The World Dynamic: – both RST and MCD vs either RST or MCD?

Peaks from 'positive' or 'negative causality'?

(Can be read in conjunction with ‘How Science is Displacing Spirituality’)

RST = Relational-Spatial Transformation

MCD= Material-Causal-Dynamics

Mach, Nietzsche, Bohm, Schroedinger contended that the world is a continually transforming relational spatial Plenum, … ‘the All’, and that material bodies are ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’).   Berkeley had argued the same, and had pointed out errors in the foundations of Newton’s ‘Principles of Natural Philosophy’, which have become part of our everyday scientific viewing of ‘how the world works’.

This is a brief summary of the ‘errors’ in the foundations of Newtonian scientific constructions of understanding, … ‘errors’ which force the abandonment of the RST view and the single-minded opting for the MCD view.

According to Mach, our experience is psycho-physical; i.e. the mind experience and the matter experience are conjugate aspects of one psycho-physical experience.   One can ‘visualize’ this in considering the current revising of view of the biological cell and then applying this ‘archetype’ to the ‘human’.  For a long time, the activities of the cell, its development and behaviours, were assumed to be driven and directed by a central controlling authority  in the nucleus of the cell in the same manner as it was assumed that the activities of the human body are driven and directed by a central controlling authority constituted by the brain.  The advantage of this model is that fits our MCD philosophical notion of the ‘organism’ as a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own locally originating, internal process determined development and behaviour [i.e. there is no ‘blurring’ of the entity and its environment as in the RST philosophical notion of a transforming relational spatial Plenum, where the inhabitant-habitat relation is like that of a storm-cell in the atmosphere which requires BOTH/AND rather than EITHER/OR logic]

The changes that are currently in progress, in our understanding of the cell and its inhabitant-habitat relationship, no longer see the nucleus as some kind of God-like jumpstart director of the cell’s development and behaviours.  While textbooks and Wikipedia still portray the ‘nucleus’ as being the command-centre and the central-intelligence of the cell;

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

In ‘The New Biology’, Bruce Lipton observes;

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

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

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

This view of the cell as a ‘unit of perception’ accords with Mach’s view of ‘sensa’ whose experience is psycho-physical being the basic elements of the world.   This puts ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ together, or rather, does not begin by splitting ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ apart as in the notion of a ‘sentient being’ which we picture as analogous to a thing-in-itself machine loaded with inboard sensing equipment akin to radar, sonar, robotic tactility, image and sound processing capabilities etc. that relates to the world it lives in by gathering and processing a load of sensory data.   Moving our view from ‘sentient being’ to ‘unit of perception’ does away with the dualist split between mind and matter and instead conceives of these as conjugate aspects of psycho-physical experience in the cell now seen as an embedded agent of perception.

Like a storm-cell in the atmosphere, the cell is ‘the universe/atmosphere/habitat expressing itself.  When the atmosphere is differentially heated by the sun and ocean, becomes pressured and tensioned, the ‘cells’ that emerge are themselves expressions of the condition of the mother-space.  As receptor-effectors, their ‘effecting’ is in conjugate relation with their receptive/experiencing of the condition of the space they are included in. The ‘ARE’ recepting-effecting that is built into the transforming relational space, they ‘ARE NOT’ sentient beings, inhabitants that are at arms length from their habitat that send out sensing signals like radar and sonar and receive and process them in a central processing unit so that it is the central process unit after it has done its analysis that is the first to discover ‘what is going on out there’.

Can we adjust our dualist view of ourselves as humans from ‘sentient beings’ whose understanding of the self-other or inhabitant-habitat relation derives from ‘sensory information processing’, to embedded receptor-effector agencies, strands in an interdependent web-of-life?   Apparently so since aboriginals have never abandoned this non-dualist view of the self-other relationship.

 * * *

The foregoing was to point intuitively to the alternative views of the mind-matter, self-other relations, and to suggest that the more comprehensive view is the non-dualist RST view, as embedded agents of perception which are included in a continually transforming relational spatial Plenum.  The MCD view derives when we impose, using language and grammar, absolute local being or ‘subject’ status (with God-like jumpstart authoring powers) on the embedded forms in the flow (i.e. features of the flow in the flow, as with storm-cells in the transforming relational space of the atmosphere).

By conceiving of forms that are flow-features in the continually transforming relational space as local, material ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own locally-originating internal process driven and directed behaviour, we have to conceive of their actions being driven by their INTENTION.   Nietzsche’s charge is that ‘science is anthropomorphism’ since we get this notion of ‘intention’ from ourselves [our ego] and we then infuse it into every exemplar of dynamics in the world.

Emerson, whose philosophy was much admired by Nietzsche, similarly observed that “the genius of nature not only inhabits the organism but creates it” and this ‘genius’ which is immanent in the unfolding world, gives ‘talent’ to a pear-tree to ‘make pears’, but pear-tree’s ego may have it thinking that the pear-making FORCE jumpstarts from within the pear-tree, and that its job in life is take these jumpstarting powers and deploy them to the fullest.

 

“But nature seems further to reply, `I have ventured so great a stake as my success, in no single creature. I have not yet arrived at any end. The gardener aims to produce a fine peach or pear, but my aim is the health of the whole tree, — root, stem, leaf, flower, and seed, — and by no means the pampering of a monstrous pericarp at the expense of all the other functions.’” — Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’

However, as Emerson continues, we seem prone to letting our ego hijack our understanding of our being agents of perception within a transformational dynamic greater than ourselves, so that we focus on ‘our ends’, like the pear-tree focusing on his own acts, his making pears, rather than taking his place in the larger-than-himself scheme of things;

“Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine.”

In the aforementioned revised model of the biological cell, the cells focus is no longer seen in terms of some central authority in the nucleus directing the activities of the cell, but in seeing cell as a receptors and effectors in conjugate relation, the cell’s primary job is now seen as ‘transmitting influences from the vast and universal to the point on which its genius can act’.  

This is the RST (relational-spatial transformation) worldview, wherein the forms in nature emerge, like the storm-cell in the atmosphere, to ‘transmit influences from the vast and universal to the point on which its genius can act’.

But this is not the common view in the Western culture.  The common view is the MCD (material causal dynamics) worldview, wherein we impute two things, ‘subjecthood’ and ‘inside-outward driving force of intention’, as a ‘stand-in’ for emerging events are inherently inseparable from the flow they are included in.  As Nietzsche says, these two notions we impute are ‘a double error’ or ‘circular reasoning’.

“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

And as Alan Watts says, in the same vein;

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

This conceptualizing notionally splits apart the interdependent connectedness of the RST and reduces it to a MCD, notionally introduces GOD-LIKE local jumpstarting FORCE AND INTENTION into the interior of a form, linguistically idealized as a ‘thing-in-itself’.  In a human, we put it in ‘the brain’ and conceive of the brain as a central authority, a centre of intentional/purposeful drive and direction of the activities of the notional thing-in-itself organism,… the flow-feature that we have split out of the flow thanks to these conceptual idealizations.

Now, this imputing of ‘intention’ to dynamics in general, is what Newton built into his mathematical models or ‘Principles of Natural Philosophy’.   And he did it by introducing the concept of FORCE as a local jumpstarting power [God-like, since it arises out of nothing].  The form that is visibly individual is a flow-feature in the RST that is not the jumpstart source of his own FORCE and INTENTION.  In modern, Machean physics, the actions of the form are NOT LOCALLY JUMPSTARTED but are constituted by the ‘transmitting influences from the vast and universal to the point on which its genius can act’

The world/flow, in opening itself up to give birth to a form-in-the-flow is informing the assertive activity (development and behaviour) of the form-in-the-flow. 

As in the Western language and grammar based rendering of the world dynamic [in dualist MCD mode], so too, in the mathematical language developed by Newton for the ‘newtonian’ dualist, MCD worldview.  Berkeley’s critique, point to two mutually compensatory errors in the mathematical foundations of calculus, is pointing to the same two mutually compensatory errors that Nietzsche is pointing to;

 

 1.  The capture of unfolding events in the sense of their being the ‘result’ of some wilful ‘intention’, and,

 

2. The invention of a notional ‘being’ to provide a logical, local, jumpstart ‘intentional authoring source’ for the ‘results’.

 

This is the ‘formula’ for splitting out and disconnecting the forms-in-the RST flow, like Charlie, Francis, Ivan and Jean.  Differential calculus provides three coupled differential equations that can ‘explain’ each ‘flow-feature’ as if it were a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour, and impute to it ‘its own trajectory’.  By this revisionism, the continuing relational spatial transforming (RST) of the atmosphere is fragmented and reduced to disconnected material-causal dynamics (MCD).

Using calculus to remove interdependent connectedness

Hurricane Katrina, even as it comes bearing down on a terrified New Orleans, is under the influence of its sister and brother cells all around and on the other side of the globe.   In our self-centred focus, we are like the victims of a mass-killer; i.e. we are not really interested in how the web of relations he is included in is ‘transmitting influences to the point on which its genius can act.’  In fact, the same superstition that has us believing in God-like local jumpstarting out of nothing forces, is going to suggest to us that his actions jumpstart from his local, internally jumpstarting ‘intention’; i.e. an ‘evil force’ that jumpstarts from within his interior.

Now, given that his actions jumpstart from an evil Force within his interior, … there’s not much point in bothering to investigate what’s going on out there in the web of relations he is included in which embodies an intelligence that is continually ‘transmitting influences to the point on which its genius can act.’.

This is where the ‘restorative justice’ of the aboriginal belief tradition gives way to the ‘retributive justice’ of the Western european superstition-based scientific belief tradition.

Yes, scientific thinking IS superstition based because of its building into its foundations the notion of a God-like Force that, notionally, locally jumpstarts creative authorship of development and behaviour out of nothing.

 

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

 

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

What Newton did in his ‘mathematical architecture’, by way of his two mutually compensatory errors cited by Berkeley and which are analogs to the ‘double error’ cited by Nietzsche in our popular psychology, was to build in ‘positive causality’ so that ‘negative causality’ and ‘circular causality’ were excluded.

In the RST worldview, ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ do not exist as processes-in-themselves; i.e. there is only ‘transformation’ in which ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are ‘appearances’, … ‘conjugate aspects’ of the one dynamic of relational-spatial transformation.  When a human collective creates a new housing development, they are at the same time destroying a forest and ecosystems.  As Mach’s principle says;

 

“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”

 

Nevertheless, in our Western culture, we are addicted to seeing the world in the dualist MCD terms; i.e. in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, as if these ‘things-in-themselves’ are locally jumpstart animated by a God-like force-coming-from-nowhere in their own thing-in-itself interior.  As Marshall McLuhan says in ‘Understanding Media’ [understanding media as relationally transforming media];

 

“Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. — Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media’  [the transforming relational ‘medium is the message’]

What Western minds, conditioned with the dualist MCD belief system ‘just don’t get’, is that space opens up the possibilities that are conjugate to the asserting activities of the inhabitants.  If one makes space into a fixed empty void and instead imputes the sourcing of dynamics fully and solely to the ‘inhabitants’ of that space, then we are forced to explain emerging dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ as if these actions are jumpstart driven from out of the interior of the ‘things-in-themselves’.  The conjugate relation between the opening of relational spatial possibility and the asserting development and behaviour is lost from view and understanding, as the imposing of the convention of absolute fixed and empty space notionally shifts the sourcing of dynamics to the absolute local, independently existing things-in-themselves that inhabit the fixed and empty [non-participating] space.

To cut to the quick, the ‘negative causality’ constituted by this relational spatial opening of possibility has been ‘engineered out’ of the mathematical foundations of Newtonian physics and thus out of science in general which is supplied by mathematical physics with foundational concepts that it uses in its reckoning of how things work.

This ‘negative causality’, in our Western culture, has been driven out of our minds and mind-tools as we apply them to reckoning as to ‘how things work’.  For example, as Pasteur on his death-bed conceded to Antoine Béchamp that;

‘le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’ (the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything)

In this view, ‘negative causality’ is at work in the world; i.e. the proliferation of certain strains of bacteria arises when there is a deficiency in ‘le terrain’ of the body.  The body as a grazing meadow for bacteria, when it gets out of balance becomes hugely nourishing for particular strains of bacteria and they flourish and multiply and grow to huge populations and dump a lot of toxic excrement into le terrain which troubles the workings of the terrain. 

Because we Western European acculturated people are people with big egos that have us believe that we are, and thus everyone is, fully and solely responsible for their own behaviour, we impute ‘intention’ to the microbes and invoke judgement upon them as in our retributive justice which seeks to punish them for their malicious actions against the state of our being.  We condemn them as ‘pathogens’ that are the ‘cause’ of our illness, and we impose the punishment of lethal injection of an anti-biotic [life-killing-drug].  These cow-like microbes protest, saying that the gates were left open and the fields were full of nutrition for them so that as they partook of the goodies, their population exploded, cramming many of them into the same space so that their excrement was too much for the normal recycling processes where others are there to consume it, and the steaming stinking piles began to mount, polluting and toxifying the terrain.  Even though they were only 1% on the basis of the number of species, they took over control of the terrain that the other 99% shared inclusion in, and with things out of balance in this way, there was a hell of a mess.

‘Negative causality’ is next to invisible to us which is why it took us so long to figure out that scurvy was due to a deficiency in ‘le terrain’ that elicited the growth of bacteria; i.e. the growth of bacteria was not coming from the force and intention of the bacteria;

 

“The first noticeable symptom of scurvy is the appearance of reddish-bluish bruise-coloured spots on your skin. … Without treatment, the spots can grow and merge to create large dark patches on your skin”  — U.K. NHS

The body appears to be ‘under attack’ by some pathogens.  The spots themselves are seen as positively asserting ‘eruptions’ in the skin.   The vision of having left the gates open for innocent microbes simply coming in for munchies, is not in the mind of the observer of these growing spots; the view of some evil alien intruder leaps into the Western acculturated mind ever since the Aesculapian (reductionist) concept of health took over from the Hygiean’ (holist) concept of health of Hippocrates;

As Robert Herwick, M.D. reminds us, much in the same vein as Pasteur and Béchamp;

“One of the most ancient concepts of health was that personified by Hygiea, the Greek goddess of health who watched over the corporeal welfare of the residents of Athens. Health was then based upon a unity with nature, a temperate lifestyle and the belief that good health was a natural attribute. Rather than treating the sick, Hygiea embodied the ideal of the preservation of natural health through living in harmony with nature. Slowly this ancient concept was replaced after the fifth century B.C. by the cult of Aesculapius, the son of Apollo and the god of medicine. … The salient point about the cult of Aesculapius is that it was a therapy of intervention, of combating a disease and seeking its expulsion from the body. The restoration of health was based to a large extent upon superstition: and at times almost charlatan mysticism which effected a magical cure together with an increase in the temple coffers

… Throughout history this dichotomy of Hygienic health through natural harmony and Aesculapian healing by intervention eternally recurs. Hippocrates, the great Greek father of medicine, returned to the former tradition and stressed the treatment of the person as a whole, reflecting and participating in a natural order of natural health.

In the former, Hygiean approach the ‘physician’ [same root as physis or physics] instituted a treatment to reestablish an inner harmony with the natural order.

This notion that the body will heal itself and the role of the physician, rather than to take control of things, is to re-establish the conditions by which the natural balances in the terrain [natural health] can restore themselves.”

Here once again, the RST and MCD worldviews vie for primacy.  The so-called ‘realists’ [dualists] see only the MCD view, while the so-called ‘pragmatist idealists’ [non-dualists] see BOTH the RST view and the MCD view, but recognize the noun-verb MCD view as being ‘nützliche Fiktion’ (useful fiction, Nietzsche) that facilitates discourse on dynamics of experience that transcend the discursive capabilities in their attempt to RE-PRESENT the dynamics of experience.  

In any case, Western retributive justice thinking, the Aesculapian view in terms of evil agents that must be expulsed, dominates our thinking and obscures the Hygiean view in terms of health as a balancing of outside-inward orchestrating influence and inside-outward asserting influence.   This ‘outside-inward orchestrating influence is the NEGATIVE CAUSALITY [which is in conjugate relation to positive causality, both being conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of relational spatial transformation (RST)].  This obscuring has greatly hampered our ability to understand ‘disease’; e.g.

 

 “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 

Here again, we are talking about the ‘psychology of the observer’, … how the observer makes sense of his observations and experiences.

But the point of this note is to propose that Newton infused the Aesculapian view into the mathematical foundations that constitute the ‘Principles of Natural Philosophy’, and furthermore, how and where this happened is captured in Berkeley’s critique of Newton’s fluxions, which identified the presence of two mutually compensatory errors of reasoning that are incorporated in the architecture of calculus, that are of the same topology as the circular reasoning identified by Nietzsche as arise in our Standard Average European language based tools for RE-PRESENTING the physical phenomena of our experience.

It is not at all difficult to follow the argument of Berkeley, which goes through the algebra and geometry used by Newton.  Eugene Bowman of Penn State will take you through it here, in ‘Casting Out Beams’  (or copy and paste this URL into your browser http://www.personal.psu.edu/ecb5/Courses/M475W/SuggestedReading/AnalystControversy-Published.pdf )

 

“First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and thou shalt see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” — King James Bible, Matthew 7:5

You will recognize in the mathematics, the same circular reasoning cited by Nietzsche, in that one starts from a set of raw observations, such as the temperature taken at successive times, that can be RE-PRESENTED as a continuous curve; e.g. of temperature versus time.   The actual curve used in Newton’s development of fluxions, however, is a parabola (y² = x) because that is used traditionally a well-behaved simple curve to develop and prove out concepts on.  Of course, this mathematics is needed to represent physical phenomena such as the variations of temperature over time, … or is that a ‘physical phenomenon’?

No, it is an ‘idealization’ of a physical phenomenon but not a physical phenomenon according to Mach and RST, because the attributes of a transforming relational space do not ‘change in time’.  ‘Time’ does not come into the physical dynamics of a transforming relational space because the transforming space or holodynamic is ‘ALL’ there is, and we are inside of it, and therefore it makes no sense to think of ourselves, the observer, as being outside of the transforming relational space and using an absolute clock and an absolute measuring rod to RE-PRESENT what is going on inside the RST.

So, let’s take another look at this curve and its derivative.  The derivative is directional in the sense that we look at ‘differences’ as proceeding from the left (from the past) to the right (into the future), the difference, in the limit as the interval (t2-t1) gets smaller of (y2-y1)/(t2-t1).  This is already the embodiment of a psychological RE-RENDERING of dynamics, as Poincaré describes;

“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.

That is, in order to simplify, we break down physical phenomena into tiny local packets of space and tiny increments of time and imagine that each of these contains a God-like FORCE which is the jumpstart animating source of the physical phenomena.  For example, Newton’s second law defines the God-like FORCE in terms the rate of change of movement of a material thing-in-itself.  The ‘force’ is presented as something that comes out of a space and time pixel, but as we know from our experience, the dynamics of the space we are included in orchestrates and shapes our asserting behaviour; i.e. the transforming relational space ELICITS a ‘rising to the occasion’ in us.  But the mathematics of physics contrains the RE-PRESENTATION of dynamic physical phenomena in terms of these physical phenomena arising from a local jumpstarting God-like FORCE AND INTENTION, as in our ego-based impression of our ‘self’ [implying that this mathematical physics or mathematical science RE-PRESENTATION is ‘anthropomorphism’ because it is based on our hubris of believing that the animating source of our behaviour jumpstarts from inside of us, which is pure ‘superstition’ if we really believe it, but otherwise can serve as ‘nützliche Fiktion’ or ‘pragmatic idealization’ if we don’t confuse it for physical reality but just use it as a supportive tool].  That is, the constructs of language, which in the case of Standard Average European languages imply fixed empty Euclidian space as an idealized operating theatre for material causal dynamics or ‘what things-in-themselves do’, … but which differ according to the architecture of the language, … are useful so long as we don’t confuse them for ‘physical reality’.

 

 “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

 

“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

Mathematics is another language, and fluxions/calculus is a language with a particular architecture that imputes to a curve, such as y = f(t) where ‘y’ stands for ‘temperature’ and ‘t’ stands for time, the notion that the sourcing force for the variation that the curve is showing, derives from the curve itself, from inside of the tiniest increments that manifest as variations of temperature.  The ‘force’ of ‘intention’ to ‘vary’ is thus embodied in Newton’s fluxions,  these tiniest packets of space and time responsible for the variations that give the form of the curve.  But Berkeley argues that what is there when the mathematical operations reduce the variations of the curve to ‘local force and intention’ is the ghost of a departed force;

“And what are these Fluxions? The Velocities of evanescent Increments? And what are these same evanescent Increments? They are neither finite Quantities nor Quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the Ghosts of departed Quantities?”

If we examine the curve of temperature as a function of time, these Newtonian mathematics condition our thinking such that;

 

“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.”

So, what are we to think if we bring a variety of different blocks of ice into our house, at different times, so that the melting of these blocks is depressing the temperature for as long as it is melting then abruptly stops depressing the temperature when it fully melts.  This effect on the temperature will look something like as follows in the diagram; i.e. the top curve shows the temperature-depressing effect of a series of melting blocks of ice brought into the house [in the constant warmth of the tropics] in december, say, and the second curve shows the temperature-depressing effect of a series of melting blocks of ice brought into the house in june.  The combined effects of these two series of temperature-depressing effects is shown at the bottom.  That is what we would graph up as y = f(t), as our temperature as a function of time.   

Do peaks represent 'positive' or 'negative' causality?

If we just take the bottom curve to a person who is unaware of the complication of the provisioning mechanism of melting ice blocks, when he looks at the temperature curves with the peaks on it, … is he not liable to think in the positive causality terms of there being some ‘assertive force’ that is the positive cause of these peaks?

In fact, if we take ‘differences’ as in ‘differential calculus’, we will be left with a series of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ anomalies that we will have to explain, ‘periods of warming’ and ‘periods of cooling’.   This is because the inflexions in the curve, to have meaning, require that;

 

“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 placement of these melting blocks is in the remote past and the continue to influence the curve from out of the remote past.  So the person (e.g. Al Gore and the AGW warmists) that look at this curve and want to give meaning to the variations in the curve, must assume that some force in the immediate past is positively causing the temperature to rise.  As they round up the usual potentially guilty suspects to see if they can find a positive correlation between their activities and these results, the concentration of CO² in the atmosphere shows up.   Some ‘denialists’ state the obvious that when oceans which contain dissolved CO²  are warmed, CO² is released into the atmosphere.  Those that see the upward variation as positively caused, however, will search for a model that would explain how rising CO² concentration will be the positive cause of the upward variation.  

But who says the ‘peaking’ in the temperature curve is a positive causal affect as a ‘warming interval’?   Why not a negative causal affect as in a ‘lessening of cooling’?

No, Newton’s fluxions do not allow that because the calculus HAS BY ITS MATHEMATICAL ARCHITECTURE IRREVOCABLY BLINDED ITSELF to negative causality and circular causality (as in continuing relational-spatial transformation), by building in the assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’.  In order to recognize ‘negative causality’ as the source of the peaking in temperature, one must accept that the present depends also on the remote past. 

Here we are getting away from the superstition of local-in-space-and-time GOD-LIKE FORCE-AND-INTENTION, and opening understanding like the aboriginal traditionalists, in terms that ancestral dynamics are continuing to be with us.  Newton’s MATHEMATICALLY-RENDERED PRINCIPLES OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY exclude the RST view wherein the world dynamic is a continually transforming relational spatial Plenum, by virtue of its mathematical RE-PRESENTING of dynamics in terms of time-based change wherein it is assumed that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’.  This is a view in where there is only ‘positive causality’ since ‘negative causality’ derives from spatial-relations that extend outward into remote spacetime.  Positive causality implies locally jumpstarting GOD-LIKE FORCE-AND-INTENTION, a ‘superstitious’ notion that has been effectively built into the architecture of the mathematics of physics and mainstream science.

It is the same dualist, MCD, ‘positive causality’ based ‘psychological aberrance’ (distortion of the physical reality of our experience by way of superstitious idealizations that conjure up the notional of locally [out of thin air] jumpstarting GOD-LIKE FORCE-AND-INTENTION ) that gives rise to moral judgement and retributive justice.  In this superstitious worldview, which has been institutionalized in the governance, commerce and justice systems of the globally dominating Western culture, one assumes, by way of double error, that evil events arise from evil intentions, and that evil beings exist that are the subject-authors of the evil results.  This saves us a lot of ‘thinking’, and it is thus ‘scientific’;

 

“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

This reduction in the expenditure of thought gives rise to moral judgements and retributive justice which sees individuals as ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own locally originating [locally-jumpstarting GOD-LIKE FORCE-AND-INTENTION].  In this reduced thought process, events can be seen as arising from intention and as being authored by local subject-authors or ‘beings’ possessed by God-like jumpstarting-out-of-nothing force and intention].   Banished from this view is the RST view wherein individuals are understood as ‘nature expressing itself’; i.e. that nature gives rise to forms for ‘transmitting influences from the vast and universal to the point on which its genius can act’.  

The superstitions that are built into the foundations of Western culture are also built into the foundations of the mathematics of physics and mainstream science.  All of this would be ‘nützliche Fiktion’ as Nietzsche observes, if our outlook is that of ‘pragmatic idealization’ wherein we acknowledge the utility of the MCD worldview without falling into the trap of believing that it RE-PRESENTS the physical reality of our experience.  The situation we are in at the moment is where we have institutionalized the ‘nützliche Fiktion’ and are imposing it by force on ourselves, through ‘retributive justice’ and ‘central authority based controlling directives’ in an attempt to MAKE IT THE PHYSICAL REALITY.
In referring back to the title The World Dynamic: – both RST and MCD  vs  either RST or MCD? , the associations can now be seen in the terms that ‘pragmatist-idealists’ understand dynamics in terms of both RST and MCD while ‘realists’ insist on either RST or MCD which excludes RST on the basis of its inherent ‘both/and’ logic and embraces MCD on the basis of its inherent ‘either/or’ logic.

The controlling of what goes on according to the enforcement of the MCD worldview amounts to a dispiriting or de-spiritualizing of society.  This is what tweaked Berkeley to his critique of Newton’s mathematical Principia, because he could see that this superstition of a GOD-LIKE FORCE-AND-INTENTION being inside of a fluxion was a total crock; i.e. that these fluxions were no more than “the Ghosts of departed Quantities”

The bottom-line effect on our society is that we have installed psychological aberrance as ‘normality’, … a superstition based psychological aberrance that derives from our confusing the linguistic idealizations of MCD for ‘physical reality’, which puts us at odds with our own inclusion-in-the-continually-transforming-relational-space experience.   As R.D. Laing put it;

 

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

 

The compounding problem, from my experience, has also been captured by Laing;

They are playing a game.  They are playing at not playing a game.

 If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me.

I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

 

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