‘Transformation’ – Where ‘production’ and ‘destruction’ are ‘conjugates’

'Production' is a concept that ignores its own conjugate, 'destruction'

Would you want to know the source of major dysfunction in the world? … even if it challenged the foundational assumptions/beliefs of your culture?

To hear what it is is one thing, to assimilate it and to let your behaviour be informed by it is quite another, since it is like whipping out from beneath your feet, the ground you have been standing on.  My experience is that many people ‘hear it’ but promptly ignore it because it is ‘just too big an adjustment’ to make ‘on your own’, unless everyone else is making it with you, therefore, almost no-one makes it.

The ‘error’ in our cultural assumptions crops up all over the place.  It is troubling our sciences of medicine and biology.  It is troubling our justice system, economics, politics, history and geography and theology.  I will briefly discuss how this same problem is cropping up in each of these areas and show how it is ‘the same problem’ in all cases.

First, what is the problem?

In the above photograph of a Timber company’s log holding yard, the economist would speak of this as ‘inventory’ and speak of the Timber company’s ‘production’ of ‘product’.

The issue is with this notion of ‘production’.  There is transformation [of the space we live in] going on here, to be sure, and in transformation, production and destruction are dual aspects of the one dynamic of transformation.  If we seek to ‘increase production’, we, at the same time ‘increase destruction’.

There is no such thing as ‘production’-in-its-own-right, there is only ‘transformation’.   The notion of ‘genesis’ without its conjugate partner ‘degeneration’ is religious idealization (e.g. Genesis 1:28).

As Nietzsche has pointed out [1], language (our abstract phonetic language) has the power of subjectification, the power to make ‘beings’ out of anything we assign a word to, after which we can append a verb and predicate to make it appear as if the linguistic-artefact ‘being’ is the author.  After observing a convection cell in a flowing medium, because it has a persisting form even though it is a feature within a continually transforming flow, we use language to ‘subjectize’ it and call it a ‘hurricane’, after which, our language further allows us to append a verb and/or a predicate making it APPEAR in our minds, as if the word-thing is the author of the action and the result; e.g. Katrina is producing giant surf along the Gulf Coast.  Katrina is wreaking destruction on the city of New Orleans.  Katrina is growing, intensifying, moving north, weakening, dissipating.   The word ‘hurricane’ and/or ‘Katrina’ impress on our minds the ‘local sourcing of dynamic behaviour’ when the reality is that the sourcing is inherently nonlocal, as characterizes ‘transformation’.  The fluid-flow of the atmosphere when exposed to solar irradiance is ‘thermally energized’ and erupts in pimples or convection cells born to re-establish thermal energy balance.   These pimples are in no way ‘things-in-themselves’ and the notion that they are ‘producing effects’ is ‘Fiktion’ or ‘appearances’.

There is nothing in the ‘thing-in-itself’ category; i.e. ‘local, visible, material objects/organisms/systems’ that is capable ‘producing’ anything because there are no ‘things-in-themselves’ in spite of language’s ability to ‘make it seems so’.   The universe is, according to the persisting inquiries of physics, a continually transforming energy-charged spatial plenum.

[As a bookmark or footnote [Since the quest for brevity does not permit exploring this in this essay] please note the important point that Mach and Schroedinger both distanced themselves from what they called ‘The Church of Science’ because the majority concensus of physicists trying to understand ‘relativity’ and ‘quantum physics’ chose to retain the notion of ‘local material things-in-themselves’ as the foundations of the world dynamic, even though they had to ‘cloak’ such discreteness in a ‘probability cloud’, rather than to concede the relational/transformational nature of the world dynamic.  Mach ‘quit the Church of Physics’ rather than agreeing to believe in the ‘reality’ of ‘atoms’ and Schroedinger declared that he wished he had never had anything to do with quantum physics in view of the concensus interpretation that retained the notion of a foundation of material things-in-themselves’ particles.  Both of these physicists understood the world dynamic in terms of energy-in-transformation wherein matter was ‘appearances’ (‘schaumkommen’).]

We don’t need to be quantum physicists to recognize what Nietzsche is recognizing [2], we can look at the photo of the log-holding yard and from our own experience acknowledge that ‘production’ and ‘destruction’ are dual aspects of the one dynamic, the transformation of the space we live in [spatial-relational transformation].

While transformation is what is actually unfolding and are included in, language allows us to capture a ‘perspective’; i.e. a historical narrative or ‘time-line’ in terms of ‘what things do’.  For example, the European colonizers’ historical narrative is a time line of events showing that they ‘constructed’ [‘produced’] a wonderful new world in the Americas.  At the same time, the colonized indigenous peoples’ historical narrative is a time-line of events showing that the colonizers ‘destroyed’ a wonderful established world on Turtle Island.  These two historical narratives are irreconcilable within the realm of ‘historical narratives’, but they are resolved in our actual experience of being included in transformation, transformation involving construction and destruction as a conjugate duality.

 Instead of evolution [of the world] being conceived of in terms of a continuing one-sided, inside-outward asserting ‘production’ of new states of the world, it is more realistically understood as the conjugation of outside-inward orchestrating ‘epigenesis’ and inside-outward asserting ‘genesis’.   This is, in fact, the model of ‘evolution’ proposed by Lamarck, Nietzsche, Rütiger, Rolph and Roux and it applies in the world in general, including both organic and inorganic forms.  As they put it, “evolution is a fluid process wherein endosmosis [outside-inward flow of potential-energy-rich nurturance] is in conjugate relation to exosmosis [inside-outward flow of kinetic-energy-charged matter].  This has the same ‘geometry’ as Heraclitus’ ‘candle-flame’ view of matter, which in turn matches the toroidal flow or ‘matter as resonance’ view of quantum physics.  The outside-inward influence is in terms of a many-to-one ‘sink’ of nurturing potentials [fuelling, energizing] while the inside-outward influence [outflux] is in terms of a one-to-many ‘source’ of assertive kinetics.

'Sink' and 'Source' as conjugates

'accommodating habitat' and 'asserting inhabitants' as conjugates

 The influx of potential and the outflux of kinetically asserting action are flip sides of the same coin, as in this composite picture of multiple hurricanes.  The pinwheeling forms are ‘made of motion’ or rather, ‘made of energy-in-transformation’.  They are NOT ‘things-in-themselves’ as language encourages us to make them over into.

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Ok, that is sufficient background to give context to what is ‘going wrong’ in the various ‘disciplines’ of society due to our use of language to notionally ‘split apart’ the conjugate duality [production-destruction, genesis-epigenesis, exosmosis-endosmosis, source-sink etc.] and thus ‘imagine’ that dynamics are in the one sided, inside-outward asserting terms of ‘production’, ‘genesis’, local sourcing’ etc.

Economics:

As in the example this essay pivots from, ‘production’, the notion of production being a ‘process-in-itself’ means that we are not taking into account that something must be destroyed at the same time as something is produced.   Economics treats ‘production’ as ‘real’ and encourages the growth of ‘economic production’ hence our current experience of heading for an ‘environmental disaster’.   As Frédéric Neyrat observes in ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’

“In extending his living space in a manner that destroys the space of others, he destroys his own space. Not initially his inside space, his ‘self’, but his outside space, this real outside-of-self which nourishes his ‘inside-of-self’. The protection of this outside space now becomes the condition without which he is unable to pursue the growth of his own powers of being.”

Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize in Economics, 2003) invokes the notion of a ‘externalities’ as ‘results’ that one get along with the ‘production results’ that are beyond what we keep an ‘accounting of’.   The problem of the inadequacy of the ‘doer-deed’ model of dynamics wherein a local ‘thing-in-itself’ [corporation, sovereign state, entrepreneur] is seen as being capable of ‘production’, is thus ‘acknowledged’ but without any solution to date.  There is certainly no acknowledgement of the psychological problem of allowing language to break the conjugate duality into two parts and simply ignore the ‘destruction’, ‘epigenesis’, ‘sink’ aspect.

History:

As already mentioned, and as noted by Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States”, there is no way to reconcile the historical narrative of the ‘executioner/colonizer’ and the historical narrative of the ‘victim/colonized’.  That is to say, there is no ‘historical narrative’ that can capture the truth in such a form that it is acknowledged as the truth by both the colonizer and the colonized.   Meanwhile, they are both conscious of being included together in a common dynamic space and there is no problem with agreement on what is unfolding, the problem comes when the historical narrative is being fashioned in terms of ‘what things do’ since one must resort to language and the words ‘construction of a new shopping mall’ and ‘destruction of an ancestral burial ground’ both apply to ‘the same dynamic’ and even if the wording is; “A native burial ground was destroyed in the process of constructing a new shopping mall”, the sense of ‘achievement’ goes along with the constructive/productive act; i.e. ‘the reality is that we now have a new shopping mall and what was there before is gone, so there is no point in dwelling on it.’.

 This notion of REPLACING something old with something new is part of the ‘dysfunctional thinking’.  It comes bundled with the notion of absolute space, without which we could not have ‘things-in-themselves’.   As in the case of the hurricane, we get to the notion of it being a ‘thing-in-itself’ by implicitly [psychologically] ‘framing it’ in an absolute space frame so that its inherent inner-outer relations are ignored.  In reality, its evolution and its movements are NOT with respect to an absolute space frame but are with respect to the flow in which it is an included feature.

 Absolute space is the rectangular [straight line] space of Euclid.  If we are in a boat and toss garbage off the stern and sail on in a straight line, we will leave the garbage behind in both time and space, … but in the real world we haven’t left in behind in either space or time and we will see it again in the future, approaching the bow of our boat.  The space we actually live behaves more like a ‘curved space’ or ‘relational space’, and it is language by which we reduce ‘relational forms’ to ‘things-in-themselves’, and ‘things-in-themselves’ cannot exist outside of absolute space where ‘space’ and ‘matter’ are understood [imagined] as mutually exclusive.

 Historians are faced with the same dilemma as economists; i.e. reconciling that which is irreconcilable within the over-simplistic reference framing one is using and will not let go of.  That is, economists are in a dilemma because the ‘global economy’ is moving into ‘implosion’ by our assuming the ‘reality’ of ‘production’-in-its-own-right, and the economists are unwilling to back off this dysfunction-infusing assumption; i.e. the ‘reality’ of ‘production’-in-its-own-right.   For historians, the principle of Lafontaine must be applied; “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure” (The reasoning of the most powerful is always the best.)

Justice:

Our traditional scheme of ‘justice’ goes back to the ‘moral code’ governing individual behaviour which is logically consistent with the one-sided view of Creation as in monotheism.   If God created ‘individuals’ and gave the individual the internal power to source his own behaviour, then we don’t have to worry about the ‘epigenesis’ aspect, the outside-inward orchestrating aspect of behaviour.   Mach’s principle says that; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”  That is; ‘genesis and epigenesis’ are a conjugate duality.   There is thus no way to understand the behaviour of an individual out of the context of the habitat-dynamic he is situationally included in, therefore it makes no sense to apply ‘moral code’ to individual behaviour.  It makes more sense to apply it to the full collective and when one explores this, it leads to a code that is ‘beyond good and evil’ which is based instead on cultivating/restoring/sustaining balance and harmony in a relational world.

 Victor Hugo and others have explored the problem with moral code based justice that is applied to individual inhabitant-dynamic out of the context of the habitat-dynamic.  Clearly, there is ‘something amiss’ when Jean Valjean is convicted of theft for taking a loaf of bread because he could no longer bear to hear starving children crying as they were put to bed hungry.   His motivation was to restore balance in the relational dynamics he was included in, however the justice system is based on imposing moral code on the individual, assuming that he is a ‘thing-in-himself’ with his own internal powers of locally sourcing his own behaviour, a notion that biochemists, biophysicists, neuroscientists and many psychiatrists and psychologists [but certainly not all] would agree to, because science has retained the doer-deed model of the world dynamic, wherein dynamics fountain forth, as Ayn Rand would also have it, from the creative interior of the individual.  This also fits with the religious notion of ‘genesis’ which went into competition of the aboriginal notion of ‘transformation’ [metamorphosis] and has predominated in our globally dominating culture.

 So our justice system is, in effect, anchored to both monotheist religious tradition; e.g. absolute centre-to-periphery directing power vested in the ‘sovereign state’ and in the ‘doer-deed’, ‘cause-and-effect’ belief system of mainstream science.  Economic ‘production’ is thus seen by the Justice system not only as a behaviour that ‘makes sense’ but as a behaviour that society must reward because we must keep renewing the state of things and production allows us to construct tomorrows material needs to replace yesterday’s aging system.  Corporate production is thus encouraged and protected by law, even if it is contributing to the current implosion and to environmental disaster, since moral code only applies to ‘what you do’ as if Mach’s principle did not apply.  Producing timber to build shopping malls is a respected and Justice-system protected behaviour.  Primitive belief based complaints about the ‘sacred forests’ and ‘burial grounds of ancestors are seen as ungrounded; though they basically replicate Mach’s principle of the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation;

 “You must teach the children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. … This we know, the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”

 So, while Economics, History and Justice are all ‘troubled’ by this language based practice of reducing dynamic forms to ‘things-in-themselves’; i.e. to local, visible/iconic, material inhabitants within ‘space’ seen as an absolute fixed, empty and infinite reference frame whose internal activities proceed in time-sequence, there is no willingness to ‘let go’ of the absolutism and ‘subjectification’

Biology:

Biology is currently troubled by the fact that ‘genesis’ does not work the way that it was envisioned, wherein the genes are inside-outward producers of our material form.  The ‘new science’ of ‘epigenetics’ has been invented to explain how it is that cells with identical DNA can create thousands of different proteins/cells depending on environmental conditions.  Furthermore, these environmentally-induced variants persist generation after generation, a phenomena that suggests that Lamarck was more correct than Darwin in his evolutionary theory.  Instead of putting these two sciences of epigenetics and genetics into one, they currently operate as two, as it would be quite an embarassment to ‘over-ride’ Darwinism with Lamarckism [same as Nietzsche’s evolutionary theory] which envisages outside-inward endosmotic activity and inside-outward exosmotic activity as one evolutionary dynamic.

 Dissidents who do not agree with this continuing separation [e.g. Bruce Lipton] have to leave the fold as adhering to a ‘belief in Darwinism and its associated genetics theory’ is compulsory if one wants to remain a fully-fledged member of the biological profession.

 This same problem has cropped up in cell research where researchers have encountered what is being called ‘irreducible complexity’.  This is the case where the relations between the components/processes in the cell appear to be ‘more important’ than the individual parts/processes.  While this is fully compatible with an understanding of dynamics in terms of transformation [relational space or Mach’s principle], if one insists on staying with ‘genesis’ or ‘production’ of systems, it leads one to the notion of an ‘intelligent designer’ who is ‘producing’ these systems.  This has led to the expelling from the biological profession of those who insist that their research shows that the web of relations in the cell predominates over the individual components seen in the standard cause-and-effect model.  The Ben Stein film ‘Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed’ documents the expelling of those researchers from the profession.  Meanwhile, the Machian view of relational space where dynamics are understood as ‘transformation’ is not mentioned.  Instead, those researchers whose research exposes the predominance of webs of relations over the cause-producing-effects of the individual parts leads only to an argument as to whether ‘genesis’ is by way of God or by way of Darwinian evolution.

 Biology remains ‘troubled’ by its insistence on staying with the one-sided ‘genesis’ model.

Physics:

Physics has been troubled as to whether to ‘ground out’ the rendering of physical phenomena in ‘field’ or ‘matter’.  That is, there is no argument that what our senses pick up as ‘empty space’ is an energy-charged spatial plenum, however, there is a difference as to whether to regard ‘reality’ as the visible aspect of space; i.e. the dynamics of material particles/bodies, or whether to regard ‘reality’ as the dynamics of the ‘relational space’ whose ‘ripples’ we perceive as local material particles.

That is, do we take into account the invisible potential energy ‘sink’ flow that is conjugate to the visible kinetic energy source-flow, or do we just ‘go with the latter’?

In ‘The Evolution of Physics’ (1938), Einstein and Infield write;

“We cannot build physics on the basis of the matter-concept alone. But the division into matter and field is, after the recognition of the equivalence of mass and energy, something artificial and not clearly defined. Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? What impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space. We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. In this way a new philosophical background could be created. Its final aim would be the explanation of all events in nature by structure laws valid always and everywhere. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone. There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality. This new view is suggested by the great achievements of field physics, by our success in expressing the laws of electricity, magnetism, gravitation in the form of structure laws, and finally by the equivalence of mass and energy.”

This notion of the possibility of being able understand the world dynamic without ‘grounding it out’ in material existence; i.e. whether to understand the world dynamic in terms of a purely relational, energy-in-flux, space, or whether to ‘ground’ the understanding in the dynamics of material particles was not only a niggling possibility in the minds of Einstein and Infeld, it was troubling many other minds in physics, as well.

David Bohm envisaged a relationship between matter and space analogous to a convection cell in the flow of the atmosphere;

“… what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and that matter as we know it is a small, ‘quantized’ wavelike excitation on top of this background, rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea. In current physical theories, one avoids the explicit consideration of this background by calculating only the difference between the energy of empty space and that of space with matter in it. This difference is all that counts in the determination of the general properties of matter as they are presently accessible to observation. However, further developments in physics may make it possible to probe the above-described background in a more direct way. Moreover, even at present, this vast sea of energy may play a key part in the understanding of the cosmos as a whole. In this connection it may be said that space, which has so much energy, is full rather than empty…It is being suggested here, then, that what we perceive through the senses as empty space is actually the plenum, which is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The things that appear to our senses are derivative forms and their true meaning can be seen only when we consider the plenum, in which they are generated and sustained, and into which they must ultimately vanish.”

Whether or not to accept as reality, the dynamics ‘that begin with material bodies or the purely relational ‘holodynamic’, has been a point of contention amongst physicists which has not been resolved, other than by political concensus.  Mach, Bohm and Schroedinger, in the words of Mach, withdrew from ‘The Church of Physics’;

Ernst mach (1838-1916) realized that science (physics) was becoming ‘the church of science’ and ‘quite the church’ when the self-appointed high priest-of-physics concensus hijacked the concept of a ‘relational space’ [transformation as the world-dynamic] when he was confronted with the demand that he commit to a belief in the reality of atoms or be ‘excommunicated’.  Albert Einstein, who was initially ‘on-the-fence’, was commissioned to ‘convert Mach’ so that he too would be one of the faithful, but as Mach’s notebooks show, he refused. (see ‘Ernst Mach leaves the Church of Physics’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Br J Philos Sci (1989) 40 (4): 519-540.)

Erwin Schroedinger (1887 – 1961) refused on the same grounds as Mach had refused.  Schroedinger said;

“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances). …” “… The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist. …” “Let me say at the outset, that in this discourse, I am opposing not a few special statements of quantum physics held today (1950s), I am opposing as it were the whole of it, I am opposing its basic views that have been shaped 25 years ago, when Max Born put forward his probability interpretation, which was accepted by almost everybody.”

The trouble in physics has exactly the same ‘topology’ as the problem that crops up in Economics, History, Justice and Biology, and it concerns whether to conceive of dynamics starting from ‘material existence’; as in the doer-deed, cause-produces-effect understanding, or whether to take into account the simultaneous outside-inward flow of potential energy that is conjugate to the inside-outward asserting material kinetics.  The material genesis of dynamics with or without the outside-inward invisible energy-flux based ‘epigenetics’.

The difference with this problem as it crops up in physics is that physics accepts the greater reality of the dynamics of the energy-charged spatial plenum and the lesser reality of material existence and material dynamics, but the nature of consciousness is tied up in all of this so that the disagreement is over the nature of perception, and, as argued between Poincaré and Bertrand Russell, whether perception by judgement should predominate over perception by feeling or vice versa.  Feeling allows us to sense inclusion in resonance as with the flock of wildgeese [or bikers] that move into a ‘V’ formation; i.e. resonance arises in the conjugate relation of outside-inward accommodating influence and inside-outward asserting action.  Poincaré comments;

 “Regarding geometry, I have had a long discussion with M. Russell, and I see that he persists in his opinion as I persist in mine; but there is one phrase that allows one to better understand the origin of our disagreement, ‘so that objects’, says M. Russell, ‘which we *perceive* as near together ..’ and he comes back to the word perceive several times in his writing. as for me, I never use the verb ‘to perceive’, nor the noun ‘perception’ because I don’t know what they mean. I don’t know if the perception is a feeling or a judgment, and I truly believe that amongst philosophers that use this word, some understand it in the first way [feeling] and others in the second [judging]. that’s why I avoid using it.” Henri Poincaré, in a letter to the journal ‘Mind’ in 1906 in response to Bertrand Russell’s critiques of Poincare’s ‘Science and Hypotheses’

 That is, physics does not ignore the fact the conjugate space-matter relation, as expressed by Mach’s principle, but there is a contentious issue as to whether the materialist view (absolute space and absolute being view) should be associated with ‘reality’ [the concensus view of physics] or whether the ‘matter-as-appearances’ view should be associated with ‘reality’ [Mach, Schroedinger, Bohm, Nietzsche].   In the categories of Economics, History, Justice and Biology [and the following categories of Medicine and Reason], the cultural assumption has been to accept the material dynamics view as ‘reality’ and this has gotten all of these fields of understanding into trouble, the suggestion being that our understanding should be informed by ‘relational space’ rather than absolute space and absolute material being.

Medicine:

A summary of the foundational problems that medical research is encountering can be found in Jonah Lehrer’s article in ‘Wired’, ‘Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us?’   Lehrer gives an account of how, when medical sciences messes with one thing (e.g. with a drug or a procedure), something else is changed [and becomes a problem] that was previously ok.   In summarizing, Lehrer observes;

“David Hume referred to causality as “the cement of the universe.” He was being ironic, since he knew that this so-called cement was a hallucination, a tale we tell ourselves to make sense of events and observations. No matter how precisely we knew a given system, Hume realized, its underlying causes would always remain mysterious, shadowed by error bars and uncertainty. Although the scientific process tries to makes sense of problems by isolating every variable—imagining a blood vessel, say, if HDL alone were raised—reality doesn’t work like that. Instead, we live in a world in which everything is knotted together, an impregnable tangle of causes and effects. Even when a system is dissected into its basic parts, those parts are still influenced by a whirligig of forces we can’t understand or haven’t considered or don’t think matter. Hamlet was right: There really are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”

The ‘trouble’ is the same trouble as in all of the afore-mentioned areas; i.e. dynamic relations seem to prevail over our understanding of systems in the one-sided terms of causal-agents-PRODUCING-results.  When medicine designs a chemical or procedure to produce a desired result in the body-dynamic, we get the same result that Stiglitz calls ‘externalities’ in economics.  There is an effect that is beyond our ‘book-keeping’.  The chemical may stimulate the production of more endorphins or whatever, but in the same manner that the timber company produces more logs, creating, in the same act, havoc elsewhere.

Medicine is not immune from what is going on in biology; i.e. both disciplines are encountering ‘problems’ with ‘understanding’ based on the one-sided notion of local material cells/systems causally producing effects.   The implications are that the underlying architecture of the organism’s dynamic life process is web-of-relation based rather than cause-producing-effect based.

The subjectifying power of our noun-and-verb language is greater than we may, at first glance, imagine.  Consider, for example, the web of relations in the flow of traffic on a busy freeway.   The opening of holes/passageways is orchestrating our asserting movements.  We could insist that we are individuals with free will and that we are gifted with locally originating, internal-process produced behaviour, consistent with biology, medicine, neurosciences, biophysics etc. and stop right there.  But our experience informs us that our movement is relative to the other vehicles and that we cannot disassociate our movement from the transformation of the relational space we are included in [from the transforming shape of the space that may open up and accommodate our forward movement or close down and suppress it].  We are well aware that by slowing down a bit or speeding up a bit, we may transform the web of spatial relations so that a driver otherwise trapped behind a slow moving vehicle is able to escape from his entrapment.  If we were to put black paint on the tires of our vehicle and log the movements of the steering wheel brakes etc., after all the traffic had cleared and the road was empty, we could revisit our black-paint path which zigged and zagged all over the place, and while we could explain it fully and solely in terms of ‘the actions of the vehicle that we produced’ without ever mentioning the outside-inward orchestrating influence of the transforming web of relations we were situationally included in, we would have to acknowledge that the zigs and zags were not our inside-outward asserting inventions; i.e. we would have to acknowledge that our actions, at the same time as inside-outward asserting [internally sourced], were being orchestrated by the transforming web of relations we were included in.

Thus, medicine, like biology, history, justice and economics, is troubled by its adherence to belief that dynamics arise from local, visible, material objects/systems whose behaviours ‘produce’ effects, a view in which dynamics are entirely due to ‘what things do’ where space is a non-participant; i.e. where space is assumed to be an absolute fixed, empty and infinite reference frame such that those things one leaves behind recede into the distance and into the time-based past and need never be encountered again; i.e. the belief that the future depends only on the immediate present, that we are continually constructing the new state of the world from the present state [a belief/assumption that Henri Poincaré debunked in Science and Hypothesis, though acknowledging that it is foundational to mathematical physics [4]].

* * *

This same pattern, describing the ‘troubles’ within the scientific disciplines and within Western society, crops up in many more places that have been discussed above, and always with the same ‘architecture’; i.e. the problems arising from considering dynamics in the one-sided terms of cause-produces-effect, rather than relational transformation wherein dynamics have dual outside-inward orchestrating and inside-outward asserting aspects, as in the sink-source toroidal flow shown above.

Therefore, this point being made, it is time to turn our attention to the role of ‘reason’ in our development of ‘understanding’.   Mach and Nietzsche argued that sensory experience should prevail over ‘reason’ in our understanding of self-and-world (inhabitant and habitat and the relation thereof) because ‘reasoning’ as we do it in our Western culture starts by endowing things with ‘identity’.   As Vladimir Tasic observes;

“So [since the problem of certainty in identity such as A=A is handled, in Euclidian geometry, by invoking the notion of invariable solids] “objects” are implicitly assumed to be invariable bodies.  Therefore the axioms of geometry already contain an irreducible assumption which does not follow from the axioms themselves. Axiomatic systems provide us with “faulty definitions” of objects, definitions that are grounded not in formal logic but in a hypothesis — a “prejudice” as Hans-Georg Gadamer might say — that is prior to logic.  As a corollary, our logic of identity cannot be said to be necessary and universally valid. “Such axioms,” says Poincaré, “would be utterly meaningless to a being living in a world in which there are only fluids.”  — Vladimir Tasic, ‘Poststructuralism and Deconstruction: A Mathematical History’ (2001)

Insofar as our reason is ‘logical’, we have already reduced it to an operation based on local entities with persisting identity, so we have bypassed the opportunity to consider/understand things in relational/transformational terms.  That is, we may as well look into ‘Reason’ in the same manner we have looked into economics, history, biology etc.

Reason:

Reason ‘has a problem’ with transformation in that in a relational space, which is the understanding of physical reality described by Mach, Schroedinger, Nietzsche, nothing ‘exists’.   That does not mean that there is nothing there/here, it means that noTHING exists; i.e. there is no ‘thing’ with a persisting identity.  Everything relates to everything else as in a holodynamic.  The transformational dynamic is purely ‘spatial-relational’ as in a fluid dynamical world.  ‘Things’ are, as Schroedinger says; ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’).  They are curvatures in space, concentrations of energy in the energy-charged spatial-plenum.

We are fully capable of understanding this sort of world via our sensory experience, as in the example of driving in the flow of traffic on the freeway.  That is, we acknowledge that our behaviour is orchestrated outside-inwardly by the web of relations we are included in, whether from the flow of traffic, or from the ocean waves when we are sailing, but the outside-inward influence is nonlocal, non-visible and non-material (it is the relational influence) and therefore not easy to ‘talk about’ and if we can’t talk about it, we can’t use reason and logic because these are based on ‘logical entities’ and propositions dealing with logical entities.  Therefore, Nietzsche comes straight to the point;

“Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

In other words, ‘reason’ is suffering from the same problem as the other ‘areas of understanding’, from being based on treatments of logical entities and what they do.  But as Mach points out, things are firstly packages of sensations that we impute ‘thingness’ to.   We feel inclusion in the wind, but that doesn’t make ‘the wind’ an ‘it’ just because we can define and word-label it.  As John Stuart Mill observed; “Every definition implies and axiom, that in which we affirm the ‘existence’ of the object defined.”

Logic is founded on the certainty in being able to discriminate between ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’, this is a requirement of logic, not a property of the way the world is (‘actuality’).  As Nietzsche says in ‘Origin of Reason and Logic’ in ‘The Will to Power’;

“We are unable to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: this is a subjective empirical law, not the expression of any “necessity” but only of an inability.

If, according to Aristotle, the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the ultimate and most basic, upon which every demonstrative proof rests, if the principle of every axiom lies in it; then one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions already lie at the bottom of it. Either it asserts something about. actuality, about being, as if one already knew this from another source; that is, as if opposite attributes could not be ascribed to it. Or the proposition means: opposite attributes should not be ascribed to it. In that case, logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us.

In short, the question remains open: are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept “reality,” for ourselves.?–To affirm the former one would, as already said, have to have a previous knowledge of being–which is certainly not the case. The proposition therefore contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true.”  – Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 516 (for the full quote, see [5])

This point, that logic is a means of ‘creating reality’ was also made by Wittgenstein, who observed that;

“The preconceived idea of crystalline purity [of logic] can only be removed by turning our whole examination around. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.)” – Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 108.

Wittgenstein is saying, as Nietzsche is saying, that since the ‘actuality’ of our sensory experience is one of inclusion in a continually transforming world, a slippery slope of incessantly changing spatial relations, we feel a need for the traction given by a logical reality in terms of ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’, even if such logic delivers a ‘created reality’ that does not conform to ‘actuality’.

Conclusion:

In every one of the categories covered in this essay; Economics, History, Justice, Biology, Physics, Medicine and Reason/Logic, the same problem is cropping up.  The problem is that we, as a culture, and I am speaking of the globally dominating culture [though not the Amerindian culture, for example], are most often letting our behaviours be informed by ‘reason’ that uses language to subjectify the dynamic forms in the continually transforming spatial-plenum, and thus allow us to think of dynamics in doer-deed terms (material-causal-agency — produces results terms).  In understanding our sensory experience in this way, we are perceiving by way of judgement and ignoring the ‘feeling’ aspect of our sensory experience.   That is, when we see a group of bikers move into a ‘V’ formation, ‘reason’ has us perceive this in terms of ‘they are moving into ‘V’ formation’, as if the source of their actions is FULLY AND SOLELY inside-outward, internal-process driven.  For the actual participants, however, their sensory experience enables them to let their inside-outward asserting behaviour respond to outside-inward orchestrating influence, the conjugate relation of the two being the condition of resonance or inside-outward-asserting — outside-inward accommodating ‘attunement’.

In other words, our understanding by way of ‘reason’; i.e. in the one-sided inside-outward asserting ‘cause-produces-effect’ terms where space is a non-participant,…  is ‘schaumkommen’, visual appearance, a ‘mediocre truth’ that fails to acknowledge the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation.

Therefore, it seems evident to me, on the basis that all of the above-discussed categories of understanding; Economics, History, Justice, Biology, Physics, Medicine and Reason/Logic are running into problems going by with ‘straight reason’ and ‘fixes’ in all cases are being contemplated that aim to ‘retrofit’ the purely inside-outward asserting model of dynamics with an outside-inward orchestrating complement, that essentially shifts understanding in all these areas from one-sided ‘genesis’ or ‘production’ to ‘relational transformation’, the conjugation of genesis and epigenesis.

The suggestion is that ‘intuition’ based on the feeling [as contrasted with visual judging] aspect of experience goes deeper than ‘reason’ since ‘reason’ has been ‘dumbed down’ by language and logic.  This is the core message of Nietzsche;

“Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

The overwhelming weight of evidence is in support of this claim, as discussed in terms of the need for retrofits in all of the above categories of understanding.

What, then, is holding us back?

My sense is that it relates to our inability to keep our sensory experience of actuality as it transpires in the moment, our ‘feeling experience’, in its natural primacy over ‘reason’, our penchant for talking to ourselves in terms of historical narrative that plays out [in our minds] from past through present to future, constantly predicting outcomes in causal fashion.   As Pope put it;

Heav’n from all creatures hides the book of Fate,
All but the page prescribed, their present state;

“In pride, in reas’ning pride, our error lies.”

— Alexander Pope, … Essay on Man

My sense also is that it is a huge ‘embarrassment’ for our culture to acknowledge our error in unnaturally elevating ‘reason’ over ‘intuition’ [the feeling aspect of our sensory experience that is informed by the conjugate relation between outside-inward accommodating influence and inside-outward asserting action].  It is not an embarrassment to the people in the streets in the ‘Arab Spring’ and in the ‘Occupy’ initiatives because the behaviours of these people are not informed as much by ‘reason’ or ‘reasoned argument’ as they are by ‘feeling’.  They intuit that the way things are is not the natural way for things to be.  They listen to the cleverly reasoned arguments of ‘the authorities’ but they are not buying ‘reason’ that fails to address ‘the feeling aspect of their sensory experience’.  They know the difference between being situationally included in an accommodating space versus a non-accommodating space, but such ‘topology’ never comes into a reasoned plan.  ‘Reasoned plans’ are constrained to terms of ‘what things’ do’ and blind to the conjugate relation between habitat and inhabitant.

‘Improved communities’ are not something that can be ‘produced’ by the assertive actions of the authorities.  Naturally evolving communities are communities that evolve their membership from outside-inward orchestrating influence as unfulfilled needs arise in the web of relations the members are included in.  The two people who are carrying something heavy and about to topple induce two more persons to come to their aid, to lighten the load and improve the balance.  The nomads passing the oasis settlement notice that the community is in need of skills that they possess and this accommodating ‘opening’ induces them to stay and settle.  Just as in traffic flow, new activity transforms the opening and induces new ‘entrées’.  These ‘holes’ in the relational web induce the coming-into-blossom of assertive potentialities.  One can’t say whether the evolving shape derives from the shape of the hole in the relational web or from the shape of the asserting member that is ‘rising to the occasion’.  That is, the situation evolves as a conjugate outside-inward orchestrating — inside-outward asserting relation.  This is also the Nietzschean view of evolution [6] and it contradicts the one-sided cause-produces-result evolutionary dynamic in Darwinism.

Finally, there is the point that Poincaré made in regard to what convinced Galileo to prefer the Copernican model of the celestial dynamic over Ptolemy’s model, and it was not as it has been vulgarized; i.e. he tried both out and felt that the helio-centric one ‘made more sense’.   In truth, Galileo reasoned that many things that had to be explained away as coincidences if one assumed that the earth did not move; e.g. all of the stars in the sky had small aberrant movements that all had the very same 365.25 day period.  Why was this?  This curiosity disappeared entirely when one used the heliocentric model.  It was this observation that convinced Galileo of the superiority of the Copernican heliocentric model; i.e. one of the theories eliminated more unresolved questions than the other.

In a similar vein, the inquirer that simply ‘tries on’ the relational space model and the absolute space models to see which one he prefers (arguments can be made for both) compares to ‘trying on’ the Ptolemiac and Copernican models where arguments could be made for both.  But also in this case, if we use the relational space model, the coincidence of all of the areas of understanding having the same topology of problem; Economics, History, Justice, Biology, Physics, Medicine and Reason/Logic disappears, and if we stay with the ‘absolute space model’, we then have to accept as a remarkable coincidence, all of these fields of inquiry being plagued by a common ‘problem topology’.

That concludes ‘the argument’ that a relational-space world view accords with our experience more closely than the more commonly assumed [in our Western culture] absolute space.   In other words, many of the incoherencies that arise when we let our behaviour be informed by the absolute space based world view disappear when we let our behaviour be informed by the relational space world view.

* * *

[1] “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

[2] “And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

[3] “Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

[4] “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 that the efforts of scientists have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by our experience into a large number of elementary phenomena. And to do this in three different ways : first, with respect to time. Instead of taking into account the progressive development of a phenomenon as a whole, we simply seek to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We assert that the present state of the world depends only on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the memory 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 laws of Newton.”  —  Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Ch. ‘Hypotheses in Physics’, subsection “Origin of Mathematical Physics”

[5] “We are unable to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: this is a subjective empirical law, not the expression of any “necessity” but only of an inability.

If, according to Aristotle, the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the ultimate and most basic, upon which every demonstrative proof rests, if the principle of every axiom lies in it; then one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions already lie at the bottom of it. Either it asserts something about. actuality, about being, as if one already knew this from another source; that is, as if opposite attributes could not be ascribed to it. Or the proposition means: opposite attributes should not be ascribed to it. In that case, logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us.

In short, the question remains open: are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept “reality,” for ourselves.?–To affirm the former one would, as already said, have to have a previous knowledge of being–which is certainly not the case. The proposition therefore contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true.

Supposing there were no self-identical “A”, such as is presupposed by every proposition of logic (and of mathematics), and the “A” were already mere appearance, then logic would have a merely apparent world as its condition. In fact, we believe in this proposition under the influence of ceaseless experience which seems continually to confirrn it. The “thing”–that is the real substratum of “A”; our belief in things is the precondition of our belief in logic. The “A” of logic is, like the atom, a reconstruction of the thing–If we do not grasp this, but make of logic a criterion of true being, we are on the way to positing as realities all those hypostases: substance, attribute, object, subject, action, etc.; that is, to conceiving a metaphysical world, that is, a “real world” (–this, however, is the apparent world once more–).

The very first acts of thought, affirmation and denial, holding true and holding not true, are, in as much as they presuppose, not only the habit of holding things true and holding them not true, but a right to do this, already dominated by the belief that we can gain possession of knowledge, that judgments really can hit upon the truth;–in short, logic does not doubt its ability to assert something about the true-in-itself (namely, that it cannot have opposite attributes).

Here reigns the coarse sensualistic prejudice that sensations teach us truths about things–that I cannot say at the same time of one and the same thing that it is hard and that it is soft. (The instinctive proof “I cannot have two opposite sensations at the same time”–quite coarse and false.)

The conceptual ban on contradiction proceeds from the belief that we are able to form concepts, that the concept not only designates the essence of a thing but comprehends it–In fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) applies only to fictitious entities that we have created. Logic is the attempt to comprehend the actual world by means of a scheme of being posited by ourselves; more correctly, to make it formulatable and calculable for us—“ —Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 516 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888)

[6] “Anti-Darwinism.. — The utility of an organ does not explain its origin; on the contrary! For most of the time during which a property is forming it does not preserve the individual and it is of no use to him, least of all in the struggle with external circumstances and enemies.

What, after all, is “useful”? One must ask “useful in relation to what?” E.g., that which is useful for the long life of the individual might be unfavorable to its strength and splendour; that which preserves the individual might at the same time arrest and halt its evolution. On the other hand, a ‘deficiency’, a ‘degeneration’, can be of the highest utility in so far as it acts as a stimulant to other organs. In the same way, a state of need can be a condition of existence, in so far as it reduces an individual to that measure of expenditure that holds it together but prevents it from squandering itself. —The individual itself as a struggle between parts (for food, space etc.): its evolution tied to the victory or predominance of individual parts, to an atrophy, a ‘becoming an organ’ of other parts.

The influence of “external circumstances” is overestimated by Darwin to a ridiculous extent: the essential thing in the life process is precisely the tremendous shaping, form-creating force working from within which ‘utilizes’ and ‘exploits’ “external circumstances” — The new forms molded from within are not formed with an end in view; but in the struggle of the parts a new form is not left long without being related to a partial usefulness and then, according to its use, develops itself more and more completely.” – Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 647