‘Inclusionality’ Update: June 14, 2013

Where opposites find union

This following is an update on research into what I previously have called ‘inclusionality’ and ‘complex community dynamics’, our ‘take’ or pyscho-physical experiencing of the world understood as a world of ‘flow’, also known as ‘the Tao that cannot be named’ [is beyond language-based description] also known as ‘Brahman’, ‘Logos’.  This update is a review of the different ways that different people [or the same people in different situations] are currently interpreting it.

I am never sure how to word such ‘reports’ but I can say, again, that I feel motivated to keep providing updates at intervals on the chance that a report such as this could help ‘put some things in perspective’ re the unfolding world dynamic and popular views thereof [e.g. the notion of a ‘world revolution’ or etc.], that might otherwise [with fewer ways to explore it at our disposal] be ‘more unsettling’.

Or, I could say that the past seventeen years has afforded me the time to pursue my passion of deep sea diving and explorative forays into the dark depths have given me familiarity with a deep sea creature whose tentacles come out in the darkness and are manipulating our individual and collective behaviour at a level below our foreground intellectual discourse, … so that it is not a bad idea to bring this out into the light of day insofar as it could help to clarify developments that might otherwise seem ‘more mysterious’.

INCLUSIONALITY UPDATE: JUNE 14, 2013

As usual, I can report that very few people see things as I do.  I say this on the basis of having many dialogues which relatively few people have a sustained interest in.  But this is the same as, for example, the views of Amit Goswami http://www.amitgoswami.org/ whose ‘quantum activism’ has a lot in common with my own understanding, but which is also missing a lot of what I am seeing.  

In this update then, I’ll try to do less of direct explanation of what I am understanding and a bit more of how I see the new understandings of the ‘quantum activism’ ilk ‘playing out’ in our societal dynamics. 

In the anarchist crowd, there are many searchers of new understanding.  I would say 90 % are searching for an improved understanding and many have been ‘trying on’ a diversity of ideas (and practices) to see how they ‘fit’ and not being satisfied, are continuing their explorations.  In Spain, I see some whose understanding is very close to my own.  I don’t know who they are personally; this is just my ‘take’ from reading some writings from an anonymous source in Spain.   For example, they see it, as I also do, that we live in a relational space so that ‘the State’ is not something ‘real’ but something which is continually sustained by our manner of socially relating.  In other words, it makes no sense to ‘attack the State’ for ‘its’ faults because ‘the State’ is the symptom that is sourced by a certain manner of social relating that derives, in turn, from a certain worldview.  ‘The State’ and its institutions will just keep rebuilding after every attack, in the same manner that ‘criminals’ and ‘terrorists’ will just keep rebuilding after being attacked by ‘the authorities’ until the source of these manifestations is finally addressed … a source that lies ‘upstream’ of the actual State institutions and resides in the worldview that orchestrates and shapes the social-relational dynamic.

REALITY IN THREE LEVELS OF COMPREHENSIVENESS

Throughout my investigations, the understanding that ‘reality’ is available in three levels of comprehensiveness, with the more comprehensive realities including the less, has held up.  The levels are basically as Erich Jantsch (Austrian physicist) cited them in Design for Evolution: Self-Organization and Planning in the Life of Human Systems (The International Library of Systems Theory and Philosophy) in 1975.

Since I have ‘been in the business’ of fleshing out and deepening my understanding of these three levels, how they come about and how they are ‘at play’ in society, I will use my own terminology.  In any case, this three level view comes directly to one’s intuition and experience.

Level I: – Relational Features in Relational Space [non-dualism]

In this most comprehensive level of reality, the intuition of our pre-lingual[un-intellectualized] sensory experience, the universe is ONE, an ALL-including, continually transforming relational spatial plenum.   This has been described by Mach, Bohm, Schroedinger and others in association with understandings coming from relativity and quantum physics.  This is the ‘non-dualist’ relational space reality of Mach’s principle [“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”] as validated in the physical phenomenon of inertial force/guidance.

The relations of self, other and space, in this view are as one would understand the relations of one storm-cell with other storm-cells with the flow of the relational space of the atmosphere-plenum.  The whole dynamic is one of thingless-connectedness and simultaneous mutual interdependence.

One can imagine how ‘things’ emerge in the flow and register as separate and individual ‘things’ in our mind by considering the tornado.  It is ‘flow-within-flow’.  There is an ‘input’ ‘sink’ [female aspect] which air rushes into and is channelled and an ‘output’ ‘source’ [male aspect] which air fountains forth from, and these are conjugate aspects of one circular flow-dynamic.  The tornado, or hurricane or, in general, convection cell, appears to us as a local, visible, material ‘thing-in-itself’, even though it is, physically, a NON-LOCAL, NON-VISIBLE, NON-MATERIAL relational flow-feature, ‘made manifest’ by the vapour and/or flotsam/debris its purely relational flow-currents gather and animate.   As with an eddy-current in a conductor that derives from an electromagnetic field, the purely relational flow force is a field of potentials/possibilities that precedes the manifest, material actualization, just as tensions in the earth give rise to local, visible, material manifestations such as earthquakes and volcanoes.  That is, the local, visible, material manifestations are NOT the primary physical reality, they are ‘appearances’ or ‘schaumkommen’, variations in the transforming relational structure of space [Schroedinger].  

We know this intuitively.  For example, we know that the earth’s lithosphere behaves as a fluid and that convection currents within it are continually carrying molten material to the surface where it solidifies and elsewhere subducts it into the interior where it is ‘recycled’.  Still, it is convenient for us to speak of ‘continents’ as if they are local material ‘things-in-themselves’ and we do name them and speak of them as if they were, just as we name hurricanes ‘Katrina’, ‘Ivan’ etc. and speak of them as if they were local, visible, material ‘things-in-themselves’.  [We would have to see the whole atmosphere at once to ‘really know’ the hurricane, and that is impossible, so it is easier to speak of the hurricane by way of its local, visible aspect, the pinwheeling vaporous arms etc, …ignoring the non-local, non-visible, non-material field of potentials that is spawning it.

There are spiritual implications here since if all things, including our human selves, are relational features in the relational flow, then we are both, at the same time, the local, visible material aspect, the pin-wheeling thing called Katrina that is ravaging New Orleans, and the non-local, non-visible, non-material field of potentials aspect that is sourcing its local, visible, material aspect.   We are Brahman (eternal self, the ‘all’) at the same time as we are Atman (individual self).  This is the picture that physicists like Erwin Schroedinger and Amit Goswami [‘Quantum Activism’] are painting.

In understanding ourselves in this third level of reality; i.e. as a relational feature in the continually transforming relational-spatial plenum, like Katrina the hurricane, we can see ourselves both as a ‘causal agent’ [Katrina is ravaging New Orleans] and, at the same time, as an ‘agent of transformation’.  In fact, if one goes back to the physics, one acknowledges that the atmosphere-plenum in taking on infusions of solar thermal energy, is brought towards the ‘boil’ and these ‘boils’ [convection cells] emerge in the service of restoring balance in the thermal energy distribution; e.g. to ‘transport thermal energy from thermal energy rich equatorial regions to thermal energy poor polar regions’.  The hurricane is born into a Robin Hood service, the need of restoring balance.  The hurricane is an agent of transformation that transmits thermal energy from the non-local to the point on which it can act (e.g. from the whole of the atmosphere-plenum to the city of New Orleans).

This level one reality, as applies to man, is captured by Ralph Waldo Emerson in ‘The Method of Nature’, as follows;

“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.”

Now, Emerson is already getting into the reduction of levels of reality by pointing out that man has a tendency to see himself only as a ‘causal agent’ and not acknowledge his greater ‘agent of transformation’ aspect.  This is like recognizing Katrina only for her ‘act’ of levelling New Orleans and forgetting that she is an agent of transformation that is contributing to the continuing transformation of the relational spatial plenum.  As Schroedinger points out, this more profound aspect of self, our agent-of-transformation aspect IS God/Brahman.  We ARE Brahman, which is what Emerson is saying.  Why reduce ourselves to our ‘causal agent’ status; that is too small a view of who we are.

This level one reality comes with a spiritual aspect that overlays aboriginal spiritualism, as well as the Taoist, Buddhist and Vedanta spiritual traditions.

In the non-dualist level I reality, space is a fullness which is both male and female at once.  For example, the potential [pressure/tension] field that is the non-local, non-visible, non-material accommodating/orchestrating/shaping [female] influence on the local, visible, material [male] hurricane/actualization is ONE phenomenon with conjugate female and male aspects.

One is reminded here of the basic suggestion in quantum physics where ‘actuality’ arrives with the ‘collapse of the wave function’ [the probability distribution] in the act of observing/measuring.  In the macro-world of our physical experience, we seem to use language to ‘reduce to the male pole’ our full experience.  By this, I mean that we psychologically/intellectually shift all attribution of dynamics away from the fullness of relational space [the female aspect] and give it all to ‘local, visible, material things-in-themselves’ and ‘what they do’[the male aspect].  To give a simple, familiar example, if we have two friends working for two similar companies and Fred sits in the same low-level job for years Bob rockets up to the top of the organization, we attribute this to Bob, and so does Bob feel he has ‘earned the promotions’.   But his advancements could be due to being in the right place at the right time; i.e. his immediate bosses could have retired or died, opening up a chain of vacated positions that he simply flowed into.

Our scientific thinking makes use of absolute space and absolute time reference framing which captures dynamics in terms of ‘what absolute things-in-themselves do’, which is a ‘reduction to the male pole’.  This is a ‘reduced’ intellectual reality that will be spoken of shortly, but the point here is that there is this sense that we impute a rising star ‘trajectory’ to Bob, as if it were of his making, when it was the opening of a corridor in relational space that orchestrated and shaped ‘his trajectory’.  If we don’t know of Bob or the company [when we don’t look], the transforming relational spatial plenum just keeps on relationally-spatially transforming, but when ‘we look’, we Bob’s trajectory.

It is important to note that when ‘we look’, we look as an excluded observer ‘voyeur’ as if from the outside-in; i.e. a God’s-eye view.  We might capture this God’s-eye view as the place where ‘intellection’ takes over.  If we are Bob, navigating within the relational space in the manner of one of many drivers in the flow of the freeway, then we let the opening of relational corridors orchestrate and shape our asserting behaviour.  When three or more bodies move under one another’s simultaneous influence, it is impossible to solve for the trajectory attributable to the individual participants [the ‘three-body problem’], so Bob, if he is honest, does not claim ‘his apparent [male, assertive] trajectory’ as seen by a voyeur observer, to be attributable to his ‘intentions’ [it was outside-inward orchestrated and shaped by the fluid/relational dynamics he was included in.  

The scientific observer, who has mapped his movements on the freeway using a GPS in his car and putting black paint on his tires which register his trajectory on the freeway pavement, can pull out these pictures and show Bob that he does indeed have a ‘male, assertive’ trajectory.   Bob’s point will be that his trajectory has no meaning in the standard scientific reduced-to-the-male-pole ‘what a thing-in-itself does’ sense, since his individual movements and the collective movements were orchestrated and shaped outside-inwardly from the relational space dynamics they shared inclusion in.  Mach’s principle applies wherein the group  [and the group’s] movements are orchestrated and shaped by the relational space they share inclusion in; “The dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are shaping the dynamics of the inhabitants.”   This self-referencing habitat-inhabitant dynamic has an ouroborical-like topology; i.e. in a crowd dynamic, the islands and channel banks that accommodate, orchestrate and shape the flow passing through them are themselves the flow.

The conclusion is that the probability function ‘does not collapse’ unless we ‘get outside of the dynamics’ [impossible] and look down and in upon them as an excluded voyeur observer [the ‘God’s-eye view’].  We then ‘intellectualize’ what is inherently beyond intellectualization.  It is this God’s-eye view ‘intellectualization’ constituted by a ‘reduction-to-the-male-pole’ [imposing of absolute space and absolute time reference framing which makes possible the notions of absolute things-in-themselves and ‘their own behaviours/trajectories/development].

Of course, there is nothing more ‘God’s-eye view-like’ than the scientist’s looking through the barrel of a microscope or telescope at the world; i.e. it is almost certain to psychologically split the observer out of the relational spatial plenum he is included in.  This is the formula for creating ‘knowledge’ based on ‘scientific observations’, the sort of knowledge, as Heraclitus says; “that does not teach understanding”.

There is just one more ‘connection’ between this level I [quantum wave dynamic] reality with ‘spirituality’ that I’d like to make before leaving it, and it bears on this God’s-eye, excluded voyeur observer view that we can equate to ‘intellectual observation/knowledge’.   Since being in this God’s-eye view mode splits us out of and apart of the relational spatial plenum we are inherently, physically included in, we must suspend this intellectualizing [suspend intellectual thinking] in order to ‘get back inside our real world experience’.   This point is made by the spiritual guides of many spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, aboriginal traditional spiritual guides etc. 

The innocent experience of a child is like that of the child-driver of a ‘bumper-car’ in the bumper car ride in the fairgrounds.  The child has no destination-orientation and does not own his/her own trajectory.  He/she enjoys the in-the-now unfolding journey of inclusion in a continually transforming relational space, … seeing the corridors of possibility opening up, some morphing into cul-de-sacs and others into fairways for speedsters, one never knows until one ventures forward and even then there is no answer, only the continuously unfolding in-the-now experience.  Outside, the parents get to look in and see their child making his/her moves and following his/her trajectory, … ‘oh, he/she made a good move there!’, as the child turns into what unfolds into a fairway that could have as easily turned into a cul-de-sac,… the parents adopting the ‘reduction-to-the-male-pole’ that characterizes intellectual excluded voyeur observer thinking.

Suspending the God’s-eye view mode of intellectual thought equates to the suspending of the collapse of the probability distribution, allowing us to remain in unlimited possibility space.  One might say, to bring our Brahman aspect to the helm of ‘self’, the flow-plenum aspect of the hurricane that is ‘transmitting influences from the vast and universal to the point on which its genius can act’, and giving a break to our Atman aspect, our Katrina thing-in-ourselves-that-does-stuff [personal causal results achieving] aspect of ‘self’.  that does stuff aspect.

In the spiritual tradition of the Gnostics, this pure innocence-based experiencing state, the non-dualist state where the split between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ dissolves, is referred to as ‘entering the kingdom’.  For the Gnostics, the ‘kingdom’ is here and waiting for those who can bring the duality of ‘within and without’ into a non-dualist unity;

3. Jesus said, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the (Father’s) kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the (Father’s) kingdom is within you and it is outside you.

 

When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.”

 

22. Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, “These nursing babies are like those who enter the (Father’s) kingdom.”

 

They said to him, “Then shall we enter the (Father’s) kingdom as babies?”

 

Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom].”

 

The idea here is, as in Schroedinger’s ‘What is Life?’ essay, that we, at the same time, Brahman, the continually transforming relational spatial plenum [the ‘eternal self’ or ‘spacetime continuum’] and Atman, the relational feature in the relational space that is uniquely, situationally included within the flow-plenum.   Our intellectual thought, meanwhile, reduces relational-features-in-the-relational-plenum to ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own internal God-like sourcing of force and direction.  In other words, it reduces-our-self-to-the-male-pole, to pure Atman, no Brahman.  When we are at one with our Brahman self, we are ‘in the kingdom’.  This is a different kind of ‘knowing’ from ‘intellectual knowing’.

“In this gospel, and this is also the case in the Gospel of Luke, the Kingdom of God is not an event that’s going to be catastrophically shattering the world as we know it and ushering in a new millennium. Here, as in Luke 17:20, the Kingdom of God is said to be an interior state; “It’s within you,” Luke says. And here it says, “It’s inside you but it’s also outside of you.” It’s like a state of consciousness. It’s hard to describe. But the Kingdom of God here is something that you can enter when you attain gnosis, which means knowledge. But it doesn’t mean intellectual knowledge. The Greeks had two words for knowledge. One is intellectual knowledge, like the knowledge of physics or something like that. But this gnosis is personal, like “I know that person, or do you know so and so.” So this gnosis is self-knowledge; you could call it insight. It’s a question of knowing who you really are, not at the ordinary level of your name and your social class or your position. But knowing your self at a deep level. The secret of gnosis is that when you know yourself at that level you will also come to know God, because you will discover that the divine is within you.”

 

In this view, the ‘fall of man’ is the fall from non-dualism to dualism;

“The Gospel of Thomas draws on the imagery of Genesis throughout, and this is no exception. In Genesis 2:9 we are told of two trees in Paradise, the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. These fit well into the themes of Thomas; good and evil are two opposites, and life is a single thing, a unity. By eating of the tree of two things, Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are eventually cast out of Paradise. Paradise, Hebrew Pardes, is a good place for trees, since the Hebrew literally means ‘orchard’”

With this comment on ‘spirituality’ [which takes a lot of words!], this completes the outline of the ‘level I reality’ and its relation with scientific reality or ‘rationality’ which is actually ‘level III reality’ in this model. 

Just to mention, … that this three-level reality model is similar to the model of Erich Jantsch [‘Design for Evolution’] whose level I he called ‘evolutionary’ while his level II, he called ‘mythological’ and level III, he called ‘rational’.

While there is strong accord, my feeling is that my descriptions are more ‘tied down’ than his, but of course, I have had the benefit of critically reviewing his.  In particular, in distinguishing between level II [his mythological] and level III [his rational], I use the metaphor of the sailboater [level II] and the powerboater [level III] where the distinction is that one is ‘voyage oriented’ since one sees one’s force and steerage as deriving from the relational space one is included in in the sailboater level II reality, and one is ‘destination oriented’ and sees one’s force and steerage as deriving fully and solely from one’s internal components and processes, in the powerboater level III.  

Jantsch similarly sees ‘divinity’ as permeating, and being accessible, in level I reality.

“In a world which is creating itself, the idea of divinity does not remain outside, but is embedded in the totality of self-organization dynamics at all levels and in all dimensions. —Erich Jantsch”

Level II Reality: – Nature and Nurture: Sailboater reality

This level II reality can be understood as a reduction/simplification of level I reality, … a reduction that delivers ‘economy of thought’, as Mach would say.  It is ‘dualist’ in that it splits apart ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’, as when we refer to ‘the environment’, that which ‘surrounds us’ but which is ‘not us’.

In level I reality, all ‘things’ from atoms to galaxies and from body cells through organs to organisms were understood as ‘relational features in a relational flow’ [relational flow = relational spatial plenum].  

Now, in level II reality, we use the ‘subjective idealizing power of language’ to reduce the relational feature to a NOTIONAL local, visible, material ‘thing-in-itself’.  Language and grammar are key here, and we know the ‘power of the word’ from our experience as to what happens when we take a dimpling-up in the flow [a storm-cell] and ‘give it a word-name-label’ such as ‘Katrina’.  We can forget about the flow which is really, physically what is going on, and switch over to talking about ‘Katrina’ and ‘how Katrina is growing and developing, and ‘what Katrina is doing’.  This level two reality is a pseudo-reality that is in terms of ‘what things-in themselves are doing’; i.e. we have dropped down a level from understanding dynamics figures or forms in terms of ‘activities’ to using the subjective idealizing power of language to re-render these activities as ‘things-in-themselves-that-do-stuff’.   In other words, we have done exactly what Emerson warns us not to do, to re-cast the agent of transformation as a causal agent that is defined by his acts. [forgetting that he is Brahman in his aspect of transmitting influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his [Brahman] genius can act.

How did language do this to us?  How did it drop out the divine and leave only the human?   How did it reduce us from ‘relational feature in the relational flow [Brahman, Tao, Logos]?

Nietzsche and Watts and Sapir and Whorf all explore how our language architecture to shape our reality.  I will cite a few of their propositions since this is a key point; i.e. we observe something that is essentially ‘dynamic’ and somehow extract from this dynamic, ‘absolute being’ that we then say is ‘the source of the dynamic’;

“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

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] … our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “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

“As soon as one sees that separate things are fictitious, it becomes obvious that nonexistent things cannot “perform” actions. The difficulty is that most languages are arranged so that actions (verbs) have to be set in motion by things (nouns), and we forget that rules of grammar are not necessarily rules, or patterns, of nature. This, which is nothing more than a convention of grammar, is also responsible for (or, better, “goeswith”) absurd puzzles as to how spirit governs matter, or mind moves body. How can a noun, which is by definition not action, lead to action?” —Alan Watts, ‘Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’

“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously  built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”  – Edward Sapir

 “Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a 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

Again, we start with our experiencing/observation of dynamics, and we use the subjective idealizing power of language to reduce the activity [e.g. the storm-cell], the relational feature in the transforming relational spatial plenum, to a ‘thing-in-itself-that-does stuff’ [‘Katrina’].   In other words, we use language to reduce our level I reality to this level II reality in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these things-in-themselves are doing’.

Now, in this dualist level II reality, we acknowledge a role for both the ‘things-in-themselves’ and for ‘the environment’.   In the non-dualist level I reality, there was no ‘time’ since the relational spatial plenum was undergoing transformation wherein the entire plenum is changing at the same time.  And, as Einstein observes;

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”

 In other words, level II reality not only makes use of words and grammar to reify the relational features and reduce them to ‘things-in-themselves, but it re-renders dynamics, which were relational in level I reality, to the actions/interactions of ‘things-in-themselves’ IN SPACE AND TIME.  Instead of the figures being relational features in the relational spatial plenum, the figures are now ‘things-in-themselves’.  Snap, Snap.

Imagine a picture of yourself in front of you along side a picture of a hurricane.  As you look at the images, you see them as local, visible, material things-in-themselves or ‘beings’.  But if you think of the earth’s biosphere as it must have been over the past few million years, you can imagine how billions of people must have been bubbling up within it and then the human ‘being’ starts to look more like a ‘bubble’ in the boil-up; i.e. an activity more than a thing, an agent of transformation more than a local machine with its own jumpstart behaviour so that it is know by its causal acts rather than by its tornado-like ‘transmitting of influences from the non-local [vast and universal] to the point on which its [Brahman] genius can act’. 

The subjective idealizing power of language does for the human relational feature what it does for the hurricane relational feature, it reduces it from an activity [level I reality] to a notional ‘thing-in-itself’ that notionally acts and interacts in space and time.

A major social dynamics ‘glitsch’ develops from the fact that we use what we take to be ‘reality’ to orchestrate and shape our individual and collective behaviour.   David Bohm spent his latter life in trying to alert people to the ‘incoherence’ which resulted from using one reality as the basis for acting so as to change that reality in a desired way, when that was not ‘really’ the operative reality, thus the change we were expecting to bring about didn’t happen; … some other change happened instead.   We compound this problem if we try to straighten out the mess we just made, without changing the reality that we are presuming is the operative reality, while the operative reality is something else.  This is Bohm’s ‘incoherence’, and one can see and discuss how this comes about across these ‘three levels of reality’.

In moving from reality level I to reality level II, we moved from the reality of the aboriginal to the reality of the Western culture and similar cultures.  The fact that Indo-European languages orient to ‘things-in-themselves’ while aboriginal languages retain ‘things’ as ‘activities’, bears on this cultural split in ‘preferred reality’.

Bohm did note, however, that our (Indo-European) languages tend to be highly noun-oriented and well suited to discussions of concepts and categories. By contrast, quantum theory demands a more process-oriented approach, a verb-based language perhaps that emphasizes flow, movement and constant transformation. (Bohm’s Holomovement – the movement of the whole.) — F. David Peat, ‘Language and Linguistics’

In moving from reality level II to reality level III, we are moving within dualist culture and these different realities are differently shaping behaviour in a manner that is recognized as ‘political’.

It is useful to keep in mind that we are all included in the same reality but we have different ‘reality viewing options’.  If we see things in reality level I, we can also see reality levels II and III which are ‘included in’ level I, and if the person can ‘see’ reality level II, they can see reality level I, but the reverse is not true.  Supposing we are on the top of a mountain and get to see all around us.  Then we climb to a higher mountain where we can see much farther and we can look down on the place we were standing before and see all that we could see from there and much more, and then we climb up to the top of a still-higher mountain and we can see much farther still, but we can see below us, included in our view, the other two viewing levels.   Meanwhile, if we descend to level III, we lose sight of the view from the higher levels.   E.g. if we start viewing Katrina as a thing-in-herself and thinking in terms of her growth, movement and causal actions, we will have lost the level I view of Katrina as an activity in the transforming relational spatial plenum.  Or in Emerson’s terms, if we start viewing man as a causal agent who is the jumpstart author of his causal achievements, we will have lost the level I view of the man as an agent of transformation, a Brahman activity.

Moving from level II reality to level III reality is like moving from one’s sense of being a sailboater in the world to being a powerboater in the world.  In the sailboater view, there is a hedging on the issue of being a relational feature in the relational flow,…however, it is understood that one derives one’s force and direction from the relational flow one is included in.   In level II reality, one falls into the nature-or-nurture dilemma, where one cannot determine to what extent one’s behaviour derives from oneself and/or from the environmental situation one is included in.  Such is the plight of the sailboater.  However, in level III reality, in thinking of oneself as a powerboater, one’s force and direction is understood to derive fully and solely from the interior of one’s self. 

Level III Reality: – Analytical Science or Powerboater Reality

This level III reality can be understood as a reduction from level II reality in that the ‘environment’ is no longer providing force and direction to the notional thing-in-itself.  The ‘thing-in-itself’ is assumed to have on board, all of the components and processes to fully provide force and direction to the ‘thing-in-itself’.

This level III reality associates with analytical inquiry.  Systems sciences pioneer Russell Ackoff uses the example of the university to describe these two levels of reality, II and III (he never gets to level I, although systems sciences pioneer Erich Jantsch did go there but few paid attention to Jantsch’s work).

We can use ‘in-and-back-out-again’ analytical inquiry to investigate the workings of a university [or anything], breaking it down into its basic components, developing understanding of each component [departments, faculties, physical plant] and its processes, and developing understanding of how all of these components and processes work together to give the university its operational force and direction.  

But as Ackoff points out, this view of the system as a local, visible, material thing-in-itself is incomplete unless the in-and-back-out-again analytical inquiry is grounded in an out-and-back-in-again synthetical inquiry.  Before we used the subjective idealizing power of language to put a word-name-label on ‘university’, it was a relational feature [a pattern of how people were coming together in a shared activity] within the relational suprasystem of community.  Another way of saying this is that every system is included in a relational suprasystem; e.g. the dynamic behaviour of a sailboat-system is relative to the dynamics of the relational space suprasystem it is situationally included in.

The simple analytical view on its own is the level III reality view.  If one acknowledges the more comprehensive view in which the ‘system’ is included within and drawing force and direction from a relational suprasystem, then the simple ‘system’ view is exposed as being basically ‘incomplete’.

Nevertheless, this level III reality is basic ‘scientific thinking’ or ‘rational thinking’ and there are plenty of people who make this level III reality their ‘operative reality’.  You can recognize it in the biological sciences, for example, which claims that it is possible to fully understand human behaviour from in-and-back-out-again analytical inquiry.

For example, Francis Crick, the co-discoverer with James Watson of the double helix structure of DNA turned his attention to the problem of consciousness in partnership Christof Koch, …

 “His view of consciousness, however, was summed up in his own book ‘The Astonishing Hypothesis’.  The hypothesis in question is ‘…that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’”

The notion that consciousness originates in the brain was/is the belief of Marxists and Vladimir Lenin wrote a book to attempt to purge ‘Machean interpretations’ wherein consciousness is understood as ‘the stuff the universe is made of’; i.e. Brahman, Tao, Logos, flow.  A Marxist spokesman on the topic, Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), primary contributor to ‘the New Economic Policy’ (NEP), put it this way;

“Organic nature grew out of dead nature; living nature produced a form capable of thought. First, we had matter, incapable of thought; out of which developed thinking matter, man. If this is the case we know it is, from natural science is plain that matter is the mother of mind; mind is not the mother of matter. Children are never older than their parents. ‘Mind’ comes later, and we must therefore consider it the offspring, and not the parent existed before the appearance of a thinking human; the earth existed long before the appearance of any kind of ‘mind’ on its surface. In other words, matter exists objectively, independently of ‘mind.’ But the psychic phenomena, the so-called ‘mind,’ never and nowhere exists without matter, were never independent of matter. Thought does not exist without a brain; desires are impossible unless there is a desiring organism other words: psychic phenomena, the phenomena of consciousness, are simply a property of matter organised in a certain manner, a ‘function’ of such matter.”

I have included this quote to highlight this ‘inversion’ of our conception of ‘consciousness’ as we go from reality level I, the home of ‘quantum activists’ like Amit Goswami (and implicitly Mach and Schroedinger) to the level III reality of biological researchers like Francis Crick and political theorists like Lenin and Bukharin (Marx was already ‘gone’ and couldn’t comment on the Machean interpretation of his work which was effectively brought to extinction by Lenin and his book ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism’ ( http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/ )

In the level I reality, man is ‘is made out of consciousness’ [the universe is consciousness; i.e. it is Brahman, Tao, Logos, flow] and in the level III reality, man is a God-like powerful thing-in-himself equipped with a neuro-cybernetic system (brain) that ‘manufactures consciousness’.

The primary feature of this level III reality is the viewing of the human organism, which we started off with in level I reality as an ‘activity’; i.e. as a relational feature in a relational flow, and reduced to a ‘sailboater’ in level II reality, has been reduced to a ‘powerboater’ in level I reality.  That is to say, the development and behaviour of the organism is assumed to derive absolutely fully and solely from the interior of the organism as a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own internal component and process driven and directed development and behaviour.  This is the popular ‘Newtonian science, analytical view’.  It is the view that has been institutionalized in our retributive Justice System; i.e. level III reality uses the cause and result model which assumes that the individual is a ‘powerboater’ whose drive and direction is fully and solely ‘his own’, therefore in assessing ‘who killed Abraham Lincoln’, there is no need to go any farther ‘upstream’ than identifying the holder of the smoking gun, James Wilkes Booth, … in level III reality, that is.  In level II and level I reality, one assumes instead that Booth is the manifestation of upstream influences, in the manner that we say that ‘the volcano erupts’ but it is not this local cone shaped thing with a hole up its middle that ‘erupts’, in fact the cone-shaped thing is the result of the erupting, not the source of it.

The restorative justice practice of aboriginal traditionalists derives from level I reality where it is assume that ‘community’ is a ‘relational activity’ and that the individual ‘man/organism’ is a ‘relational activity’ so that eruptions of violence are understood as deriving from the relational flow of community that manifests through a particular relational feature we call ‘a human’.  The mission, in restorative justice, is to find a way for the relational activity called ‘community’ to transform so as to relieve the tensions which are the upstream source of the manifest ‘eruption’ of conflict/violence.

There is more to say about this level III reality, but I don’t want to make this into a book, right here, anyhow.   I will just say that the absolute independence of the organism as ‘thing-in-itself’ depends on the type of language we use and what assumptions we build into the architecture of the language.  Poincaré comments on this, pointing our that our default language is the language of Euclidian geometry because it is ‘simplest’;

“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 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

When we make space absolute empty, which we do if we make dynamic forms into absolute, independently-existing things-in-themselves, then we have to notionally introduce a God-like power into our ‘thing-in-itself’, level III reality ‘powerboater’ to logically back up its fully and solely internally driven and directed development and behaviour.  We do this with our choice of language [word and grammar architecture], as Nietzsche notes;

“I am afraid we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

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Summary:

The findings here are that we have available to us, ‘three choices of reality’ that we can use to understand the world dynamic and our own dynamics and how these relate to the world dynamic. 

The claim is that if we develop our plans and have them shape our individual and collective behaviour, based on a reduced reality [level II or  level III reality], then the results we actually get will depart from the results we anticipated, and this will not be a random difference, but rather a systemic problem referred to by Bohm as ‘incoherence’.   If things get worse in the wake of our trying to improve them, and we try to fix a deteriorating circumstance without modifying the level of reality that is the source of the deterioration, we will only component the problem.

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” —Einstein

What is going on in the world today can be understood in terms of the different types of ‘incoherence’ that arise from using ‘reduced levels of reality’ [II and III] to address issues that require more realistic [level I reality] attention.

For example, using level III reality based ‘retributive justice’ which assumes that a person is a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own internal process driven and directed behaviour, we will be chasing symptoms rather than source and we may induce the growth of that which we are attempting to remove [‘criminal’, ‘terrorist’ behaviour].  That is, we do nothing to remove the relational tensions that are the upstream source of the manifest eruptions of conflict/violence and may exacerbate them.  The same incoherence shows up in the allopathic treatment of illness; i.e. the source of the illness in level I reality is relational; a question of things falling out of balance.  The attack by criminals and terrorist pathogens is the symptom rather than the source [‘Le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’].

If the administering of antibiotics correlates with improvement in health, this does not prove that the microbes ‘caused’ the illness, it could mean instead that getting rid of them allowed the natural relational processes some ‘space’ to restore balance.  For example, if you go out in the wet and cold and your body, as a resonance system, has difficulty sustaining balance and resonance, this may result in conditions favourable to the proliferation of a bacterium that has been in your body but which had no ‘foothold’ until that point.  Once it proliferates, it puts a new ‘de-balancing’ stress on the body-as-resonance-based system, and even though the earlier de-balancing [cold-and-wet] stress has now departed, the new debalancing stress from the proliferating bacterium inhibits recovery.   An antibiotic at this point may remove the debalancing stress of the proliferating bacterium and expedite re-balancing.

The case of c. difficile infections and the failure of antibiotics, on the one hand, and the success of restoring floral balance by infusing balanced digestive tract flora [‘fecal transplant’], supports the level I reality as the ‘operative reality’; i.e. says that ‘health’ is the sustaining of balance in ‘le terrain’ and that restoring health = restoring balance and NOT defeating the attacking pathogens.

The incoherence in the case of c. difficile was to continue to administer different kinds of antibiotics which further de-balanced the digestive track flora and did nothing to help the colonitis, because the problem was not ‘the attacking pathogens’ but the missing strains of bacteria needed for balance in the digestive track flora, that had been wiped out by a normal course of antibiotics [e.g. as a precautionary for minor surgery] which debalanced ‘le terrain’ in such as way as to provide fertile ground for the proliferating of c. difficile in the first place.  The claim that patients were afflicted with ‘new and lethal strains of the ‘superbug’ c. difficile’ were bogus.  These bacteria did nothing to otherwise healthy doctors, nurses, visitors and hospital staff.

Ask yourself whether the ‘superbug’ appeared to be a ‘superbug’ because the problem of rebalancing in this case, was not through ‘killing off pathogens’ but in restoring missing strains of bacteria in the mix of 500 or so different strains that reside in the normal gut.  Ask yourself whether the ‘success rate’ of nearly 100% for the fecal transplant application does not reinforce this conclusion.  And ask yourself, further, if the death of hundreds of thousands of people since 1958 when this flora re-balancing treatment was first successfully tried is not an ‘incoherencie’.  

“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

There are many more incoherencies.  Putting millions of people in prisons on the basis that ‘they are guilty’ and the community/state is ‘innocent’ is another one.

These incoherencies derive from confusing reality level II and III for the physical reality of our experience as relational features in a continually transforming relational spatial plenum; i.e. ‘reality level I’.

[N.B. See also conclusions/observations at bottom of ‘Plant Intelligence’ commentary, below].

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Appendix:  -Selected Additional Examples of ‘Incoherences’.

Logical Truths, Stomach Ulcers and Anthropogenic Global Warming

An important source of confusion that generally pervades our multi-level reality derives from our use of Aristotelian logic in conjunction with scientific thinking and experimental validation of hypotheses.

For example, we can formulate a hypothesis that ‘acidic conditions cause stomach ulcers’ based on a ‘correlation’ between certain acidic conditions and stomach ulcers.   This may, without exception, be confirmed and thus the logical proposition be seen as ‘true’.

Later (this actually happened), a hypothesis may be proposed that bacteria cause stomach ulcers, and proponents of the ‘acid conditions cause’, who have developed expertise, reputation, treatment approaches etc. debated (opposed) this.  Meanwhile, the bacterial cause has turned out to be the more comprehensive view and the bacterial activity is the source of the acidity, so the acidity turns out to be a secondary effect or ‘symptom’ rather than ‘the cause’ of the ulcers.  [The question of ‘balance’ is a yet more comprehensive ‘cause’ which is still ‘waiting in the wings’].

How many cases are we familiar with where there is argument over the ‘cause’ of some ‘result’?  Consider the problematic cases of ‘HIV causes AIDS’ and ‘CO2 concentration in the atmosphere causes global warming’.  There is continuing dissent in both of these cases even though many years have passed since the supporters of the ‘causal’ interpretation won the battle ‘politically’ without ever settling it ‘scientifically’.

Meanwhile, few scientists disputed some kind of ‘correlation’ between the one activity [e.g. rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere] and the apparently related activity [rising surface temperature] although many argued that it was a ‘negative correlation’ in that the CO2 concentrating lagged the temperature rise rather than preceding it; i.e. the temperature rise appeared to ‘cause’ the increase in CO2 concentration, as would be the normal thought since CO2 dissolved in sea water is given off as the water temperature rises. 

Neither Medical Science nor Meteorological Science employs level I reality which would understand dynamics in terms of ‘relational features’ in a ‘relational space’.   If they did, they would see the continually floating present condition as the nexus of many relations rather than their presumption of a ‘normal state’ which is acted upon by an influence that causes the ‘system’ to depart from its ‘normal state’.  Where does this ‘normal state’ come from that allows us to speak of whether the temperature is ‘going up’ or ‘going down’?  When we look at the long term temperature curves, they are full of ‘cycles’ and there are local ‘risings’ within broader ‘lowerings’ and there are local ‘’lowerings’ within broader ‘risings’.  In other words, there is no basis for saying whether the temperature is ‘going up’ or ‘going down’ other than by our imposing of an ‘absolute space reference frame’ that contains the ‘system of climate’ seen as a local-in-space-and-time, thing-in-itself.  This is crazy, but this is what is going on, and it is not ‘seen’ because ‘not looked for’; i.e. the assumptions buried in our mathematical approach turn climate into a ‘linear system’ that responds to influences only ‘in-the-present’.

For example, humans are non-linear systems.   The wife puts up with her husband’s philandering ten or fifteen times, and then, the sixteenth time, she shoots him.  Nature is like this.  If you pour sand grains on the top of a pile of sand building at the critical angle of repose, it will accept several hundred grains no problem, then suddenly an avalanche comes.  This is called ‘self-organized criticality’.  It is a non-linear system behaviour that associates with ‘memory’ and ‘thresholds’.  When the explosive release of built-up energy happens, is impossible to predict.  There is only a general relation [‘power law’] that says that there will be many more little explosions compared to big ones [earthquake occurrence is a case of self-organized criticality].

Why shouldn’t climate be a nonlinear system?   Since we know that nature is ‘springy’ in that one can charge a spring and it will slowly discharge, as when a heavy object with positive buoyancy drops into water, descends, and then rises to the surface.   If there is a cold winter and voluminous ice deposition, the melting ice in the summer sources a long retro-warming cycle [cooling influence] that can counter other rising cycles such as might associate with the warming phase of orbital wobbles or sun cycles.   In other words, the cycles in the global surface temperature curve are based on physically real influences which are generally cyclical and it is thus without any justification that we say, at any point in time, that ‘the temperature is going up’ or ‘the temperature is going down’.  There are rising trends and lowering trends that imply cyclic influences and what we see in the temperature curve is therefore the result of relational interference.  If we put a big block of ice in our cellar one year and we measure the house temperature the next year, the summer cycle of rising temperature will be moderated by the retro/cooling effects of the melting ice and our temperature curve will be showing the net effect which includes the influence from the remote past [our placement of the block of ice].  If the exposed surface area of the melting mass of ice varies as it melts then the retro-influence on the summer warming cycle will show up as curvy detail on the temperature curve.

Recall what Nietzsche said about ‘intention’ and how it relates to our thinking as we observe the temperature curve;

… “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

We are thinking, if the curve goes up, that ‘something must have made it go up’.  But the apparent rise could be due to a decline in the retro-warming/cooling influence.  A cycle of strong cooling that subsided for a while and then strengthened again would show up on the temperature as a rise in temperature even though the warming influences during that time were steady/flat.  But would we not think that we should be able to find a ‘cause of warming’ to explain the rise in temperature, and be ‘looking around’ for some ‘cause’ that might explain it?

The ‘glitsch’ here is in the language we use and the impressions it gives us.  It is correct to say that the little positive hill on the temperature curve is a ‘rise in temperature’, which is just a quantitative measure, but it is not correct to say that the positive hill represents ‘warming’ since that implies ‘the type of influence’.  It is not ‘warming’ that produces the rise in temperature but ‘cooling’ [a drop in cooling].  We have both warming influences and cooling influences affecting the temperature curve, but we tend to associate ‘rises in temperature’ with ‘warming’.

We make the same sort of mistake in medicine because of our orientation to ‘positive cause’ of illness by ‘pathogens’.   But the rise in the presence of pathogens is arguably due to a decline in the body balance.  If we plot illness as we plotted temperature, we are correct in calling a positive bump a ‘rise in illness or fever’, but we are not correct in calling it, for example, a rise in ‘infection’ which implies ‘agency’ and which would imply pathogenic cause, as it could instead be due to a decline in balancing force of the body [I could call it a decline in the ‘immune’ system but that implies defence against pathogens and I am referring to balance sustaining ability].  

Medical science did not ‘cotton on’ to infections associated with vitamin deficiencies after studying them for decades, due to what Nietzsche is saying above; i.e. we have a psychological bias to looking for positive causes.

“The evidence from disease would have led sooner to a conception of these food constituents and their functions but for a not unnatural bias in thought.  It is difficult to implant the idea of disease as due to deficiency.  Disease is so generally associated with positive agents — the parasite, the toxin, the materies morbi— that the thought of the pathologist turns naturally to such positive associations and seems to believe with difficulty in causation prefixed by a minus sign.” — Medical Research Committee, Report on the present state of knowledge concerning accessory food factors (vitamines), Special Report No. 38, London, H.M.S.O, 1919.  Cited in ‘The Germ Theory, Beriberi, and the Deficiency Theory of Disease’ by K. Codell Carter  [ negative cause ]

The positive cause has a ‘male’ assertive connotation to it, while the negative cause has a ‘female’ accommodating connotation to it.  Newtonian physics deals in ‘what material things-in-themselves do’; i.e. all male and no female.  The female accommodating influence is ‘done away with’ by imposing the notion of absolute space [non-influencing space].  The male agency is local, visible, material agency while the female influence is non-local, non-visible and non-material and made manifest through the male; e.g. the proliferation of bacteria is visible, but not the spatial-relational de-balancing that elicits such proliferation.  The rise-to-fame-and-glory of the man who asserts himself in his work, getting six promotions in five years, might be looking so good because that’s how things go in a mafia operation where inter-gang warfare is continually opening up positions to rise into.  The breakthrough that led to the invention of the transistor was to think of current in terms of the flow of ‘holes’ rather than the flow of ‘particles’ (electrons); i.e. using fields to open up holes in semiconductor material which orchestrated the flow of electrons proved more flexible and efficient than pushing particles through hard-wired conductors.

The negative causal ‘female’ influence, although non-local, non-visible and non-material [spatial-relational] is arguably the mother-source of the local, visible, material male influence.  For example, we could monitor the performance of the university-system but since the university system is included in the relational suprasystem of community, the pulses of higher performance would necessarily derive from the community-suprasystem in which the university-system was included. 

When a curve’s up-and-downs are interpreted in physics, the assumption is made that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’, but as in the case of the temperature curve discussed above, this would only be legitimate if the male agency were fully and solely driving the curve.   As in the melting ice example, negative causal influences from the remote past can directly influence the present.  Since these negative causal influences may have cyclicities, both past and future are enfolded in the present.

When we ‘graph’ temperature as a curve on a flat sheet of paper, we are doing something mathematical with these observations.   We are ‘subjectizing’ temperature and imputing to it, ‘its own trajectory’ and we say that ‘temperature goes up’ and ‘temperature goes down’, just as Nietzsche notes how we use the power of words and grammar to subjectively idealize AN ACTIVITY.   Temperature is defined as the average kinetic energy of the molecules, thus it is an activity and not a thing-in-itself.  However, we use the subjective idealizing powers of language to compose statements like ‘the temperature is rising’ and ‘the temperature is falling’.   Meanwhile, the ‘cyclicity’ or ‘wave aspect’ of nature associates with ‘spring loading’ which moves kinetic energy into potential energy, and ‘spring unloading’ which moves potential energy into kinetic energy, so by subjectizing ‘kinetic energy’, which is local, visible, material, we occlude/eclipse ‘potential energy’ which is purely relational; i.e. ‘non-local, non-visible, non-material’; i.e. statements like ‘temperature is rising’ are ‘reductions-to-the-male-pole’.

The melting of ice requires a lot of work on the part of the free gas molecules that have to deliver a good portion of their kinetic energy to their buddies imprisoned in the crystal cell structures of ice.  They succeed in liberating their buddies, but only at the price of their becoming exhausted of kinetic energy and thus slowing down so that the observer who measures temperature will measure a lowering of temperature in the gaseous medium.  The full story of the temperature curve then, cannot be delivered by paying attention to the ‘rising’ and ‘falling’ of the curve, since this occludes/eclipses what is going on with the potential energy which resides in the relational space which is part of the spring-loading and unloading of cyclic/wave dynamics.  When the kinetic energy rises, the potential energy falls and when the kinetic energy falls, the potential energy rises [conservation of the sum of potential plus kinetic energy]. 

The temperature curve is therefore only ‘half the story’.  If I were managing the temperature of my house and using ice in the process [like nature is managing our living space], I would be valuing the stocks of potential energy just as much as the stocks of kinetic energy.   That is, ice is loaded with negative potential energy that can cancel out positive kinetic energy [exhaust and slow down free gas molecules].  If I acquired some blocks of ice some years back and they are still melting, they are directly affecting today’s temperature readings.  Cyclic ice ages have a continuing effect on today’s real-time temperature readings, just as my ice blocks have a continuing effect on my today’s real-time house temperature readings. 

So, where does this notion come from that a rise in this influence or that influence (CO2 concentration) is responsible for real-time variations in the temperature curve?  That is the implication of comparing and correlating the temperature curve and the CO2 concentration curve; i.e. one is searching for a ‘cause’ in the sense that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’.  Where does this assumption come from?

Answer:

“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.

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.

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”

[N.B. See also Berkeley’s critique of Newton’s fluxions]

If I have been planting blocks of ice in my cellar and closets and a new guy comes in to explain the variations on my house temperature curve, his psychological bias will be to look for positive causes to ‘rises in temperature’,… not decline in cooling influences.  The positive causes are ‘male’ while the cooling influences are ‘female’ in that they orchestrate/shape the movement of the curve from the outside-inward.  When we see a little positive ‘hill’ on the temperature curve, it can be caused by the cooling influence ‘sucking the curve up’ and not ‘pushing it up’ as with a positive causal influence.  It’s like Bob ‘moving up in the organization because of his bosses retiring and dying; i.e. we plot his trajectory as if it were due to his assertive, positive causal influence, when the reality is that his movement is orchestrated and shaped outside-inwardly by the opening of possibilities in the relational space he is situationally included in.

This gives us a clue to the comment of Marina Leibman, Chief Scientist in Russia’s Earth Cryosphere Institute;

“There is no global warming caused by human activity, first because greenhouse gases do not affect climate. They do not affect climate. That is a physical theory, it is an invented horror – it does not exist.” … “While politicians and public … compare “today” with “yesterday”, geologists (science community which I belong to) always think in terms of geological time, [cyclic] events lasting thousands and millions of years. Such a viewpoint takes a lot of imagination in addition to knowledge. Not that effective as something Global and Hazardous, we call it in Russian “Strashilka” (a scarecrow).” (2010) —Marina Leibman, Russian Academy of Sciences, Chief Scientist, Earth Cryosphere Institute, Siberian Branch.

Marina is implicitly speaking of global ‘incoherence’, aka the belief in ‘anthropogenic global warming’, which comes from formulating one’s actions as if one were in a level III reality, while in fact living in a level I reality.  The urgency in this belief derives from the notion that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’ so that ‘every moment counts’.  The dualist view which splits people out from and apart from the land establishes the conditions for ‘thinking’ that behaviours jumpstart from ‘people’/‘humanity’, giving rise to the incongruous visions such as ‘farmer John produces corn’ and ‘humanity produces global warming’, as if they were doing this from ‘outside of the world’ as a God might do it [this is what comes from the ‘God’s-eye view’ of level III reality aka ‘rational reality’]. 

Where, in our rational modeling schemata, do we take into account how much energy is moving from kinetic to potential and from negative potential to kinetic [as in melting cyclically deposited ice/permafrost]?  If we did incorporate it (and there is some attempt to, for example, explore the whole carbon cycle including how it is ‘frozen into’ plants and ‘captured’ out of its free air realm into liquid bondage), it would make no sense to interpret a temperature curve in a purely positive causal sense when the curve can take on shape by being sucked up by a decline in the release of negative potential energy that sap the kinetic energies of dynamic particles, in their continuing cycles of emprisoning and liberating which we, while in reality level III choose to ‘linearize’ by splitting apart matter and space with the abstract device of absolute space and absolute time reference framing.

In general, nature’s dynamics involve continuing conversion of kinetic to potential energy.  The relational space of nature is ‘springy’, ‘cyclic’; i.e. it is a wave dynamic.  However, one of the conjugate aspects in this energy dynamic is ‘local’, ‘visible’, and ‘material’ [the male, particle dynamics aspect] while the other is ‘non-local’, ‘non-visible’, and ‘non-material’ [the female, purely relational aspect].   This conjugate aspect entity, one aspect of which is non-local, non-visible, and non-material, with the other aspect, local, visible, material, … is the description of a ‘complex number’ as occurs in the mathematical formulation of ‘harmonic motion’ [cyclic phenomena].

A wave function or wavefunction in quantum mechanics describes the quantum state of a particle and how it behaves. Typically, its values are complex numbers.

The collapse of the wavefunction happens when we ‘observe/measure’ the ‘particle’.  The particle and its motion constitute ‘kinetic energy’ and when we are looking at this, we don’t see the ‘potential energy’ in the field that is orchestrating/shaping their individual and collective behaviour and which creates them.

When we pull the child in from the bumper car ride, where she had no trajectory of her own and have her watch her brother, she will, now as an excluded voyeur observer rather than as an included-in-the-relational-flow experient, impute to her brother, his own trajectory, aided by language which will facilitate her saying things like we would say about Katrina’s behaviour, …. ‘look, he is turning into the fairway’,… ‘look, he is cutting off that red one and smashing into the blue one’.

She is no longer ‘inside’ the transforming relational space.  By intellectualizing the dynamics using the God’s-eye view of the excluded voyeur observer, she has eaten from the tree of knowledge of opposites and split herself out of the relational world dynamic that she is ‘in reality’ [level I reality] ‘really’ included in.

When she is playing in the bumper car ‘game of life’ with her 25 ‘brothers and sisters’, they in a reality wherein; “the islands and channel banks that accommodate, orchestrate and shape the flow passing through them are themselves the flow”

Experientially, they are always in reality level I.  Mentally, they are on the cusp of reality levels II and I.  They have let go of the God’s-eye view of the excluded voyeur observer that puts them into reality level III.

To summarize this topic; Logical Truths, Stomach Ulcers and Anthropogenic Global Warming;

1. The ‘truth’ of logical propositions, as Goedel’s theorem shows, is inherently exposed to ‘incompleteness’.  In the case of stomach ulcers, a correlation was found between acid conditions in the stomach and stomach ulcers.  The logical proposition was that ‘acid conditions CAUSED stomach ulcers’.  Experimental observations were seen as confirming the truth of this proposition and an infrastructure was built around it, including a hierarchy of experts in the treatment, pharmaceutical chemicals, literature and education etc.  The next correlation, between bacteria and acid conditions and stomach ulcers let to the logical proposition that bacteria caused stomach ulcers and that acid conditions were a side-effect.  The infrastructure already in place, developing out of the first ‘truth’ resisted being ‘superseded’ by a newer, more complete truth [less incomplete truth].  The ‘still more complete truth’ of the proposition that a de-balancing of the relational ‘terrain’ opens the possibility for proliferation of bacteria is ‘waiting in the wings’.  The overall point is that the truth of logical propositions is only as good as the propositions.  There is no guarantee that a logical proposition is ‘complete’ and in fact it cannot be complete, this side of infinity.  ‘Truth’, no matter how solid and exact it is, has no value outside of the logical proposition that it sits in.  Truth is therefore a very limited form of meaning/understanding.

2. Nature’s dynamics, according to our experience, are inherently ‘cyclic’.  Cyclic phenomena, to be mathematically expressed, require ‘complex numbers’, numbers that have conjugate ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ aspects.  These conjugate aspects correspond to (a) the ‘local, visible, material ‘particulate’, ‘male’ aspect and (b) the ‘non-local, non-visible, non-material’ ‘relational space’, ‘female’ aspect.  In the non-dualist view, these conjugate aspects, the inside-outward asserting creative male influence and the outside-inward accommodating/orchestrating/shaping influence on individual and collective behaviour, are ‘one COMPLEX dynamic’.  Mainstream science ‘reduces-to-the-male-pole’ this dynamic, by imposing an absolute space and absolute time observation/measurement/reference framing.  Ernst Mach refers to the motivation behind this as an ‘economy of thought’.  Instead of Mach’s principle wherein “They 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”, we get the reduced level III reality  which is in the all-male aspect terms of ‘what local, visible, material things-in-themselves are doing’.

3. Incoherence is arising from our use of ‘Truth’ of incomplete logical propositions, and the reduction of nature’s COMPLEX dynamics ‘to the male pole’ to construct a level III reality that shapes our individual and collective behaviours.

Plant Intelligence

This is just a short note to flag the fact that the ‘incompleteness’ of level III reality is steadily being detected within mainstream science, and the notion of ‘plant intelligence’, which is still standing, is something we can watch ‘fall’ since it is heading for a major fall, which could bring down with it, a lot more unjustified belief in level III reality.

The background is that the notion of a biological cell has shifted up and out of level III reality, the reality level which sees the cell as a ‘thing-in-itself’ or ‘unit of being’ with God-like force and direction jumpstarting from out of its nucleus.  The cell is increasingly being seen by biologists, as a ‘unit of perception’; i.e. as the conjugate relation of cell ‘receptors’ and cell ‘effectors’.   This change is ‘a work in progress’;

Wikipedia still portray the ‘nucleus’ as being the command-centre and the central-intelligence of the cell;

“The function of the nucleus is to maintain the integrity of these genes and to control the activities of the cell by regulating gene expression — the nucleus is, therefore, the control center of the cell.” — Wikipedia

However, in ‘The New Biology’, Bruce Lipton observes;

“As is described by Nijhout, genes are “not self-emergent,” that is genes can not turn themselves on or off. If genes can’t control their own expression, how can they control the behavior of the cell? Nijhout further emphasizes that genes are regulated by “environmental signals.” Consequently, it is the environment that controls gene expression. Rather than endorsing the Primacy of DNA, we must acknowledge the Primacy of the Environment!” —Bruce Lipton

Instead of a stand-alone, internally driven and directed thing-in-itself, the new biology is re-casting the cell from a ‘unit of being’ that ‘does stuff’, to a ‘unit of perception’ that is continually giving expression to the transforming relational space it is situationally included in.

“Receptor IMPs [Integral Membrane Proteins]  ”see” or are “aware” of their environment and effector IMPs create physical responses that translate environmental signals into an appropriate biological behavior. The IMP complex controls behavior, and through its affect upon regulatory proteins, these IMPs also control gene expression… The IMP complexes provide the cell with “awareness of the environment through physical sensation,” which by dictionary definition represents perception. Each receptor-effector protein complex collectively constitutes a “unit of perception.” –Bruce Lipton

Moving on to plants, notice the general pattern that, because we impute ‘independent existence’ to the ‘organism’ in level III reality, we are forced to impute to it as well, and internal God-like source of force and direction, a ‘centre of authority’ and ‘centre of intelligence’ of some type [i.e. we exclude acknowledging the female aspect of outside-inward orchestrating and shaping of development and behaviour as in level I reality, and to with the one-sided reduction-to-the-male-pole’].  We do this in our standard model of the human organization as well; i.e. science models the human organism in the level III ‘rational’ reality.  However, stem-cell research and epigenesis, as associates with the above discussion of the ‘new cell biology’ has given up on this notion of the God-like internal force and direction of the cell; i.e. the jumpstarting source of development and behaviour notionally attributable to a ‘centre-of-authority’ and ‘centre-of-intelligence’ notionally residing within the ‘independently-existing’ organism.

Given this level III reality, ‘intelligent behaviour’ can only ‘map back’ into its notional source in a ‘centre-of-authority’/’centre-of-intelligence’ residing in the interior of the organism, in this case, ‘plant’.

All kinds of evidence of ‘plants cooperating’, within their own family and across families and even across the ‘plant/animal’ boundary are cropping up with new investigative technologies.  The problem is that plants do not even have a ‘central nervous system’ to map the source of this intelligence back into.  This has scientists scratching their heads, but refusing to give up on the notion of ‘intelligent behaviours of plants’, because, of course, it is an essential requirement of level III reality, which endows relational features of a relational space [to use level I reality terminology for a moment] with absolute independently existing ‘being’, forcing the sourcing of behaviour to come from the interior of the organism. 

In level I reality, the plant is an ‘activity’, a ‘relational feature within the continually transforming relational spatial plenum’.  We make use of the ‘subjective idealizing powers of language’ to reduce the plant to a level III reality ‘thing-in-itself’, and impute to it ‘its own intentions’ as implied in ‘intelligent behaviour’. 

Level III reality, which is where the Western culture defines its own human organism members, is about to be hoisted by its own petard [rational science] whose increasingly sophisticated investigatory technologies are outgrowing the simplicity of the level III reality.  We are about to watch the ‘crumbling’ of the level III reality ‘foundations’ of the Western culture which has separated it from the level I reality grounding of the aboriginal culture and certain other ‘belief traditions’ [Buddhist, Taoist, Vedanta]. 

Note that we are not, as individuals, bound to level III reality, but we [Western civilization which is now globally dominant] have institutionalized it in our systems of governance, commerce and justice.  And it’s not as if we have institutionalized it as a ‘useful, economy-of-thought based tool’, …we have institutionalized it as an enforced belief so that unbelief is not allowed to threaten the system or its institutions.  Thus, gentle transformation is not possible unless, or until, there is general recognition of the incompleteness of level III reality.   This seems to be coming about, but the more we share the source of our growing incoherencies, the merrier; i.e. we can all lend a hand in bringing about this awareness which will then open the door to harmonious transformation.  I have personally referred to this sharing as aboriginal ‘decolonizers’ have cited it; as their number one priority; i.e. ‘undermining the intellectual premises of colonialism’ [Taiaiake Alfred, ‘Peace Power and Righteousness’].