An inclusional worldview
SCARP – Society of Confused Attributions, Rewards and Punishments
We ARE the SCARP that we are toppling down.
The warrior spirit in each of us that seeks to defend the vulnerable deserves respect, but I am not so certain of career militarists. Continuation of strife is continuation of their employment and status. Churchill’s hard military mind supported the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended the 1914-18 WWI; a ‘Carthaginian peace’ that would ‘bully’ and abuse a new generation of innocents, and so obviously infuse them with anger and hunger for vengeance that cartoons in the newpapers of the time were predicting another war when German newborns reached that age of majority; 1918 + 21 = 1939.
The ‘winners’ of WWII get to write the history and the way it is told suggests that the pathogenic forces of aggression ‘jumpstarted’ from Nazi politicians led by Hitler.
Is this not a ‘confused attribution’ of causality and culpability? What sense does it make to simply ‘ignore’ the historical conditioning of the German people by years of alienation and bullying, to the point that they were a ticking time bomb, and then to claim that their aggression jumpstarted from Hitler and the Nazis? Were Churchill and other militarist politicians like him ‘free of blame’? It is said that Churchill was a prophet because he always insisted, in the years coming up to WWII that the Germans couldn’t be trusted and that they would inevitably have to be ‘dealt with’ again. Sounds too much like the ‘career militarism’ that keeps Europe and the world in a continual state of war, doesn’t it? Of course, Churchill went from prophet to saviour and ‘winner’s history’ presents what happened, as we present things in court in our Western justice system, as if the community is innocent, righteous and beyond reproach, and that criminal aggression jumpstarts from the internal ‘intention’ [allegedly twisted intellect and purpose] of the errant brother.
Our experience and intuition scream out to us that WWII has ‘deeper roots’ than Hitler and the Nazi’s, roots that lead back to the bully alliance of France, Britain and others, so why do we ‘write it up’ as if ‘it all started with the rantings of this guy, Adolf Hitler’?
What is the reason for this CONFUSED ATTRIBUTION of causality and culpability?
Two philosophers have notified us of two reasons which are not ‘independent’ of one and the other. Friedrich Nietzsche shows us how our Western civilization psychological habit is to reduce every dynamic event to ‘doer-deed’ architecture while Henri Poincaré shows us how our Western scientific-thinking habit is to reduce every dynamic event to local-in-space-and-time causal sourcing [local jumpstarting].
Since our experience is of living within a continually transforming relational space and since modern physics affirms this inherently continuous, relational experience, on what basis would we not affirm it in our intellectual treatment of it? Nietzsche explains the psychological habit in terms of its appeal to ego, while Poincaré explains the scientific-thinking habit in terms of the convenience of simplicity that is embodied in ‘what science is’. As Ernst Mach observed;
“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
Nietzsche’s point about the ‘ego’ claiming ‘I did it’, ‘this outcome/result jumpstarted from me’, ‘I am the cause of this effect’, he elaborates as follows;
“[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
“Our bad habit of taking a mnemonic, an abbreviative formula, to be an entity, finally as a cause, e.g., to say of lightning “it flashes.” Or the little word “I.” To make a kind of perspective in seeing the cause of seeing: that was what happened in the invention of the “subject,” the “I”! —Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 548
Evidently, we build this psychological habit into our language; e.g. the origin of ‘lightning’ is the historical conditioning of the relational spatial-plenum, but we can bring the phenomenon into the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of absolute space and absolute time simply by saying ‘lightning just flashed’, in the manner of ‘the gun just fired’, erasing the historical development of the phenomenon, the gradual buildup of static electricity through wind and friction and other dynamics. It is like saying ‘the fifth skier crossing the same mountain slope ‘caused’ the avalanche; i.e. are we to jumpstart cause and effect from that local ‘here’ and ‘now’ [space and time] and ignore the historical development that is, ‘realistically’, the physical ‘cause’ of the ‘effect’?
Attributing the ‘cause’ of the avalanche-effect is a ‘logical’ rather than ‘physical’ attribution. Physically, there is a matrix of relations [‘friction’] that develop that hold the piling snow in place which at some point become non-sustainable. The wind, vibrations in the ground and the disturbance/pressure of the first four skiers were weakening that relational matrix, so the ‘physical phenomenal’ story does not start from the fifth skier. But when the mother of two children who were playing in the snow below, pulls their lifeless bodies out of the avalanche rubble, she is not interested in doing post-doctorate research that will fully elucidate on the ‘cause’ of this result.
As she looks back up the trail of disturbed snow left by the avalanche, she sees the fifth skier in the red ski jackets and blue ski-pants standing right there at the top of the avalanche delta, and he is obviously ‘the one responsible’ for this terrible result, and this knowledge brings ‘closure’ to what has happened, that is more solid and more final than esoteric? discussion in terms of infinite cause as in a relational continuum [1], such as maintained by David Bohm and others.
This attribution is ‘logical’ but ‘confused’ and it happens all the time. It can happen to a man who is just installed as the fifth CEO of a commercial corporation [or the fifth president of a nation] who suddenly finds himself sitting at the top of the delta from which a cascading cause is seen to jumpstart which ‘could be good’, … ‘could be bad’.
Obvious, the historical preconditioning of the relational space that a dynamic behaviour transpires within is of essential relevance to what unfolds. It is absurd, from a physical phenomenological point of view, to ignore the historical preconditioning of the relational space and to insist that the cause of the outcome, good or bad, jumpstarts from the ‘causal agent’ who ‘right now’ sits at the top of delta of cascading cause.
To reward or punish the alleged ‘causal agent’ on this sort of basis of ‘attribution’ of ‘causality/culpability’ is a very ‘confused’ behaviour.
But we, Western civilization, have institutionalized this confusion in our systems of governance, commerce and justice.
WE ARE THE “SOCIETY OF CONFUSED ATTRIBUTION, REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS” (‘SCARP’), and we are right now on an ever-steepening, slippery slope of our own making.
As Nietzsche points out, it is our ego, our ‘powerboater’ [as contrasted with ‘sailboater’] sense of who we are, that insists that we are the one, the point, where the buck starts and stops, for whatever unfolds at the base of the delta whose upper apex we occupy. It is this kind of jumpstarted causal logic that earns the fifth CEO of Enron etc. the big bucks. After stroking one’s ego and banking the big bucks, it is difficult to back out of this causal logic when there is disaster at the base of the delta.
But as Poincaré points out, it is our scientific thinking, that similarly ignores historical preconditioning in establishing ‘causal attribution’, and we ignore it because it simplifies our ‘calculations’;
“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.
Evidently, science, also, has chosen to ignore the historical preconditioning of the relational space that dynamics transpire within, in deducing cause-and-effect relations, and the reason is given openly and explicitly; i.e. it is for simplifying convenience;
“instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation”.
Newton’s insight into gravity was that ‘gravity was everywhere at the same time’ and thus every material body was moving under the simultaneous mutual influence of every body [including itself], but this was mathematically ‘intractable’, so Newton had to impute a ‘jumpstarting source’ [the analogue of ‘ego’] to every point in the abstract absolute space reference frame, and this ‘jumpstarting source’, he called ‘force’. By calculating the ‘local jumpstarting force’ at whatever location was needed, based on the distribution of masses in space, one could ‘make an end run’ around the so-called ‘three body problem’, the impossibility of solving for the motion of a particular body when it was a participant in three-or-more bodies moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence.
How could this be? How could one use mathematical trickery [calculating a vector force field in absolute Euclidian reference space] to get a solution that was mathematically impossible to get?
As Poincaré observes, there is a simplification here in that the historical preconditioning of the relational space is ignored, and “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.”
But the dynamics of nature are full of physical phenomena that ‘build and release’, like a relational matrix of springs, some of which are charging while others are discharging. In the case of ‘lightning’, the relational electric charges slowly build and ultimately release, and when we make the assumption that ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’, we capture the lightning in the difference between two successive frames, and say ‘lightning flashes’, without “ studying directly the whole succession of phenomena”. We do the same for ‘avalanches’; i.e. we make believe that ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’ and so we do not see the critical weakening of the relational matrix constituting the ‘friction’ that holds the heavy load of snow on the slope due to the rumbling of the SUV at the base of slope driven by the mother bringing her children up to the base of the slope to play in the snow.
We are the SCARP!
If you blow up your paper lunch bag and pop it with a loud bang, are you the cause of the man near you going berserk; i.e. the man with ‘shell-shock’ aka ‘PTSD’? Depends on whether you assume, or not, that ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’, or whether one should instead be “studying directly the whole succession of phenomena”, including the historical conditioning of the individual that went berserk, which would open the door to ‘other causes’ that would by and by dilute the paper bag popper’s role in the affair.
If someone rolled a power-keg down a rocky slope and on bouncing down and hitting its 17th rock, it detonated, would the newspapers show a picture of the fairly innocuous looking 17th rock and headline; “Innocuous rock causes massive explosion!” or would they look ‘upstream’ into the ‘whole succession of phenomena’ for the cause, i.e. at the dynamics gave rise to the ‘explosive device’. If you ask the ‘scientist’, he will say something like; “the explosion was caused by the intense compression of the explosive material in the keg, due to deformation of the keg arising from the particular manner in which it collided with the rock.
In the case of the person going berserk, the scientist will assume that ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’ and address the ‘rage’ that is captured in the difference between two observation frames [as in video recording]. The scientist will orient to what happens from the moment the bag is popped; i.e. the popping triggers fear and rage that… “occurs when oxytocin, vasopressin, and corticotropin-releasing hormone are rapidly released from the hypothalamus. This results in the pituitary gland producing and releasing large amounts of the adrenocorticotropic hormone, which causes the adrenal cortex to release corticosteroids. This chain reaction occurs when faced with a threatening situation”.
Similarly, if a woman has been historically preconditioned by sexual abuse, an unintentional brushing of her breast may trigger fear and rage associated with its being perceived to be a threatening situation. It may be the innocuous 17th rock that detonates this emotional explosion.
Now don’t go away, there is much more to this story; like how our Western SCARP habit of ‘banishing the female aspect’ in dynamics comes about. Hint: it is closely related to what has just been discussed.
This ‘trapping filter’ of looking for explanations of physical phenomena by taking ‘space’ and ‘time’ difference and assuming that ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’ puts us in the mental habit wherein we expect ‘cause’ to be ‘positive’. For example, supposing you are monitoring temperatures and in some interval between present and the immediate past, we see a rise in temperature and begin to search for a causal agency that is responsible. Chances are, we are going to look at everything else that is going on at the same time and try to find a ‘deviation’ in some or other physical dynamic that correlates with this rise in temperature.
But it could be that the cause is ‘negative’; e.g. an ice sheet that has been lowering the temperature for a long while has finally melted so the temperature depressing influence, having ceased, is the source of the apparent ‘rise’ in temperature [it is only a ‘rise’ in the sense of a decline of a temperature-depressing influence rooted in the remote past].
This ‘negative cause’ where ‘something that was there and has now gone away’ is responsible for a change in the system, opens up a whole new way of understanding ‘cause’. For example, the following comments of Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel prize in Medicine for Vitamin C;
“Mr X has a lack of vitamin C and contracts a cold. The cold leads to pneumonia. Mr X dies and his body is taken to the mortuary…not with the diagnosis “lack of vitamin C”, but with the diagnosis “pneumonia”. This does not matter for him any more, but matters for the rest of mankind, which is mislead in its thinking and judgement about vitamins.”—Dr Albert Szent-Györgyi [Note: there are roughly 200 different bacterial and viral exposures that can ‘cause pneumonia’ and ‘death by pneumonia.]
“Last year I collected a rather unfortunate personal experience. I broke down with pneumonia which I could not shake off for months, until I discovered that the quantities of ascorbic acid which I took (one gram daily) had become insufficient at my age (84 years). When I went up from one gram to eight, my troubles were over.”
How many rocks might be the ‘cause’ of explosion of the power keg as it tumbles down the slope?
How many balloon bursters, bag-poppers and backfiring vehicles might the ‘cause’ of the panic attack in the PTSD/shell-shock sufferer?
How many skiers and vehicle drivers might be the ‘cause’ of the avalanche?
How many innocuous unintended touchings might be the ‘cause’ of fear and rage in the person historically preconditioned by sexual abuse?
In all of these examples, it is possible for ‘cause’ to have a ‘negative sign’ and to derive from the historical preconditioning of the relational space the alleged ‘positive causal agent’ shares inclusion in.
The innocuous 17th rock ‘causes’ the power keg explosion IFF one assumes that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’
The bang noise makers ‘cause’ the panic attack in the PTSD shell-shock sufferer IFF one assumes that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’
The 5th skier ‘causes’ the avalanche IFF one assumes that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’
The innocuous unintended touching ‘causes’ the negative fear and rage experience in the sexually abused person IFF one assumes that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’
And, of course, the innocuous [under normal conditions] bacterium or virus ‘causes’ pneumonia IFF one assumes that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’
This simplification of convenience, the assumption that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’ has become such a routine unquestioned habit with us, the SCARP, that we have become the SCARP [the society of confused attributions, rewards and punishments].
There is more, still, to be gleaned from inquiry into these inverted ‘negative sign causalities’ where ‘something that goes away’ is the source of what we perceive as a ‘positive happening’ due to our ‘difference-taking’ observations. That is, how do we know, if something like temperature goes from ‘lower to higher’, whether it is due to an adding to the heat that was formerly there, or to ceasing a heat-removing process that was formerly there? The relative equilibrium in temperature derives from many processes working, at the same time, in both the heat-adding and heat-removing direction, and the observed ‘difference’ could be due to ‘positive cause’ or ‘negative cause’; i.e. to the dynamics of the ‘operator’ or to the dynamics of the ‘operand’.
When vitamin C is taken away on the ‘operand’ side, but not until then, the conditioned relational space opens up for the bacterium-operator to spring into action. The proliferation of bacteria is much easier to ‘see’ than the conditioning of the relational space associated with the decline/deficiency of vitamin C. But of course, that is why there is more investment in bacteria-killing pharmaceuticals than in vitamins [which can come through healthy diet].
These ‘two types of causality, positive and negative’, can be further investigated by way of a thought experiment. Picture a man’s living space like an obstacle course that he is running and that we are monitoring as ‘outsiders’. We know that he has to ‘get up in the morning, light the fire, clean and dry his clothes, make his coffee and his breakfast, shovel the snow off the porch and away from the barn door, hitch up the horses and wagon, ride into the forest, fell some trees, de-branch and load them on the wagon, drive to the market, sell the wood and return home [and care for the horses etc. etc.] and run the obstacle course again the next day and the next.
We are measuring his positively-caused results in terms of the number of logs he produces and sells at the market. Starting from ‘effect’ or ‘result’, the graph of logs produced, by-and-by we see the curve bump upwards to double what it was. Our first thought is likely to be in terms of him having found a way to increase his production. Perhaps he has traded his axe and saw in for a chainsaw or traded his horse and wagon in for a four-wheel drive truck and thus amplified his positive causal powers. But the causal agency could also be negative; e.g. it could be that his girlfriend has moved in with him and is clearing away the obstacles of clothes cleaning, coffee and breakfast making; i.e. the negative cause of opening up of the relational living space and making it more accommodating to his actions is what is causing the production curve to double. We see yet another rise in the production curve and once again our first thought is that he has found a way to improve his positive causal production. But it turns out that the weather has changed and the snow shovelling and fire-making have been removed from his obstacle course, so it is once again on the negative causal side; i.e. on the side of ‘opening the way for’ [making the relational space more accommodating for] his positively asserting actions.
As Lao Tzu observed;
“Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.”
If we measure his production in terms of the money he is paid for his logs, we are thinking of the marketing transaction that takes place [‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’] as captured by a video of his delivery of his log production to a buyer at the market. The notion that this transaction is the culmination of his positive cause-effect achievement will be the interpretation his ego insists upon. He may give his girlfriend a small part of ‘his hard-earned money’ [the check will have his name on it] to buy a dress and feel very benevolent and generous as he does so, since he is already giving her a roof over her head and food in her belly. Meanwhile, the doubling of HIS production was actually due to the ‘negative cause’ associated with her improving of the accommodating quality of the relational space he is operating in.
Just as we said that the increased production of bacteria ‘causes the pneumonia’ IFF one assumes that; ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’ [ignoring the conditioning of the relational space of the body that was making it more accommodating to the production of bacteria], we can similarly say that the increased production is ‘caused by the logger’ IFF ‘the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past’. Our eye is naturally attracted to the growth in the pile of logs the man is bringing to market, thus to say ‘he has doubled his production’ presents the growth of results in ‘positive causal terms’ and is misleading in the same way as saying; “something has increased the temperature”. That is, it might instead be the case that “something that was decreasing the temperature has gone away; i.e. my block of ice that was cooling my apartment has finally melted”.
Now, the reader has probably intuited that there is more ground to cover in regard to the notion of the ‘two signs’ of causal agency, particularly if she has read Poincaré’s comments on Euclidian space as a ‘language convention’ which suggests that if we get rid of the Euclidian reference frame based ‘talk’ that is allowing us the ‘polar opposites’ of ‘up’ (positive) and ‘down’ (negative), or male-assert/intrude and female receive/accommodate, we can go all the way to where everything is both transmitting and receiving at the same time [Gabor/quantum communications] like a matrix of springs that wrap over and around the earth and can be charging and discharging at the same time at different wavelengths/periodicities. This is the ‘holodynamic experience’ and it is arguably, like the Tao, beyond the reach of language.
There is a problem here with respect to how language is architected, in regard to ‘how far language can go’ in delivering complex experience such as described by Sapir and Whorf, and by Bohm and Poincaré;
“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
Benjamin Whorf published three articles in the MIT Technology Review titled “Science and Linguistics”, “Linguistics as an Exact Science” and “Language and Logic”. He was also invited to contribute an article to a theosophical journal, Theosophist, published in Madras, India, for which he wrote “Language, Mind and Reality”. In these final pieces he offered a critique of Western science in which he suggested that non-European languages often referred to physical phenomena in ways that more directly reflected aspects of reality than many European languages, and that science ought to pay attention to the effects of linguistic categorization in its efforts to describe the physical world. He particularly criticized the Indo-European languages for promoting a mistaken essentialist world view, which had been disproved by advances in the sciences, whereas he suggested that other languages dedicated more attention to processes and dynamics rather than stable essences. Whorf argued that paying attention to how other physical phenomena are described in the study of linguistics could make valuable contributions to science by pointing out the ways in which certain assumptions about reality are implicit in the structure of language itself, and how language guides the attention of speakers towards certain phenomena in the world which risk becoming overemphasized while leaving other phenomena at risk of being overlooked.”
“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
This completes the ‘introduction’ to this essay. Since the described concepts apply generally. Any physical dynamic available to our experience can be revisited coming from a more critical awareness that acknowledges our SCARP status.
* * *
Mayan Prophecy Update
Up until this point, I have not shared this information with anyone but closest family. At 11:50 a.m. on December 21st, I will be amongst a group of people lifted into the heavens, but only briefly so, and when the group is lowered to earth again, we will be descending into a world radically different from the one we left.
That’s if all goes well with the flight taking me from the pacific northwest offshore island boonies to Las Vegas that I am booked on to visit family over the holidays.
When we are primed for spooky stories and mysterious transformations, every little bump in the night tends to be amplified by our senses, making our heart-beat quicken and our goosebumps rise. That is, prophecies tend to want to self-fulfill.
But that’s not to dismiss the Mayan prophecy. We really do need a break from clinging to the old formulas which aren’t working, and since everything does move in cycles, we do need some kind of ‘excuse’ to let ourselves ‘let go’ and be liberated from deeply entrenched ruts.
Here’s the ‘change in the wind’ that’s turning my goosebumps on;
The medical establishment has a problem, as all mainstream science does, with its failure to understand phenomena [including illnesses] that arise from ‘deficiencies’.
A lot of people are dying early, unnecessarily, because of listening to medical science, and/or trusting themselves to medical science. I scarcely need to say that medicine does a lot of good; of course, … but that is not my point. I am pointing to a particular ‘blindness’ that pervades science in general and medicine in particular, a blindness that is about to be replaced by clear vision of what we have been missing.
The problem I am speaking of is endemic in Western society because of our having assimilated the mainstream way of over-simplified ‘scientific thinking’ that is in terms of ‘what things do’; i.e. in terms of ‘positive agency’.
If you read the history of medical science’s difficulty [huge!] in tuning in to ‘deficiencies’ as the source of illness, one sees acknowledgements of the difficulty, but little philosophical/conceptual analysis. Here’s one historical observation, from many, of our inability to see causation that arises NOT from positive causal agencies, but from ‘deficiencies’ as with vitamin/dietary deficiencies;
“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 ]
With respect to unnecessary loss of life, consider this one example of where the medical establishment continues to fail to see and understand the ‘deficiency’ side of illness.
In 2007 I started tracking the case of ‘c. difficile’, which kills thousands of people annually by its association with acute colitis, even though there is a very simple remedy [rebalancing the digestive track bacterial flora aka ‘fecal transplant’]. The remedy is still not accepted by the medical establishment so that if you have never heard of it, and you get colitis because your digestive tract bacterial flora is out of balance from taking anti-biotics, you have a very real chance of dying from it. In fact, 70,000 people have died from it in the U.S., arguably needlessly, over the past five years. The Center for Disease Control still ‘does not get it’;
http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/hai/ (March, 2012). People getting medical care can catch serious infections called health care-associated infections (HAIs). While most types of HAIs are declining, one – caused by the germ C. difficile* – remains at historically C. difficile causes diarrhea linked to 14,000 American deaths each year high levels.. Those most at risk are people, especially older adults, who take antibiotics and also get medical care. When a person takes antibiotics, good germs that protect against infection are destroyed for several months. During this time, patients can get sick from C. difficile picked up from contaminated surfaces or spread from a health care provider’s hands. About 25% of C. difficile infections first show symptoms in hospital patients; 75% first show in nursing home patients or in people recently cared for in doctors’ offices and clinics. C. difficile infections cost at least $1 billion in extra health care costs annually.
It’s not that C. difficile is a pathogen, it is that the way that the digestive tract flora is ‘out of balance’ makes it like the tinder dry forest relative to a discarded cigarette butt.
Periodically, every few years a few doctors will do small scale experiments to reconfirm that the remedy works [there is no money or career rewards for working on this as it does not involve money-making pharmaceutical remedies], that it is very simple, and that its success rate is over 90%. But that still doesn’t mean that the medical establishment will accept and endorse it.
Here are a few quotes extracted from the following March, 2011 Canadian Medical Journal .
Dr. Thomas Louie, head of infectious disease at Calgary’s Foothills Hospital, performed his first fecal transplant in 1996 at the home of a patient who’d been suffering from a C. difficile infection for two years, after an administrator informed him that it couldn’t be done in the hospital. He’s since performed 70 such home treatments, mostly by enema, on a volunteer basis, nights and weekends. “I’m taking the risk myself,” he says
But in 2012, the remedy is still not approved [don’t forget, 14,000 people in the U.S. alone are dying every year from C. difficile associated colitis so that’s roughly 250,000 unnecessary deaths in the U.S. and Canada since 1996];
Meanwhile Burnaby’s Dr. Jeanne Keegan-Henry performed a fecal transplant in 2010 without getting approval from the local health authority, Fraser Health. Keegan-Henry claims the procedure cured the patient of recurrent C. difficile and would now like to offer the treatment more broadly, on compassionate grounds. But her local health authority forbade her from performing another treatment without an approved research proposal. In Canada, hospitals and local health authorities decide whether to take on the risk associated with an experimental treatment.
“At any given time, there are always some people sick in the hospital with C. difficile,” says Keegan-Henry, noting that 40% of patients fail first-line treatment and 40% of remaining patients fail second-line treatment. “Patients have died because they didn’t get access to this procedure.”
But Dr. Andrew Webb, vice president of medicine at Fraser Health, says the evidence isn’t strong enough to support fecal transplants as a rescue therapy. What literature exists comes from nonrandomized case studies, he says. “With these studies, you tend to report the positive and not the negatives. … There’s a rather long list of nasty infections that can be transmitted from bodily fluids.”
Of course, Dr. Louie and others (a tiny minority) using this remedy have taken the precautions to prevent the transmission of disease. As another researcher says in the same article;
“A review of 100 Scandinavian cases found that fecal bacteriotherapy cured 89% of patients (Anaerobe. 2009;15: 285–90). Dr. Johan Bakken, the review author and a gastroenterologist in Duluth, Minnesota, says the risk of transmitting a contagious agent through fecal bacteriotherapy is merely “theoretical.”
Bakken says there hasn’t been a single reported case of a transmitted infection agent. He also estimates that more than 500 unpublished fecal transplants have occurred, most of those without donor screening because of its high cost. In most sites where fecal transplants are undertaken, donors are a “bed or table contact” of the infected individual, to minimize the risk of disease transmission, Bakken adds.”
This note is not really about ‘C. difficile’, but instead it is about something huge that pervades our society, a certain blindered way of looking at the world that is effecting almost everything, governance, justice, the economy, biological cell research and the concept of evolution, as well as medicine. That is what I would like to share in this note, whether or not the Mayan prophecy has anything to say about this ‘re-awakening’.
To get straight to the point, the findings of modern physics, since the early 1900s, point to the dynamic physical world of our experience as being a relational continuum that mainstream science has, since Newton, for reasons of simplifying convenience, rendered in the non-relational terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, and this OVER-simplification, pervasively institutionalized in our society, has become the source of major dysfunction.
One example is the ongoing C. difficile fiasco and the centuries of trouble recognizing scurvy and other deficiency related illnesses as researchers looked instead for ‘positive causal pathogens. The pattern in all of those cases replicates what is currently going on with C. difficile; i.e. a handful of researchers would periodically rediscover that the cause is negative rather than positive, but the establishment always holds out for a positive causal explanation and fails to ratify a negative cause.
[N.B. see current recurrence of ‘a handful of researchers’]
How does this happen?
In order to understand it, and if you have the same experience as me, you will be unable to find this explicitly written down anywhere, you have to deconstruct all of the usually-unquestioned assumptions in our standard scientific-thinking mode of inquiry. But, knowing the answer, we can abbreviate this for the purpose of this short note, and ask the question; ‘how do we put a negative sign on ‘cause’?’ … as was suggested in the above cited 1919 Medical Report?
“the thought of the pathologist turns naturally to such positive associations and seems to believe with difficulty in causation prefixed by a minus sign.”
Here’s a simple example in the case of ‘warming’. Supposing you have an apartment block that you are continually monitoring the temperature of. Occasionally, you notice a sudden rise in temperature and you naturally try to correlate it with what else was going on at that time. How hot a day was it, was the humidity on that day any different? Did some of the apartment occupants get together and turn on their own private heaters [i.e. did electrical consumption rise at the same time, or was there the smell of kerosene in the air on that day. You look at anything and everything that might correlate with the increase in temperature.
You share the story of this investigation with one of the occupants, and he immediately sees the answer. Three months before the rise in temperature, he had stockpiled ice in his apartment because he wanted a cooler ambient temperature, and the ice had finally all melted on that day that the temperature had, as a result, gone up. In other words, the rise in temperature was due to something that had happened in the remote past (ice deposition/stockpiling) that had depressed temperatures ever since that time and had finally depleted on the day of the ‘rise in temperature’. But the investigation had set off with the starting assumption that it is ‘positive’ agencies that will cause rises in temperature, and moreover, positive causal agencies are contemporaneous with the ‘effect’. After all, that is an assumption that has been built into the ‘design’ of scientific thinking, as the following comment by philosopher of science, Henri Poincaré, shows;
“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.
The point is that our investigative model is set up to look for contemporary correlations that identify the causal agent.
Or, more accurately perhaps, our ‘psyche’ has been set up to look for positive causal agency that manifests in contemporary correlations.
For example, it is obvious to the casual observer that the Colorado river has ‘carved out the Grand Canyon. It is obvious because we know from experience, since playing in the ditch in the rain, that flowing water carves out channels in the dirt. But how about if we put a drop of ink in the middle of a sheet of paper; by bending the sheet, we can make the drop of water dance and flow all over the sheet and make the same sort of river/tributary flow patterns. What about the role of uplift and subsidence in the country rock where the Grand Canyon formed, did it make the runoff water dance? It inevitably did. It was where the runoff gradients came from in the first place. We make that ‘disappear’ by imposing an absolute space and absolute time reference/measuring frame over the moving water so that we attribute ALL of the movement of the water to the water, and none to the transforming country rock, the river banks or female receptacle that is making the water dance (come this way, now come this way). The imposed substitute fixed female space, the Euclidian ‘box’, takes the place of the real physical dynamic female space, and in the process, 100% of the dynamics are attributed to the male positive causal aspect.
Again, the ‘negative causal’ side is the ‘female’ side, the ‘river banks side’ rather than the positively causal river flow [fountainhead] side. These two influence are in ‘conjugate relation’; i.e. they are not ‘two’ separate influences but dual aspects of the one dynamic of the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum.
How come our psyche seems only to tune to the ‘male’ aspect of the dynamic, the ‘positive, contemporary, causal agency’? … and blinds us to the ‘female’ aspect of the dynamic, the negative, non-contemporary [historical preconditioning based] causal agency’?
We have to go back to Sapir, Whorf, Poincaré and Nietzsche to the answer to that. Together they are saying that it is ‘language’ that is doing this. Nietzsche reminds us that we break up an event into doer-deed (subject-predicate) components, as with ‘ego’ that imputes a local ‘I’ to serve as the positive causal author of behaviour, … which PSYCHOLOGICALLY splits us out of our strand-in-the-relational-web physical reality. Poincaré reminds us that we use the language of absolute space and absolute time [a fixed containing box] that substitutes for the dynamic female aspect;
“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
Sapir and Whorf remind us that the Hopi language does not backward continue all dynamics to local subject based starting points like the European languages do, but allows dynamics to be understood in terms of relational transformation. For example, Hopi acknowledges that group dynamics can be like the relational dynamics in the flow of the freeway [canoes in the flow of the river] where the female opening of space that accommodates movement into it is conjugate to the asserting male movement. There is only ONE PHYSICAL FLOW-MOVEMENT with conjugate aspects. The relatively moving participants are continually creating the banks they are themselves flowing through. The male and female movements cannot be split into two separate parts. Mach’s principle applies; “the male asserting is giving shape to the female accommodating at the same time as the female accommodating is giving shape to the male asserting.” The transforming spatial-relations are one dynamic. The outside observer tends to focus on the ‘positive space’ male aspect as in ‘what things-in-themselves are doing’, ignoring the ‘negative space’ female aspect as in ‘what openings of possibility-to-do’ are unfolding for me?’. But the included participant is well aware that he needs ‘negative space openings’ to assert into, and he recognizes that the ‘flip side’ of his moving [relative to the others, not to an absolute fixed space reference frame] is the transforming of the negative space that he and others need in order to continue positive asserting This is the realm of ‘the three+ body problem’ discussed earlier.
Continuing on this same theme of ‘the missing female aspect’, … how would you describe your actions in the morning? E.g. …‘get out of bed, get washed up, have coffee and breakfast’. You are the raging river in action. But what about the bathroom where towels and everything were clean and in place, and what about the coffee and breakfast that was waiting for you; i.e. the accommodating conjugate aspect of your dynamic. If coffee and breakfast is in the kitchen, you take it in the kitchen, if it is in the dining room, you take it in the dining room. Is your dynamic not a little bit like the ink drop in the middle of the bending sheet of paper, made to dance by the transforming of the relational space you are moving about in?
How would you INCLUDE that in your giving an account of these dynamics? What are you leaving out if you are the meteorologist and you say; ‘Hurricane Katrina is heading north toward New Orleans’? That is a purely male positive causal account. Aren’t you forgetting that the whole atmosphere is opening and shifting around to accommodate her move, and that it is impossible to split into two separate and distinct parts her ‘inhabitant-dynamic’ and the conjugate ‘habitat-dynamic’? Furthermore, the whole atmosphere is the primary source of the movement. The source of the movement could be female, the sun warming the atmosphere and inducing it to dance with itself. The dynamic does not begin with the storm-cell and ‘its’ actions just because our language is architected so as to infuse doer-deed structure into every relational process/event, as in ‘lightning flashes’, ‘storminess grows and moves’, … to make it appear as if the dynamic is locally launched, which it clearly is not. As Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’, “the relational dynamic of nature not only inhabits the organizings [organisms], it creates them. In aboriginal languages this would be; ‘the Organizing of Nature not only inhabits the organizings but creates them.’
The aboriginal languages of Turtle Island (North America) do not assume philosophical dualism by breaking events apart into ‘doer-deed’ topology as European languages do. That is, our European architecture language based in ‘being’ and ‘dualism’ is causing us to ‘drop out’ the female conjugate of the dynamics and impute all action to male, positive causal agency.
The following three quotes by Sapir, Whorf and Bohm, all point to the same failing in our ‘Standard Average European’
“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
Benjamin Whorf published three articles in the MIT Technology Review titled “Science and Linguistics”, “Linguistics as an Exact Science” and “Language and Logic”. He was also invited to contribute an article to a theosophical journal, Theosophist, published in Madras, India, for which he wrote “Language, Mind and Reality”. In these final pieces he offered a critique of Western science in which he suggested that non-European languages often referred to physical phenomena in ways that more directly reflected aspects of reality than many European languages, and that science ought to pay attention to the effects of linguistic categorization in its efforts to describe the physical world. He particularly criticized the Indo-European languages for promoting a mistaken essentialist world view, which had been disproved by advances in the sciences, whereas he suggested that other languages dedicated more attention to processes and dynamics rather than stable essences. Whorf argued that paying attention to how other physical phenomena are described in the study of linguistics could make valuable contributions to science by pointing out the ways in which certain assumptions about reality are implicit in the structure of language itself, and how language guides the attention of speakers towards certain phenomena in the world which risk becoming overemphasized while leaving other phenomena at risk of being overlooked.”
“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.)
To this end Bohm developed the notion of a particular language form, the Rheomode, adapted to the discussion of quantum theory and, indeed, to consciousness. It is not clear if Bohm ever considered the Rheomode to have any practical consequences – ie that people would end up speaking it. However, he does appear to have encouraged staff and students at Brockwood Park School, England to experiment with the language. Towards the end of his life Bohm met with Blackfoot and Ojibwaj speakers and discovered that their own family of languages, as well as their process-world view, have much in common with the Rheomode.”
We can further extend this ice-stockpiling example by supposing that the stockpiled ice had CO2 dissolved in it. The surplus CO2 being liberated from the melting ice would reach a peak at the same time as the warming blip, suggesting that the rising CO2 might have reached some threshold whereby it caused the warming jump. That is, if one assumed that the cause of the warming was ‘positive’, the rising CO2 would have provided the best correlation to explain it, even though there was no reason to be looking for such a correlation in the first place, given that the change was due to a ‘minus’ [ice deficiency] instead of a ‘positive’.
Evidently, we are looking at a psychological ‘glitch’ that is more general than what occurs in the medical arena;
“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
This ‘blindness’ we’re talking about is not just to do with medicine; it is far more general.
How general is it?
It appears to lie at the source of ‘patriarchy’ in Western civilization, and the tradition of moral judgement based on ‘good and evil’, and the secularized theological concept of sovereigntism, and the hierarchical organizing approach, and philosophical dualism, the habitat-inhabitant, mind-matter split. That is, it appears to lie at the source of almost all of those understandings that make the aboriginal belief tradition differ from the Western civilization belief tradition.
That is, there is clear evidence showing that ‘it does’.
And Nietzsche has basically explained it already.
To put it succinctly, Newton invented ‘force’ to enable us to re-render dynamics as if they jumpstarted from ‘here’ and ‘now’ [all male positive cause]. Our ego invented ‘intention’ to enable us to re-render our dynamics as if they jumpstarted from ‘here’ and ‘now’ [all male positive cause]. In other words, Newtonian physics is ‘anthropomorphism’ and we have institutionalized it in our globally dominating Western culture-ized society.
Every high school student that studies science, is taught Newton’s laws, but few are taught the philosophical problems that Newton ran into that prevented him from capturing and including in his scientific laws, the full complexity of nature’s dynamics as were coming to him [as come to anyone of us] from his observations and experience. For example, Newton saw everything in the cosmos as being mutually interdependent, [non-dualist dynamics in which male-positive cause and female-negative cause are dual aspects of the one dynamic of the continual transformation of relational space].
But when Newton tried to capture this in a mathematical formulation, it proved impossible because, while the maths allowed him to explain dynamics in terms of ‘two body interactions’ [implying absolute fixed empty and infinite space], mathematics lacked the capability to capture the motion of three or more bodies moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence. Newton commented; “an exact solution for three bodies [for the relational web view of dynamics], if I am not mistaken, exceeds the force of any human mind.”
The simplification he was forced to make, which philosophers like Mach and Nietzsche and Schrödinger and Bohm have argued is getting us into trouble, is something we continue to ‘use’ every day, without even thinking about it.
The simplification is this. While Newton’s insight on the gravitational field was that everything was at the same time influencing everything [as in the aboriginal ‘web-of-life’], there were no mathematics capable of capturing this, so he invented the notion of ‘force’ so that he could break the dynamics down to ‘what things did’ when ‘force’ was applied to them. But as Nietzsche objected, this is how we like to think of ourselves in our ‘ego’ mode; i.e. we like to think of ourselves as local, independently-existing material things-in-ourselves with our own locally-originating intellect and purpose-directed behaviours. That is, our ‘intention’ plays the same sort of role as ‘force’; i.e. it allows us to think in terms of the dynamics of ourselves or of an object, as jumpstarting from the thing-in-itself due to a ‘force’ that is either externally applied to it, or internally sourced within in [e.g. ‘intellect and purpose’]. This invention of ‘force’ allows us to artificially ‘break apart’ the interdependent, relational ‘web-of-life’ view, the ‘physical’ reality according to the findings of modern physics, and synthetically ‘re-render’ the essentially ‘relational’ dynamic instead, in the idealized terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what things-in-themselves do within an idealized absolute fixed reference frame [absolute space and absolute time]. There are no such things in the world of our physical experience as ‘absolute space and absolute time’, but we impose these mathematical framing/measuring devices to ‘simplify’ the physical dynamics of our experience, which are inherently relational, as in the aboriginal worldview.
I will say again, for emphasis, that it is the ‘ego’, the local jumpstarting intention that is called Fiktion by Nietzsche, plays a corresponding role [enables the notion of local here and now jumpstarting of behavioural dynamics] to ‘force’ in Newtonian science; i.e. ‘force’ enables the notion of local here and now jumpstarting of dynamics. And furthermore, that the notion of ‘force’ derived from ‘ego’ making science ‘anthropomorphism’. As Nietzsche says, we invent this local jumpstarting of behaviour by imposing the doer-deed notion on an event, so that the outcome, we see as being due to the intention of the doer;
“[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
“Our bad habit of taking a mnemonic, an abbreviative formula, to be an entity, finally as a cause, e.g., to say of lightning “it flashes.” Or the little word “I.” To make a kind of perspective in seeing the cause of seeing: that was what happened in the invention of the “subject,” the “I”! —Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 548
This ‘mechanical’ worldview that sees dynamics in terms of what independent things-in-themselves do in absolute space and time SEEMS to work very well in simple applications, and we have progressively institutionalized it in commerce, justice and governance/management in general, … but it is oversimplification that is hurting us, and this ‘hurt’ is implicitly moving us back towards ‘resilience’ and ‘sustainability’ in our economic activity and towards ‘restorative practice’ in our ‘justice’ maintaining systems.
As Ernst Mach observed, the real, physical space we live in is a space where ‘what we do’ ‘bounces back on us’. Mach’s principle can be stated;
“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.”
That is, the findings of modern science/physics are that our living space is a continually transforming relational space. This means that the SOURCING of dynamics is non-local, non-visible, and non-material [it is ‘relational’ as in a ‘holodynamic’ or as in the ‘everywhere-at-the-same-time’ influence of gravity]. But what the common simplification does is to ignore the relational character of our living space and recast dynamics in terms of locally jumpstarting them in the ‘here’ and ‘now’ [in absolute space and absolute time].
This ‘nonlocal’ sourcing of dynamics sounds a bit weird, no? But what about the ice stockpile that we only noticed when it depleted? What about if it had been put there by our great grandfather before we were even born [and why not?], and here we were noticing the warming and looking for contemporary positive causal agency IN THE IMMEDIATE PAST!
How about the WWII war veteran with PTSD who goes berserk when someone blows up and pops a paper lunch bag. Do we look in the immediate past for a positive cause; i.e. the paper-bag popper caused it? Or do we look in the remote past for a negative cause (a balance deficit), such as the war experience?
What about if someone rolls a powder-keg down a hill and it bumps over a dozen rocks before it at last hits one that detonates it. Does the ‘headline’ that captures this say; ‘Innocuous looking rock causes huge explosion’? No, we would likely go back upstream to the people who pushed the keg over the crest of the hill, or to the people who made the explosive ingredients etc.
The point is once again, Mach’s point which comes directly from our experience; “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.” The ‘curse of the mummy’ is suggestive of booby traps being set thousands of years ago that reach out to foil today’s tomb robbers. Such a space [all space, since this is general] is historically preconditioned, so that the cause of the falling obelisk is not simply the male asserting agent in the present that ‘triggers’ it, but the historical preconditioning.
As with C.difficile, if the balance in the relational space is destabilized, then normally innocuous agents can move into unoccupied spaces to consume nurturances and proliferate and be seen as ‘pathogens’. If society becomes divided into those with overabundance and those impoverished, normally innocuous people can move into unoccupied spaces to consume nurturances and proliferate, and be seen as ‘thieves’.
Now, when would the ‘cause’ of this not be seen with a ‘negative sign’; i.e. in terms of ‘deficiency’?
The reason why is that ‘cause’ has, by the force of European/scientific language architecture, been reduced to purely male positive cause. Therefore the only thing available to explain why some have more and some have less is positive male cause. The negative female cause has been eliminated by imposing a notional fixed reference box in place of the female aspect. Those who fall into a ‘birdsnest on the ground’ or ‘land of milk and honey’ still attribute ‘what they achieve’ to ‘what they achieve’, out of the context of how accommodating the negative female causal aspect was to them. That’s because we view the actions of the individual as jumpstarting from the individual, as if the individual really was situated within a fixed box such as the absolute space and absolute time reference frame we use to measure his actions.
Conclusions:
We are SCARP, a Society of Confused Attribution, Rewards, and Punishments.
Our Western culture has a big problem, as does its science, with its failure to acknowledge phenomena that arise from ‘deficiencies’ [and/or ‘holodynamic cause’, like the influence of gravity which is ‘everywhere-at-the-same-time’].
For example, how DO we put a negative sign on ‘cause’? Like the pathologist, our general habit is to turn to positive associations of cause and we have difficulty in believing in causation “prefixed by a minus sign.”
In the relational space of a fluid dynamic, the dynamic is ‘both signs at the same time’, male-and-female, positive-and-negative, source-and-sink. We experience these conjugates in the act of breathing and our tendency is to ‘make two dynamics out of the one dynamic’ because one seems to follow the other (exhaling follows inhaling), but our focus in this case is on ‘motion’ and ‘motion’ is downstream from the organizing tension, the ‘spring-loading’ of space in which there is simultaneous ‘loading’ of the springing (conversion of kinetic to potential energy) and ‘unloading’ of the springing (conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy), as in the conjugate relating of the crest and trough of a wave. We can observe ‘duality’ here even though the physical phenomenon is essentially ‘non-dual’.
The harmonious feeling in an embrace lies in the dynamic unity that comes from, at the same time, asserting and accommodating. Our actual included-in-relational-space-experience affirms the viewpoint of Heraclitus that ‘opposites’ are only apparent and spring forth from out of each other. The toroidal flow of the hurricane is ‘polar’ with respect to the dynamic relational topology of sink transforming into source along its central flow-channel, however, this ‘local opposition’ is not ‘foundational’ or absolute but is engendered by the evolutionary tendency in the overall relational space.
Still, given that we, and all ‘local forms’ [cells, atoms, particles, planets, stars] are, like the convection cells in the flow, ‘organizings’ within the ‘Organizing’, the latter being the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum that is engendering ‘organizings’ within itself, the Brahman that not only inhabits but creates its Atmans, how do we ‘talk about this’? Is it not the Tao-that-cannot-be-told?
Our psychological investigations reveal that Newton invented ‘force’ to enable the re-rendering of dynamics as if they jumpstarted from ‘right here’ and ‘right now’ [all male positive cause], just as our ego invented ‘intention’ to enable us to re-render our dynamics as if they jumpstarted from the ‘right here’ and ‘right now’ of our ‘self’ understood as ‘local being’ [all male positive cause]. In other words, Newtonian physics takes on the appearance, as Nietzsche suggests, of ‘anthropomorphism’ and we have institutionalized this reduction of ‘infinite cause’ to ‘locally jumpstarting all male cause’ as the discursive-traction-giving reformulation of choice in our globally dominating Western culture permeated society. This fragmentation of the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum into locally jumpstarting male causal agents provides the architecture of our European languages.
One problem.
We have used this language so much and so often to describe ‘what is going on in the world’ in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves are doing in space and time’ (the ‘right here’ and ‘right now’ coordinates of anyone’s personal perspective), that we tend to confuse this fragmented ‘idealization’ for ‘physical reality’. The physical reality, as modern physics informs us, is not this linguistically fragmented reconstruction, but the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum, the ‘holodynamic’, the ‘Organizing’ which is continually gathering and regathering its diverse multiplicity of ‘organizings’ whose relation to the ‘Organizing’ is topologically analogous to the convecting cell or ‘resonating feature’ in the flow.
Huge pressures have been building in our society that would have us ‘break out’ of this self-imposed psychological reduction of cause to all male, positive cause. These pressures are arising because we are forgetting that our linguistic reconstruction of the relational space of our experience is a ‘simplification of convenience’ rather than physical reality consistent with our experience, and it is this ‘confusing’ of ‘idealization’ for ‘physical reality’ that is ‘giving us fits’.
In science, we use the language of mathematics which converts the local forms we have assigned word-name-labels to, to absolute existences or ‘identities’. As John Stuart Mill observes; “Every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the existence of the object defined.”
This issue of whether these things we are giving names to are ‘physically real’ is an issue that divides scientists. Poincaré observes that mathematicians split into two camps on this; ‘realists’ that believe that these forms that we have named and given notional things-in-themselves local being status to are physically real and exist whether or not there is anybody there to observe, define and assign name-labels to them, and ‘pragmatist-idealists’ that believe that these named, notional things-in-themselves forms [that the observer psycho-logically breaks out of the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum] are ‘idealizations’ that are useful and perhaps necessary [for rational discourse] but are not to be confused for ‘physical reality’. The ‘relationists’ [pragmatist-idealists] such as Mach, Poincaré, Nietzsche, Bohm, Schrödinger were, as Mach put it, ‘kicked out of the Church of Physics’ for the heresy of not believing in the absolute physical existence, as local things-in-themselves-beings, of these observer-named-and-defined relational ‘organizings’ within the ‘Organizing’. Poincaré comments on this psychological division in scientific-thinking minds as follows;
“…the [realists], as I was saying, speak constantly of epistemology; that is, the science of sciences. And it is well understood that this epistemology is completely independent of psychology; that is, that it must teach us what the sciences would be if there were no scientists ; that we must study the sciences, not of course with the supposition that there are no scientists, but at least without the supposition that there are. Thus not only is Nature a reality independent of the physicist who could be tempted to study it, but physics itself is also a reality which would exist even if there were no physicists. This is realism indeed.
And why do the pragmatists refuse to permit objects which could not be defined in a finite number of words? It is because they believe that an object exists only when it is conceived by the mind and that an object could not be conceived by the mind independently of a being capable of thinking. There is indeed idealism in that. And since a rational subject is a man, or something which resembles man, and consequently is a finite being, infinity can have no other meaning than the possibility of creating as many finite objects as we wish.
… And then we can make a somewhat peculiar remark. Realists ordinarily adopt the point of view of physics. They affirm the independent existence of material objects or of individual souls, or what they call substances. For them, the world existed before the creation of man, even before the creation of living beings ; it would still exist even if there were no God nor any rational being.
… But 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.
— Henri Poincaré, ‘Dernieres Pensées’, Ch. V. ‘Les Mathematiques et la Logique’
The ‘idealists’ are in the position of the so-called ‘denialists’ in todays issues; i.e. their views are of little consequence as the ‘realists’ have ‘elected themselves’ as central authorities and continue to institutionalize practices based on the realist belief system. It is this predominance of the ‘realist’ belief based system that is the source of SCARP and our non-restorative Justice system that assumes that space is a non-participant in the dynamics of individuals, forcing us to assume that that the behaviour of the individual jumpstarts fully and solely from out of the interior of the individual, so that an outcome, if traced back ‘causally’ to an individual, can be assumed to ‘cul-de-sac’ right there, in the interior of the individual, no matter if the judge and prosecutor and the members of the jury are part of a relational bully-gang that conditions the common living-space/habitat that is at the same time conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants so as to incite acts of violence against the oppressing faction, and hiding this behaviour behind the declared neutrality of the Justice system. [The ‘restorative justice’ of aboriginal tradition acknowledges the web-of-relations in the community dynamic that makes the notion of locally jumpstarted positive cause impossible, so that ‘justice’ is seen instead as an operational process that cultivates, restores and sustains balance and harmony in the relational web that is ‘community’]
These sorts of pressures as continue to rise in our modern ‘realist’-based SCARP are ‘haunting’ our communities giving us a sense that the time is ripe for ‘something big has to happen’. The Mayan prophecy is thus a ‘good fit’; i.e. there is a positive correlation between rising dysfunction-tensions that suggest ‘something big has to change’ and the Mayan prophecy that some huge change is about to happen. We thus find ourselves in the same sort of position as climatologists studying ice cores for cyclic concentrations of CO2 and cycles of global surface warming. There is a clear correlation but ‘which is causing which’? Or, rather, what is the sign of the causality, positive or negative?
So, maybe David Bohm is right, that ‘cause’ is not one-sidedly male, and neither is ‘cause’ two-sidedly male-female, at least not in a dualist sense, but is instead infinite-dimensional, as in a holodynamic [fluid-dynamical world] where everything is the cause of everything. Is it the farmer or the soil, male or female, positive or negative that is producing the crops? Or is it the sun? The farmer (imputed male positive cause) gets paid, the soil (female negative cause) gets used.
Lao Tzu had something to say about this;
“Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.”
Even though the soil and in general the opening of possibilities in the relational space we are included in ‘orchestrate’ our actions and ‘put us to work’, we are in the habit of giving full credit to ourselves, to our male positive causal actions, for the ‘results’ of ‘cause’. This dualist notion of ‘all male genesis, no female epigenesis’ is foundational to the free-market/capitalist process.
‘We’ is the voice of the observing, narrator-Judge, who, by claiming to be ‘outside of the goings on he is reporting on’, claims to be a ‘neutral observer’, who says, ‘the farmer raises crops’ [I saw him doing it], ‘the cells reproduce’ [I saw them doing it], ‘the cars move down the freeway’ [I saw them doing it]. But we know, for example, that the cells are organizings within the Organizing of nature rather than local subjects/beings that jumpstart their own assertive behaviours. The cells are what lie in the middle-place/milieu between the outside-inward orchestrating agency of the receptors and the inside-outward asserting positive agency of the effectors.
The observer-judge who removes himself from the dynamics he is, though he denies it, included in, can no longer ‘feel’ what the participant in the flow of the freeway feels-experiences, that he is included in a three+body dynamic wherein his assertive moving relative to the group, is at the same time, the accommodating opening of relational space allowing his assertive moving. In other words, it is through his included experience that he understands ‘cause’ in a non-dualist sense. By accepting his relational negative-causal powers, he can participate in opening up space to dissolve an imminent conflict/collision, and/or operate bully-gang style to selectively close down the ‘accommodating opening’ in the flow that is conjugate to assertive movement. The observer-judge documenting these goings on, who captures them in the one-sided male-assertive terms of ‘what things-in-themselves are doing’, will, by his choice of language, blind the reader of his judgement/report to the ‘negative causal sourcing’ of what unfolds. That is, our Justice system officially ‘pretends’ that there is no such thing as ‘negative causal sourcing’.
If the ambulance driver makes it through congested traffic faster than others, should we assume ‘positive cause’; i.e. should we assume that this is due to his causal powers? Or should we assume ‘negative cause’? In order to assume ‘negative cause’ we have to acknowledge the physical reality of negative cause, of the female conjugate aspect of dynamics, which at the same time acknowledges the relational nature of space [space is not just infinite emptiness/void that drifts in between the only real things, the local absolute ‘things-in-themselves’ beings]. Any group of people in the flow of the freeway understands that they can use spatial-relations to entrap or liberate selected others, and they understand as well that no evidence of this is left behind in evidence linguistically documented in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.
They can also take pride in their contribution to how many accidents DID NOT HAPPEN that WOULD OTHERWISE HAVE HAPPENED, because of their joint relational-space based capability of opening up accommodating space as and where needed. Where such accidents have ‘been allowed to happen’, there is no evidence left behind that records how easily it could have been prevented by ‘negative cause’, but those who experienced inclusional participation in that flow, who held the power of negative cause in their ‘collective hands’, would have captured a record of this. If they had tried to share that with the judge, the judge would likely have said something like; “this court deals in facts, it does not deal in imaginative suppositions. We are here to determine exactly what happened, and the only way to determine this is to capture what everyone involved in the events leading up to the accident did, and in what way, if any, their actions causally contributed to the outcome”.
This sort of justice system, that deals only in positive cause, is foundational to SCARP, a Society of Confused Attributions, Rewards and Punishments.
As sentient becomings, ‘organizings’ in the grand ‘Organizing’, we might just stand still contemplating what looks like a desert all around us, closing our eyes and reopening them and watching spring bringing the desert alive with us in the middle of it. Are we like the drop of water in the middle of the bending sheet of paper, pulled this way and that, a dancer in an ocean of ‘negative cause’, … or are we the macho determined stream made of USDA-approved ‘positive cause’ that is going to carve its mark into, and sculpt the landscape it inhabits? Does man belong to the earth or does the earth belong to man? Perhaps we need the BOTH/AND logic of the included third to unravel this question; i.e. perhaps, as the non-dualists/relational theorists [Mach, Poincaré, Bohm, Schroedinger] contend, it/we is all one thing, a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum, an Organizing within which we are ‘organizings’.
I, you, she, we.
In the garden of mystic lovers
these are not true distinctions.
—Jelaluddin Rumi
In order to figure this out, moving beyond our predominating SCARP status would be helpful.
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Footnote on ‘Politics’
Many if not most of the arguments in the world, and the ‘alignment of behaviour’ [hierarchical organizing] come from observing ‘what things-in-themselves are doing in space and time’, and ‘judging’ ‘what we/they should be doing’ and ‘what we/they should not be doing’. We could not make these judgements without making ‘causal attributions’ as to what the ‘results’ of the behaviours in question are, or are likely to be, and we ‘reward’ and ‘punish’ on this basis which leads to relative value rankings of different courses of action.
In the secular realm which governs ‘what is and is not legal’, [going beyond the religious/spiritual realm wherein one decides ‘what is and what is not moral’], causal attributions can become difficult because of the complexity of technology. To further complicate things, scientists and technologists disagree on many issues. This has been leading, increasingly, to a techno-social Darwinism as described by evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin;
“It is one of the contradictions of a democratic society in a highly advanced technological world, … to make rational political decisions, you have to have a knowledge which is accessible only to a very few people.” [Lewontin continues by noting;] “that different people have different interests, and therefore the struggle is not a moral one, it’s a political one. It’s always a political one, and that’s the most important thing you have to recognize… that you may be struggling to make the world go in one direction, … [while] somebody else is struggling to make it go in another direction, and the question is; who has power? And if there’s a differential in power, and if you haven’t got it and they have, then you have to do something to gain power, which is to organize. “ – Richard Lewontin
I certainly don’t agree with Lewontin that this is the way it has to be. For starters, this scenario is cast entirely in terms of ‘positive cause’ and is therefore in the realm of ‘idealization’ rather than in the realm of ‘physical reality’.
Furthermore, Lewontin is describing a ‘fault-intolerant’ system due to the fact that these ‘rational political decisions’ [based on dubious and controversial scientific theories] are being made within massively powerful hierarchical systems that make decisions affecting everyone on earth, based on a majority vote within those sovereign states with the most powerful and advanced technological infrastructures on earth. All around the world, at the same time, there are initiatives that seek to restore ‘local sustainability’ and to cultivate and sustain harmony and balance, that have up until the present been rendered impossible due to increasingly centralized regulated direction.
While popular bandwagons like ‘anthropogenic global warming’ (AGW) seek to move this techno-political power to global scale regulation and enforcement, the forces of devolution of techno-political decision-making are going on at the same time. If one finds merit in the discussion in the body of this essay, it will become apparent that the ‘positively signed’ causal attributions in AGW suffer from the faults that have been discussed. Purely positively-signed causal agency DOES NOT EXIST IN THE PHYSICAL, NATURAL WORLD.
In the earlier discussion of the excluded observer-judge, it was evident that the logical, linguistic documentation in terms of ‘what things in-themselves were doing’ captured the dynamics in purely ‘positive causal’ terms, and failed to acknowledge the ‘negative cause’ conjugate aspect which ‘left no physical record’, but which was responsible for ‘what didn’t happen’ in such a manner as to cultivate and sustain balance and harmony in the flow. It was pointed out that the experience of the participants is where the understanding comes in, of ‘negative cause’ as the conjugate of ‘positive cause’.
Thus, in moving the planning and direction of ‘what things do’ up a vertical hierarchy so that directions can be cascaded down, since only those at the ‘ground level’ are inclusionally experiencing participants, the only thing that CAN BE PORTED UPWARDS from where the rubber meets the road is ‘positive cause’. Dynamic behaviours directed by instructions encoded in terms of ‘positive cause’ are like ‘robot/machine behaviours’; they are ‘literal’ translations in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’. As such, they are missing the source of resilience that associates with ‘negative cause’ [where it is in conjugate relation with ‘positive cause’; i.e. in physically real dynamics, rather than in dynamics as documented in ‘positive cause only’ terms by an ‘excluded observer-judge’]. The splitting apart of ‘authority/direction’ from ‘responsibility/implementation’, as is commonly done in large scale vertical hierarchical organizations thus creates the potential for great dysfunction by its tendency to convert naturally ‘organic’ dynamics rich in negative cause influence, to ‘programmable machinery’ operating in pure ‘positive cause’ assertive mode.
This effect continues to intensify with advances in communications; i.e. the SCARP continues to steepen.
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