Western Dysfunctional Belief in the ‘Existence’ of Material Objects/Organisms

the key to knowing what a thing is, is to enter into a relationship with it, so that it can become what it is

Western science promotes ‘belief’ in the ‘existence’ of material objects and material organisms as ‘things-in-themselves’ that reside, operate and interact in a notional absolute space and absolute time ‘container’ which serves as a  measuring/reference frame or ‘coordinate system’.

Western scientists (some of them, like Mach, Poincaré, Bohm, Schroedinger) claim that the notional existence of material objects and material organisms [local, independently-existing material systems] is just ‘pragmatic idealization’ [Poincaré] that we tend to ‘confuse’ for ‘reality’.   Material objects have no place in the physical reality of our actual experience.   This is also the view of linguists such as Whorf and Sapir and philosophers such as Nietzsche.

That is, there are many views of particular scientists, philosophers and linguists that claim that the notion of ‘being’ as in ‘independently-existing material entities’, is idealization that is a convenient ‘communications device’ that allows us to construct a MECHANICAL ‘semantic reality’ based on ‘things’ and ‘what things do’ that bypasses the relational complexity of the physical reality of our actual experience wherein everything is influencing everything within a transforming relational continuum.  But, as Mach warns;

“Purely mechanical phenomena do not exist. The production of mutual accelerations in masses is, to all appearances, a purely dynamical phenomenon. But with these dynamical results are always associated thermal, magnetic, electrical, and chemical phenomena, and the former are always modified in proportion as the latter are asserted. On the other hand, thermal, magnetic, electrical, and chemical conditions also can produce motions. Purely mechanical phenomena, accordingly, are abstractions, made, either intentionally or from necessity, for facilitating our comprehension of things”. … “We … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Ernst Mach

 

Western ‘reality’ as we present it to ourselves in our spoken and written communications [as distinguished from our actual experience] is a ‘mechanical reality’ that we construct ‘semantically’, by supposing that, …  it is ‘true’ that there really are local, independently-existing material entities [objects, organisms, systems] in the world and then building this notional ‘truth’ into the basic structures of our language; i.e. into noun-and-verb ‘what things do’ structures.   Unfortunately for us and our world dynamic [‘civilization’], our confusing of this being-based ‘semantic reality’ for ‘reality’ and employing it as our ‘operative reality’ is putting us at odds with our own experience, and introducing ‘incoherence’ and ‘dysfunction’ into our relational/social dynamic.

For example, the ‘allopathic’ model of Western medical science, and the ‘allopathic’ model of the human social dynamic interprets the development of imbalances and their associated relational tensions that give rise to ‘venting’ [periodic eruptions such as earthquakes, avalanches, volcanic activity] that seek to reconfigure relations in a more balanced, less relationally tensioned manner, … in terms of ‘things’ and ‘what things are doing’ [e.g. rocks falling, continents or plates colliding, volcanoes spewing lava etc.] rather that acknowledging that the primary dynamic is relational transformation.  Language equips us to impute ‘being’ to a volcano or a hurricane and grammar gives nouns that stand-in for relational forms the notional power of jumpstart authorship of their own development and behaviour; “… the volcano is growing larger and is spewing lava high into the sky”, and/or “Katrina is growing larger and stronger, … and is ravaging New Orleans”.

Of course, in the physical reality of our actual experience, what is going on is relational transformation in which these named relational features are in no way independent things that are the authors of their own development and behaviour, as our noun-and-verb language-and-grammar portrays them.   They do not ‘exist’ as things-in-themselves, they are relational features within a transforming relational continuum.

Exactly the same can be said of the human seen as a ‘human BEING’.  It is our ‘ego’ that would have us speak of ourselves as ‘independent beings’ with our own local powers of development and behaviour; ‘the human is growing larger and stronger and is shooting his neighbours’.   What we are describing are relational dynamics nesting within more relational dynamics; i.e. “it takes a whole community to raise a terrorist”.  Our noun-and-verb language allows us to break into the transforming relational continuum and on the basis of visual imagery, conceptually break out and isolate ‘events’, giving them a being-based author and a cause-and-effect result so that the event appears to be a thing-in-itself without dependency on the transforming relational continuum it is, in reality, an inextricable feature in.   ‘Katrina’ is not really the author of the devastation in New Orleans, she is only a ‘word’ as is the case with all such semantic ‘beings’.

Psychology (egotism) lies behind our habit of employing our ‘semantic reality’ as ‘operative reality’ [confusing it for reality and having it orchestrate and shape our individual and collective behaviours].  As Nietzsche observes;

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

Because we are continually using noun-and-verb language-and-grammar DEPICTIONS of the transforming relational continuum, it is very difficult to conceive in our mind’s eye the relational worldview, as those using relational language architectures do, which makes no foundational use whatsoever of ‘things-that-be’.   As Wittgenstein observes, the ‘pictures’ [of being-things] hold us captive and ‘we cannot get outside of them’.  That is, if hear the word ‘hurricane’, we think of a swirling ‘thing’ that is ‘growing larger’ and ‘moving from A to B’ which is not the physical reality of our actual experience; i.e. the physical reality is the overall transforming relational flow in which the storm-cell is an inextricably included relational feature.

We don’t need the concept of ‘being’ to understand relational features within a transforming relational continuum, but noun-and-verb language-and-grammar uses ‘being’ as in ‘independently-existing objects and organisms with their own local jumpstart authoring power of development and behaviour’ as the basis for constructing a being-based ‘semantic reality’ that we can sure with others who make the same assignments of word-meaning as we do.

Relations are all there are, in the physical reality of our actual experience.

“By the principle of Occam’s razor, physicists and philosophers prefer ideas that can explain the same phenomena with the fewest assumptions. In this case you can construct a perfectly valid theory by positing the existence of certain relations without additionally assuming individual things. So proponents of ontic structural realism say we might as well dispense with things and assume that the world is made of [relational-spatial] structures, or nets of relations.” – Meinard Kuhlmann, ‘What is Real’, Scientific American, August 2013

Given that Western civilization has in fact opted for a noun-and-verb language architecture, we have ingrained in ourselves the habit of thinking of dynamics in terms of ‘the action of things’ which gives us our ‘allopathic’ Western medical science and our ‘allopathic’ Western political science.   That is, instead of acknowledging the relational reality wherein imbalances that associate with relational tensions are sourcing periodic disturbances within relational continuum, we interpret these disturbances in ‘allopathic’ terms; i.e. in terms of ‘the attack of pathogens’.

This allopathic ‘semantic reality’ that Western society is employing as the ‘operative reality’ dismisses the relational view of cultures with relational languages [culture = language, language = culture] and thus dismisses the understanding that relational tensions associated with imbalance are the source of violent disturbances [“it takes a whole community to raise a terrorist”] and employs a moral judgement based ‘retributive justice’ which scapegoats those through whom the relational tensions ‘vent’ and lets the community (the overall relational dynamic) ‘off the hook’, as if the community had no hand in it.  That is the beauty of employing idealized ‘independent beings’ in semantic models of reality; … relational dynamics can be seen as arising from the actions of the participants in the dynamic, seen as locally jumpstart actions deriving the participants seen as ‘things-in-themselves’ that are fully and solely responsible for their own behaviours.  Philosophically, this doesn’t stand up, as Nietzsche points out;

 

“How false is the supposition that an action must depend upon what has preceded it in consciousness ! And morality has been measured in the light of this supposition, as also criminality. . . . The value of an action must be judged by its results, say the utilitarians: to measure it according to its origin involves the impossibility of knowing that origin. But do we know its results ? Five stages ahead, perhaps. Who can tell what an action provokes and sets in motion ? As a stimulus ? As the spark which fires a powder-magazine ? Utilitarians are simpletons —“

.

“The re-establishment of “Nature”: an action in itself is quite devoid of value ; the whole question is this: who performed it? One and the same ” crime ” may, in one case, be the greatest privilege, in the other infamy. As a matter of fact, it is the selfishness of the judges which interprets an action (in regard to its author) according as to whether it was useful or harmful to themselves (or in relation to its degree of likeness or unlikeness to them).”— Nietzsche on ‘Morality’ and ‘Herd Behaviour’ in ‘The Will to Power’

‘Taking stock’;

Western society, which is now globally dominant due to colonization wherein the Western culture with its science-based technologies has taken the world captive, so to speak, is employing as ‘operative reality’ a being-based semantic reality that leads to allopathic interpretations of ‘disturbances to mechanical normality’.

We have scientists who say; ‘don’t believe in science-as-mechanics’ but mechanical science is nevertheless being employed as our ‘operative reality’ hence the current globally deployed allopathic medical science and allopathic political science.

This seems unlikely to change without a change in the architecture of language; i.e. noun-and-verb language-and-grammar is going to keep building mechanical semantic realities which are used as ‘operative reality’.  Instead of disturbances to the relational social dynamic being seen as arising from the relational tensions of imbalance, the disturbances are being attributed to those through whom the relational tensions are venting, and they are being scapegoated for that which originates within the over relational social dynamic.    Of course, the nastiness associated with terrorist acts few people want to acknowledge complicity in, at least in Western culture, and the allopathic [attack of evil pathogens] scientific model thus has great appeal since it holds that all people are ‘independent beings that are fully and solely responsible for their/our own behaviour, ignoring the heartless creation/toleration of misery-filled ghettoes that breed the angry ones who will be venters of the relational tensions that arise from social relational imbalances.

This ‘error’ that separates being-based ‘semantic reality’ used as ‘operative reality’ from the physical reality of our actual experience and has us believing in the ‘allopathic’ model of disturbance to ‘normality’ is woven into the popular ‘good and evil’ narratives of our modern era.

Political leaders get behind the notion of the ‘declared independence’ of their political state, and rally the people in their ‘self-interested pursuit of happiness’ as ‘independently existing states’, a disastrous semantic conceptualization in a world of interdependent relations as in the physical reality of our actual experience, engendering ‘incoherence’ [Bohm] wherein our actions as directed by our ‘independent-being-basedsemantic operative reality’ clash with the physical reality of our actual relational experience.

We are not heeding the warnings about the limitations of science;

“We … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Ernst Mach

When, in medical science or in political science, there is a disturbance of mechanical normality, we are quick to identify those through whom the relational tensions of imbalances manifest, as pathogens that, being independently-existing material beings that are fully and solely responsible for their own behaviours, are local jumpstart causal authors of the disturbance.   There is thus no path that maps back through the venters into a more general cogenerationwithin the interdependent relational social matrix.

The allopathic model has great appeal by virtue of its conciseness and finality.  As in an Agatha Christy ‘whodunnit’ or an episode of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), there is this closure when we keep hauling in the net which is dredging the deep and dark waters of the non-yet conscious and coming to this point where we shall see in the full and clear light of day, the author of the pathogenic act.   It is easier to consider this ‘the end of the trail’ and not satisfying at all to acknowledge that the real origin of the pathogenic act, which merely vented through this fish we have pulled in, derived instead from all of us, from imbalance-based tensions in the relational social dynamic.  This is too loosey-goosey for us Western amateurs of crisp and final logic, and would force us to trade out our binary moral judgement based ‘retributive justice’ for a beyond-good-and-evil restorative justice wherein we acknowledge that ‘it takes a whole community to cultivate a pathogen’.   We prefer the finality that comes with scapegoating the ‘venters’ of imbalance-based relational tensions;

“For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement. … The preconceived idea of crystalline purity 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’, 107-108

When the least stable of colonized people reaches his threshold of tolerance to colonizer abuse and ‘goes ballistic’ and the supporter of restorative justice advocates backing off the insensitive use of the colonizer’s ‘power to humiliate’ [Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s words on the first anniversary of 9/11], the supporter of allopathic science [moral judgement based retributive justice] will respond; ‘don’t make excuses for terrorists’.

Logic is binary and is founded on the ‘independent being’ of the logical elements in logical propositions.   The division of a relational social dynamic into ‘the actions of good people’ and ‘the actions of bad people’ is a simple model that sets up an optimization schema whereby one ‘rewards the good’ and ‘punishes the bad’ as a general animating ethic for an individual and/or collective;

“So I reject the notion that the American moment has passed. I dismiss the cynics who say that this new century cannot be another when, in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt, we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good.

 

I still believe that America is the last, best hope of Earth. We just have to show the world why this is so. … “ — Remarks of Senator Barack Obama to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, April 23, 2007

The potential problem is that if it is the ‘power to humiliate’ that is venting through ‘terrorism’, as Chrétien suggests, then the pathogen-exterminating strategy of allopathic science may promote the growth of this venting, in which case ‘promoting the ultimate good’ may degenerate into ‘battling immediate evils’ so that the ‘ultimate good’ will be defined as ‘the elimination of evil”, a degeneration into an Armageddon that ‘restorative justice’ never gets to since it interprets ‘terrorist acts’ as ventings from relational tensions rather than simply as the ‘acts of terrorists’ [evil acts that are fully and solely attributable to evil terrorist pathogens].

The notion that mechanical science [interpretation of dynamics in terms of ‘the action of things-in-themselves’ is ‘non-sense’ is overtly shared by some scientists even though ‘science’ seems to run its own course.

 

 

« cette affirmation : « la terre tourne » , n’a aucun sens » — Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis

The organization of the milky way is also grounding for organization in the solar system so the earth’s relational dynamic is included in a relational dynamic bigger than itself, and physics has not yet incorporated this intuitive understanding in its representations, although it has been spoken of; i.e. the following suggestion by Einstein and Infeld is essentially a recommendation to consider matter and field as a non-duality;

 

“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.” – Einstein and Infeld, ‘Evolution of Physics’

Meanwhile, science as it is practiced and employed in ‘scientific thinking’ about the world we live in, continues to be ‘dualist’ and ‘being-based’ [mechanical and thus nonsensical], as does ordinary logic since the logical elements in propositions are assumed to have fixed identity.   They are like storm-cells SEEN [through noun-and-verb language constructs] as BEING pathogens that are independent of the habitat in which they reside, operate and interact.

This essay, to this point, reviews how we are shooting ourselves in the foot by applying the purely mechanical [convenient nonsense] paradigm of science, inappropriately, to the relational physical reality of our actual experience, as in the ‘allopathic model of Western medicine and Western political science’.

Science can help us track down and exterminate the pathogenic causes of disruption in the normal operations of our society, but science depends on logical propositions that are both subjective and incomplete.   That is, science is good for proving that a certain causal agent is responsible for a certain result; i.e. for validating a logical proposition such as John Wilkes Boothe  killed Abraham Lincoln.  But logical propositions are inherently subjective and incomplete, and incapable of standing on their own shoulders and questioning the completeness of their own propositions.   E.g. the ruthless dictator whose oppression of his people incubates relational tensions that vent in rebellious actions may have the best forensic scientists in the world tracking down and exterminating ‘those who are responsible’ for the rebellious actions, but science will not discover the ‘dictator’ as among those responsible, since science simplifies its inquiry by breaking things down into separate events and searches for ‘independent material beings’ as causal agents that are fully and solely responsible for the alleged disturbance;

“It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent. … Logic, therefore, remains barren unless fertilised by intuition.”- Henri Poincaré

The logic of cause-effect events that is employed in popular mainstream science  [science as the ‘mechanical dynamics of independently-existing material entities] is ‘too small’ to capture the physical phenomena of our actual experience in a transforming relational continuum.

Some reasons for this attempt to share this material;

Popular mainstream ‘being-based’ scientific views employed as ‘operative reality’ as in the ‘allopathic’ models of Western medical science and Western political science, are likely to exacerbate relational tensions and imbalances that are the source of ‘ventings’, falsely identified in the ‘being-based’ terms of ‘the attack of pathogens’. Many may suffer and die from this erroneous being-based interpretation.

‘Ventings’ deriving from imbalance and relational tension are misinterpreted in terms of ‘binary conflict’ as in ‘defensive immune system problems’ and the ‘attack of pathogens’.  This is the case in both Western medical and political science and in both cases, we are said to be moving into the ‘post antibiotic age’ meaning that our “proven” techniques for exterminating pathogens are no longer working so that we say that the pathogens are becoming ‘resistant’ to anti-pathogenic attacks.   Meanwhile, logical propositions are subjective and incomplete [e.g. “DDT kills mosquitoes”].  We can prove logical propositions to be true, but that physical reality of our actual experience is very different from the subjective and incomplete propositions of logic; i.e. the imbalances and relational tensions set up by colonizing powers oppression of colonized peoples is the source of ‘pushback’, eruptions of violence that ‘vent’ through minorities which we then identity as ‘independent evil beings’ that are fully and solely responsible for their violent (terrorist) actions aka ‘pathogens’.  This allopathic interpretation of ‘venting’ of relational tensions mistakenly identifies ‘secondary symptoms’ as ‘source’, as suggested in Pasteur and Béchamp’s ‘Le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’ [imbalances and associated relational tensions in the terrain are the source of microbes-gone-wild].

Powerful authorities that protect imbalances and relational tensions, in being blind to their own role in sourcing violent ‘ventings’ or ‘pushbacks’, have the science and technology as seen in Crime Scene Investigation, to identify the ‘pathogens’ [or is that ‘venters’]. Science and technology is also developing predator drones that can exterminate the identified pathogens. Thus science and technology in the hands of powerful egotists supports the one-sided pursuit of individual self-interest by improved ability to identify and exterminate ‘pathogens’ [mistaken interpretation of ‘venters’, those who find themselves squeezed within relational tensions associated with imbalance, whose violent venting aims to wrest a reconfiguration that lowers the relational tensions they are caught in].   Conflict that has been the fuel of social relational transformation then becomes a war of purification in which ‘the ultimate good’ is ‘the eradication of evil’ [rebalancing by way of mutual annihilation rather than by transforming relations].

There is low public awareness of the manner in which noun-and-verb scientific language-and-grammar shapes our ‘semantic reality’ which we are employing as our ‘operative reality’, a ‘being-based’ operative reality which is ‘at odds with’ the physical reality of our actual experience. The logical propositions of science can prove that Saddam Hussein is the source of pathogenic disturbances, but logic cannot discern whether such a source is a vent that is the blow-through of energy that has been building from relational tensions incubated by the colonizing powers, or whether the source is an independently existing being that is the full and sole author of the disturbance.

[In fact, the standard logic of the excluded third assumes that the identity of two opposing elements cannot be blurred by any interdependence as occurs in a relational space where element A (e.g. a storm-cell) and element B (another storm-cell) are both equal to the third element C (the atmospheric flow) such that A ⊂ C (A is contained in C)  and B ⊂ C (B is contained in C) so that A ⊂ B.  That is, if storm-cell A is contained in the atmospheric flow C and if storm-cell B is contained in the atmospheric flow C then storm cell A must be contained in storm-cell B and vice versa.  Any change in the properties/behaviour of A registers at the same time, as a change in properties/behaviour of B.].

Snuffing out the Saddam storm-cell could simultaneously transfer those energies elsewhere.  That is inevitable in a transforming relational continuum wherein the binary duality of creation and destruction is idealization; i.e. it is impossible to create a house in the forest without destroying forest.  What is really going on is transformation of the relational space that is continually gathering and regathering into relational forms.

~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~

The remainder of this essay will inquire more deeply into the issues of ‘reality’ as dependent or non-dependent on independently-existing material entities.

* * *

In studying ‘exceptionally performing teams’, it seemed as if the matrix of relations of multiple teams was the source of organization of the individual teams.

One might see the same thing in the universe; i.e. the relational dynamics in the milky way (and beyond) is the source of organization in the solar system.

This agrees with the findings of modern physics; e.g;

“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” … “The properties of one mass always include relations to other masses,” … “Every single body of the Universe stands in some definite relations with every other body in the Universe.” Therefore, no object can “be regarded as wholly isolated.” And even in the simplest case, “the neglecting of the rest of the world is impossible.” – Ernst Mach

Imagine the relational flows among and betwixt all of the corporations and nations in the world.   each corporation has an ‘organization’ which we picture as being deliberated directed by the corporation, … just as we think of the organization in the solar system as being driven by the planetary members of the solar system and the influences among them.

What i am saying is that the basis of organization, as we common see it, is ‘things’ that are ‘working together’ like members of a team.  but even in teams, it seems as if the organization in a particular team can derive from the relational dynamics of ‘teams of teams’ so that one might assume that ‘teams’ or ‘team dynamics’ which are relational activities, derive from relational activities.  We can see a cluster of gnats as a kind of local ‘ball of activity’ or ball of organizational activity.  what if ‘things’ are just balls of organizational activity.   These gnats are continually ‘being born’ and ‘dying’ so the organization of the cluster does not depend on the individual part[icipant]s.

Do we really need ‘things’ at the bottom of ‘organization’?

Maybe ‘things’ are just an artefact of a particular approach to communications; i.e. that approach being noun-and-verb language-and-grammar.

That is implicit in my philosophical investigations.   It is implicit in Lamarcks view of biological life; i.e. the organization we call ‘life’ is seen by Lamarck as arising from the outside-inward inductive (exciting) influence of ‘les fluides incontenables’ that is actualizing ‘les fluides contenables’.    This is what researchers into modern physics have found about ‘fields’.  as Carlo Rovelli says 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’

Since fields are inductive organizing influence that is everywhere at the same time, we could say that the universe is made from inclusionally nesting inductive organizing influence.

Just as the organizing of the gnats is visible to us as a local cluster even though the local structure that has visible form is just the relational dynamic [as with a storm-cell in the flow of the atmosphere], we could suppose that the all of the local, visible, tangible structural forms are ‘made of relational dynamics’ in which case it becomes a moot point as to whether there are any ‘things’ at the bottom of that dynamic; i.e. if we go all the way down to the bottom, we may find that all there is, is ‘organizing energy’.

That would fit with Einstein and Infeld’s view that we can do away with ‘matter’ and go with just ‘field’, as Rovelli is also suggesting;

“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.” – Einstein and Infeld, ‘Evolution of Physics’

Human communities persist for many generations with people coming and going.  in other words, one might assume that the community organization is more basic that the things that keep joining in and bowing out.  This view seems even more apropos if we think of humans being in a food net or ecosystem; i.e. the relations are the basis of the participants, rather than vice versa.   Communities that develop in the ocean around volcanic thermal vents seem to build from thermal circulations or whorls which become bacteria which form tube-worms and so on and so forth.  The structural forms seem to be secondary to the organization, like the coral reefs are secondary to the micro-biomic organizational dynamic.

My guess is that it is just the architecture of language [noun-and-verb architecture] that has given us this idea that ‘being’ or ‘things’ lie at the bottom of the forms that we see; i.e. it is our language the produces ‘being’, not the physical world.

I have tried to express this in a discussion forum where there is much confusion over ‘identity’ and ‘identity politics’; i.e. people don’t believe in the reality of all this division into categories, but they acknowledge that we can be hurt by it simply because society seems to pretend it is real.

The view I am trying to express in the following is that the problem of identity politics is something we inherit from language and ‘language is culture’, and ‘culture is language’.

Here is one of my comments that tries to suggest that ‘our language is doing it to us’ [and therefore that Bohm is right, we really do need  a new ‘relational’ language].

It raises questions like ‘did Indians exist before they were discovered by European colonizers’?  what we have to decide is whether, when we mix Indians in with colonizers in a common habitat, whether or not this changes the definitions of Indians, colonizers and habitat.   Mathematically speaking, if we assume that space is relational (non-Euclidian), then things have no meaning ‘in their own right’ but derive their meaning relative to the configuration of everything they share inclusion in.  This is true for entities that share inclusion in the space on the surface of a sphere since there are no fixed reference points to anchor a fixed measuring/reference frame to.   If a thing can only take on meaning relative to the other things that share inclusion in a common relational space, every time we perceive a new form in that space, the whole web of relations is transformed so that all of the things that were in the space prior to the new discovery have to be redefined.   This is like the parents and members of the family as new members come it, it transforms the net of relations and since relational context is the sole definer of things within a relational space, everything that we knew that was in that space must be redefined by the discovery of something new in that space.

This is an important problem that was researched by Henri Poincaré in regard to ‘set theory’ or ‘the theory of categories and how to define membership in categories’.  Some mathematicians argued for sets wherein, after one devised the rules for membership in the set, one could add as many new members as one liked without redefining the rules of membership [this leads to ‘infinite sets’ or treats ‘infinity’ as something ‘real’].   The other group maintained that every time one added a new member to the set one had to redefine all of the members of the set.   In this case, ‘infinity’ is not ‘real’ but just a possibility that one could work towards if one ‘had the time’ to keep adding and redefining [i.e. infinity is not accessible to mere mortals].

Could we add as many new members to the animal kingdom as we want, without redefining the members who were in the kingdom before we added the new members?  For example, we could define Indians in their local setting ‘pre-contact’ with European colonizers and then we could add colonizers.  But would we then have to redefine ‘Indians’?

You can see the problem; i.e. if we define ‘content’ in terms of relational dynamics or relational context then we have to redefine ‘Indians’ when we add ‘colonizers’ into the same relational habitat [“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” – Mach’s principle]

If Mach’s principle holds, as it does in a relational space, we have to redefine Indians when we add colonizers as new members.

If we start with a male in our menagerie and then add a female, do we have to redefine what a male is?  If we think of a male in terms of a local thing-itself defined by its local properties, its internal components and processes [imagine that we built a male machine] then we would not have to redefine it after constructing a new female member of the set, UNLESS, we gave priority as regards the ‘meaning’ of a thing, to the web of relational dynamics it was included in.   That is, in adding the female to the set, the relational dynamics of the male would have to be redefined.  Should we give priority meaning to a thing to its relational dynamics or to its local physical properties as a thing-in-itself?

More generally, if we look at another animal or another person, although the network of relations they are included in is vast and complex and not locally visible to us, it does have a huge influence in defining ‘who they are’.  Meanwhile, we seem more interested in their local, material form and their local actions since these are readily available to our visual and tactile senses.   If we are male and she is female, we may be interested in fondling her breasts and having sex with her and not even think of how connecting with her may connect us to the network of human microbiomes that have intermingled in her, including many interesting sexually transmitted disease microbiota.   [Microbiomes get entangled within one another, blurring the notional ‘independence’ of their ‘identity’; i.e. blurring the notion of one-form, one-identity.

So, there is a question, when we add a new member to the set, whether we think of ‘who they are’ in terms of their relational dynamics and entanglements [very complex as in ‘cosmic fetalization’] or whether we think of them in terms of their local material structure and content.   As far as adding a female member to a set which already has males in it, if it were just another electronic robot, we would not have to redefine the male [we might want to reprogram it], but if we think of a person in terms of their relational dynamics, we would have to redefine the male when we added the new female members.  If we accept that the relational dynamics [cosmic fetalization] is the more REAL AND MEANINGFUL ‘identity’, the local thing-in-itself common properties based identity can be regarded as a ‘pragmatic idealization’ that is ‘not real’.  Western science has meanwhile chosen to regard the local common properties based categorization as ‘real’ [this leads to ‘identity politics’ since it is then possible to understand what a thing is, out of the context of its relational cosmic fetalization.  In this case we could know what an Indian was before it ever lived together with European colonizers and we could know what a female was before it ever lived together with males.   There is evident logical contradiction here, of the vicious circle or ‘petitio principii variety’.

This is the issue that Peat and Bohm are talking about that Peat speaks to in ‘Blackfoot Physics’.   In the relational language of indigenous aboriginals, one understands the members of the set in terms of their relational dynamics, rather than in terms of their local material thing-in-itself structure.  Therefore, to add European colonizer members to the indigenous aboriginals and other members of the turtle island set, we should have to redefine all of the pre-contact members of the set since their relational dynamics will be transformed, that is, if we understand them by their relational dynamics rather than their local, visible, tangible material properties.

Which way we understand people differs on the basis of our language architecture; i.e.;

 

“The problem with English is that when it tries to grapple with abstractions and categories it tends to trap the mind into believing that such categories have an equal status with tangible objects. Algonquin languages, being for the ear, deal in vibrations [waves] in which each word is related directly, not only to process of thought, but also to the animating energies of the universe.

 

 

[in modern physics] It is impossible to separate a phenomenon from the context in which it is observed. Categories no longer exist in the absence of contexts.

 

 

Within Indigenous science, context is always important. Nothing is abstract since all things happen within a landscape and by virtue of a web of interrelationships. The tendency to collect things into categories does not exist within the thought and language of, for example, Algonquin speakers.

 

 

This leads to a profoundly different way of approaching and thinking about the world. For, in the absence of categories, each thing is mentally experienced on its own merits, and for what it actually is. Rather than indulging in comparison or judgment, Indigenous speakers attempt to enter into relationship with them.

 

 

What is needed, Bohm argued in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, is a new sort of language, one based on processes and activity, transformation and change, rather than on the interactions of stable objects. Bohm called this hypothetical language the “rheomode.” It is based primarily on verbs and on grammatical structures deriving from verbs. Such a language, Bohm argued, is perfectly adapted to a reality of enfolding and unfolding matter and thought.

 

 

David Bohm had not known when he wrote of that concept that such a language is not just a physicist’s hypothesis. It actually exists. The language of the Algonquin peoples was developed by the ancestors specifically to deal with subtle matters of reality, society, thought, and spirituality.

 

 

A few months before his death, Bohm met with a number of Algonkian speakers and was struck by the perfect bridge between their language and worldview and his own exploratory philosophy. What to Bohm had been major breakthroughs in human thought — quantum theory, relativity, his implicate order and rheomode – were part of the everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, Mic Maq, Cree and Ojibwaj.” – F. David Peat, ‘Blackfoot Physics’

This is what Poincaré is talking about when he is discussing how mathematicians are split on this question of whether earlier members in the set need to be redefined when we add subsequent members;

“At all times, there have been opposite tendencies in philosophy and it does not seem that these tendencies are on the verge of being reconciled. It is no doubt because there are different souls and that we cannot change anything in these souls. There is therefore no hope of seeing harmony established between the pragmatists [pragmatist-idealists] and the Cantorians [Cantorian realists]. Men do not agree because they do not speak the same language, and there are languages which cannot be learned.” — Henri Poincaré,  Dernières Pensées Chapter V, Mathematics and Logic

What Poincaré is suggesting is that ‘intuition’ is a language that cannot be learned while logic is a language that can be learned.  But I would say that if a European is raised speaking an indigenous aboriginal relational language, then he will keep relational experience based intuition in a natural precedence over logic.   So there is hope, if we bring in a new relational language.  That is, language is our problem; i.e. our ‘being-based’ language is the source of Western society’s social dysfunction [‘incoherence’ in Bohm’s terms].

* * *

Extract from a Discussion Forum on the topic of how ‘language confuses’

what is confusing this discussion is language.

noun-and-verb language-and-grammar constructs ‘identity-based semantic realities’.

for example, statements like the following imply the ‘existence’ of ‘things-in-themselves’;

“the experiences of black people in the USA vs. black people in the UK, has absolutely nothing to do with the podcast.”

do ‘black people exist’ and do ‘white people exist’ as implied in that statement?

““The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.” – Edward Sapir

in relational languages, there are no ‘beings’ and thus nothing to anchor ‘identity’ to, and nothing to impute ‘subjecthood’ and ‘local jumpstart authorship’ to, there are only relational activities such as ‘dances with wolves’.

if you make ‘black people’ the subject of a sentence and if you make ‘white people’ the subject of a sentence and if you make ‘the American’ the subject of a sentence, and if you make ‘Katrina’ the subject of a sentence, you are affirming the ‘existence’ of the named subjects and imputing ‘identity’ to them.

“Every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the existence of the object defined” — John Stuart Mill

conflict can arise within multi-person relational dynamics. if there are four people involved and one them is killed in the conflict, noun-and-verb language might report this as; ‘A Christian was killed by Muslims’, or a Woman was killed by men. or A black was killed by whites.

why not; ‘someone died in the fracas?’ why ‘identify’ an ‘author’? do we really need a notional ‘causal author’? i.e. the world is a transforming-in-the-now relational continuum, an ongoing relational activity.

“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

Our pre-literate experience is of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum and it does not have to be shared or communicated. if we decide that we want to share/communicate it, it is not written in stone that it must be communicated in terms of subject-verb-predicate constructs that break it down into ‘events’ with causal authors. That is just one ‘communications techniques’ or ‘language architectures’ and it is a ‘mechanical’ approach which breaks things down into separate and seemingly unrelated events [it assumes that the present depends only on the immediate past]. in this noun-and-verb approach we create persisting identities out of relational forms in the transforming relational continuum.

prior to the arrival of colonizers in north america, were there any ‘indians’ there? after the colonizers arrived and appropriated all the land, would we be accurate in isolating [in space and time] acts wherein ‘the indians are stealing apples from the colonizer’s orchards’? the ‘identities’ of indians and colonizers cannot be separated out from their relational entanglement, as in ‘indians are stealers of apples’. the imputing of authorship is something that comes from the device of breaking the transforming relational continuum into separate parts called ‘events’ that are portrayed as having a beginning and an ending as well as causal authors and results. it’s convenient but it has some major drawbacks. for example, the post-colonization indian is nothing like the pre-colonization indian, so we can’t say that ‘indians were there’ before they were discovered by the colonizers. in other words, as in the general understanding coming from modern physics, relations author things, rather than vice versa.

“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” … “The properties of one mass always include relations to other masses,” … “Every single body of the Universe stands in some definite relations with every other body in the Universe.” Therefore, no object can “be regarded as wholly isolated.” And even in the simplest case, “the neglecting of the rest of the world is impossible.” – Ernst Mach

because Western culture employs a noun-and-verb language [culture=language, language=culture], we share our pre-literate experience by using a type of language which breaks it down into local thing-in-themselves authors of cause-effect actions-and-results and make up ‘stories’ in this fashion. furthermore, we create a whole management infrastructure based on these stories that are in terms of ‘independent things’ and ‘what these things do’. so, we end up defining ‘indians’ as ‘stealers of apples’ which fails to acknowledge the relational entanglement that blurs their identity with that of the orchard ‘owners’ and puts concepts such as ownership and theft in question [they have no meaning in our pre-literate experiencing of inclusion within a transforming relational continuum].

bottom line: ‘identity’ is foundational in noun-and-verb language-and-grammar. language = culture and culture = language. Western culture = noun-and-verb language. The ‘semantic reality’ in Western culture is ‘being-based’ [based on notional things-in-themselves with persisting identity that we construct using semantic structures like ‘indians are stealers of apples’] and the noun-and-verb semantic reality is nothing like the ‘semantic reality’ in cultures with relational languages. ‘Identity politics’ is an artefact of Western culture = noun-and-verb language. It does not make any sense in our pre-literate experience. if you believe in Western semantic realities, which are what you find in the views of the world you hear on the media news and in the speeches of politicians, then you are confusing ‘pragmatic idealization’ for ‘reality’. the pragmatic idealization that is in terms of what things-in-themselves are doing has little to do with the physical reality of our actual RELATIONAL [preliterate] experience.

don’t believe what you are told, trust your pre-literate relational experience which has no need of explaining dynamics in the mechanical terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these things-in-themselves do’.

* * * * *