intellectual representation ‘DDT kills mosquitoes’ encourages us to think in terms of ‘cause-and-effect action’ and to ‘spray our land with DDT so as to cause the death of the mosquitoes that have been residing, operating and interacting with us in our community. Just as George W. Bush announced ‘mission accomplished’ in the case of the initiative kill the regime of Saddam Hussein, we can affirm the ‘cause’ and ‘result’ of our ‘actions’ WITHIN THE (b) OPERATIVE REALITY, but that is merely a ‘logical operative reality’ and what is going on in the (a) physical reality of our natural experience is very different. The concept of ‘cause-and-effect action’ is just too neat and tidy to be ‘real’ in the sense of the physical world of our actual experience.
The Problem with the (b) Reality Concept of ‘Cause-Effect Action’ and How the (b) and (a) Realities ‘Relate’
Herein lies the ‘heart of the matter’ of rising confusion and incoherence in Western civilization and it has been often spoken of by philosophers, but never ‘picked up on’ by Western civilization as a whole, since academia and its influence on the institutions of Western society; government, commerce and justice, has been and continues to be an overall staunch supporter of putting (b) reality into an unnatural precedence over (a) reality. The different values and motivations that arise as a result can be seen by exploring the concept of ‘cause-and-effect action’ through an example [the child-soldier] and by considering the following observations by Nietzsche wherein he refers to belief in the ‘subject and predicate concept’ [‘cause-effect action concept’] as ‘a great stupidity’.
“That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force–in will, in intention–it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 484
What Nietzsche is saying [in his overall physical context] is that while the world of our experience is a transforming relational activity continuum which ‘recycles itself’ (enfolding into itself and unfolding from out of itself), the intellectual ‘subject-and-predicate constructs’ we use to give RE-presentation to the world of our experience in the notional parts-wise terms of ‘beings’ and ‘what they do’.
‘Being’ is an abstract concept [idealization] that comes built into noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language-and-grammar; i.e. ‘being’ is not a concept understood by peoples that employ flow-based [relational] languages [e.g. indigenous aboriginal societies where the base case is that; “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials, where all quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. … “].
‘Being’ is an abstract idealization [not affirmable by natural experience] that plays a foundational role in the intellectual subject-and-predicate grammar, the grammar of ‘cause-and-effect action’;
“Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. “Reason” in language — oh, what an old deceptive witch she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’
Our natural experience is of inclusion in a relationally transforming continuum wherein ‘everything is in flux’ [Heraclitus] and where ‘forms’ are ‘activities’ within the world as a transforming relational activity continuum. Sure, we can take an activity such as a hurricane, and by using our noun-and-verb language-and-grammar, give it a name, ‘Katrina’, and have this subject-noun inflect a verb and produce a predicate, as in ‘Katrina is growing larger and stronger’, and, ‘Katrina is ravaging New Orleans’, … imputing both ‘being’ to a relational-activity, and ‘cause-and-effect action’ (Katrina ravaged New Orleans). As Nietzsche captures it;
“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
Clearly ‘cause’ does not jumpstart from a ‘being’; e.g. ‘Katrina’ is, in the (a) reality of our experience, a ‘becoming’, a ‘relational form’ within the transforming relational activity continuum. The ‘subject and predicate’ constructs of language, meanwhile, give us impression [“the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, … gives us the impression”] of dynamics that does away with our having to bother our minds about how the ‘subject’ as ‘idealized being’ is an ‘activity’ that is inextricably included within the world-given-only-once, … a transforming relational activity continuum [e.g. as in modern physics]. If we acknowledge this (a) reality wherein the relational form is an ‘activity’ within a ‘transforming relational activity continuum’ rather than an ‘independent being’, as modern physics suggests, then we are in the relational world of Heraclitus and Mach;
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus
“The dynamic of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants” – Mach
The forms as activity-cells within a flow [transforming relational activity continuum] are thus ‘interdependent’ in a fundamental way; i.e. they are continually mutually influencing one another in their development and behaviour [as in the relational ‘ecosystem dynamic’]
“[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
What this implies in the case of ‘cause-and-effect action’ is that relational influence [fields] are the more fundamental ‘cause’ and ‘result’;
“Fields of force are the primary reality, and ‘matter’ a secondary or derived phenomenon” —Michael Faraday
‘Supply’ (output) and ‘demand’ (input) are not the source of ‘relational ecosystem dynamics’, they are the ‘result’. The only reason for the convection cell to form is to transport thermal energy from regions of thermal energy field (relative) surplus to regions of thermal energy field (relative) deficit. Using noun-and-verb language, we can eclipse the sourcing-and-receiving authorship of field by imputing ‘independent machine status’ [‘being’] to the cell and impute to the cell the actions of ‘input’ and ‘output’, as if the space the cell is included in is a ‘passive habitat’ that is being exploited by the cell that is sucking resources from it, and is being used as a receptacle for what the cell no longer needs.
This is how we use noun-and-verb language-and-grammar to get from ‘reality (a)’ to ‘reality (b)’; i.e. we notionally convert the (a) reality ‘cell in the flow’ to the (b) reality ‘independently-existing machine that resides, operates and interacts in a passive habitat whose resources the machine can exploit and whose voluminous capacity can be used as a disposal receptacle for what the machine no longer wants’. Instead of the habitat being acknowledged as the mother of that cells/inhabitants that are continually gathering and being regathered within it [as with storm-cells in the atmosphere], the cells are RE-presented [using noun-and-verb, language-and-grammar], in a (b) reality as independent machines with internal powers of sourcing and receiving that are stirring up the fluid medium they are included in, in direct contradiction to the (a) physical reality of our experience wherein the fluid-medium ‘is the message’.
The intellectually convenient impression that noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language-and-grammar achieves, by restarting, in the intellect, the world dynamic in the revised terms of the dynamics of notional ‘independent things’, is to get rid of having to hold-in-the-mind, all of the relations between and amongst the relational forms-and-influences that are associated with the unique situational inclusion of particular relational forms within the transforming relational activity continuum. The ‘relational forms’, now seen by language as ‘independent things’, are stripped of their unique, relational-situational essence and synthetically re-outfitted from scratch as objects that can be locally re-defined, by their own local attributes. Science has been built upon this relations-stripping, locally reconstructed, local being-based generalization within an absolute space and absolute time reference frame ‘setting’, which opens the way for scientific predicting of outcomes (desired future states of affairs) in cause-and-effect action terms; … spraying DDT is a causal action that will result in the death of mosquitoes [the desired future state of affairs]
“Science itself, … may be regarded as a minimization problem, consisting of the completest possible presenting of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought” —Ernst Mach
Of course, this (b) reality depiction is a logical depiction, whereas in the (a) physical reality of our natural experience, there is only the transforming relational activity continuum (the world given only once) with ourselves as relational forms (activities) with ‘agent of transformation influence’ within it, as Emerson captures in ‘The Method of Nature’, chiding us, at the same time, for reducing ourselves from our (a) reality ‘agent of transformation’ within the transforming relational activity continuum to a (b) reality ‘doer-of-deeds’ within a habitat that is notionally independent of its inhabitants;
“Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’
The Example of the Child-Soldier vis a vis Reality (a) and Reality (b)
In reality (a), the child is seen as a relational form within a transforming relational activity continuum, much as the convection cell in the flow which is the flow at the same time as the relational form which gathers within the flow. As Emerson says, the flow not only inhabits the organism, it creates it, so that there is no sense of ‘independent existence’ here.
In reality (b), the reality of mainstream science and academia, the child is seen as an ‘independent reason-driven system with internal process driven and directed development and behaviour that resides, operates and interacts within a habitat that is deemed ‘independent’ of the ‘inhabitants’ that reside, operate and interact within it. As such, the child is deemed ‘fully and solely responsible for its own behaviour’. Western society qualifies this modeling of the human as a ‘being’ with internal knowledge and intellectual processing-driven behaviour, by speaking of ‘the age of responsibility’, meaning that it takes some time for loading of knowledge and interpretational programs into the interior of the child, to make sense of this ‘fully and solely responsible’ proviso that is forced upon this intellectual conceptualizing by the notion of the ‘independent being’ of the child.
In any case, the (b) reality RE-presentation of the relational form labelled ‘child’ gives the impression that the child’s ‘actions’, however well-informed or not-well-informed, as jumpstart SOURCED from internal processes within the child and that such actions deliver an explicit ‘result’ or ‘outcome’.
If the child soldier puts his gun in someone’s mouth and blows their head off then Western science uses ‘cause and effect’ to assert that the child soldier’s action is the ‘cause’ of the man’s death (‘the effect’), and Western moral judgement based retributive justice contends that he is the offender and the dead man the victim and that he, the child soldier, must be punished for having been the ‘doer’ of this evil ‘deed’. The (b) ‘reality’ is operative here; i.e. the ‘being’-based, scientific ‘what independent things do’ reality’.
However, according to our common experience affirmed by psychological studies;
“Children model their behavior primarily on the behavior of their parents and other authority figures. Whether or not this behavior is effective at producing happiness doesn’t prevent the child from modeling it; the modeling is not a result of reasoning, but is due to simple observation and imitation. This mimicry is illustrated in the old saying “Like father, like son,” or now better put, “Like parent, like child.” Whether parents are happy or not doesn’t stop a child from imitating what he or she observes; children are like dry sponges ready to absorb the first water they come in contact with.”
In other words, the authoring source or ‘cause’ of the result (dead man) has ‘relational roots’ that go deeper than the child, contradicting the notion that ‘local cause-effect actions’ are the authoring source of this ‘factual reality’.
Furthermore, the killing of the man is like ‘taking-out’ a key stone in an arch so that what we see as ‘the result’, the dead (key stone) man [independent-human-being], is not the ‘full story’ on the ‘result’ according to our actual experience. The ‘real result’ that we experience includes influences from the collapse of the matrix of mutual relational tensions that the man had been holding in balance. If we roll a rock down the mountain, the ‘reality’ is not ‘the cause-effect action’, the reality is the transformation of relations constituting the terrain; e.g. the rock lodging in the stream and the stream overflowing its banks and flooding the town etc. And in the hole where the rock had been, an exposure to solar irradiance and moisture inducing the sprouting of long buried seeds etc.
In the (a) physical reality of our natural experience, not only do we NOT know the real SOURCE of an action, we do not know the real RESULT of an action, therefore, treating ‘local cause effect actions’ as ‘real’ and using them to direct our social dynamics managing behaviour is bound to spawn confusion and incoherence. Nietzsche captures the inherent uncertainties in ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ as follows;
“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’
What is being called into question here is the foundational (b) reality underlying Western moral-judgement of justice, which presumes the ‘universal knowledge of good and bad’ behaviour. In the (a) reality of our natural relational experience, restorative justice is the natural approach to justice in that we cannot, in (a) reality, isolate the ‘subject’ of the action from the ‘object’ of the action. People’s dynamics are simultaneously being influenced by the dynamics of the community they are included in. In fact, the relational view of social dynamics that we experience, are only notionally reduced to ‘the dynamics of independent human beings’ by the abstracting power of noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language-and-grammar [subject-and-predicate] RE-presentations.
“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
Not all peoples have this concept of ‘people’ as ‘independent beings’ with jumpstart cause-effect, action-authoring powers that reside, operate and interact within a habitat that is notionally independent of the inhabitants (independent beings) that reside, operate and interact within it. As Whorf and Watts and Nietzsche and others have pointed out, such a depiction is synthetically constructed by the noun-and-verb language architecture. The suggestion is that the energy-charged relational medium we are included in, is the real source of all the action, including the gathering of things within the medium.
“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” — David Bohm
The concept of ‘cause-and-effect action’ is readily RE-presented in the intellectual RE-presentations of noun-and-verb [subject-and-predicate] language architectures, but contradicted by our relational experience based intuition.
The ambiguity of both ‘cause’ and ‘result’ in the ‘child-soldier’ example suggests instead of a collection of independent individuals, … a ‘relational pool of humanity’ in which people are at the same time ‘hitters’ and ‘fielders’ of influence, a relational pool that is continually transforming as its members influence others at the same time as others are influencing them.
Of course, within a transforming relational activity continuum (the world given only once) solar irradiance is conditioning water circulation and atmospheric circulation and a climate dynamic with diurnal, seasonal and epochal variation that orchestrates the behaviours of the relational forms such as humans included within them, inducing them to huddle together as the habitat cools and disperse and re-fresh as the habitat warms.
Huddling and dispersing and other outside-inward orchestration of inside-outward asserting behaviours, although we experience them as natural and intuitive [even puppies do it] are ‘not allowed’ in the constrained (b) reality which portrays human dynamics solely in terms of inside-outward asserting actions arising from internal processes within the ‘independent’ organisms. When people huddle for warmth, then, in the (b) reality it has to be because ‘like minds think alike’ rather than because relational forms within a transforming relational activity continuum are inherently animated in their individual and collective behaviours by outside-inward orchestrating influence.
Science and academia stick with this (b) reality, ‘internal intelligence-driven sourcing of behaviour of ‘independently-existing organisms’ whether cells, plants, humans’ concept, TO THE BITTER END, since to abandon it would be to abandon the synthetic (b) reality foundations of science. Thus science is forced into some weird explanations of physical phenomena that are, in (a) reality, outside-inward orchestrated, but which in science’s (b) reality, must be purely inside-outward asserting. These subject-and-attribute constructs are what Nietzsche calls ‘a great stupidity’;
“We postulate that this temperature-sensitive motility is one survival mechanism of S. acidocaldarius that allows this organism to move away from lethal hot spots in its hydrothermal environment.”
In a Nova documentary entitled ‘Slime Mold Smarts’ we hear the following ‘great stupidity’ (that is more transparent than most);
“The slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a single cell without a brain, yet it can make surprisingly complicated decisions. In this animated video short, watch as a slime mold navigates through a maze and solves a civil engineering problem.” — Nova
The David Suzuki ‘Nature of Things’ video called ‘Smarty Plants’ documents the efforts by scientists who are trying to figure out where the ‘amazing plant intelligence’ that they are observing with new video and microscope technologies, that shows directly and unambiguously, how plants co-operate within and across species so as to improve their health and sustainability.
• Did you know that all plants forage for food in much the same way as a bear or a squirrel?
• Did you know that plants that can “talk”?
• Did you know that plants, like animals, can sense when they’re under attack and can actually defend themselves?
• Did you know that some plants can “tag” insects for predation?
• Did you know that the roots of an Eastern European invader called Spotted Knapweed can capture and hold territory by waging chemical war on other plants?
• Did you know that there’s a parasitic plant that can actually identify and choose between two different plant hosts by sniffing out their chemical IDs?
• Did you know that a plant that grows on the shores of the Great Lakes can identify its relatives and even help them out?
• Did you know that some plants can tell which insect is eating it by the chemicals in the insect’s saliva?
• Did you know that plants emit a chemical scream for help when they’re under stress, and that other plants can listen in on their SOS messages?
• Did you know that “mother” trees can actually nurture their young?
These imputed ‘intelligence’ attributes of plants is made all the more amazing since plants don’t even have a nucleus or central nervous system into which we can impute a place of residency (much less a description of the intelligence-sourcing equipment) for the centre-of-intelligence.
One might think that such amazing findings might lead us to question our basic (b) reality model which reduces the (a) reality relational forms in a transforming relational activity continuum, to notional ‘independent beings’ with internal process driven and directed behaviours that reside, operate and interact in a habitat that is notionally independent of the ‘inhabitants’ that reside, operate and interact within it. That is, might we not, from these findings on plants, tune in to the Whorf, Nietzsche et al hypothesis that such ‘being-based’ RE-presentations of plant behaviour derive from ‘errors in grammar’ as described by Nietzsche and by Whorf?
Should we not tune in to the warning by Mach, that ‘mechanical behaviour is impossible’ and that it is just a way of economizing on thought?
“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
The ‘case of the child-soldier’ argues for the relational view of the world and for restorative justice rather than ‘moral judgement based retributive justice’.
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Where Does Science Go Wrong?
Science does not ‘go wrong’. Science simply gives us mechanical models of varying simplicity that give RE-presentations of the world.
“The motions of the Universe are the same whether we adopt the Ptolemaic or the Copernican mode of view” of celestial dynamics, … “both views are, indeed, equally correct.” i.e. the geocentric and the heliocentric views are merely two “interpretations” of a Universe that “is only given once.”. Mach goes on to warn; “we … should beware lest the [thought-and-language-based] intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.”
Science aims to make generalizations that deliver the standard benefit of generalization; i.e. to model and predict the outcome of never-before-seen dynamics using our knowledge of dynamics we have seen before. As already mentioned, in order to do this forward modeling, we have to forget about ‘outside-inward orchestrating influence’ of the relational space the notionally ‘independent’ causal agent is situationally included in, so as to be able to assume that its behaviour is fully and solely deriving from out of itself. Thus we make the assumption that all objects that appear to be ‘more or less the same’, are the same. If the slave strikes and kills the slave-master, this must be seen as the same as if the slave-master strikes and kills the slave, since, in Western science as in Western justice, all men are more or less the same [i.e. we cannot generalize the ‘subject’ as a causal agent in an all-hitting, no-fielding context, unless we ignore outside-inward orchestrating influences imposing on the relational form coming from its unique situational inclusion within the transforming relational activity continuum]
Once we assume that all humans are more or less the same, then we can morally judge the behaviour of the individual human, fully and solely on the basis of ‘what he does’ as if ‘what he does’ derives fully from internal process drive and direction. The behaviour of a generations-long oppressed slave in striking and killing the slave-master is, in the (b) reality, the same as the behaviour of a generations-long slave-oppressing slave-master in striking and killing the slave, in the eyes of Western science and Western law.
Our experience-based intuition informs us otherwise. That is, our experience informs us that relational tensions amongst things (relational forms) can build to thresholds where there is a violent release of energy associated with a transition to a less-stressed relational configuration. We experience/observe this in earthquake and avalanche phenomena, as well as in social relational phenomena. Meanwhile, science treats these ‘nonlinear dynamics’ as ‘exceptions’ or ‘special cases’ so as keep the simple generations as primary rather than inverting the view [as would bring it into consistency with the (a) reality] and see the generalization based science as a ‘special case’, … the special case that arises from putting ‘things’ into precedence over ‘relations’ rather than vice versa, as supported by modern physics and the (a) reality.
To summarize to this point; what science treats as primary is the generalization of physical phenomena in the (b) reality terms of ‘independent material objects and organisms’ and ‘what they do’, which eclipses the primary role of ‘relations’ as understood in modern physics and in ‘nonlinear dynamics’ wherein ‘outside-inward orchestrating influences’ are acknowledged to be the source of inside-outward asserting relational forms and the shaping influence of their individual and collective behaviours. In the relational or fluid-dynamical worldview, the energy-charged relational influencing medium aka ‘field’ is the source of everything, including ourselves [as Bohm observes, in a statement cited earlier]. In other words, science has inverted the primary and secondary realities and is mistakenly putting the secondary reality into action as the primary operative reality;
“For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement. … The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination around. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.)” – Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophical Investigations’, 107-108
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The Hitting-Fielding View of Dynamics [The Wave-Dynamical View]
In the (a) physical reality of our natural experience, the people and animals we engage with are continually conditioned by their/our experience and this impacts how they/we ‘field’ the ‘hitting action’ that is incident on us. In the baseball metaphor of ‘hitting’ and ‘fielding’, we commonly speak of the ‘hitter’s results’ as if it is due fully and solely, to the hitter’s action. We thus attribute variations in hitting results to variations in the hitter’s action, and we attribute superior or inferior hitting results to superior or inferior hitting action.
To what extent are the hitting results due to ‘fielding’ or to the ‘hitter’s actions’?
However, this all-hitting, no-fielding assumption, which is built into science and into Darwinism, depends on the assumption that ‘all fielding is more or less the same’. If, for example, a group of players were to give easy pitches and open up plenty of accommodating hitting space to their crony group, they could arrange for ‘superior hitting results’ for their cronies and ‘inferior hitting results’ for non-crony others.
TECHNICAL INSERT:
One might think of this hitting-fielding arrangement in terms of a semiconductor where the fielding corresponds to the electrified body of the semiconductor that is accommodating [or disaccommodating] the passage of the signal, … and the hitting as corresponding to the signal trying to transmit [make passage] through the semiconductor. The signal actually passing through is shaped by the outside-inward ‘fielding’ influence of the electrified semiconductor body and at the same time by the inside-outward hitting action of the signal/voltage that is ‘pushing through’ through the body of the semiconductor. [see for example, Gabor’s quantum physics compliant ‘Theory of Communications’ wherein the ‘complex signal’ corresponds to outside-inward orchestrating influence in conjugate relation with inside-outward action, as between the stator and rotor in a dynamo].
The action of a little girl popping her party balloons ‘correlates’ with the violent fielding response of the war veteran with PTSD, and in this case [which is treated as a ‘special case’ so that the little girl will not be punished], it is acknowledged that what transpires is as much or more due to the fielding as it is to the hitting. Once again, this is an inversion from the physical reality of our experience since our social engaging always involves ‘hitting-fielding’ dynamics where the ‘hitting result’ is not fully and solely due to the hitter’s action, but is influenced, as the same time, by the ‘experiential conditioning’ of the fielder. A hitting result of a male touching a female can range from purring to a slap in the face. There is no way to isolate the causal contribution of the ‘hitter’s action’ from the accommodating/disaccommodating contribution of the fielding, although both Western science and Western justice claim to be able to do this. The problem in making this separation of contributions has been referred to as ‘the fundamental dilemma of causality’ [Donald Rubin, Harvard Medical professor]. The approach to isolating the two (as in testing the efficacy of pharmaceutical remedies) is to use statistics, however, even in that case, one must assume that ‘all experimental units’ [‘fielders’] are ‘more or less the same’. In other words, one must ignore the experiential conditioning of the fielders of the hitting action.
This ignore-ance is built into science by imposing the foundational assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’;
“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”
The (a) physical reality of our natural experience informs us that we live in a transforming relational activity continuum wherein the progressive development of a phenomena allows influences from earlier on in the transforming relational continuum to shape later unfolding.
“The new world conception. —The world exists; it is not something that becomes, not something that passes away. Or rather: it becomes, it passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away — it maintains itself in both. —It lives on itself: its excrements are its food.” . . . And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1066/67
The extraction of a ‘cause-and-effect action’ by the ‘scientific method’ requires that we construct a measurement based ‘approximation’ of the world and then make a succession of re-measurements of it so as to capture ‘its change’ ‘over time’. Science’s ‘laws of nature’ are formulated in this fashion, so that our concept of ‘cause-and-effect’ is based on ‘change’ ‘over time’ of the ‘world-as-a-material-being-thing that changes-over-time’. In this case, when we measure change, … “ 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.”
Mach describes this process of measuring cause-and-effect as follows;
“The laws of nature are equations between the measurable elements α,β,γ,δ . . . . ω of phenomena. As nature is variable, the number of these equations is always less than the number of the elements. If we know all the values of α,β,γ,δ . . . . by which, for example, the values of λ,μ,ν . . . are given, we may call the group α,β,γ,δ . . . . the cause and the group λ,μ,ν . . . the effect. In this sense we may say that the effect is uniquely determined by the cause. The principle of sufficient reason, in the form, for instance, in which Archimedes employed it in the development of the laws of the lever, consequently asserts nothing more than that the effect cannot by any given set of circumstances be at once determined and undetermined. If two circumstances α and λ are connected, then, supposing all others are constant, a change of λ will be accompanied by a change of α, and as a general rule a change of α by a change of λ.” – Ernst Mach, ‘The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of its Development’
However, Mach qualifies this cause-and-effect [mechanical model] as follows;
1. Purely mechanical phenomena do not exist. The production of mutual accelerations in masses is, to all appearances, a purely dynamical phenomenon. But with these dynamical results are always associated thermal, magnetic, electrical, and chemical phenomena, and the former are always modified in proportion as the latter are asserted. On the other hand, thermal, magnetic, electrical, and chemical conditions also can produce motions. Purely mechanical phenomena, accordingly, are abstractions, made, either intentionally or from necessity, for facilitating our comprehension of things. The same thing is true of the other classes of physical phenomena. Every event belongs, in a strict sense, to all the departments of physics, the latter being separated only by an artificial classification, which is partly conventional, partly physiological, and partly historical.
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2. The view that makes mechanics the basis of the remaining branches of physics, and explains all physical phenomena by mechanical ideas, is in our judgment a prejudice. Knowledge which is historically first, is not necessarily the foundation of all that is subsequently gained. – Ernst Mach, ‘The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development’, Chapter V, ‘The Relations of Mechanics to Other Departments of Knowledge’
In other words, … “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
The general problem in the mechanical approach taken by Western science and Western institutions of government, commerce and justice (held in place by academia), is a problem in logic that can be introduced by Nietzsche’s statement on the ‘great stupidity’ of belief in ‘subject and predicate’, cited earlier and recited here for convenience;
“That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force–in will, in intention–it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 484
“Predicative logic” is the problem. It is used to avoid the antimonies of impredicative logic, but it is used at a heavy price, that of having to accept that ‘infinity is real’, which contradicts the reality (a) understanding 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
This principle that predicative logic is ‘running over’ is not the view of Mach alone. Faraday, Einstein, Poincaré, Schroedinger, Bohm and others have also argued forcefully for it. It essentially concerns the separation of subject and object, observer from observed. In the ‘field’ or ‘relations first’ view, there is no subject-object split since ‘things’ are to ‘space’ as convection cells are to flow [things are the nexa of relational influences aka ‘relational forms in a transforming relational activity continuum’;
“The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.” – Erwin Schroedinger
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“Fields of force are the primary reality, and ‘matter’ a secondary or derived phenomenon” —Michael Faraday
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“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the [relational] structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances).”– Erwin Schroedinger
Space is not [empty] Euclidian’ … “Space is a participant in physical phenomena” … “Space not only conditions the behaviour of inert masses, but is also conditioned in its state by them.”, … “the recognition of the fact that ‘empty space’ in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, compelling us to describe its state by ten functions (the gravitation potentials g(μ,ν), has, I think finally disposed of the view that space is physically empty . . . “A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone” —Albert Einstein.
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“Since according to our present conceptions the elementary particles of matter are also, in their essence, nothing else than condensations of the electromagnetic field, our present view of the universe presents two realities which are completely separated from each other conceptually, although connected causally, namely, gravitational ether and electromagnetic field, or as they might also be called space and matter. Of course it would be a great advance if we could succeed in comprehending the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field together as one unified conformation. Then for the first time the epoch of theoretical physics founded by Faraday and Maxwell would reach a satisfactory conclusion. The contrast between ether and matter would fade away, and, through the general theory of relativity, the whole of physics would become a complete system of thought, like geometry, kinematics, and the theory of gravitation.” — Einstein, ‘Ether and the Theory of Relativity’
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“We cannot build physics on the basis of the matter-concept alone. But 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. This new view is suggested by the great achievements of field physics, by our success in expressing the laws of electricity, magnetism, gravitation in the form of structure laws, and finally by the equivalence of mass and energy.” — Einstein and Infeld, ‘The Evolution of Physics’
As Poincaré points out, it is impossible to describe some ‘thing’ without reference to ‘other things’, therefore in building up a system of numbers, it is impossible to avoid a petitio principii or circular reference. This has prompted Poincaré’s comment “Cantorian realism is a disease from which mathematics will have to recover” [1], [2].
I will revert to citations again since this has already been ‘written up’ in publications such as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I see no reason for reconstructing such description.
The general point is that if the members of the set are mutually interdependent, then one cannot add members to the set without redefining the set since this would be like adding a new storm-cell to the set of storm-cells in the atmosphere; i.e. the adding of an additional storm cell changes the definition of all of the others. As the number of storm-cells goes towards infinity, the size of the storm-cells goes towards minus infinity. This corresponds to ‘the tiling problem’ in non-euclidian (relational) space. Only if one regards infinity as ‘real’ in the here and now, can one accept ‘predicative logic’ as ‘real’.
“Logic is — according to Poincaré — the study of properties which are common to all classifications. There are two different kinds of classifications: predicative classifications, which are not modified by the introduction of new elements; and impredicative classifications, which are modified by new elements. Definitions as well as classifications are divided into predicative and impredicative. A set is defined by a law according to which every element is generated. In the case of an infinite set, the process of generating elements is unfinished; thus there are always new elements. If their introduction changes the classification of already generated objects, then the definition is impredicative. For example, look at phrases containing a finite number of words and defining a point of space. These phrases are arranged in alphabetical order and each of them is associated with a natural number: the first is associated with number 1, the second with 2, etc. Hence every point defined by such phrases is associated with a natural number. Now suppose that a new point is defined by a new phrase. To determine the corresponding number it is necessary to insert this phrase in alphabetical order; but such an operation modifies the number associated with the already classified points whose defining phrase follows, in alphabetical order, the new phrase. Thus this new definition is impredicative.
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For Poincaré, impredicative definitions are the source of antinomies in set theory, and the prohibition of impredicative definitions will remove such antinomies. To this end, Poincaré enunciates the vicious circle principle: a thing cannot be defined with respect to a collection that presupposes the thing itself. In other words, in a definition of an object, one cannot use a set to which the object belongs, because doing so produces an impredicative definition. Poincaré attributes the vicious circle principle to a French mathematician J. Richard. In 1905, Richard discovered a new paradox in set theory, and he offered a tentative solution based on the vicious circle principle.
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Poincaré’s prohibition of impredicative definitions is also connected with his point of view on infinity. According to Poincaré, there are two different schools of thought about infinite sets; he called these schools Cantorian and Pragmatist. Cantorians are realists with respect to mathematical entities; these entities have a reality that is independent of human conceptions. The mathematician discovers them but does not create them. Pragmatists believe that a thing exists only when it is the object of an act of thinking, and infinity is nothing but the possibility of the mind’s generating an endless series of finite objects. Practicing mathematicians tend to be realists, not pragmatists or intuitionists. This dispute is not about the role of impredicative definitions in producing antinomies, but about the independence of mathematical entities from human thinking.” – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The point is that ‘subject and predicate constructs’ make use of ‘infinity’ and we are then placed in the position of having to choose whether we are Cantorian realists or Pragmatist idealists; while the former ‘believes in the (b) reality’, the latter sees the (b) reality as a useful tool. Society contains a mixture of people, some Cantorians and some Pragmatists. The pragmatists embrace the (a) reality (relations) as primary and hold the (b) reality to be a useful tool that should not be ‘allowed to run away with the workman’. The Cantorians embrace the (b) reality as being ‘all she wrote’.
“.. the Cantorians are realists even where mathematical entities are concerned. These entities seem to them to have an independent existence; the geometer does not create them, he discovers them. These objects therefore exist so to speak without existing, since they can be reduced to pure essences. But since, by nature, these objects are infinite in number, the partisans of mathematical realism are much more infinitist than the idealists. Infinity to them is no longer a becoming since it exists before the mind which discovers it. Whether they admit or deny it, they must therefore believe in actual infinity.” … At all times, there have been opposite tendencies in philosophy and it does not seem that these tendencies are on the verge of being reconciled. It is no doubt because there are different souls and that we cannot change anything in these souls. There is therefore no hope of seeing harmony established between the pragmatists and the Cantorians. Men do not agree because they do not speak the same language, and there are languages which cannot be learned.” Henri Poincaré, ‘Dernièries Pensées’
* * * END OF TECHNICAL INSERT * * *
. . . . continuation of… Where Does Science Go Wrong?
Returning to the theme of hitting-fielding and ‘cause-and-effect action’, … the point is made in the ‘Technical Insert’ that there is a blurriness/uncertainty on the both the ‘source’ and the ‘result’ side of ‘cause-and-result’. This blurriness/uncertainty crops up in more than one way; i.e. it crops up in the (a) reality in ‘nonlinear dynamics’ wherein relational tensions can accrue and unpredictably release in burst of energy (as in avalanches etc). It also crops up in the inherent limitations in the (b) reality in the fact that science’s generalization-based ‘laws of nature’ require ‘measurements’ to determine the state of affairs now, in order to ‘prime’ the equations so that the equations can be extrapolated into the future to predict the future state of affairs. This problem has been called ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’ aka ‘chaos theory’ which was discovered by Henri Poincaré in 1895, almost forgotten by academia (how convenient!) until rediscovered by MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. It was originally described as follows;
“A very slight cause, which escapes us, determines a considerable effect which we can not help seeing, and then we say this effect is due to chance. If we could know exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial instant, we should be able to predict exactly the situation of this same universe at a subsequent instant. But even when the natural laws should have no further secret for us, we could know the initial situation only approximately. If that permits us to foresee the subsequent situation with the same degree of approximation, this is all we require, we say the phenomenon has been predicted, that it is ruled by laws. But this is not always the case ; it may happen that slight differences in the initial conditions produce very great differences in the final phenomena; a slight error in the former would make an enormous error in latter. Prediction becomes impossible and we have the fortuitous phenomenon. “ – Poincaré, ‘Science and Method’
Poincaré pointed out that this problem of sensitive dependence on initial conditions equally impacts ‘the moral sciences and particularly in history’. In other words, it has to do with ‘the observer’ rather than ‘with the observed’. It is not about how physical phenomena ‘work’ but about how our ‘observing instruments work’. It is useful to review Poincaré’s physical example as background context for exploring how ‘chaos theory’ (sensitive dependence on initial conditions) applies in interpretations of ‘history’;
And on the other hand what means the phrase ‘very complex’? I have already given one solution, but there are others. Complex causes we have said produce a blend more and more intimate, but after how long a time will it be before this blend satisfies us. When will it have accumulated sufficient complexity? When shall we have sufficiently shuffled the cards? If we mix two powders, one blue, the other white, there comes a moment when the tint of the mixture seems to us uniform because of the feebleness of our senses; it will be uniform for the long-sighted, obliged to look at it from a distance, when it would not yet be so for the short-sighted. And when it has become uniform for all eyes, we still could push back the limit by the use of instruments. There is no chance for any man ever to discern the infinite variety which, if the kinetic theory is true, hides under the uniform appearance of a gas. And yet if we accept Gouy’s ideas on the Brownian movement, does not the microscope seem on the point of showing us something analogous?
This new criterion is therefore relative like the first ; and if it retains an objective character, it is because all men have approximately the same senses, the power of their instruments is limited, and besides they use them only occasionally.
It is just the same in the moral sciences and particularly in history. The historian is obliged to make a choice among the events of the epoch he studies; he recounts only those which seem to him the most important. He therefore contents himself with relating the most momentous events of the sixteenth century, for example, as likewise the most remarkable facts of the seventeenth century. If the first suffice to explain the second, we say these conform to the laws of history. But if a great event of the seventeenth century should have for cause a small fact of the sixteenth century which no history reports, which all the world has neglected, then we say this event is due to chance, and so the word has the same sense as in the physical sciences ; it means that small causes have produced great effects.
Clearly, the fact that measurements are required to prime the pump of science’s laws of nature is a kind of ‘catch 22’ in that subjective interpretation is required in the measurement phase that blurs the certainty that purportedly lies in the laws themselves. This is not only true in the micro-realm but also in the macro-realm.
“In the book ‘Causality and Chance in Modern Physics’ Bohm argued that the way science viewed causality was also much too limited. Most effects were thought of as having only one or several causes. However, Bohm felt that an effect could have an infinite number of causes. For example, if you asked someone what caused Abraham Lincoln’s death, they might answer that it was the bullet in John Wilkes Booth’s gun. But a complete list of all the causes that contributed to Lincoln’s death would have to include all of the events that led to the development of the gun, all of the factors that caused Booth to want to kill Lincoln, all of the steps in the evolution of the human race that allowed for the development of a hand capable of holding a gun, and so on, and so on. Bohm conceded that most of the time one could ignore the vast cascade of causes that had led to any given effect, but he still felt it was important for scientists to remember that no single cause-and-effect relationship was ever really separate from the universe as a whole.”
In a similar vein, Howard Zinn, in ‘A People’s History of the United States’, pointed out that history could be interpreted from the point of view of ‘the conquerors’ who constructed their own wonderful new world that replaced what was previously ‘in place’, AND, it could be interpreted from the point of view of ‘the conquered’ who saw the same activities in terms of the destruction of a wonderful established world. Both of these views are (b) reality, all-hitting, no-fielding views and could be subsumed in the (a) reality view of relational transformation, in which case the basic notion of ‘history’ being a time-based succession of cause-and-result actions disappears and is replaced by ‘earlier-and-later’ in the world given only once as a transforming relational activity continuum.
If ‘cause-and-effect’ seems to be losing all ‘credibility’ in this investigation, why should this ‘collapse of cause-and-effect’ be denied? We know that ‘Katrina’ does not really ‘grow larger and stronger’. We know that we are looking at a relational form in a transforming relational activity continuum. We know that one thing can’t change without everything changing. We know that Schroedinger is right, we are looking at variations in the relational structure of space that are growing larger and stronger. The ownership of the development and growth is the world as given only once. There is no such thing as ‘being’ in the physical reality of our natural relational experience, and therefore no such things as ‘causal agents’ that are responsible for ‘results’. ‘Cause and effect action’ is language-game RE-presentation of transforming relational activity. For one thing, ‘cause and effect action’ is foreground activity that transpires in a passive background. The background is something we call ‘space’, as if the foreground figures are something independent of the background ‘space’. This is language game play that has little to do with the physical reality of our natural experience;
“Space is another framework we impose upon the world” . . . ” . . . here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws; but let us clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature.” . . . “Euclidian geometry is . . . the simplest, . . . just as the polynomial of the first degree is simpler than a polynomial of the second degree.” . . . “the space revealed to us by our senses is absolutely different from the space of geometry.” . . . “Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a [relational] non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space ; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible. Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself, are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics ; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French.” – Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis
The architecture of the language we use for the “representation of the world on the stage of thought” can either make our investigations very simple or very complex, and scientists have historically tended to let their language ‘correct our experience’, to ‘keep the representations of physical phenomena ‘simple’, … so that subject and attribute statements such as ‘the earth rotates’ are allowed to correct the physical reality of our natural experience wherein “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. Our willingness to let language correct our experience has us burying and hiding our simplifying assumptions that enable a simpler language architecture, giving us this exposure to using the representations of too-simple language as the operative reality that guides our behaviour and thereby puts us in conflict with the physical reality of our actual relational experience, … a conflict that manifests as confusion and incoherence in the ‘Western civilization enterprise’.
“And just as our Copernicus said to us : It is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round, since thus the laws of astronomy are expressible in a much simpler language ; this one would say: It is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round, since thus the laws of mechanics are expressible in a much simpler language. This does not preclude maintaining that absolute space, that is to say the mark to which it would be necessary to refer the earth to know whether it really moves, has no objective existence. Hence, this affirmation; ‘the earth turns round’ has no meaning, since it can be verified by no experiment; since such an experiment, not only could not be either realized or dreamed by the boldest Jules Verne, but can not be conceived of without contradiction; or rather these two propositions; ‘the earth turns round,’ and, ‘it is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round’ have the same meaning; there is nothing more in the one than in the other. “ — Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Ch. VII Relative Motion and Absolute Motion
Could we play the game of RE-presentation of the world dynamic, the transforming relational activity continuum, using another language architecture? Evidently we can and we do [‘we’ being used to include our indigenous aboriginal brothers and sisters]. We can play it with a ‘relational’ aka ‘flow-based’ language architecture in which case ‘nouns and adjectives’ signifying independent beings (objects, organisms) become ‘relational forms (activities) in the transforming relational activity continuum aka ‘the flow’ aka ‘the field’ aka ‘the world given only once.
Flow-time (contrasts with cultural norm of fixed time); — Unlike our conventional ‘linear-sequence’ based notion of ‘time’ (time that is anchored to a notional beginning at the time of minus-infinity, and which advances linearly in positive increments in the direction of plus-infinity, serving as a measuring rod for the aging/evolving of the universe [seen in terms of ‘being’, a ‘universe that exists’] and/or anything that ‘exists’ ‘in the universe’, ‘flow-time’ derives from our inclusional spatial-relational experience. The comparison can be seen in Heraclitus’ and Aristotle’s differing interpretations of the unity and plurality of the cosmos; e.g;
“Plato clearly distinguished between Heraclitus’ SIMULTANEOUS unity and plurality of the cosmos and Empedocles’ SEPARATE PERIODS of Love and Strife. At the same time, they are mentioned together as both alike in believing in the unity and plurality of the cosmos; and Aristotle’s coupling of the two might conceivably have been motivated by the Platonic comparison, the important distinction between them being overlooked.” – Kirk, Raven et al, The Presocratic Philosophers
However, ‘Western civilization’ and its institutions of government, commerce and justice are based on taking seriously the split-apart fixed-space and fixed-time ‘subject-and-predicate constructs’ [reasoned discourse in noun-and-verb language-and-grammar] and our moral judgement based justice system claims that there really are such things as ‘cause-and-effect actions’ as in a ‘deed’ that has been authored by a ‘doer’ and that we all have access to the universal knowledge of good and the universal knowledge of evil and that, therefore, we are equipped to ‘reward good actions’ and ‘punish bad actions’ and to use this as our social dynamics management scheme. But after Nietzsche, Mach, Poincaré and others have torn this notion to shreds, as is recorded above, what remains?
What remains is our experience based intuition that taps directly into an understanding of our inclusion in a transforming relational activity continuum. This is the source of ‘restorative justice’ that arises naturally in communities using relational (flow-based) language architectures. This approach puts experience into a natural precedence over intellection (reason and logic) and keeps us out of the trap of “regarding the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, as the basis of the real world”.
Intuition is something that Western man has ‘put down’ because of the Western model of man as an ‘independent reason-driven machine’ that resides, operates and interacts in a habitat that is notionally independent of the inhabitants [such as these independent reason-driven machines aka ‘human beings’] that reside, operate and interact within it.
What does experience-based intuition become, with this intellectual model of a human, as a ‘being’, an ‘independent reason-driven system with internal knowledge and intellection driven and directed development and behaviour [yes, even the cells are intelligence-driven systems in the models of Western science]. It becomes something dark and primeval, somehow stored in the genes and unleashed at birth, something called ‘instinct’ [how else could one describe it after embracing reality (b) the reality born of noun-and-verb subject-and-predicate constructs, which allows only all-hitting, no-fielding sourcing of behaviour and denies the outside-inward behaviour orchestrating influence inherent in relational forms that are uniquely, situationally included in a transforming relational activity continuum?
Experience-based intuition is where behaviour attunes to outside-inward orchestrating influences inherent in one’s situational inclusion in the transforming relational activity continuum. Why not restore it to its natural precedence over the cheap and superficial subject-and-predicate based (b) reality of Western civilization and Western science?
“The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato on is pathologically conditioned; so is their reverence for logical argument. Reason equals virtue and happiness, that means merely that one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark appetites with a permanent daylight — the daylight of reason. One must be clever, clear, bright at any price: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downward.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’
What is there in ‘indigenous aboriginal wisdom’ that induces in [at least some of] us the resonances of ‘authenticity’ and puts the hollow tinny ring of Western intellectual political rhetoric to shame? What is there in ‘indigenous aboriginal restorative justice’ that owns up to the circularity wherein “the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants” acknowledge our inclusion in a relational medium that powerful crony inhabitants use to manipulate the dynamics of disempowered other? … that is lacking in Western moral judgement based retributive justice which prides itself on treating slaves who strike slave-masters on an equal basis with slave-masters that strike slaves, on the basis that ‘cause-effect actions’ can be judged as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in their own right, implying that relational strife should play no role in the just evolution of social relations and that intellectual theory should drive and direct the management of social dynamics, … ‘intellectual theory’ that cultivates belief in the ‘all-hitting, no-fielding’ modeling of dynamics which depicts ‘inferior hitting results’ as being entirely due to ‘inferior hitting competencies’ and superior hitting results as being due entirely to ‘superior hitting competencies’ [i.e. as if crony fielding had no selectively differentially accommodating or disaccommodating influence on hitting results].
CONCLUSIONS:
“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
We [users of noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language and grammar representations] are capable of tuning into two realities which can be used to drive and direct our individual and collective behaviour; i.e. our noun-and-verb language opens up to us the second (b) option reality.
(a) the world seen as ‘a transforming relational activity continuum’ wherein individual ‘things’ form from mutually reciprocal influence, something that can be discussed using a flow-based language with two temporal tenses (earlier and later). This reality has no subject-object splitting and individuals for whom this reality is their primary reality see themselves as sailboaters or surfers within an energy-charged plenum whose development and behaviour derives from the relational dynamics they are situationally included in, as with convection cells in a flow; i.e the flow is an energy-charged relational plenum which engenders relational forms whose actions are continuing the dynamics of the flow-habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the flow-habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the relational forms that ‘inhabit’ it.
(b) the world seen as a collection of local, visible, tangible material objects that reside, operate and interact in a habitat that is ‘independent’ of the dynamics of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it. This ‘habitat’ that serves as a container that is independent of the thing inhabiting it is, ultimately, in our minds, an absolute space and absolute time reference frame. This reality splits apart subject and object, and humans and all organisms are seen as independently-existing ‘powerboaters’ with their own internal powers of authorship of development and behaviour.
This second (b) reality ‘did not happen’ for peoples that employ a flow-based [relational] language architecture. The second (b) reality is the reality of ‘science’ which reduces the world dynamic to mechanical cause-effect interactions.
“Science itself, … may be regarded as a minimization problem, consisting of the completest possible presenting of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought” —Ernst Mach
In the relational worldview (e.g. of modern physics and indigenous aboriginals using flow-based [relational] language architecture), there is no generalization of relational forms that, like convection cells in a fluid-flow, are the conjugate relating of outside-inward accommodating and inside-outward asserting influences. The generalizing of relational forms in the one-sided, all-hitting, no-fielding terms of ‘beings’ with powers of cause-effect actions, foreground figures inheriting all dynamics authoring powers, complemented by a notional passive space/habitat that serves as the source of resources taken in by the inhabitant-organisms and as a dumping ground for their outputting of unwanted wastes, …derives from noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language-and-grammar;
“It is sometimes stated that Newtonian space, time, and matter are sensed by everyone intuitively, whereupon relativity is cited as showing how mathematical analysis can prove intuition wrong. This, besides being unfair to intuition, is an attempt to answer offhand question (1) put at the outset of this paper, to answer which this research was undertaken. Presentation of the findings now nears its end, and I think the answer is clear. The offhand answer, laying the blame upon intuition for our slowness in discovering mysteries of the Cosmos, such as relativity, is the wrong one. The right answer is: Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are receipts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them.” – Benjamin Whorf, ‘The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language’
What Benjamin Whorf says here changes the assumptions built into our ‘Western civilization enterprise’. It says that ‘science’ is a derivative of noun-and-verb Indo-European language-and-grammar. Therefore, ‘science’ is prone to the ‘error of grammar’ cited by Nietzsche, wherein a ‘relational activity’ is converted into a ‘being’ plus a ‘verb’. The relational activity of a storm-cell in the atmospheric flow, a relational activity within a transforming relational activity continuum is kicked aside to make way for an ‘error of grammar’ in the guise of a ‘subject-and-predicate’, ‘cause-and-effect action’ structure viz. ‘Katrina ravages New Orleans’ which Nietzsche quite rightly labels ‘a great stupidity’.
This ‘error of grammar’ is what has us employ the being-based (b) reality as our ‘operative reality’, and it has been my experience that ‘education’, is promoting the continuing incumbency of the (b) reality as the ‘operative reality of choice’ by Western institutions of government, commerce and justice. It is not that education could not ‘open up for critical inquiry’ “the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part”, however, this is not happening, and perhaps it has always been the case that ‘education lags’ the evolution of understanding. As Johannes Kepler, who was more of a ‘lone-wolf investigator’ than an ‘academic’, observed;
“As regards the academies, they are established in order to regulate the studies of the pupils and are concerned not to have the program of teaching change very often: in such places, because it is a question of the progress of the students, it frequently happens that the things which have to be chosen are not those which are most true but those which are most easy. And by that division in things which makes different people form different judgements, it so happens that certain people are in error contrary to their own opinion.” – Johannes Kepler, ‘Harmonies of the World’
Certainly, the worldview-impacting findings of modern physics, of Schroedinger et al, which restore precedence to the (a) reality in which subject and object are NOT split apart, and where the world is given just once, as a transforming relational activity continuum, are not being widely incorporated in the many academic disciplines so that much of what academics are saying is ‘contrary to their own opinion’. In Kepler’s time, the findings of the ‘lone wolf investigator’ still had a chance because the flywheel effect of corporate interests and international banking cartel etc. had not developed into the massive change-restraining influence that it is today. Of course, the ‘lone-wolf’ investigator benefits from accessing the works of academia, but the ‘lone-wolf’ has an advantage in that the works of academia arise through a variety of disciplinary ‘silos’, leaving the diamond rich field of transdisciplinarity ripe for the picking; i.e. where intuition can be used to bring into connective trans-silo confluence, [searching for coherency spikes], a diverse multiplicity of real and imagined observations and experiences.
It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent. … Logic, therefore, remains barren unless fertilised by intuition.- Henri Poincaré
As mentioned in the body of the essay, different people use different logics [predicative and impredicative] in their attempts at reasoned understanding of the same physical phenomena; ‘logicians’ are ‘realists’ whereas ‘intuitives’ are ‘pragmatist idealists’. This divides the social collective as to ‘which reality’ [(a) or (b)] they put into precedence over the other. Poincaré recognized that there is a growth of ‘realists’ amongst practicing mathematicians and that pragmatists or intuitionists are becoming more of a minority. He had a pessimistic view of there being any resolution of the division between the ‘realists’ and the ‘pragmatist idealists’;
“… At all times, there have been opposite tendencies in philosophy and it does not seem that these tendencies are on the verge of being reconciled. It is no doubt because there are different souls and that we cannot change anything in these souls. There is therefore no hope of seeing harmony established between the pragmatists and the Cantorians. Men do not agree because they do not speak the same language, and there are languages which cannot be learned.” Henri Poincaré, ‘Dernièries Pensées’
Personally, I am not as pessimistic as Poincaré (1854 – 1912). He did not see intuition mobilizing people around themes such as exemplified by Frédéric Neyrat in ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’ which suggests that people are once again becoming confident that our experience-based intuition [which inform us that construction and destruction are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of relational transforming] should be given precedence over our predicative intellection;
“In extending his living space in a manner that destroys the space of others, he destroys his own space. Not initially his inside space, his ‘self’, but his outside space, this real outside-of-self which nourishes his ‘inside-of-self’. The protection of this outside space now becomes the condition without which he is unable to pursue the growth of his own powers of being.” — Frédéric Neyrat, ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’
The ‘Western civilization enterprise’ needs its ‘missions’ and ‘goals and objectives’ based on reason and intellect which seem to take humans captive within the enterprise. People are supposed to be ‘expendables’ in support of intellectual concepts such as ‘the sovereign state enterprise’ [“nationaiism is an infantile disease, the measles of the world” – Einstein] and in support of intellectual revenue and profit targets in ‘the corporate enterprise’ [“what can’t be measured, can’t be managed”], putting the human spirit in considerable distress. Within this pathological ‘Western civilization enterprise’, held together by academia and enforced by a like-minded moral judgement based retributive justice system, things do happen which invert the unnatural precedence of intellection over intuition; e.g. the Apollo 13 experience.
The space program was a ‘cold war’ enterprise born of the intellectual objective of establishing technological superiority in the competition between/amongst sovereign states, wherein the humans involved were seen as ‘expendables’ needed to carry out the mission and achieve ITS goals and objectives. But when an oxygen tank exploded, shattering in the process, all hope of achieving the mission goals and objectives, the natural human ‘intuition’ that had been suppressed by top-down directives and which lay latent and hidden in the ordered behaviours of the intellectually-defined human cogs-in-the-intellectual machinery, were liberated and ascended into their natural leadership position, at the same time as silo structures used in the construction of the space transport were opened up for trans-silo cannibalizing/synthesizing in the service of emergent, outside-inward orchestrating, situational need [to pass through the eye of a needle (re-entry) and get home safely]. When the Grumman rocket engineer complained about the plan to fire the lunar landing module’s rockets in open space, which ‘they were not designed for’, the team leader retorts; ‘’I don’t give a damn about what anything was DESIGNED for, all I care about is what it is CAPABLE of.’ This is a statement that suggests that outside-inward, situational orchestrating influence is the naturally PRIMARY reality while inside-outward driven and directed ‘intention’, as in ‘mission, goals and objectives’ is intellectually imposed convention that too often [in the Western civilization enterprise] takes us captive and make us expendables in the enterprise of achieving its intellectual targets.
We know that ‘disasters’ can induce the needed ‘inverting’ of realities and restore (a) [relational reality navigable by experience-based intuition] over (b) [being-based reality navigated by intellectual drive and direction], … but there is no reason to believe that the inverting cannot occur spontaneously.
What stands in the way of spontaneous inversion is the problem identified by Heraclitus, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche; i.e. noun-and-verb language-and-grammar architecture ‘puts us to sleep’
“And some men are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep.” — Heraclitus
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“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the medium of language” (“Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandnes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache”)
That is, the problem with ‘keeping in mind’ what noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language-and-grammar ‘is doing to us’ [putting us into reality (b)] is that we are using it and its ‘being’-based concepts in the process of trying to escape from its influence over us.
“Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. “Reason” in language — oh, what an old deceptive witch she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’
It is hoped that essays such as this which repeat the warnings of Mach, Nietzsche and others, can help contribute to a more general ‘awakening’;
“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
Insofar as we are unable to induce a more general awakening which could source the needed transformation to restore (a) reality [relations based intuitive reality] in a natural precedence over (b) reality [being-based intellectual reality], we will continue to subject ourselves to the confusion and incoherence of making ourselves captives within a self-imposed scam constituted by
“the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part”
* * * * *
Footnotes:
[1] “Remember our discussion of “infinity” and Gauss’s protest against “the use of infinity as a completed [object]. . . The Infinite is only a manner of speaking.” “Actual infinity” was as impossible for Gauss as it was for Aristotle. It remained impossible until the moment of Cantor’s great success. In our earlier discussion of infinity there was an emphasis on how very strange this concept is, how difficult, how controversial it was at first. Cantor had such a hard time getting the mathematical world to take his ideas seriously! How could so many brilliant intellects have contemplated these ideas and backed away? Why did the great French mathematician Henri Poincaré call Cantorism a disease from which mathematics would have to recover? Most mathematicians of the time, we must conclude, considered the idea of “actual infinity” to be impossible! In this way, it satisfies our criterion for being a great idea.” –William Byers, ‘How Mathematicians Think: Using Ambiguity, Contradiction, and Paradox to Create Mathematics (2007)
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[2] “Let us attempt therefore to study the psychology of the two opposing schools [‘Cantorian realists’, ‘pragmatist-idealists’] from a purely objective point of view just as if we ourselves were not a member of these schools, as if we were describing a war between two ants’ nests. We shall first of all observe that there are two opposite tendencies among mathematicians in their manner of considering infinity. For some, infinity is derived from the finite; infinity exists because there is an infinity of possible finite things. For others, infinity exists before the finite; the finite is obtained by cutting out a small piece from infinity.” — Henri Poincaré, ‘Dernièries Pensées’
[3] Dealing with Two Realities
The physical reality of our natural experience is one of inclusion in a relational activity continuum.
The reality that we intellectually construct with a noun-and-verb language-and-grammar is something different. We call it ‘science’ or ‘scientific thinking’. It is a modeling of the world and it models by breaking up the relational activity continuum and RE-PRESENTING it in terms of subject-verb-predicate cause-and-effect actional units, so that instead of ‘farming’ being an activity within the relational activity continuum, … and since it is an activity that appears to us as we view it from an airplane or from a hilltop as a seasonal ‘green-growth-blotch’ in the relational activity continuum, … we use language to give it local, in-itself ‘being’ and refer to it as ‘a farm’.
Once we do this, we start this ‘great stupidity’ as Nietzsche calls it, and we have the noun-subject ‘farm’ inflect verbs to give RE-presentations such as ‘the farm produces wheat’. Of course, the farm, once we have imputed it to be a local productive thing, is like a churn that ‘makes butter’; i.e. it is a machine that has to be cranked. and so, in starting with this metaphorical reduction of a seasonal green-growth-blotch in the relational activity continuum and giving it local, material ‘being’ as a machine that produces wheat, … we have to keep the metaphor hanging together by explaining who cranks the local machine that churns out [produces] the wheat, and so we say that it is Santa Claus and his elves that do this magic …. oops, that’s another story, …. and so we say that it is farmer John and his ‘farmhands’ that crank the farm that churns out the wheat.
Now, picture the European settler on his horse on the hill, side-by-side with the savage on his horse, with the settler trying to explain that that green blotch way out there on the prairie is a separate thing-in-itself, a sort of ‘goose that lays golden eggs’, when properly stroked by farmer john and his farmhands.
Would we say that the savage is the ‘great stupid’ for not being able to understand this, or would we go with Nietzsche’s use of ‘great stupidity’ in this context?
In any case, what we have here is two very different realities vying for incumbency as ‘the operative reality’. As Moonhawk points out; “The entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part” … has built itself out within this synthetic mechanical reality. Or, in other words, we have not listened to warnings such as Emerson’s — “Don’t let the tools of thought-and-language run away with the workman” (these tools will reduce us from relational ‘agents of transformation’ to local ‘doer-of-deed beings’), … or Mach’s; — “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.”
For collections of ‘ordinary folks’ trying to provide for their children, the relational reality is the natural way to go. Carving everything up intellectually and administering and regulating it on the basis of ‘material properties’, ownership, ‘legal transactions’ is, as Lao Tsu says, a license for greedy individuals and cartels to steal, … moving us farther away from Engel’s description of the savages, as observed in their Iroquois confederacy; “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned”.
PART II WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Non-Duelling Realities
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Are the human inhabitants of nature ‘competing with one another’ … ‘in a struggle with nature’, as portrayed in Darwinian Evolution?
“In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind never to forget that every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life; that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals. Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of the species will almost instantaneously increase to any amount. The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force.” – Charles Darwin, ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’, Chapter 3. Struggle for Existence’
This presumption of ‘organic beings’ competing with one another in their ‘struggle for life’ is the intellectual residue of a long standing cultural meme in English thinking which surfaced a century earlier in Adam Smith’s 1776 treatise; ’Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’
“Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond it. But in civilized society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce.” —Adam Smith
There is no notion of ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ ranks in a transforming relational activity continuum, or in the relationally interdependent matrix of an ecosystem.
An examination of word usage in Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’ suggests that Darwin was doing what Wittgenstein suggests goes on in scientific investigations; i.e. the mechanistic theory of explanation is not the result of investigation but the advance requirement we impose going into the investigation; i.e. there is no mention of investigation of a possible relations-first evolutionary dynamic:
Word Count Analysis from Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’
| Term | # | Term | # |
| Destroy/destroyed/destruction | 77 | Cooperate | 0 |
| Individual | 298 | Cooperation | 0 |
| Perfect/perfection | 274 | Symbiosis | 0 |
| Beat/beats | 17 | Association | 0 |
| Kill/killed/killing | 21 | Collaboration | 0 |
| Exterminate/extermination | 58 | Collaborate | 0 |
| Death/dying | 16 | Interaction | 0 |
| Race/races | 132 | Synergy | 0 |
| Victorious/victory/war | 19 | Synergistic | 0 |
| Select/selection/selects | 540 | Synergism | 0 |
| Species/descent | 1884 | Affiliate | 0 |
| Community (monospecies) | 34 | Community (multispecies) | 0 |
| Coadapt/coadaptation | 4 | Associate | 0 |
Douglas E. Caldwell, ‘Cultivation of Microbial Consortia and Communities’
Nietzsche’s head on critique of Darwinism, for views which smelled of the crowded streets of London, pointed , as Lamarck had, to an evolutionary process that applied generally in the world, wherein outside-inward orchestrating influence of the relational field induced and shaped the inside-outward asserting relational forms.
“Nietzsche drew heavily on the ideas of an obscure Anglo-German zoologist, William Rolph (‘Biologische Probleme’). … Rolph denies the existence of an instinct for self-preservation – or at the very least rejects the notion that such a drive represents the principle motivation of animal behaviour. Rather, life seeks primarily to expand itself. This elementary proposition is expressed as a law of assimilation, a law operative in both the organic and inorganic world. Growth, Rolph argues, is determined by a process of diffusion, in which endosmosis predominates over exosmosis. All organic functions, from nutrition and reproduction right up to evolution, can be explained by, and reduced to, this fundamental activity; they are not, as most contemporary biologists assumed, a manifestation of the instinct of self-preservation.” – Gregory Moore, ‘Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor’.
As also in modern physics, where ‘relations’ are primary and material objects and organisms, secondary ‘appearances’ [relational forms], there can be no notion of ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ species since all things are mutually dependent on all things;
“[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
Darwinism continues to have a major influence on how [Western] people see themselves and their ‘economies’. The sense of ‘superior performers’ and ‘inferior performers’ is widely held to be true, in the one-sided all-hitting, no-fielding sense that ‘hitting results’ are attributable fully and solely to the hitter’s actions, and owe nothing to ‘fielding’, … even though our experience-based intuition informs us that ‘fielding’ can shut down hitters with good competencies and inflate the performance of hitters with limited competencies [as where cronies pitch easy and open up lots of field space to hit into for their members and pitch tough and close down field space to hit into for non-crony others]. That is, in the physical reality of our natural experience, one’s situational inclusion within a matrix of relational influences puts one in a situation where the outside-inward accommodating quality of that situation over-ridingly shapes the blossoming or shrivelling of the assertive potentials of the hitter.
The notion of ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ organic beings comes from notionally imposing an ‘absolute space and absolute time reference frame’ for these beings to ‘reside, operate and interact in’, a frame that replaces the relational fielding of the physical reality of our natural experience.
Science (which is Darwinist and vice versa), in trying to explain ecosystems that include varies species of plants, insects, birds, animals in terms of ‘cooperation’ and ‘competition’ have to impute ‘intelligence’ to individual plants, as science has done for the ‘organic being’ called ‘man’. ‘Plant Intelligence’ [discussed in ‘Duelling Realities’] is reversed engineered from having first infused ‘independent existence’ into ‘organic beings’ such as genes, cells, organs, organisms and given them an absolute space and absolute time operating theatre (independent of them) to reside, operate and interact in’. This ‘intelligence’ is commonly regarded as the internal process that drives and directs independent ‘organic beings’ as in Darwinism and Western science generally.
As Henri Poincaré points, out ‘intuition’ transcends ‘logic’ and ‘intuition’ arises from our experience of inclusion within a transforming relational activity continuum. Poincaré further points out that science has us ‘inverting the natural order of things’ by allowing our logical theories to ‘correct our experience’. Such is the case with the notion that ecosystems are constituted by a diverse multiplicity of ‘independent organic beings’ that are cooperating and competing. In other words, after intellectually decomposing a reciprocally determining relational matrix of relational forms and synthetically endowing each form with ‘independent existence’, we fill in the gaps as to how the ecosystem hangs together be imputing ‘intelligence’ to reside inside of each member of the ecosystem to explain cooperation and/or competition.
Noun-verb-subject intellectual constructs aka ‘predicative logic’ is a ‘dumbing down’ of our intuition of relational complexity motivated by ‘economy of thought’ that comes with the manufacturing of certainty. By ignoring the influence of ‘fielding’ in the conjugate hitting-fielding dynamics of nature [by imposing a notional absolute space and absolute time containing frame to make relational forms such as hurricanes appear as ‘independent object beings’], we get the simplified cause-effect model in which all observed developments must then be attributable to ‘hitters’ aka assertive causal agents or ‘doers-of-deeds’. Moral judgement that gives either credit and blame and assessments of superior and inferior is a system built on top of this view of the world in terms of a diverse collection of ‘organic beings’ that reside, operate and interact within a habitat/space that is notionally ‘independent’ of such inhabitants as reside, operate and interact within it. This abstract, idealized belief is foundational to science, including the biological sciences and Darwinism, the latter having a major influence in the shaping of our view of self as an ‘intelligence-directed, independently-existing, organic being’.
Thus, the Darwinist view differs radically from a ‘relations-first’ view in which the diverse forms in nature evolve from continually transforming relational influences within an energy-charged field [plenum] of relational influences that is given only once. Again, the Darwinian world view starts from the foundational notion of independent ‘organic beings’ and is developed as a one-sided, all-hitting, no-fielding dynamic. The implication is that the ‘space’ in which these notional ‘organic beings’ reside, operate and interact, is ‘independent’ of these inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it. This runs counter to the modern physics understanding, wherein;
“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
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“The dynamic of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants” – Mach
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“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus
Nevertheless, Darwinism is the standard worldview of globally dominant Western society and it has a profound effect on one’s sense of self and one’s relationship with nature. In fact, our common Western sense of self, as an independent ‘organic being’ that is independent of the habitat it resides in, establishes a stylized ‘reality’, the (b) reality discussed In the essay ‘Dueling Realities’, where the focus was on describing these two ‘realities’ ;
(a) the world seen as ‘a transforming relational activity continuum’ wherein individual ‘things’ form from mutually reciprocal influence, something that can be discussed using a flow-based language with two temporal tenses (earlier and later). This reality has no subject-object splitting and individuals for whom this reality is their primary reality see themselves as sailboaters or surfers within an energy-charged plenum whose development and behaviour derives from the relational dynamics they are situationally included in, as with convection cells in a flow; i.e the flow is an energy-charged relational plenum which engenders relational forms whose actions are continuing the dynamics of the flow-habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the flow-habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the relational forms that ‘inhabit’ it.
(b) the world seen as a collection of local, visible, tangible material objects that reside, operate and interact in a habitat that is ‘independent’ of the dynamics of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it. This ‘habitat’ that serves as a container that is independent of the thing inhabiting it is, ultimately, in our minds, an absolute space and absolute time reference frame. This reality splits apart subject and object, and humans and all organisms are seen as independently-existing ‘powerboaters’ with their own internal powers of authorship of development and behaviour.
And, the theme embodied in the ‘Dueling Realities’ essay was in support of the following propositions;
It has been suggested by Moonhawk (MIT linguist) and others, that “the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part” is a scam, in the sense that it is built on the error warned of by Ernst Mach, of “regarding the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, as the basis of the real world [of our natural experience]”, … that arises from our noun-and-verb architecture of language.
Bohm also points to the ‘incoherence’ that arises in the real relational world of our natural experience, by our continuing belief in the ‘Western civilization enterprise’ within its binary logical systems of government, commerce and justice; … a ‘what is’ that is denying the ‘what could be’ that is accessible to people who do not fall into the trap that Mach warns of; … “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned”. The latter words are from Friedrich Engels and echo the descriptions of the Iroquois Confederation given also by Thomas Jefferson and others.
My contention is that those philosophers are correct, who identify the ‘flaw’ built into the genomic structure of Western civilization as ‘predicative logic’, … the characterizing of the world dynamic in noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language-and-grammar constructs, … i.e. in the ‘subject-and-predicate’, ‘cause-and-effect actions of notionally ‘independent’ things’, … aka, … ‘science’.
In this complementary essay, ‘Non-Dueling Realities’, the focus is on understanding what it means in a practical, everyday sense to accept the inherent primacy of the (a) reality, the physical reality of our natural experience, over the noun-and-verb language-and-grammar, intellectual RE-presentation based (b) reality; i.e. what it means to accept Heraclitus proposition.
“Listening not to me but to the Logos [‘field of influence that steers all into all’], it is wise to agree that one is all and all is one.” – Heraclitus
It is necessary to listen to one’s own experience in order to get this because ‘words and language’ are incapable of capturing what is going on in the (a) reality where ‘all is one’. The problem with objective language is that it gives RE-presentations of the world as if the world were out in front of an observer; i.e. it splits apart subject/observer and object/observed, and this obscures the ONE-NESS of the world which includes the observer within its transforming relational dynamic.
“The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.” – Erwin Schroedinger
In common everyday terms, we know that language breaks ‘particular actions’ out of the relational continuum and that we assign ‘value’ to the actions in the sense of whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or if they are ‘right/just’ or ‘wrong/unjust’. For example, ‘killing’ is an act that can be perceived as ‘good, courageous, heroic’ as many people see the killing that is done by the ‘American Sniper’. The ‘positive value’ of ‘right and just’ is given to his acts of killing because such acts are seen as eliminating evil terrorists. Of course, the community which sees itself in a good-versus-evil jihad to eliminate the great U.S. Satan, the opposite value is given to the acts of killing authored by the American sniper.
The judgement of the ‘value’ of an ‘act’ is subjective. Some see the act of constructing a housing development in the forest as ‘good’ and some see it as the ‘destruction of forest’ and as ‘bad’. In reality (a), there is only relational transformation in which ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ are subjective ways of looking at transformation; i.e. there is no ‘hitting’ without ‘fielding’ yet we like to speak of ‘hitting results’ out of the context of ‘fielding’. In fact, Western society and Western science constrains it talk to one-sided RE-presentations that are in the ‘all-hitting, no-fielding’ terms of ‘what things do’.
Listening to one’s own experience, there can be no ‘hitting’ without ‘fielding’. ‘Hitting’ without ‘fielding’ would be ‘the sound of one hand clapping’. We reduce relational transformation, the only physically real dynamic in our natural experience, to one-sided all-hitting, no-fielding RE-presentation by way of subject-verb-predicate intellectual constructs such as ‘Katrina is growing larger and stronger’. What happened to the transforming relational continuum we experience as ‘atmosphere’ which is ‘everywhere at the same time’ and within which, ‘Katrina’ (the storm-cell) is a ‘relational form’?
The principle is established, herewith, that we can and do use noun-and-verb language-and-grammar to reduce continuing relational transformation to one-sided all-hitting, no-fielding intellectual RE-presentations. That is, the principle is established, herewith, that it is easy to fall into the trap of confusing our language-based intellectual concepts (reality (b)) for ‘reality’, … and leaving behind in the dust, the physical reality of our natural experience. This is a trap that is the source of confusion and incoherence because it conflicts with the physical reality of our experience (a) wherein;
“[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
Philosophers of science have warned us about putting our simple subject-verb-predicate intellectual constructs into an unnatural precedence over our relational experience;
“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 going on here?
What is going on here is that there is no such thing in the (a) reality of our natural experience as ‘an act’ or ‘event-in-itself’ such as ‘a killing’, any more than there is such a thing as an ‘eruption’ of a volcano, or an ‘avalanche’. What there is, is relational transformation that can be inferred by material dynamics. Scientific inquiry does recognize this and calls it ‘nonlinear dynamics’ and/or ‘self-organized criticality’ and it involved the progressive development of phenomena by way of the progressive development of relational influences retained as ‘spring-loading’ [potential energy] that accrues until it reaches a threshold where material reconfiguration occurs, often with a violent release of stored energy.
There is every reason to acknowledge these ‘nonlinear dynamics’ as the general case, and the simple linear ‘what things do’ conceptualizing of dynamics as the special case. In nonlinear dynamics such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, avalanches, etc. (and in social dynamics where ‘tempers flare’), the progressive development of the phenomenon must be taken into account and NOT simply the ‘action’ that ‘erupts’ as a result of a continuing relational dynamic. Our scientific manner of thinking about things, for reasons of ‘economy of thought’, ignores the progressive development of phenomena and simply focuses on the secondary ‘eruptions’ that are isolated in space and time, as if they were ‘locally authored’ by some local ‘causal agent’.
“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”
Ok, we can see in this, that ‘science’ itself, in order to simplify the intellectual RE-presenting of physical phenomena, ignores the physical reality wherein a present ‘action’ derives from continuing relational dynamics. Feuding families continue to feud [undergo period eruptions of violence] even after having forgotten what started it all, and the value they put on the same killing is seen as ‘good’ by one side and ‘bad’ by the other.
Their respective subjective perspectives which have progressively developed through their unique situational inclusion in the common living space, equips them for judging and assigning value to ‘acts’ according to their own ‘experiential conditioning’.
Something is ‘fishy’ about this one-sided, all-hitting, no-fielding, intellectual concept of ‘an act’ notionally authored by an independently-existing ‘causal agent’ or ‘doer-of-the-deed’. In fact, a moment’s reflection reminds us that ‘the act’ is an intellectual concept coming from subject-verb-predicate RE-presentations; … ‘he shot and killed a man’. How did we extract the ‘doer-of-the-deed’ from the transforming relational continuum and set him up in the one-sided, all-hitting, no-fielding terms of a ‘causal agent’? We did it by intellectually (i.e. notionally) disconnecting his relational figure from the relational ground he is included in, by intellectually imposing, as the new, non-relational ground for him to reside, operate and interact in, an absolute space and absolute time containing/reference frame. In other words, that’s what subject-verb-predicate language constructs effectively do;
“It is sometimes stated that Newtonian space, time, and matter are sensed by everyone intuitively, whereupon relativity is cited as showing how mathematical analysis can prove intuition wrong. This, besides being unfair to intuition, is an attempt to answer offhand question (1) put at the outset of this paper, to answer which this research was undertaken. Presentation of the findings now nears its end, and I think the answer is clear. The offhand answer, laying the blame upon intuition for our slowness in discovering mysteries of the Cosmos, such as relativity, is the wrong one. The right answer is: Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are receipts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them.” – Benjamin Whorf, ‘The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language’
As Nietzsche observes, it is by an ‘error of grammar’ that we construct this synthetic concept of ‘an act’ authored by a ‘causal agent’. It is from language that we get our synthetic, all-hitting, no-fielding notion of a man as an ‘independently-existing, internal process driven and directed causal agent’ who resides, operates and interacts within a habitat that is notionally ‘independent’ of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it. This abstract ‘absolute container’ is something we generate with “the intellectual machinery we employ in the representation of the world on the stage of thought’”, which is NOT the basis of the real world.
“Space is another framework we impose upon the world” . . . ” . . . here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws; but let us clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature.” . . . “Euclidian geometry is . . . the simplest, . . . just as the polynomial of the first degree is simpler than a polynomial of the second degree.” . . . “the space revealed to us by our senses is absolutely different from the space of geometry.” . . . “Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a [relational] non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space ; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible. Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself, are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics ; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French.” – Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis
If we were to employ a relational, non-Euclidian language convention, we would be in the same camp with our indigenous aboriginal brothers who use a flow-based (relational) language convention.
We live within a continuing story, a story where relations are primary and things and ‘what things do’ such as ‘killings’ are secondary in the same manner that ‘eruptions’ are secondary ‘surfacings’, the primary physical reality being the continuing transforming of relations. This is what one understands in capturing one’s experience in a flow-based language [the noun ‘man’ is then a verb, ‘a manning’ comparable to a convection cell in a relational flow-continuum].
“Listening not to me but to the Logos [‘field of influence that steers all into all’], it is wise to agree that one is all and all is one.” – Heraclitus
The direction coming to our behaviour from our natural experience, in the case of relational tensions arising between/amongst our friends, induces us to move so as to reduce these tensions so as to subsume ‘eruptions of violence’ prior to their ‘surfacing’; i.e. to restore balance and harmony in the context of relational influence fields. If we could do this spontaneously, we would be like the community described by Chuang Tzu;
“They were upright and correct without knowing that to be so was righteous. They loved one another without knowing that to do so was benevolence. They were sincere without knowing that to do so was loyalty. They kept their promises without knowing that to do so was to be in good faith. They helped one another without thought of giving or receiving gifts. Thus their actions left no trace and we have no records of their affairs” – Chuang Tzu
When relations are NOT managed so as to subsume relational tensions so that they do not erupt in violence, we get eruptions in violence such as ‘killings’. Our experience informs us that these eruptions cannot be meaningfully considered out of the context of their progressive development from relational influences, but our Western cultural norm is to use these ‘acts’ as if meaningful-in-themselves and to operate a system of justice based on moral judgement that assigns value to them; i.e. honouring killings as the acts of courageous heroes in the battle of good against evil, or denouncing killings as the acts of evil terrorists in the battle of good against evil. As we know from experience, different people are always in contention as to whether to morally judge the ‘author of the killing’ as a courageous hero or an evil villain.
We can thank all those people who played a role in helping to reduce relational tensions [to restore relational balance and harmony] so as to subsume eruptions of violence prior to their surfacing (prior to the relational tensions reaching and exceeding the threshold at which the spring-loaded energy is violently released in a re-configuration that breeds less tension); i.e. moving so as to transform relational tensions is an alternative to eliminating one of the contributors to the tensions, or mutual annihilation to remove both.
Restorative Justice (RJ) is the alternative to the Western standard moral judgement based retributive justice based which assigns ‘value’ to notional ‘locally authored act’ (the localizing in space and time eclipses the progressive development of the phenomenon). Restorative justice assumes that we can never fully know the source of an ‘action’, nor the ‘result’ of an action;
“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’
If the process of moving so as to reduce relational tensions and subsume eruptions of violence is non-judgemental [does not impose the ‘offender-victim split’] then it ‘is’ restorative justice’ i.e. it is the natural way to move within the (a) reality of a transforming relational activity continuum.
In moving so as to reduce relational tensions and subsume eruptions of violence without imposing any offender-victim judgements, the question as to ‘what value’ to assign to ‘an event’ seen as an action authored by a ‘causal agent’, is avoided. Judging the killings of an ‘American sniper’ as ‘good, heroic and courageous’ will inevitably enrage the adversary whose moral judgement is opposite in sign, increase relational tensions and augment the incidence of eruptions of violence [perhaps not immediately, but relational tensions will be ‘re-charged’, and the loaded springs will be like bombs waiting to be triggered].
Our experience informs us, through our intuition, that through people teasing, poking and abusing a dog, that dog will eventually reach a tolerance threshold where he becomes a ‘biter’. To morally judge the act of biting and to manage social dynamics on the basis of punishing ‘acts of violence’ is to ignore the physical reality of our natural experience (a), wherein the eruption of violence is secondary to the progressive development of the phenomena which is inherently relational in nature. There is thus a circularity in physical phenomena which argues against an imposing of moral judgement by one individual or segment of a community against another individual or segment. In other words, it is impossible to isolate the actions of an individual from the dynamics of the overall relational matrix. ‘innocence’ and ‘guilt’, ‘offender’ and ‘victim’ are absolutist idealizations that are alien to the physical reality of our natural experience and alien to thinking deriving from flow-based language. Assuming collective responsibility [restorative justice] comes natural in flow-based language thinking where the social dynamic is understood as an interdependent relational matrix.
The ‘evidence’ gathering, in the relational case, is not constrained to debate on rational cause-effect, noun-verb-predicate intellectual constructs, but orients to ‘truth in experience’, hence the ‘sharing circle’ where the sharing shifts from the ‘head-voice’ to the ‘heart-voice’, where the circle includes representation from the full community so that those close to the fallen ‘courageous heroes’ who are being called by others ‘evil villains’ can share their grief with those ‘opposing others’ who are close to their fallen ‘courageous heroes’ who are being called ‘evil villains’ . The physical reality of our natural experience that flows from our heart-voice stands as a more basic ‘truth’ than the intellectual constructs articulated by our head-voice. In fact, in a transforming relational activity continuum, it is impossible to ‘isolate’ opposites of any type, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ included, as pointed out by Nietzsche. A ‘cause-effect act’ is a ‘being-based’ intellectual construct; i.e. it is the artefact of “intellectual machinery employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought that should NOT be regarded as the basis of the real world”.
Intellectual reasoning based judgement, therefore, should take a back seat to the physical reality of our natural experience.
“Reason” is the reason we falsify the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.
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“The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato on is pathologically conditioned; so is their reverence for logical argument. Reason equals virtue and happiness, that means merely that one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark appetites with a permanent daylight — the daylight of reason. One must be clever, clear, bright at any price: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downward.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’
Intellectual reasoning, by way of noun-verb-predicate constructs, rests dependently on the abstract concept of ‘being’ [“an empty fiction”] and the ‘error of grammar’ that it enables;
“Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. “Reason” in language — oh, what an old deceptive witch she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’
Conclusions;
We, the people of the Western culture, are much like any other people when we are silently engaging in relational living and experiencing, but when we ‘start talking’, we are prone to letting our intellectual reasoning [reality (b)] hijack our experience-based intuition [reality (a)] and letting our head-voice take over the helm from our heart-voice. This is a mistake that leads to confusion and incoherence. This is where moral judgement based retributive justice comes from, which establishes the innocence and righteousness of the judging individual or judging segment of community, in the same fell stroke, that it establishes the guilt and depravity of the judged individual or judged segment of the community.
In order to subsume the confusion and incoherence that is arising from putting reality (b) [our intellectualizing mechanics based moral judging] into an unnatural precedence over reality (a) [our relational experience that informs us intuitively], we need to restore the natural precedence of reality (a) over reality (b), as in restorative justice and as in circle processes.
What is holding us up on this is not only the huge size of this ‘error of grammar’ [it is hard to see something that is not small enough to be seen standing in front of one so that its limits can be used to identify it, but so large that it encompasses one so that there are no visible limits to identify it];
“The entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part” is a scam, in the sense that it is built on the error warned of by Ernst Mach, of “regarding the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, as the basis of the real world [of our natural experience]”, … that arises from our noun-and-verb architecture of language.
… but also the relative advantage enjoyed by those whose monopoly ownership holdings allow them to ‘tease’, ‘manipulate’ and extort sweat-shop services and debt foreclosed properties from ‘have-nots’, off the radar screen of moral judgement based justice, which meanwhile protects their persisting monopoly holdings that enable such ‘manipulating’.
Restorative justice and the circle process are approaches that restore ‘reality (a)’ into its natural precedence over ‘reality (b)’. They can be embodied in the general fabric of the social dynamic, to stand above moral judgement and intellectual debate.
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