Updating Psychology: Logic of the Included Third

Summer Solstice Essay, 2011

The world is in a mess and we are having a devil of a time trying to understand why we behave the way we do, individually, and collectively, and ‘psychology’ does not seem to have any answers.  In fact, psychology has been born and bred by those whose inquiry is ‘analytical’, hence the terms ‘psychoanalysis’, ‘Jungian analyst’ etc., and the practice of taking an individual into a safe haven where he can ‘open up’ and divulge to himself, the genetic sources of his own behaviour.

Whatever happened to ‘field’ as in physics, wherein outside-inward influence predominates over inside-outward influence?

[See also ‘A Field View of Logic’]

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As Emerson observed in ‘The Method of Nature’, ‘the dynamics of our living space not only inhabit the organism, they create it’.  In the field view of the world, material bodies are ripple-structures in the energy-charged medium (‘spatial plenum’).   And as Nietzsche observed, “evolution is a process of diffusion in which outside-inward flow predominates over inside-outward flow.” Nietzsche’s contemporary Ernst Mach, who inspired and influenced Nietzsche, according to his sister and to his correspondence, was the acknowledged mentor of Einstein and Poincaré on the philosophical basics, not only on the way the world works, but how we think about how it works (e.g. absolute motion versus relative motion).

So, let’s put it this way, psychology, as an academic discipline and field of intellection, has approached an understanding of individual and collective behaviour by inquiry into the interior of the individual, while physics has been saying, for a century now, that all bets are off on the analytical approach, because outside-inward influence predominates over inside-outward influence INSOFAR AS MATERIAL STRUCTURES/SYSTEMS ARE CONCERNED since matter is secondary to field; i.e. material structures/systems are ‘ripple structures’ in the energy-charged spatial plenum.

How would we go about ‘fixing psychology’ to bring it ‘up to date’, so as to get a better fix on why the global social dynamic seems so dysfunctional [could psychology be throwing fuel on the fire?]

The first thing to note is that the default logic of psychology [and mainstream sciences such as biology] is the ‘logic of the excluded third’ (Aristotelian logic) while the logic of relativity and quantum physics is the ‘logic of the included third’.  Before inserted the respective definitions here, the general difference can be heuristically portrayed using a familiar example; i.e. the Kennedy Family.

By observing Joe Jr. (died in WWII at age 29), John, Robert and Edward, we might say, in correspondence with Aristotelian logic, that all four were very ‘PURPOSEful’ individuals.  According to the nannies who raised them, they were the products of their father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy’s EXPECTATIONS.

Ok, to be fair, psychologists have spoken about this outside-inward behaviour shaping effect (the ‘field of expectation’ that the individual is included in) but because of the biological model (inside-outward genetic development), the effect tends to be seen as a secondary ‘nurture’ effect in the ‘nature [inside-outward asserting genetics] and nurture’ dichotomy; i.e. psychology assumes that ‘the field of expectation’ is a secondary ‘nurture’ effect.  So that when Harvard professor of psychology Burrhus Frederic Skinner speaks about it, he is inclined to think in terms that this ‘outside-inward influence is dominant in our current society, but not something that we can’t ‘overcome’;

“Each of us has interests which conflict with the interests of everybody else.  That’s our original sin, and it can’t be helped.  Now, ‘everybody else’ we call ‘society.’  It’s a powerful opponent and it aways wins.  Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants.  Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it slightly to his own advantage.  But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age.  Many prevail against one, and men against a baby.  Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.  It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom.  The ‘ologies’ will tell you how it is done.  Theology calls it building a conscience or developing a spirit of selflessness.  Psychology calls it the growth of the super-ego.

“Considering how long society has been at it, you’d expect a better job.  But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secure.  The behavior of the individual has been shaped according to revelations of ‘good conduct,’ never as the result of experimental study.  But why not experiment?  The questions are simple enough.  What the best behaviour for the individual so far as the group is concerned?  And how can the individual be induced to behave in that way?  Why not explore these questions in a scientific spirit?

To be clear, Skinner is talking about society as a people collective  in a manner entirely different from, for example, Edward Hyams in ‘Soil and Civilization’ where the dynamics of nature [acting outside-inward on the inhabitants] orchestrate/shape/organize the dynamics of the inhabitants.

Whether or not people’s intellect appears to overpower nature’s orchestrating signals, the situation is akin to Skinner’s description of how society wins out in the end;

“Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it slightly to his own advantage.  But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age.”

That is, nature’s overall ecosystemic web-of-life wins out over any particular civilization in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age; e.g. civilizations have not been able to hold up against 50 year droughts.

Meanwhile, the ‘starting point’ for Skinner’s Walden Two Utopia, is ‘people’, not ‘nature’.  The above quote from Skinner is through the mouthpiece of Frazier, the leader of the Utopian community;

“Each of us,” Frazier began, “is engaged in a pitched battle with the rest of mankind.”

“A curious premise for a Utopia,” said Castle.  “Even a pessimist like myself takes a more hopeful view than that.”

“You do, you do,” said Frazier.  “But let’s be realist.  Each of us has interests which conflict with the interest of everybody else.  That’s our original sin. …” [the initial quote from Skinner continues on from here].

The parallels with Darwinism are clear here, in Skinner’s [Frazier’s] remarks.  Now, why would nature infuse into its inhabitants “interests which conflict with the interests of everybody else” ?

Indeed, why would Nature infuse the ‘original sin’ of self-interest into each of its emergent forms?

Maybe it’s just the way we’re looking at things.  Maybe this ‘conflict’ is not ‘really conflict’?

In fact, that’s precisely how it comes out if we shift gears into the logic of the included third, and this is not new, its logic that’s been around since Heraclitus.  He referred to the ‘backstretched connexion’ between opposites.  As Nietzsche also said, the notion of ‘what things do’ [the doer-deed model] is inherently too simple to reconcile with our experience.  We have already spoken about how ‘expectation’ and ‘purpose’ in the social dynamic seem to be two sides of the same coin, but in the physical phenomena of nature, we acknowledge the same relationship between outside-inward influence and inside-outward influence; e.g. the ‘rotating pinwheel’ of the hurricane [the inside-outward assertive behaviour] and the ‘rotating field-flow’ [the outside-inward inductive shaping of behaviour] which predominates;

Our habit is to reduce motion to a one-sided assertive dynamic that originates from a local point source, a kind of ‘centre-of-purposeful-asserting’.  But in the ‘field’ view, this is always a ‘deconstruction’ of the conjugate pair, as can be seen in the case of the hurricane.  But we don’t acknowledge the ‘field’ view and so we personify the one-sided agency and make believe it is driven from out of its internal centre-of-intention, intention that we can further deconstruct into biochemical processes that furnish the power-drive and intellectual processes that furnish the steering.  Our notion of the ‘organism’ is thus stripped of its outside-inward predominating influence and no longer has the power-and-steerage geometry of a ‘sailboat’ which acknowledges that power and steerage derive from the habitat-dynamic that it is included in.  Instead, our notion of ‘organism’ is that of the ‘powerboat’; i.e. we impute it to have its own inboard source of power and steerage.

Our view of ‘community’, using this model of the organism, deconstructs in such a manner that the source animation of individual and collective behaviour is seen to reside in the interior of the individuals, in their knowledge and purpose.

The ‘mistake’ here seems obvious, no?  The field of expectations immanent in society, includes the outside-inward orchestrating influence of the ‘land’.  We rise at dawn and retire at sunset.  We plant in the spring and harvest in the fall. The traditions and rituals of indigenous peoples’ communities overtly acknowledge the orchestrating cycles/dynamics of nature.   Edward Hyams in ‘Soil and Civilization’ is implicitly saying the same thing as Skinner is saying in the context of ‘individual and group’, only Hyams is saying it in context of ‘individual and plenum’ [energy-charged spatial plenum].

In re-reading Skinner’s [Frazier’s, in Walden Two] comment, we can see how Skinner is in the process of deconstructing social behaviour in such a manner that the ultimate source of the community dynamic is seen as emanating from the inboard centre-of-power-and-steerage of the ‘biological organism’.  Thus, the ‘experiment’ is to construct from scratch, a more healthy ‘inboard centre-of-power-and-steerage’ as the foundation of the community dynamic, and to ‘jump out of’ the behaviour shaping influence that comes to us as a ‘revelation’ as to what constitutes ‘good conduct’.  This ‘revelation’ embodied in the group expectation, could come from anywhere, as in the story;

“… where Chimpanzees were sprayed with ice-water every time they touched a distinctive red ladder placed in their cage.  The chimps quickly learned to police one another so that there would be no climbing by anyone on that ladder.  There was soon no longer any need to spray the ice-water since their mutual policing was so effective.  When newcomers joined the group, they were quickly trained not to touch the red ladder, and when the entire group was replaced, one after the other, with new residents who had never experienced the spraying of ice-water in association with touching the red ladder, the entirely new group continued to police themselves so that they did not climb on it.  Learning ‘good behaviour’ was by way of revelation of what the group held to be ‘good behaviour’.”

So, instead of acknowledging the role of nature’s dynamic orchestrating role in outside-inward behaviour shaping, Skinner deconstructs to the interior of the biological organism which is itself conceived of, by the oversimplistic Aristotelian logic of the biological sciences, in these same Darwinist ‘powerboating terms’ as if it possessed its own INBOARD power and steerage for the development of its form and ‘system features’.   By this way of thinking/mental modeling, the desired community dynamic can be ‘manufactured’ by re-loading the primary driving and steering source of behaviour, the internally resident intellect/knowledge and purpose, with ‘the right stuff’.

“The behavior of the individual has been shaped according to revelations of ‘good conduct,’ never as the result of experimental study.  But why not experiment?  The questions are simple enough.  What the best behaviour for the individual so far as the group is concerned?  And how can the individual be induced to behave in that way?  Why not explore these questions in a scientific spirit?”

Skinner is totally discarding what Hyams points to as primary, the outside-inward behaviour-shaping influence of Nature’s dynamic.  Granted that there was spurious ‘red-ladder’ type of noise within the social field of expectation that was doing the outside-inward shaping of individual and collective behaviour, but more importantly, the ‘this is the way we do things around here’ group expectation included compliance with the outside-inward influence of the habitat-dynamic.  That is, the Walden Two community, while it might intellectually try to put itself in harmony with nature, would remove the understanding that ‘the people belong to the land’ and substitute instead, ‘the land belongs to the people’, so that the people of Walden Two would ‘care for’ their environment.  This tragically misses Emerson’s vital point that the organism is not only animated by nature’s dynamic, it is created by it.  The ‘buck’ of behaviour doesn’t start and stop inside of some notional centre-of-drive-and-intention in the organism, the ‘buck’ of behaviour starts and stops with the ceaselessly innovatively, spatial-relationally unfolding plenum called ‘nature’.

But the notion of inside-outward assertive drive and steerage is strongly entrenched in the Western culture, and it manifests, once again, in Walden Two; e.g. in the description of where happiness derives, there is no sense of conjugate habitat-inhabitant relational resonance/bliss;

“The community members are happy, productive, and creative; happiness derives from the promotion of rich social relationships and family life, free affection, the creation of art, music, and literature, opportunity for games of chess and tennis, and ample rest, food, and sleep.”  – Walden Two reviewed in Wikipedia

Psychology, in the light of the above discussion, needs to ‘upgrade’ its logic from the logic of the excluded third whereby, if the organism’s behaviour = A, then A can never equal not.A (someone else’s apparently conflicting behaviour), to the logic of the INCLUDED third wherein both A and not.A are included in ‘T’.

What’s at stake right here is whether or not we are going to resolve our notion of ‘conflict’ and ‘competition’ as a kind of polarized opposition or head-butting inherent in our human experiencing of the world dynamic.  As Stéphane Lupasco says, the logic of the included third resolves polarized conflict by way of a ‘higher level of reality’;

“To every phenomenon or element or logical event whatsoever, and accordingly to the judgment which thinks of it, the proposition which expresses it, to the sign which symbolizes it must always be associated, structurally and functionally, a logical antiphenomenon, or anti-element or anti-event and therefore a contradictory judgment, proposition or sign in such a fashion that the former can only be potentialized by the actualization of the latter, but not disappear such that either could be self-sufficient in an independent and therefore rigorous non-contradiction – as in all logic, classical or otherwise, that is based on an absoluteness of the principle of non-contradiction.”

The point half-way between actualization and potentialization is a point of maximum antagonism or ‘contradiction’ from which, in the case of complex phenomena, a T-state (T for “tiers inclus”, included third term) emerges, which is capable of resolving the contradiction (or ‘counter-action‘), at another, higher level of reality. “  – Lupasco, Stéphane., Le principe d’antagonisme et la logique de l’énergie, 1951.

In relativity and quantum physics, the ‘T’ is the ‘energy-charged spatial plenum’ whose dynamic is the primary influence on the development of form, behaviour and organization of the ‘material’ that gathers and regathers within it.  In this view, the same as was articulated by Emerson in ‘The Method of Nature’, we do not ‘bottom out’ in the interior of material forms since they gather and regather like forms in a lava-lamp, implying the deeper reality of the dynamic of the spatial plenum.

The expectation that arises in the thermal field dynamics of the atmosphere orchestrates the emergence of convection cells whose mission in life is ‘restoring balance and harmony’ in the overall flow; i.e. the cells emerge to transport thermal energy from equatorial regions of over-abundance to polar regions of impoverishment.  The energy-charged spatial medium not only orchestrates the behaviour of the material system, but creates it.

Deepening our reality to a level beyond the reality in terms of the dynamics of local material objects/organisms is what is called for by ‘the new physics’ and it requires the ‘logic of the included third’.  [See also – Stéphane Lupasco et le tiers inclus. De la physique quantique à l’ontologie ^[1]]

This logic is the logic of a world which is firstly ‘relational’ in a spatial sense.  It is thus a higher order geometry in the sense that we can build fixed structures from spatial relations, but without having to impose an absolute fixed reference space in the process so that the transforming spatial relations that associate with their dynamics are the same spatial relations as associate with their structure.  This is the basis of ‘holodynamics’ which are not dependent on ‘the dynamics of things’; i.e. there is just one dynamic, the dynamic of habitat that is not only the source of the movement of the fixed forms within it, but is also the source of the gathering of the fixed forms [which are inevitably transient and included in the overall spatial-relational transformation].

Moving into a reality where there is nothing solid to depend on is a slippery business for the materialism-infused western mind.  But this is the world of ‘fields’ which ostensibly applies to [is a good way of describing] the world of our real-life experience.   Moving beyond matter and the dynamics of matter is described by Carlo Rovelli in ‘Quantum Gravity’;

“In Newtonian and special relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities – particles and fields – what remains is space and time. In general relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities, nothing remains. The space and time of Newton and Minkowski are reinterpreted as a configuration of one of the fields, the gravitational field. This implies that physical entities – particles and fields – are not all immersed in space, and moving in time. They do not live on spacetime. They live, so to say, on one another. It is as if we had observed in the ocean many animals living on an island: animals ‘on’ the island. Then we discover that the island itself is in fact a great whale. Not anymore animals on the island, just animals on animals. Similarly, the universe is not made by fields on spacetime; it is made by fields on fields.”   — Carlo Rovelli, in ‘Quantum Gravity’

Whoa!  Shifting realities is quite a ride!  But we have already said that a continent is not just a ‘fixed material thing’, it is that portion of a fluid convection cycle that is accessible to our direct visual sensing.  That is, its fixed-thingness is conveniently defined by the limitations of our visual sensing;

There is nothing that is ‘fixed’ in the universe, there are only ‘relations’, but there are quasi-fixed dynamic forms that change slowly compared to our relatively short life-cycle experience.  We can push things that little step farther and make the slow changing material forms (that are inherently ‘relational’ in the fluid energy medium that is nature) ‘absolutely fixed’ by defining and name-labelling them.  As John Stuart Mill observed “every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the local existence of the object defined.”.  Thus, the slowly moving top-side portion of the lithic convection cell that surfaces like a whale’s back where ‘North America’ is, we endow with ‘local material being’, thanks to language and the process of defining and name-labelling.  Of course ‘North America’ retains none of the implications of the basic substrate being ‘field’ as discussed by Rovelli, whereby everything is ultimately ‘relational’;

“This implies that physical entities – particles and fields – are not all immersed in space, and moving in time. They do not live on spacetime. They live, so to say, on one another. It is as if we had observed in the ocean many animals living on an island: animals ‘on’ the island. Then we discover that the island itself is in fact a great whale.”

For the indigenous peoples of North America, however, the land is alive, and rather than name the land after a person [which would make no sense since people belong to the land] such as Amerigo Vespucci, is named instead ‘Turtle Island’ which fits into native creation myth that implies unending spatial-relational transformation, just as the new physics [relativity, quantum physics] does.   It is for this reason that the connection is often made between ‘quantum reality’ and the reality of indigenous peoples [e.g. physicist F. David Peat’s ‘Blackfoot Physics’].

The logic of the included third, as Lupasco observes, resolves the apparent contradictions between phenomena and anti-phenomena at a higher level of reality [or deeper, in any case a reality that transcends the reality of the dynamics of material objects/organisms].

This higher level of reality is described in Emerson’s ‘transcendentalist’ view wherein the organism is no longer seen as developing out of itself within an absolute fixed containing space in the Aristotelian teleological visual archetype of an acorn pushing out of itself to blossom forth into an oak tree [the outside-inward shaping influence of the medium is rendered null and void in this view].  Instead, the organism is not only animated by the dynamic of the habitat it is included in, it is created by the habitat dynamic.  There is just one ‘force’ in this ‘reality’ and it belongs to the spatial plenum.  It is both the evolutionary force and the force that manifests in the relational movements of material forms.   It is the field-based evolutionary influence that shapes the development of form, behaviour and organization.   In this ‘higher level reality’, material objects and organisms are secondary ‘appearances’ (Schrödinger) that associate with our limited sensory capabilities.

For example, even though we are included in atmospheric turbulence, our visual sensing, coupled with language based intellection encourages us to point towards the tornado, and say; ‘look, it is coming right towards us’.  The blind man would ‘see it’ [understand it] otherwise; i.e. “the turbulence we are included in is on the rise.   It is reaching peak intensity”.  The notion of ‘inclusion’ gives way, with vision and language, to the notion of a self-other split, the split between phenomenon and anti-phenomenon; A = what is going on right here with me; i.e. the inhabitant dynamic, … and not.A = what is going on out there; i.e. the habitat dynamic.   In our habitual default logic of the excluded third, the third element that could reconcile A and not.A is missing so that A can never equal not.A; i.e. the inhabitant dynamic can never equal the habitat dynamic.  But, of course, in the new physics, the habitat dynamic and the inhabitant dynamic are in conjugate relation and Mach’s principle says;

“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.”

Vision and language contrive to put us into a lower level of reality that is in terms of locally existing inanimate beings and animate beings, reducing the potency of the energy-charged spatial medium relative to the animating source of the development of form, behaviour and organization, to nil, and in the process imputing the animating source of the development of form, behaviour and organization, to local animate beings and inanimate beings, treating them as powerboaters with their own local inboard source of power and steerage.

There is no need for the habitat to do anything in this case, because the inhabitants are deemed responsible for everything, for their own development of form, for their own behaviour and for their own organization.

In this reality, if people do not organize themselves, there would be no organization, no harmonious social dynamic, because in this reality, the sole source of organization derives from the ‘inhabitants’.   This is the source of the split between the ‘anarchist’ understanding and approach of indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and the ‘authoritarian’ understanding and approach of the European colonizers.  But the evidence is that the anarchist understanding and approach [in the sense that outside-inward organizing influence is inherent in nature’s dynamic] of the indigenous peoples is born out by their experience; e.g.

“To Engels, Morgan’s description of the Iroquois [in Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society and The League of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois] was important because “it gives us the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no state.” Jefferson had also been interested in the Iroquois’ ability to maintain social consensus without a large state apparatus, as had Franklin. Engels described the Iroquoian state in much the same way that American revolutionaries had a century earlier: “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households — still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal — including the women.” — Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders

The weight of real world experience is on the side of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, which positions the ‘ultimate animating source’ upstream of material forms, and so are the findings of the new physics of relativity and quantum theory.

The two levels of reality, the less comprehensive level being in terms of material dynamics and the transcendentally more comprehensive level being in terms of ‘field’ that not only orchestrates the behaviour of ‘animate and inanimate beings’ but engenders them, are implied by Shrödinger in his following statements, including his rejection of the popular majority view of his fellow scientists;

“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances). … Let me say at the outset, that … 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.” – Erwin Schroedinger

The mathematical device of ‘probability’ ‘rescued’ the materialist view by preserving the notion that ‘inanimate beings’ [material objects aka ‘particles’] were foundational to the world reality, its just that we can’t put our finger on where the basic particles are, but when we do track them down and are able to observe them, we validate the proposition that ‘they really do exist’.  Thus observation becomes the justification for their existence, a proposition mocked by Schrödinger in his ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ thought experiment where the probability-based theory [of Max Born and the others] of what is going on cannot be validated because the postulated uncertain reality is hidden within a black box, and when the lid is removed from the box to check things out, the postulated uncertain reality no longer applies; i.e. in mathematical terms, ‘the probability function collapses’.

But there are two ways to pursue inquiry into the ‘two levels of reality’ [field level and material level] and while the one just discussed pertains to the absoluteness of the existence of material beings/objects, the other delves into the notion of the absoluteness of ‘motion’ that goes hand-in-hand with the notion of ‘absolute material being’; i.e. the materialist reality imputes all of the sourcing of animation in the reality to locally existing animate beings and/or inanimate beings.  It follows that their movements, which in general are comprised of the development of form, behaviour and organization, are ‘absolutely their own’.  That is, while their interactions will contribute to the unfolding patterns, the materialist reality allows no sourcing of animation of any type, such as might influence the development of form, behaviour and/or organization, to come from the relations among these animate and inanimate beings, beyond that which ‘comes directly and uniquely from the locally existing beings themselves.

This translates into the fact that this level of reality associates with imposing the convention of absolute Euclidian space on our reality, as the reference box or ‘operating theatre’ for the material beings to ‘do their stuff in’.

But this over-demanding constraint on our modeling of the dynamic world of our experience, shows up elsewhere, where we can get at it more easily [without mathematics].

As Howard Zinn observed, historical narratives can be delivered from opposite perspectives which he calls the ‘executioner’ and ‘victim’ perspectives.  A prime example is the history of Turtle Island as told by the colonized indigenous peoples and the history of North America as told by the colonizers of the indigenous peoples.

As in the case of Skinner’s Walden Two, we are missing something when we talk about history in terms of ‘what people do’.   We are missing acknowledgement of the dynamic medium.  These opposing realities based on ‘what people did’ are both true and transpire ‘at the same time’.  In fact, evolution in general involves generation and degeneration.  If we observe the earth from space, we can see forms gathering and regathering in the atmosphere on a continuing basis.  A moment’s reflection informs us that what is going on is ‘transformation’ in terms of spatial relations.  The ‘forms’ that we talk about are not ‘things-in-themselves’ but patterns that form in our minds.  The flow of the atmosphere is purely spatial-relational and does not depend on ‘forms’, though ‘whorls’ in the flow are ways in which the flow-dynamic expresses itself [as in Bohm’s and Schrödinger’s point that material forms are ‘ripple-structures in the energy-charged spatial medium’].

In this sense the atmospheric flow is like a holodynamic in which the development of form, behaviour and organization is purely relational and without dependency on any ‘local material being’.  But let’s not devalue the secondary whorl too much because, implicitly, we are talking about ‘the organism’; i.e. ‘ourselves’.  Though the bad news is that the whorl is ‘secondary’ to the flow it is included in, the good news is that IT IS THE FLOW; i.e. it is the flow expressing itself by way of ripple structures.

Returning to our thread of phenomenon and anti-phenomenon; e.g. colonizer and colonized, our examination of the historical narratives says that the colonizers came out of the east, heading west; e.g. there was no colonizing of North America coming out of the west, from Japan and China etc., it all came out of the east, from Europe.

These historical narratives have ‘really put their foot in it’ now because they imply that motion is absolute; i.e. the motion of material beings from west to east constitutes absolute motion.  But to an observer on the moon, or to an astronaut observer in space, the earth is a sphere and there can be no absolute motion on the surface of a sphere [absolute motion can only happen in a flat plane as in the rectangular space of Euclid].  On the surface of a sphere there are no absolute fixed reference points so there can be no absolute motion, there can only be the rearranging of spatial relations of the things [themselves spatial-relational forms] in that space on the surface of the sphere.

That is, the moon observatory will show, if it records pictures of the earth every day for a thousand years or a hundred thousand years [which could be played back at 16 frames per second or etc.] that the higher level reality of what is going on in the space on the surface of the earth is ‘spatial-relational transformation’.  When the colonizers emigrated from Europe and immigrated to America, we have these two historical narratives mentioned by Zinn but perhaps in more general spatial relational terms.  Something is being ‘undone’ [degenerative] in the land they are moving out of at the same time as what they are ‘doing’ in the land they are moving into.  These are two realities that are going on at the same time.  And the reason why they are two, is because we have left ‘space’ as the ‘mothering medium’ out of it.  There we go again, like Skinner, talking about people and ‘community’ and ‘history’ out of the context of the dynamic spatial plenum that not only orchestrates their behaviour but creates them.  The moon observatory, on the other hand, does not see any ‘absolute motion’ from east to west going on, it sees only ‘rearrangement’, in spatial-relational terms, of the inhabitants of the ‘spherical space’ on the surface of the earth that is self-referencing; i.e. that wraps over and around into itself.

Now, the geometry that wraps over and around into itself is the geometry of a toroid, and if one can picture it in examining an earth-worm in action.  The earth worm looks like a convection cell; i.e. what goes down and out of the earthworm wraps back around and into it again.  The question is, which came first, this toroidal flow as in a convection cell, in which case the worm would be a ‘biofilm’ that forms in the convection cell, or does the worm come first and then acts as the source of this flow that pulls in inputs and discharges outputs in order to ‘live’?

is a worm a biofilm attaching to a toroidal flow-cell?

Wait a minute, this is the ‘machine model’ of the organism which imputes inboard power and steerage to it.

How did I get to this model of an ‘individual’ convection cell?  — I removed from view, the engendering flow-dynamic in which it is included.  I reduced it from a sailboater that derives its power and steerage from the spatial dynamic it is included in, by re-presenting it as a powerboater with its own inboard power and steerage, … as a machine, …just like how the biological sciences model the ‘organism’.

Does the living space dynamic engender life-forms or do life-forms engender themselves and simply use the space they are born into as a ‘playground’ to exploit according to their self-interests?

Who’s on first?  The emigrant who is responsible for undoing a lot of stuff in Europe is, at the same time, the immigrant who is responsible for doing a log of stuff in North America.  What makes this possible is his absolute shift in location from west to east.  Of course, if we thought in terms of the inhabitants belonging to the habitat rather than the habitat belonging to the inhabitants, then we would agree with the moon observatory and say that what we are really looking at is the rearranging of a spatial plenum; i.e. that the dynamics are relational rather than absolute.

If the dynamics are relational and the inhabitants are included in them, then the inhabitants are relational as well, and this takes us back the ‘quantum reality’ in which material forms are ‘ripple structures’ in the energy-charged spatial plenum.

How is that we can be so deceived by the material level reality?

One answer is, as Poincaré has suggested, ‘the power of word’ and language.  As Joseph Campbell observed, homo sapiens should have been named homo symbolicus because once we define and name a symbol, e.g. a sovereign state flag, it becomes part of our belief system, the map over-rides the territory and defines it.  That relates to the ‘existence’ or ‘non-existence’ ontological aspect [As Nietzsche reminds us, all is ‘becoming’ and ‘being’ is a total Fiktion but it is a ‘useful Fiktion’ because we can’t ‘talk about’ ‘becoming’ since we are wrong as soon as we open our mouths; i.e. everything is in flux.]

Another answer relates to what has been called the ‘ceteris paribus’ assumption.  For example, if we watch a fireworks rocket splaying out against a black sky, we think of this in terms of the acorn-to-oak-tree development of form, and as the rockets become more numerous and we get to the finale in which there are patterns on top of patterns, and we are more in the mode of the moon observatory that is watching spatial transformation rather than the absolute movement of particular things, … we are nevertheless mindful of the possibility of ‘analytically deconstructing’ the fireworks display and attributing it to the sum of individual acorn-to-oak-tree blossomings.

But this is where ceteris paribus comes in. The reality is that the spatial relations are really transformed as each fireworks explodes, so there is not a simple summation, there is instead a spatial-relational transformation.  Beyond this, the pattern of the exploding fireworks is shaped outside-inwardly by the force of gravity (the parabolic curves) and by the viscosity of the air which depends on moisture, temperature, density etc., so it was never the doer-deed case, really [in reality], that the pattern WAS FORMED BY the fireworks itself in an acorn-to-oak-tree fashion, … that is merely a highly over-simplified way of looking at it.

“One can’t step into the same river twice as it is not the same river nor the same person that steps into it” – Heraclitus

To say that the European colonizers are responsible for the development of North America, as Ayn Rand and others do, is a joke.  At least it is like that joke where man claims he has God-like powers to create new things all by himself, and when God asks him to show how he does it, man reaches down, saying, ‘First I take some dirt…’, and God stops him right there, and says; “Use your own dirt.”

What’s going on here?  The usual thing.  We leave out the space we are included in, the space that engenders us and orchestrates our behaviours [we don’t just rise at dawn because ‘we have free will’ and ‘make our own choices’ and in general ‘do it our way’], that is simply the low level reality that we fabricate by substituting an absolute space box for the energy-charged medium or spatial plenum, and substituting absolute ‘being’ by way of definitions and name-labels for the dynamic forms that we observe.

The result of imposing these simplifying conventions and absolutizing linguistic devices (definitions and words) is the low level reality that starts off from notional animate beings and inanimate beings moving about and interacting within an absolute reference-frame space, a containing box that serves as a fixed and empty operating theatre for the stage plays [historical narratives] we build using our notional absolute locally existing animate and inanimate beings.  This lower level reality sucks all of the animating sourcing out of the energy-charged medium and re-invests it in the notional absolutely existing local animate and inanimate beings.

Psychology and biology is ‘in cahoots’ on this, and I am not suggesting that it is ‘consciously intentional’ but that, as Nietzsche says, it derives from the ‘ego’.  By taking the egotistical view of ‘self’ as a ‘local powerboater’ with our own inboard power and steerage and implanting it in our natural sciences [anthropomorphism, as Nietzsche points out is the case here], what we get back seems to have consistency but only in a certain way of thinking, the ‘doer-deed’ type of reality where we claim personal credit for the ‘results’ of our own actions as if the dynamic habitat was ‘putty in our hands’; e.g. one of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free  who comes from crowded, impoverished Europe to become a wealthy and powerful farmer in America, will crow that ‘I did it my way’.   After all, who caused this to happen if he, himself, did not cause it?  We can’t credit the land because the land just lay there like a passive woman while he plowed it and planted his seed in it.

But we could ‘fix this picture’ if we took Emerson’s advice and acknowledged that the land not only inhabits the organism, it creates the organism.  This being the same ‘geometry’ as proposed by Nietzsche, Mach, Bohm and Schrödinger wherein the outside-inward [habitat-inhabitant] influence predominates over the inside-outward [inhabitant-habitat] influence, as in “material systems are ripple-structures in the energy-charged spatial plenum.

This ‘quantum reality’ is a higher level reality that resolves the apparent conflict of opposition, as described by the logic of the included third, and Lupasco’s associated narrative.

Psychology has been hamstrung by the biological sciences, by biology’s model of the organism as a machine-made-of-meat and by Darwinism which purges the ultimate animating source from the energy-charged spatial plenum and re-invests it in the interior of the organism so that we are to understand that the development of form, behaviour and organization is predominantly driven from the inside-outward rather than from the outside-inward, the latter being postulated by Nietzsche, Lamarck, Mach, Bohm, Schrödinger [the ‘dissidents?’].

Skinner’s attempt to understand organization of a social dynamic out of the context of the predominating outside-inward influence of the natural habitat-dynamic, is a case in point.  Meanwhile, Skinner was on target with the direction of his inquiry, which made the point that ‘good behaviour’ was by ‘revelation’.  Changing the venu for a second, and relocating our notional experient from the city into his natural habitat, the ‘revelation’ is one of experiencing outside-inward — inside-outward resonance.   It is by ‘revelation’ that I discover while riding within a group of motorcyclists, that the turbulence space I share inclusion in, reduces its opposition to me if I move in a certain way; i.e. my clothing stops flapping and I need much less throttle to sustain my speed than otherwise.  Because I am a physicist I can go home and figure out what is going on here; i.e. why the wildgeese in V formation fly farther and faster for less energy expenditure than they could ever do it for flying solo.  Now I can go out with others and we can seek out those ‘sweet spots in the slipstream’ that we are able to co-cultivate, but my ‘good behaviour’ first came to me by way of ‘revelation’ (by way of my conjugate outside-inward — inside-outward dynamic relation).  And the fact is, that my theory will only guide me ‘to the place’ and it is my situational/inclusional experience that will validate that I am there.

Darwinism and genetics theory are on the point of collapse.  The predominance of outside-inward over inside-outward influence is being recognized by many scientists.  Many are openly mocking the still-mainstream theory, not that they have a ready substitution, nor that they are looking towards quantum reality and the logic of the included third, but nevertheless.  There is now a group of scientists who have formed an ‘International Hologenomics Society’ [formerly called ‘International Post-Genetics Society’] and they have their own rap song  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k_oKK4Teco The common observation is that “DNA sequence may be lost in translation”, or, ‘environmental signals predominate in the translating of DNA into proteins’; e.g. cells with identical DNA [stem-cells] become muscle, fat or bone cells according the environment they develop in; i.e. this result is easily obtained by putting the same cells into three different Petri dishes containing three different solutions.’

Psychology can bail out now, it doesn’t have to wait around for the final demise of the biological model of the organism.  Crick’s dogma which prevailed from 1956 – 2008 has been swept away.

Carl Jung tried to reconcile psychology with ‘the new physics’ in a joint effort with Wolfgang Pauli but they didn’t work it out, and they couldn’t possibly have worked it out so long as they kept the individual in a basic foundational position.  Like the toroidal flow of the convection cell, the individual is in a conjugate outside-inward — inside outward [habitat-inhabitant] relation in which the outside-inward influence predominates.  The individual cannot be understood out of the context of its conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation and models that are unable to let go of the notion of absolute ‘being’ of the individual are unable to reconcile opposites.  The ultimate animating-sourcing primacy in the model must go to the ‘third element’ as in the ‘logic of the included third’, the spatial plenum which resolves the apparent opposition of A and not.A, phenomenon and anti-phenomenon, colonizer and colonized.

* * *

[1] Revue de synthèse : 5e série, année 2005/2, p. 431-441.

Stéphane Lupasco et le tiers inclus. De la physique quantique à l’ontologie

Basarab NICOLESCU

RÉSUMÉ : Nous rappelons tout d’abord les trois étapes majeures dans l’œuvre de Stéphane Lupasco (1900-1988) : l’introduction du principe de dualisme antagoniste, l’examen des notions d’actualisation et de potentialisation et la formulation de la logique du tiers inclus. Ensuite, nous étudions les relations entre le tiers inclus et la contradiction et entre logique et ontologie et nous évoquons le rapport entre Gonseth et Lupasco. Enfin, nous introduisons la notion de niveaux de Réalité qui donne une explication simple et claire de l’inclusion du tiers.

ABSTRACT : At first, we expose the three major periods in the work of Stéphane Lupasco (1900-1988) : the introduction of the principle of antagonistic dualism, the consideration of the notions of actualization and potentialization and the formulation of the logic of the included middle. Later, we study the link between included middle and contradiction and between logic and ontology and we evoke the relation between Gonseth and Lupasco. Finally, we introduce the notion of « levels of Reality », which gives a simple and clear explanation of the meaning of the included middle.