A PRELIMINARY NOTE ON “NONLOCALITY”

When we read written narratives, we have the option of understanding ACTIONS and DEVELOPMENTS as being either LOCALLY AUTHORED or NONLOCALLY AUTHORED (e.g. as in a BUMPER-CAR-GAME.   Intellectual works involve this same ambiguity in regard to the their ‘origin’ or ‘authorship’.  Newton spoke of ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ and Michel de Montaigne spoke of bees that picked things up from here and there unintentionally which contributed to unfolding reality in a manner that was not of their deliberate intention.  This suggests a reality that is more complex than simple LOCAL AUTHORING and is more like a BUMPER-CAR GAME wherein WE ARE NOT AUTHORS of our actions and developments, due to our inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.  As in the BUMPER CAR GAME, we may APPEAR to be the AUTHOR of an action even though the action does not ORIGINATE with us, thus we are NOT THE AUTHOR but we are instead a PARTICIPANT in a relational dynamic that transcends our LOCAL ACTIONS and RELATED DEVELOPMENTS, as in the case of the honey bees.

Our investigation will reveal that there is no such thing as a LOCAL AUTHOR of actions and developments, this being ABSTRACTION that derives from the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR as Nietzsche points out.  In other words, language allows us to formulate representations of reality such as ‘bees make honey’ but the imputing of LOCAL AUTHORING is simplifying abstraction as in Nietzsche’s example of the DOUBLE ERROR; ‘Lightning flashes’ where the flashing IS the lightning and there is no LOCAL AUTHOR called ‘lightning’.   In the same sense there is an overall, all-including relational dynamic in which bees and honey-making are included such that speaking in terms of the BEE as a LOCAL AUTHORING AGENT is abstraction born of the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR.

WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are in the habit of constructing A SUBSTITUTE REALITY based on LOCAL AUTHORING of actions and developments based on the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR.  While the reality of our sense experience is of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum which is a NONLOCAL DYNAMIC, NONLOCAL DYNAMICS are INEFFABLE since our WESTERN language accords to the LOCAL and EXPLICIT the foundatonal role.  While statements that imply LOCAL AUTHORING such as ‘the bee makes honey’ DO AN END-RUN around the obstacle of INEFFABILITY of our sense-experience reality of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum which is NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT, what we are putting ourselves into, with such DOUBLE ERROR based abstraction, is a SUBSTITUTE REALITY featuring notional (NAMING-INSTANTIATED) THING-IN-ITSELF BEING with notional (GRAMMAR-GIVEN) powers of AUTHORING actions and developments.  This REDUCED to EFFABLE-because-lOCAL-and-EXPLICIT SUBSTITUTE REALITY facilitates the construction of the Apollonian pseudo-“reality”.

Problems develop when we employ the SUBSTITUTE REALITY (the Apollonian abstraction which is only good for INFERENCE of the Dionysian [fluid or Wave-field] reality, as a DIRECT SUBSTITUTE REALITY.  These problems characterize modern WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT social dynamics.

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The following EIGHT points (numbered in German) list the ‘basic ingredients’ that go into our WESTERN CULTURE construction of a NAMING and GRAMMAR-based SUBSTITUTE REALITY that is so familiar to us that we automatically ‘pick up on it’ (through reading or hearing English or one of the ‘Standard Average European’ (Whorf’s terms) languages.

The SAE language SERVES UP FOR US A “SUBSTITUTE REALITY” which is a SIMPLER REALITY that the REAL REALITY of our SENSORY EXPERIENCE: i.e. it is “SIMPLER” to express in language.

Yes, what I am saying (which has been said many times by others, such as Poincaré) is that trying to construct REPRESENTATIONS of reality with language based on fixed entities (nouns or names implying LOCALLY EXISTING THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES) is IMPOSSIBLE in the sense that such a language cannot represent a flow-continuum (the transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka ‘the Tao’ wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE.   The architecting of a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF based language has, by definition, a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO topology wherein the FIGURE “MOVES THROUGH” the GROUND and does not capture situations like the HURRICANE in the ATMOSPHERE understood as a HURRICANING OF THE ATMOSPHERE implying the REAL FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE topology.

Here we have the primary architectural design criterion used in the development of SAE languages such as English; i.e. SIMPLICITY.  And what is meant by simplicity in language architecture is AVOIDANCE of having to capture the entire transforming relational continuum when talking about our experiences, since, IN REALITY (i.e. in the REALITY of our sense-experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka the Tao), there is just one continually transforming world, which we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have chosen to RE-PRESENT in a PIECE-MEAL fashion.

EXAMPLE: Where our sensory experience is informing us that THE LANDSCAPE IS TRANSFORMING and that this includes the TOWNING as GROWTH that is conjugate with SHRINKING OF WILDERNESS, our choice of language architecture has us speak in terms of ‘the TOWN’ as if it were a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF which was the GRAMMATICAL AUTHOR of its own GROWTH, as in ‘the TOWN is GROWING’.

Here we ‘kiss goodbye’ to REALITY, the sense-experience reality of our inclusion in a TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE wherein TOWNING is manifest, NOT simply in terms of “A TOWN” that is ITSELF GROWING and DEVELOPING, … but in the context of TOWNING as an included feature within the overall TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE which also includes the CONJUGATE SHRINKING of the WILDERNESS.

As far as language-based representation goes, it definitely IS SIMPLER to use the ABSTRACTING power of language to use NAMING and GRAMMAR, which Nietzsche calls THE DOUBLE ERROR, to ABSTRACT OUT (thanks to NAMING and GRAMMAR) a notional “TOWN” that is “GROWING” and totally FORGET (simply IGNORE) the CONJUGATE SHRINKAGE OF WILDERNESS.

That’s the SIMPLIFYING POWER of our WESTERN CULTURE Standard Average European language architecture.  That’s what it does, SIMPLIFY REALITY to facilitate easier language-based representations, …representations which are no longer REPRESENTATIONS OF REALITY, but are INSTEAD, REPRESENTATIONS OF A SUBSTITUTE REALITY which is much easier to capture in language-based representations than the REAL REALITY of our SENSORY EXPERIENCE.  I have made this POINT NUMBER ! in the following list of points describing how we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are constructing our SUBSTITUTE REALITY that  on the basis that it is SIMPLER TO REPRESENT IN LANGUAGE than the REAL REALITY of our sensory experience wherein everything is in continual relational flux, as is the basic nature of the Wave-field dynamic aka ‘the Tao’..

THE SYNOPSIS OF THIS MESSAGE IS THAT WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS ARE USING LANGUAGE TO CONSTRUCT A “SUBSTITUTE REALITY” WHERE THE DESIGN CRITERION HAS BEEN TO “SIMPLIFY REALITY” (I.E. TO USE A SUBSTITUTE REALITY THAT IS SIMPLER THAT OUR REAL SENSE-EXPERIENCE REALITY) to make our representations simpler and easier to share.

The GOOD NEWS IS that our WESTERN CULTURE language based SUBSTITUTE REALITY is a lot easier to construct and share because it lets us break the continuum down into separate pieces as in the case of the TOWN that is GROWING larger and more populous and productive, … without having to address the greater reality of the transforming relational continuum, the overall TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE in which TOWNING is an innately relational development within the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE, and “NOT” a “LOCAL TOWN- THING-IN-ITSELF” that is purportedly the AUTHOR of ITS OWN GROWTH and DEVELOPMENT as the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR give expression to, thereby creating a SUBSTITUTE REALITY where FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO (TOWN and COUNTRY are TWO) so that we can speak of the GROWTH OF THE TOWN as if IN ITS OWN LOCAL AND INDEPENDENT RIGHT.

WHILE REALITY REMAINS our SENSE-EXPERIENCE REALITY wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE and there is thus TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE, the SOCIAL ‘OPERATIVE REALITY” propagated through our SAE language discourse, is a SIMPLER SUBSTITUTE REALITY, featuring NAME-instantiated (notional) local THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES with GRAMMAR-given (notional) powers of LOCAL AUTHORING of actions and developments.  Thus the example of ‘THE TOWN” that we say “IS GROWING LARGER and more POPULOUS and PRODUCTIVE” (i.e. we make it out to be a local thing-in-itself with its own powers of authoring actions and development).

MAIN POINT OF THIS NOTE: WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS USE LANGUAGE TO CONSTRUCT A SIMPLIFIED “SUBSTITUTE REALITY” THAT IS CAPTURABLE IN SIMPLER LANGUAGE THAN THE “REAL REALITY” WHICH IS AN ALL-PERVADING WAVE-FIELD FLOW.

BY CONTRAST, MODERN PHYSICS AND “THE EAST” (INCLUDING INDIGNEOUS ABORIGINAL CULTURES) ACCEPTS THAT SINCE SENSE-EXPERIENCE REALITY IS OF INCLUSION IN THE FLOW, REPRESENTATIONS BASED ON NOTIONAL “LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES” ARE INNATELY INCAPABLE OF CAPTURING THE INNATELY FLUID SENSE-EXPERIENCE REALITY.  WHAT MAY APPEAR TO BE AN EXCEPTION IS WHERE LANGUAGES EMPLOY NOTIONAL “LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES” , BUT ONLY AS AN EXPEDIENT MEANS OF “BOOTSTRAPPING” AN IMPRESSION OF THE FLUID REALITY (SEE -VIER- (4) IN THE LIST BELOW).

 

The following list of 8 points all tie back to the basis issue here which is that our WESTERN CULTURE REALITY that comes bundled into our SAE language is a SUBSTITUTE REALITY that is SUBSTITUTED because it is SIMPLER than the REAL REALTY of our sense experience.

As David Bohm has pointed out with his example of the DEATH OF LINCOLN which could be understood in many ways within the context of the transforming relational continuum, including being the result of the INVENTION OF GUNPOWDER, we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have chosen to STANDARIZE on the basis of ‘NOT THAT WHICH IS MOT REAL BUT THAT WHICH IS MOST SIMPLE’ because what is REAL emerges from an unbounded fluid dynamic (the transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka the Tao) and too complex to capture in LOCAL and EXPLICIT language architecture terms.

As far as LOCAL and EXPLCIT capture goes, the SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein ‘the TOWN is GROWING’ is a lot simpler to put into a language-based representation than is the NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT ‘there is TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE’.  Yes, I just ‘did it’ but notice the sweeping NONLOCALITY and IMPLICITNESs of ‘there is TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE’.   One gets the feeling that every time a new structure ‘goes up’ in ‘the TOWN’, the whole damn landscape changes so that we would be wrong to use language in a manner that suggested THE REALITY of the TOWN GROWING in a local sense because the entire NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT LANDSCAPE is TRANSFORMING during such APPARENTLY “LOCAL ONLY” changes.

As we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS KNOW, by our continuing focus on CONSTRUCTION OF TOWNS, something else is going on, it is the forgotten conjugate reduction of the wilderness, the DEA INCOGNITA, the invisible goddess that is getting ENTIRELY LEFT OUT OF OUR CONVERSATIONS that orient to THE GROWTH of the TOWN (as if it were a FREE and INDEPENDENT THING-IN-ITSELF without any conjugate Wilderness partner that is bulldozing down as part of the process of SUBSTITUTING the engineered RE-development of the land.  There is NO GROWTH of the TOWN here, there is TRANSFORMATION of the LANDSCAPE. As the TOWN GROWS, SO ALSO THE WILDERNESS SHRINKS, the overall phenomenon being the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE.

While we speak in great detail of how we construct the GROWTH of the TOWN, engineering new streets and buildings, we imply that all of this transpires within an absolute empty and infinite Euclidian space.  That is the abstraction that allows us to construct a SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein we split FIGURE-and-GROUND-into TWO, address the GROWTH of the FIGURE such as the TOWN as if it were a LOCAL INDEPENDENT THING-IN-ITSELF residing within an absolute empty and infinite containing space.   That’s part of the SUBSTITUTE REALITY construction that comes with the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR; e.g. ‘the TOWN is GROWING’.  NOT IN THE REALITY OF OUR SENSE-EXPERIENCE wherein there is TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE (the transforming relational continuum).

‘Nuff said; the point is that WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS EMPLOY the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR to construct a SUBSTITUTE REALITY which is a SIMPLIFIED pseudo-reality chosen to make representation of our REAL-LIFE SENSE EXPERIENCE REALITY, easier to capture and share in language-based terms.

THE FOLLOWING IS A SELECTION of OBSERVATIONS which can be brought into connective confluence in the mind to deliver an understanding that is no longer constrained to the SUBSTITUTE REALITY FORMULATION based on FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO which splits apart SUBJECT AND OBJECT such that, for example, “TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE” is reduced  to the SUBSTITUTE REALITY terms wherein ‘the TOWN is GROWING larger and more populous and productive’ (as if it were situated with the absolute empty and infinite container of ABSTRACT Euclidian space)

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-EINS- (1)  POINCARÉ

And just as our Copernicus said to us : It is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round, since thus the laws of astronomy are expressible in a much simpler language ; this one would say: It is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round, since thus the laws of mechanics are expressible in a much simpler language. . This does not preclude maintaining that absolute space, that is to say the mark to which it would be necessary to refer the earth to know whether it really moves, has no objective existence. Hence, this affirmation; ‘the earth turns round’ has no meaning, since it can be verified by no experiment; since such an experiment, not only could not be either realized or dreamed by the boldest Jules Verne, but can not be conceived of without contradiction; or rather these two propositions; ‘the earth turns round,’ and, ‘it is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round’ have the same meaning; there is nothing more in the one than in the other. “ — Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Ch. VII Relative Motion and Absolute Motion

 

-ZWEI- (2) NIETZSCHE

“In Reason’ in language!  ……..(Note how Nietzsche points to ‘being’ as the underpinning of ‘reason‘; i.e).  … “Being is thought into and insinuated into everything as ‘cause’; from the concept ‘ego,’ alone, can the concept ‘Being’ proceed.”……….– oh what a deceptive old witch it (reason) has been!  I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

 

-DREI- (3)  EINSTEIN

Since according to our present conceptions the elementary particles of matter are also, in their essence, nothing else than condensations of the electromagnetic field— Einstein, ‘Ether and the Theory of Relativity’

 

NOTA BENE:

Relational representations of reality that avoid building in any HARD DEPENDENCY on LOCAL MATERIAL BEING are essential in order to ensure the consistency of the representation with the reality of our sense experience.  This requirement is also acknowledged by Wittgenstein in his summary statements in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus;

 

-VIER- (4)  WITTGENSTEIN

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

 7.0 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”),

–Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

 

-FÜNF- (5) ACADEMIA

Nietzsche, held that the Dionysian resulted from the absence of the Apollonian (and not the other way around) so in a sense the Apollonian held a kind of primacy. Indeed the Greeks themselves held that Apollo was the superior God.

http://faculty.fiu.edu/~harrisk/Notes/Aesthetics/Apollonian-%20Dionysian%20Dichotomy.htm

NOTA BENE:

There is a bifurcation in our conceptualizing of reality in the Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy; i.e. in the Dionysian reality, everything is related and swimming in a sea of inter-relations as also in the indigenous aboriginal ‘mitakuye oyasin’ which is suggestive of a purely relational ‘Wave-field’ continuum, while in the Apollonian “reality”, the world is populated by discrete, local ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves’ with their own local powers of AUTHORING actions and developments implying, at the same time, the existence of an empty containing space of infinite extent (Euclidian space).  Note that the ‘quotation  marks’ are placed around the word “reality” in “Apollonian reality”, since the Apollonian vision of reality rests dependently on the “existence” of binary logical mental abstraction (psycho-logical abstraction) wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO which cannot be affirmed by sense-experience of inclusion in the Wave-field  The Dionysian, on the other hand, is consistent with sense experience wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE, and where it is only the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR which abstractly SPLITS OUT “FIGURE” as if it were a THING-IN-ITSELF whereupon GRAMMAR is employed to notionally impart to “IT” “ITS OWN” powers of authoring actions and development.  This DOUBLE ERROR creates the ILLUSION of a separate, independently existing thing-in-itself with its own powers of AUTHORING actions and development.

 

-SECHS)- (6)  TUNCEL

In a few years, it will be 150 years since Nietzsche called for a return to a Dionysian culture in his The Birth of Tragedy, at least in the Western context. Can we today say that the spirit of our contemporary culture is Dionysian? I would say not, although there are pockets of Dionysian practices in general culture and many Dionysian movements in the domain of the spirit. Modern dance was inspired by Nietzsche’s ideas on the Dionysian; Kandinsky appropriated the Dionysian into visual arts and thereby initiated abstract painting; in philosophy Bataille and Heidegger developed ideas on ecstasy and ecstatic disposition; installation and performance art forces human capabilities and operates along limit experiences; the whole drug culture, though fraught with nihilism (and in the US with racism) has Dionysian elements, and finally, psychoanalysis promotes the Dionysian indirectly insofar as it opens up new vistas and experiences for the non-rational in the human. However, these Dionysian movements of the last 100 years or so are divergent and lack coherence to a large extent. To make the Dionysian the spirit of our times will take much effort and also chance. As for the former, we can do our share; as for the latter, we can hope for Dionysus to appear.

– – – from … The Dionysian Revealed Itself As Truth: Have We Understood it? By Yunus Tuncel

 

-SIEBEN- (7) SCHROEDINGER

“ … the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.

 Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God). 

To Western ideology the thought has remained a stranger. 

 – Erwin Schroedinger, ‘What is LIfe’, ‘Epilogue: On Determinism and Free Will’

 

-ACHT- (8)   NIETZSCHE

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

 

FOOTNOTE: The above 8 points are all pointing to a FLOW-BASED REALITY, however, in order for us to open up our senses to allow it to take form, we must first find a way to suspend our WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT ‘reflex’ of understanding things in SUBSTITUTE REALITY terms (APOLLONIAN “reality”) wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO, and allow the fluid FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE reality of our sense-experience (our DIONYSIAN sense of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka the Tao) to assume its natural precedence.  This requires an acceptance of the natural primacy of our sense-experience reality wherein the Tao that can be told is not the true Tao.

Since “The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao”, … we cannot expect to acquire an understanding of reality through any direct and explicit language-based representation.  This point is directly addressed by Wittgenstein (see VIER above) as he points to the need to get to the relational (Dionysian) understanding by using the abstract concepts of local things-in-themselves (Apollonian).

The APOLLONIAN has a great appeal due to its brevity and crispness in addressing phenomena WHICH ARE MADE TO APPEAR LOCAL by the combination of NAMING and GRAMMAR.  However, this brevity and crispness in APOLLONIAN LANGUAGE IS ONLY AS AN EXPEDIENT STEPPING STONE or SPRINGBOARD (inference-engine) to OVERCOME THE INNATE “REALITY-SHORTFALL” OF LANGUAGE BASED ON “NAMING-INSTANTIATED THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES” with “GRAMMAR-GIVEN POWERS OF AUTHORING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT”.

While the DIONYSIAN BLURS AND REMOVES THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN FIGURE-AND-GROUND (SELF-AND-OTHER), IN SO DOING IT DRAWS UP THE CURTAINS OF LOCAL CONTAINMENT, BRINGING BACK OUR AWARENESS OF INNATE INCLUSION IN THE ENDLESSNESS of the RELATIONAL CONTINUUM, our immersion in the unbounded transforming relational continuum wherein we are ‘ONE WITH EVERYTHING’.

As Schroedinger points out, this Dionysian sense of being ONE WITH EVERYTHING has remained foreign to WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT thinking (the Apoollian has hijacked the position of primacy in the WESTERN psyche;

 Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God). 

To Western ideology the thought has remained a stranger. 

 – Erwin Schroedinger, ‘What is LIfe’, ‘Epilogue: On Determinism and Free Will’

While Modern physics supports the return of this understanding, WESTERN CUTURE ADHERENCY has locked into primacy, the Apollonian along with the EGO-based sense of LOCAL AUTHORING power that comes with it, making the LOCK-IN-BY-HIGH-SWITCHING COSTS of this WESTERM CULTURE inverted Apollonian primacy very high indeed.

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