My original plan, back in 1996, intended to describe, with an examination of its roots, structure, and performance (i.e., behavior), the ineffable item consciousness. (In English “consciousness” is linguistically an item, a noun; this is an important detail.) My answer eventually led me to Whitehead’s notion of “actual occasion,” a fundamental nano-event, and his claim that such spontaneous occasions precede matter; it is an action without an actor (performer of the action.) As I understand it – which might be incorrect – matter consists of, or is the result or apparent form of such moments of action. He used those roots to construct, in essence, a formal, rigorous theology, or a rationalization of it. For my purpose his ultimate theologic product serves no useful purpose and actually distracts from the profound possibilities that his fundamental concept – that is, “actual occasion(s)” – allow. To me, he missed one of the great opportunities in intellectual development.

At the time that he flourished (1861-1947) mathematicians were struggling with and resolving the usefulness of Aristotle’s two kinds of quantity: continuous and discrete. The academic discussion eventually dismissed continuous quantity as unnecessary, laying the groundwork for discrete mathematics and the subsequent virtual explosion of mathematic, scientific, and technological development. The 20th century and many of its greatest results and products can be traced to discrete math. Discrete math itself hinges solely on the concept of discreteness. Discreteness roughly means particle-like, something either physical or conceptual that has a beginning and an end, or edges, or boundaries of some kind that separate it from everything else. Numbers are quantities with boundaries; anything less than or more than eight, for example, resides outside of the number eight’s “boundaries.”

Discrete math’s insistence on discreteness threw away a second kind of quantity or amount: continuous quantity. Old Ari had apparently believed that a line, for example, had a kind of continuous, unbroken amount because it contained both an infinite amount of possible parts and yet was a different length than some other line. In order to distinguish one line from another without counting an infinite number of shorter lengths that might fall within each (which would make different lengths equal because both contain an infinite number of sub-lengths) he devised the notion of continuous quantity. Modern math dismissed the notion as unnecessary, deciding that discrete quantity is good enough for every problem.

Whitehead missed the opportunity to take the newly defined discrete mathematics’s use of discreteness, then find an obvious counterpart suitable to his infinitesimal “occasion.” It appears to me that occasions and events have as their defining characteristic a quality I call “movingness.” {Time, to some, might seem more obvious. Two reasons preclude it. Time is a dimension, not a characteristic. More importantly, in Whitehead’s work, “actual occasions” precede time; I’ll cover this later, if at all.}

Whitehead did define his occasion, of course. But in the context of his era and especially of his ten year writing partner’s (Bertrand Russell’s) key role in resolving the discrete/continuous issue it astonishes me that he would ignore the opportunity to offer his work in counterpart to theirs and do so in language and logic similar to theirs. He could easily have shown that the discreteness that permits rapid mathematical advancement does so at the cost of describing a lively universe as lifeless bits. Then he could equally easily have shown that the movingness of his “actual occasion” permits equally rigorous and precise description of the liveliness that motion itself exhibits. With the pair of characteristics, both the precise and the intuitively apparent features of the universe would together provide complete intellectual understanding of physical reality for anyone interested in pursuing it.

Despite overlooking the chance that his work had presented, Whitehead’s “actual occasion” has given us the only significant idea from which we can derive liveliness and do so with some assurance of validity. Without Whitehead’s notion Crick’s discreteness-based, reductionist hypothesis (Astonishing Hypothesis1) triumphantly precludes life except as an illusion of scale. But with it (i.e., with discreteness) we can have both precision and life. No one has contributed a single equally simple and fundamental notion, other than Whitehead, with greater value. He may have mis-mapped a New World, but he found it when no one else would even consider looking. His “actual occasion” deserves to stand as one of the greatest of the 20th century’s achievements. [line added, 10/6/08:] But, I’ve learned of others with things to say, some preceding Whitehead, most after him, about which more, later.

Occasions allow complex events

8/20/08, ~1pm, A², Wells St. (temp sleeping room) 

Consciousness, its definition and so forth, being my target subject, has for years seemed to me more of an event than a thing. Stumbling upon Whitehead’s “actual occasion” immediately looked like the key to unlocking consciousness as a complex event. But reading key parts of his book, and comparing it to the decades of subsequent comment made me dismiss it as a lost opportunity. Theologic proponents – largely Christians – have adopted “process philosophy” as their own because Whitehead pointed them in that direction. Doubtless, this dissuaded serious mathematicians from ever giving Whitehead’s late-life work in analytic philosophy a second look.

His key idea (as far as I care) is an “actual occasion,” an event caused by nothing because it itself, and that precedes “things.” Indeed, for him it both permits and becomes things. It does not occur in time, it creates time. This primacy puts it at the beginning of existence itself, virtually causing existence. For people with any kind of theologic proclivity this naturally feeds their expectation that a deity causes the cause. But for the rest of us, especially those of us who want to avoid the logical fallacy of begging the question, we cannot say that “God caused it, therefore god exists.” (It presumes something so as to “prove” what it merely presumes.) Instead we can only stick to the facts: “actual occasions” simply occur. And, for me at any rate, that suffices.

It is sensible to reduce a thing to its parts, and those to their parts down to their atoms and quanta. Similarly we can reasonably reduce events to their parts and sub-parts; ordinary math does this through vectors. The end of this latter process – event reduction – will doubtless be something resembling Whitehead’s actual occasion. (I’m dropping the quotes; you know it’s a special phrase.) He began with that, then he added a second fundamental that he called, consistently, an “actual object.” From those two key ideas he developed what is now called “process philosophy” and introduced a unique conception of God that he felt was rigorous. The deism detracts from the valuable contribution that his actual occasion made. Starting with an occasion, and many of them, offers us some hope, though, of climbing a ladder to larger and more complex events, events that co-occur with the objects his occasions produce. This requires us to balance an object’s discreteness with an event’s movingness. It also permits us to dismiss any confusion about “co-occurrence” simply by recognizing that one – the actual object – consists of (or is the result of) the other, the actual event.

Insert on 9/04/08, ~9pm, A², Sweetwaters. 

That last line – balance discreteness with movingness – constitutes the core notion from which, I believe, most of reality as we know it can be understood: in addition to the discreteness of discrete things stands the movingness of action. Without the second characteristic “all that is” reduces to inert objects pushing each other around according to the conscious-less “choices” of unstoppable particles of motion (quanta of energy.) The objects collect, join, cluster, and self-assemble allowing the compounding process itself to effectively preclude some of the randomness. Yet the relentless permanence of quanta of energy compels the inert to appear, but only appear, to take action. Eventually a grand self-assembly arises that appears to be endowed with initiative, then morphs and mutates and discovers (stumbles upon) replication that then enables the lowly particles of energy conjoined with Higgs’s bosons to accelerate grand self-assemblies, objects that now give the appearance of non-random, self-initiated action. Life becomes a name for the mere illusion that a self-acting object made of lesser inert objects cannot define. This is the universe borne only of discreteness, the characteristic formalized by mathematicians like Whitehead, his colleague Russell, and peers like Gottlob Frege (who asked, "What objects do number-words (‘one,’ ‘two’, etc.) refer to?")

Only movingness – the characteristic that precedes motion – can permit motion and action apart from particles of energy to exist. With it we can rationally climb a ladder parallel to that of discrete self-assembly and derive a complex, physical-but-non-material action, an event, and a coherent self-contained self-perpetuating event at that. If we accept movingness as a an equally valid, equally fundamental characteristic to that of discreteness, then both structure and motion become intellectually tractable (although tractable does not imply “easy” any more than fundamental would imply simple.)

8/20/08, ~1pm, A², Wells St. (temp sleeping room): 

Consciousness is, to me, such an event: a complex and compounded, and yet still an integrated, self-sustaining whole. Its unique importance to us, its exquisite complexity, its co-location with the object called a brain, its immediate accessibility, and its apparent connection to physical-but-non-material (that is, not immaterial nor illusory) reality(s) make consciousness one of the finest candidates for study as a complex of actual occasions. Elsewhere I call it a “complex, adaptive action.”

(10/1/8, 4:36pm. ) Movingness, particleness, and Whitehead’s metaphysics of Process Philosophy serve as a beginning point for a rigorous model of consciousness. This seems to be my general purpose in writing this. For the moment, consider it the title for this bagatelle of text.

Religion vs. Occasion

more … 9/04/08, ~9pm, A², Sweetwaters. 

Yeah, Whitehead laid his foundation with the intention of sharpening religion. After a brilliant start he philosophized without seriously addressing the history or the origins of religious belief. I think I’ve meandered my way (a meander I’ll share soon enough) to a sensible – at least an arguable – history of religious and spiritual belief that – also arguably – point to personal, internal cognitive experiences that become religions, but that could also point back from the cognition to his actual occasions.

Before I lay that out: I have so far called upon a mathematician to dismiss the singularity of math’s primary form (discrete math, but only dismissing it as sufficient), suggested adding an entirely new branch of mathematics (something that begins with movingness as a complement to discreteness), passingly invoked the entire academic field of complexity theory, suggested that both life and consciousness can be explicitly and rigorously defined knowing full-well that hundreds of brilliant, living, working scholars have so far failed at the latter and most everyone in human history has failed at the former, intimated that all spirituality and its plethora of developed cosmogonies, cosmologies, and derivative cultural institutions began in neurological events in long-dead individuals’ brains, and (get this) now insinuate that this all fits together in ways that any intelligent non-specialist person can easily understand. As a backyard gardener recently said (quoted in the Chicago Tribune, late in Aug. ’08), “If you’re going to make a statement, don’t mumble.” {~1,600 wds, so far}

9/07/08, ~9pm, A², Espresso Royale Café (ERC-Main.) 

The statement, explicitly, is that consciousness has a scientifically sensible origin (for which Whitehead laid the groundwork, or at least its kernel) and development – both from birth to adulthood and from the Big Bang until now – that requires no particular deity or religion to create it, that it (consciousness) logically co-exists with brains, and (or but?) that its origin and operation suggest do not require a material brain to function and persist. The last bit alludes to near-death, out-of-body, remote viewing, and past life regression experiences. I mention them with trepidation, but with full awareness that some reader somewhere will excitedly detect the logical conclusion, then misconstrue, un-rigorously extend, and then misuse their own misunderstanding. What I see in the logic clearly points that way, but that way is narrow and missteps include insanity or behavior that can endanger many more than the solitary fool. (However, I do find the possibilities entertaining at a minimum.)

The schematic can be stated simply enough, although the argument, evidence, and proof-of-concept require rather substantial effort (largely in scholarly libraries.) An actual occasion amounts to nothing more than the tiniest, briefest expression of activeness/movingness. (Before I forget to mention it: although “activeness” is linguistically correct and sufficient, its common use implicitly carries a hint of an actor acting. “Movingness” intends to eliminate that hint and, so, purifies the characteristic of personality, making it “objective” for scientific inquiry.) As “movingness moving,” no particular thing engages in or performs the action; this is the most critical and difficult concept. It is dangerously close to today’s very rude American slang expression, “Shit happens,” as both the slang event and the occasion attribute results to no origin at all. An occasion in fact amounts to “origin,” at least in Whitehead’s work; matter comes out of occasions, and time also comes out of occasions, so neither time nor matter can be blamed for the occasion nor for the “amount” of time that an occasion requires. An occasion does not have an origin nor an originator; rather it originates. It constitutes impulse that can – although it need not – yield a result, an occasion. (Naturally this rouses the question: what circumstance occurs or condition exists that makes one occasion yield a result and another none? Briefly, I dunno; I merely note the fact so as to be thorough. Toldja there’s work to do.)

9/16/08, ~11am, A², Wells St. (temp sleeping room) 

From this concept of movingness moving we simply look and can see that an all but infinite number of instances have and do occur. Furthermore, occasions occur and recur, but might also differ in various ways (by which I mean, duration, shape, “size,” and the like.) And the simultaneity, concurrence, juxtaposition, and iterative features of multiple occasions permit – although do not require – compounding and interaction. Interaction(s) may be expected – again, not necessarily required – to influence the manifestation of one occasion by another. Finally, the compounding of occasions can, just as happens in the macro level world in which we live, become a much grander occasion or event. For example, we know from atomic and chemical and other physical science that atoms form molecules that move and that can move in unison and become a monsoon or hurricane event; grander (galactic) and tinier (quantum) levels of reality exhibit similar compounding. Finally, under certain conditions compounding becomes complex, not merely additive. The entire field of complexity theory examines this and repeatedly proves the non-linearity of what have become known as complex adaptive systems (CASs, coined by Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann, but based on his and other people’s work.)

My schematic, then, simply (1) expects that the things we know about physical matter also occur in comparable scales (or degrees, or levels) in regard to motion, from the movingness of a Whiteheadian actual occasion to a mind busily thinking, and (2) that the apparent inseparability of motion from matter is illusory, an illusion borne of the persistence (since the Big Bang?) of the pairing rather than of proof of inseparability. The first, intuitively, seems straightforward: structures and events both evolve. The second, though, requires us to imagine dancing that occurs without dancers. A bit of a challenge to the non-mystic, and to the scientist or mathematician who wishes to remain employed.

9/07/08, ~9pm, A², Espresso Royale Café (ERC-Main.) 



While Whitehead later calls upon his version of a largely Christian god to explain the origin of occasions – he seems to have expected and sought an initiative behind movingness moving – it seems to me that science and mathematics and the universe can begin and work quite well without speculating about some metaphysical precedent to the Big Bang or the “First Actual Occasion.” That is, deities may or may not exist, but observable and calculable reality does not require attending to gods in order to observe and calculate anything. We need not pester a deity with an invocation before grabbing a ruler to accurately measure our foot, nor to examine, use, and calculate all that might follow an actual occasion, nor even to examine any instance of an occasion. I wouldn’t yammer on about it except that some misguided reader will yammer – vociferously – about some alleged atheism (denial) when I’m trying to deal only with – constrain my monolog to – ordinary physical reality (i.e., practicality.)

{insert 11/21/08, taken from old notes2}: A point cannot move without becoming a different point; hence discreteness or particleness prohibits motion. Mathematics – discrete math, at least -- begins by postulating particles, forbids motion to remain logically consistent, then successfully describes every conceivable path of motion, until it ultimately faces physicist Roland Omnes’s exasperated exclamation that “we [physicists] don’t know even what motion is [his italics.]”3

9/07/08 : Now, theonyms, actual occasions, actual mentation (to use the perfect, but archaic, term), and their connection.

Theonyms

“Theonym” is the general term for names of deities, the logical and linguistic class into which fall all deity names, the “proper names” which are personal identifiers for them. They are onomastic terms. The world has – so far as anyone has catalogued to date – over 19,000 such names. And just like all names no one ever translates them, they just move intact across languages as people in one place learn a name and use it. Typically – at least here in the Western world – a deity name only acquires an occupational attribute. A few persistent scholars have devoted a lot of time and energy to trace the linguistic origins of some important theonyms – I suppose we could call them (although [to my knowledge] they do not) theo-onomasticists or theo-onomastologists. We mostly only know the cultural origin, not the linguistic; the linguistic origins are probable more than they are definitive. Ordinary people’s names have been traced more thoroughly than theonyms. This occurs because our names sometimes derive from deities (Theodora is a female lover of god, so it is a “theophorous” proper name [that is, a proper name {of a person} derived from the names of their gods]), from royalty (e.g., from King David), occupations (Smith, Forester), and characteristics (Ralph from old German meaning wise wolf, or nicknames like Baldy.)

Theonymony, not Theonomy, and objects

9/16/08, ~12pm, A², Wells St. (temp sleeping room) 

The study of theonyms is theonymony. It must not be confused with theonomy. Theonomy refers to “God’s law(s)” and typically appears in literalist American Christian writings about proper behavior and is of no use to me here. You can examine, if you like, the etymology of the suffixesi for the two terms to assure yourself that my usage is correct. I only want to bring your attention to the difference to save you useless internet searching, and a troublesome argument that could be borne of confusing the two (but also to sequester the theonymists far away from me.)

10/03/08, ~2:30pm, A², Wells St. 

But what does theonymony have to do with consciousness? Just a moment ago I said that theonyms, actual occasions, and actual mentation do connect. Movingness, I believe, gives us a fundamental characteristic of reality (as we experience it) from which we can account for all those unruly issues; it connects them by serving as a common root. I’ll spend more time on the characteristic later, and just focus on the connection(s) I see.

Let me assume – until I later make a good argument for it – that movingness significantly differs from discreteness. This means, in my terms, that thinking that itself depends upon a core belief in discreteness as a sufficient characteristic to account for and explain the universe and its contents (from quanta to consciousness) is a constrained way of thinking. This dependence upon discreteness ultimately fails to explain – rather than merely describe – motion of any kind, often misleading a thoughtful person to understand the universe as nothing more than lifeless objects that interact and effectively delude an observer with an illusion that life exists. This conclusion contradicts what anyone can plainly see: life lives just as obviously as objects persist. 10/03/08, ~3:08pm

10/08/08, Swtwtr, 10:22 p.m. 

By asserting that objects depend upon a fundamental belief in objects (whether those we see that consist of lesser objects or those that are abstract [e.g., ideas]) and in the primacy of objects (as the total content of all that physically exists, including the particles of energy in quantum mechanics [vs. quantum field theory]) and concurrently treating even abstractions as objects (such as numbers, ideas, and events) two conclusions appear. One, that motion possesses a wholeness, integrity, and thus has discreteness. Weather processes acquire object-like names such as hurricane, monsoon, and storm. This betrays our presumption that only objects are credible to us. And two, that objects lack something we need for accurately describing the motion we see as plainly as we see the object. Thus, objects are insufficient for accurate perception and understanding of the physical universe, making all object-like language that we us equally suspect.

My reaction to object-dependence and its insufficiency is simple and, I think, useful. Movingness provides a complement to the discreteness of objects. Since I’m writing non-sequentially, forgive me if I’ve already said this: while we can and do see events (whether a storm or a ballet) as objects only to make it convenient to distinguish them from the rest of reality and truly understand they are events not objects, our perception and understanding only accounts for this movement/event in terms of its component objects, dancers or air and water molecules, being moved. This differs from an alternative way of looking: the grand event consists of lesser events that consist of lesser motions. Scientific reduction applies to action as to objects. I can see little reason other than habit for viewing motions as a mere trail in time through which objects pass; we can just as rationally account for objects as footprints in space that appear after action has occurred. The object is a husk formed in space by action that lacks an actor.

That said, I have no basis for totally rejecting perception from those with object-oriented proclivities. Our nervous systems and bodies function extremely well using this presumption, and science and mathematics have enjoyed spectacular advances by limiting the field of view to objects. I’d be a fool to deny the value that an assumption of object-ness has added. This admission, though, does not require me to deny my alternative view. In fact, as far as I can see, the inadequacy of objects to explain consciousness (cognition of any kind, actually), deism, irreproducible spiritual experience (millions of reports), or even Whitehead’s “actual occasion” (actor-less action) urge if not demand that I and all the rest of us give the non-discrete notion of movingness our direct attention as a requisite precursor belief that makes those aspects of reality tractable. Sorry, though, for yammering on about it.

An acceptance of movingness as a peer to discreteness requires us to make it rigorous and tractable; with it we can use Whitehead (and others) for untangling the inconvenient but real mind; we can grasp the depth of quantum field theory, and restore the value that non-nominal languages (like Apache, Cherokee, et al) give its speakers who easily understand the immaterial realities of both quantum fields and spirits. Sigh … gotta go. 11:40pm, 10/8/8

…

09/08/08, Swtwtr, 11:22 p.m. 

In ANW’sii P&R4 he says: “We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies, are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions. Such a change of thought is the shift from materialism to Organic Realism, as a basic idea of physical science.” – Process and Reality, p. 471.

This seems to show that he sought an alternate formal reality that counters materialism. At first glance, my schematic seems to agree with him (which pleased me as I’d made no attempt to do so.) Unfortunately it seems to me he leapt to a conclusion without properly allowing his actual occasion(s) to speak for itself, as it were. (OK, three books make more of an amble than a leap, but you get the idea.) Happily, he dismissed Descartes’s schism that led to materialism. But ANW still failed at that late point (p.471) to so much as notice that his Organic Realism borne of actual occasions requires an antecedent, a precursor, to occasions. No, I’m not referring to initiative.

It astonishes me that, having lived in the thick of the discrete math commotion and its explicit requirement, that discreteness – a mere characteristic – lays the foundation for it and that this detail should evade his keen mind’s eye. A philosophy of organism seems to me to presume that not only does organism require an actual occasion, but also to presume that occasions can only, and inevitably lead to organism, i.e., vernacularly “life.” Had he demanded of himself what the discrete-men did of themselves, movingness as a precedent requirement would have taken a central place in his musings … and it would have led not merely to organism but to all manner of compoundings and complexities of motion, both living and otherwise. My ramble, here, must focus on the necessity of countering the discreteness (object-ness, if you will) that precedes then produces mathematical and then scientific thought with an equally fundamental – and equally intuitively obvious – characteristic. Movingness serves better than any other quality of natural reality.

Theonymony – 2nd mention

09/10/08, Swtwtr, 8:08 p.m. 

Unrelated to Whitehead (to whom my attention’s return lurks beyond a hiatus), but related to consciousness and to deism and its theonymony, and the metaphors for deities (rather, metaphors that became deities) a psychological tidbit came to mind [I was just reading a paper (by Olaf Jäkel, 2002) applying the cognitive theory of metaphor to religion (ISSN 1618-2006, Das online-Journal metaphorik.de.)]

“Father” and “fatherly” and maternal equivalents regularly appear in many deific traditions, qualities that clearly relate to, if not derive from, the creator/progenitor role that many deities play. These terms typically presume to evoke indications of warmth, comfort, provisioning, guidance, and the like. An unfortunate consequence of such terms arises when ordinary human psychological functions dealing with parental characteristics and their emotional associations intrude upon parental metaphors.

Generally humans form their personal understanding of their experience based upon the actions of the parents towards the child: whatever the parent does relative to the child, the child will add to its own definition of “love.” Children have no alternative input to form any other understanding, thus become adults who act towards those they love as their parents did toward them. It is well known that abused children express their most extreme terror and panic when torn – usually by legal means – from an abusive parent: the abuser provided the only form of “love” they have known (hence separation / abandonment terror) and cannot (for lack of experience of comforting, healing, helping behavior from one whom they “know” loves them) and will not (because “only” abuse constitutes love) accept any other treatment as “loving.” They then grow into abusive adults, as any working social worker will attest and a wealth of research confirms; love, to them consists of abuse.

Anecdotally, I personally knew an individual born with a congenital heart condition that required early treatment. It took until age 4-5 before the trouble was finally identified. So the parents acquired the financial means to address it, then scheduled open heart surgery, and devoted all their energy to the child’s recovery. The child then survived physically, emotionally, and prospered intellectually. Some time into puberty I overheard a conversation between classmates about the now young adult. The lusty teen had said to a potential date that “I want to cut you up,” and instantly doomed any hope of ever dating anyone. This rolled around in my mind once in awhile until I recalled the heart surgery. What would a loving, but not terribly intellectually endowed, parent say to a child facing the ordeal of heart surgery? Very likely something like, “We love you so much that we will do anything to save your life so we found a doctor who can fix your heart. The doctor will put you to sleep then have to cut you – but it won’t hurt while you’re asleep -- to get inside and fix it.” And the child, “Will it hurt? Why do you want him to cut me?” And the parent, “Because we love you.” A four-five year old child cannot detach the cutting (surgery) from the loving, especially when they are overtly connected. It would never come to mind, so surgery would become embedded, entangled, and identified with love. Cutting “is” loving, so when you want to love, you cut; worst of all, the childish logic never enjoyed review, reconsideration, and a clarified overhaul because it is embedded at a primal level, in the deepest emotional need we know.

Deities as parents, thus, acquire every type of personality depending entirely and only upon each individual’s personal history with – and sometimes without (death and orphanry, or simple abandonment or chronic absence) – their primary early caregiver(s.) Abused children have abusive deities, so can justify abuse based both on their own abusive experience (“I came out [matured] all right”) and their presumptive abusiveness of the Primal Power and Source. Personal, individual psychological processes impose on whatever source (commonly an ancient individual’s personal mystic experience) that generated the deity from a metaphor for mystic cognition, if the language describing the deity, such as a parental metaphor enables such interference. Parental qualities attributed to the divine are particularly vulnerable to intrusions from a devotee’s mind. Now, back to work.

The cognitive theory of metaphor and metonymy (CTMM, see Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By5) and derivative Blending Theory (BT), -- particularly as a human rather than cultural proclivity -- requires us to give additional attention to the cognitive origin of deities, their characteristics, and attendant roles. The latter two, if metaphor and metonym do in fact account for the bulk of language production, expose the risk that humans take by using analogic tools to convey cognitive content; and the former (cognitive origin) makes objectivity difficult. Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity6, 1933, p. 747–61.) long ago admonished that “the map is not the territory.” In order to find the metaphoric territory that theonyms and their qualities map encourages a search for (1) their etymological source(s), (2) the explicit semantic content thereof, (3) the analogic possibilities of the sememes (meanings), and most importantly (4) some candidates for cognitive content that could become or produce those sememes that act as metaphors for cognition. This uniqueness of mystical experience eludes normal language, forcing metaphoric language that, over time, devolve into objects, entities, and deities.

Mystical experience is both a cognitive event and a ubiquitous aspect of deism and of spirituality generally. Such experience now enjoys the benefit of technological neurological study – vs. first-person reportage – of brains engaged in alternative states of consciousness (see, e.g., Eugene D’Aquili and Andrew Newberg’s work.7)  stop ~11 p.m.~3,900 wds

10/01/09, 11:45am, A², Wells St. 

Theonyms, I believe, based on a first (vs. thorough) glance at the etymological research, describe various aspects of individual mystical experience. Many hundreds or thousands of reports of mystical experience ranging from the ancience to today and from American suburbs to remote shamans (diluted by an abundance of charlatans, swindlers, and fakes) contain variations of similar language for similar experiences. The experience occurs in the human brain but, inconveniently, gives the person the sense that what they are experiencing encompasses all of the universe and all of time.  stop ~12:19pm

Mystic movingness, actorless action

9/20/08, ~3pm, A², Wells St. (temp sleeping room) 

Returning to consciousness and its experience of apparent divinity (descriptions of which I think morph into theonyms), ANW’s occasions provide the critical link. Earlier I’d yammered on about the discreteness – the boundedness – of the math that dominates today’s world (and science and generally our entire way of seeing the world), but then pointed out that the complement to discreteness is movingness (not passive fluidity, nor time in any place in space.) For anyone familiar with mystical experience – this would include scholars who study it, neurologists who examine it, and those who have experienced it or pursued the experience – one of its profoundest effects is a sense of unity. This does not mean merely a general feeling of well-being, of wholeness of mind, body and their integrity as a unit; it means a feeling of cosmic union, or union with the cosmos.

The experiencer typically struggles to find an accurate way to describe it; phrases like “being at one with God [or with the universe],” or “losing one’s sense of self” [losing the separation of self from any & everything], and includes standardized religious phrases like the Catholic Christian “Unio Mystica” [mystical union (and the church presumes union with God)], “ego death,” and now neurologists Newberg and D’Aquili’s newly coined phrase “absolute unitary being” or “AUB.” These two neurologists distinguish different levels of mystical experience, and put what they call AUB at the top of the mystical list based on its neurologic uniqueness. According to them, a person who achieves it (AUB) not only feels “at one with the universe” but no longer even distinguishes the universe from their personal self: they alone are the universe and the universe is the only “self” that exists. It is reported to be deeply gratifying and liberating but also provides a profoundly emotional experience against which the deepest personal love we have yet known seems like a mere flirty wink. And this brings me directly to ANW.

If ordinary experience, and the scientific analysis and understanding of it, depend upon today’s mathematics that itself depends upon discreteness, then science cannot and can never truly examine nor understand, nor even account for mystical experience: it has no parts, particles, subdivisions, boundaries, limits, insides, nor outsides; it eliminates discreteness.

But if ANW’s actual occasion depends – as I believe – upon an equally fundamental characteristic like my proposed quality “movingness” (which has equally valid “reality” or “realness” to discreteness), then we can reliably and systematically – thus, scientifically – examine not only mystical experience as a tractable phenomena, but also re-examine ordinary mountains and men as complex events rather than as bounded complex objects composed of lesser bounded objects.

Luckily, mystical experience gives us an explicitly suitable target: it has no object, objects, observer, nor observed. Yet, if the reports (many thousands of them) indicate anything at all, the experience consists of motion, action, movement, flow, fluidity, initiative, and emotion all of which exist entirely devoid of any mover or shaker. To use a metaphor, it seems to me it would be like one is watching ballet but that no dancers do any of the dancing, and yet the ballet exists, occurs, and has perceptibility.

Action without an actor constitutes (at least it does for me) the heart of ANWs actual occasion. And his occasions provide all that anyone should logically need to describe and study a highly sophisticated, complex, stand-alone, physical but non-material event like mystic moments. From there – a valid minimum action acting, or movingness moving – to consciousness itself becomes a tractable non-material reality. I expect tracing the growth from actual occasion to mind will require at least as much work as it has taken physicists to deconstruct the road from rocks down to quantum particles and up to quasars; but it ought take less than the 2,000 years since Democritus proposed the atom (the smallest uncuttable object.) After all, we’ve acquired experience at explaining one level relative to another and can re-apply that expertise.

Adding that second quality – movingness – gives us a beginning from which to build a rational, logical (consistent and coherent) method(ology) for seeing into the universe’s ground of being. It also permits (but does not guarantee) us to restore vitality to what Rudolf Steiner called “the coffin of science,”8 the particle-based way of seeing “all that is” as lifeless blocks, the view explicitly expounded by Frances Crick (again, see his Astonishing Hypothesis book.)  4:15pm{9/24. misc. edits}

Thisness and QFT

10/06/08, ~7:00pm, A², Espresso Royale Café (ERC-State St.) 

“… [I]nner content is not sufficient for cognition, even when the representations that carry the content play a role in generating appropriate behaviour.” Terry Dartnall, 2000.9

9/25/08, ~3:30pm, A², Espresso Royale Café (ERC-State St.) 

Oh no! Browsing the net, I stumbled upon Stanford’s entry10 about quantum field theory (QFT), a complement to quantum mechanics (QM.) Late in the article (sect. 5.1.3 and following) I finally found a reference (for which I’d been searching) to a new-ish book (Hättich 200211) applying or invoking Whitehead:

“Seibt 2002 and Hättich 2004 defend process-ontological accounts of QFT. A critical examination of a process ontological understanding of QFT is given in Kuhlmann 2000 and also in Kuhlmann 2002 where an interpretation in terms of so-called tropes (i.e., properties understood as particulars) is proposed as a better alternative. Cao argues, e.g., in Cao 1997b, that the best ontological access to QFT is gained by concentrating on structural properties rather than on any particular category of entities.”

And earlier (sect. 5.1.1.) the writer specifically brought up “discreteness” saying,

“Probably the most immediate trait of particles is their discreteness. Particles are countable individuals in contrast to a liquid or a mass. Obviously this characteristic alone cannot constitute a sufficient condition for being a particle since there are other things which are countable as well without being particles, e.g., money or maxima and minima of the standing wave of a vibrating string. It seems that the so-called primitive thisness or haecceity is missing to make up a sufficient condition for a particle, i.e., it must be possible to say that it is this or that particle which has been counted in order to account for the fundamental difference between ups and downs in a wave pattern and particles particles (see also the entry on quantum theory: identity and individuality).”

So, I have much more reading to do.  3:51pm

9/27/08, ~3pm, A², Wells St. (temp sleeping room) 11:00 a.m. 

Before I do more reading – which, in my case, tends to lead me away from whatever goal I’d been pursuing before the importance of the diversion demanded my attention – Hättich’s book appeared, from its description and recency, to directly affect my musings about particleness and movingness. It explicitly attempts to build a bridge between, and then to integrate, Whitehead’s metaphysics with the rigors of quantum field theory (QFT.) Three book reviewers, all of them physicists, point out the book’s strengths and weaknesses. They seem to concur that Hättich provided the best and most important blending of the two conceptual domains. None granted him {her?} the accolade “successful” because the book had limitations and disputable points; neither limits nor debates suggest failure, but either will temper the measure of the book’s argument’s success. Assuming I find a copy, find the time to read it, and have the intellectual wherewithal to understand it – QFT employs powerful mathematical tools beyond the reach of most of us (including me) – then it may show that someone else has already done the heavy lifting for my little discussion (i.e., the pages in your hand.)

But until then, the Stanford essay pointed directly to the core of one end of my thoughts: the discreteness of particles. From the quote above, discreteness and its particles clearly enjoy a very long history of discussion. At some minor intellectual risk for lack of reading about that discussion, I can comment off the cuff.

The haecceity (this/thatness, not the whatness) of particles also apply to the motions and movements of movingness. Movements and items both intuitively possess some distinguishability, as the Stanford writer says, both from their environment and from one another. Does the discreteness of particles and the discreteness of movements defeat my insistence on movingness as a counterbalancing complement to discreteness? I think not. As I use “movingness” it refers both to change/changing and to the persistence of change (or, at a minimum, duration.) Particles possess and exhibit persistence of non-change. This/that individual object (regardless whether physical or abstract) persists as itself. This/that motion – remembering that I’m referring to action without an actor, objectless action acting -- differs from {… break 12:21 - 03:50pm…} an individual object in its persistence in time, I think, more so than space. Obviously they both exist in spatio-temporal places, but one emphasizes space, the other time. At least I think that suffices to differentiate them; I could be wrong. In fact, I’ll set this aside until I satisfy myself about their shared discreteness but differing expression: objectness/particle-ness vs. movingness. Perhaps I’ll even dig up the reference to mathematician Shapiro’s comment that numbers themselves are considered objects. I think Shapiro refers to their lack of change (explicitly the opposite of motion / movingness), that they have a permanent and immutable form (“2” remains “2” regardless time or notation [binary, decimal, spelled]); so I have to deal with it some time.

Oh! QFT differs from QM (quantum mechanics) as the latter, QM, explicitly emphasizes the particle-ness at the extreme minimum scales of the universe; QFT, though, emphasizes the “field” that ordinary folks can kind of understand by imagining a cloud of energy. QFT’s imaginary cloud has no tinier bits of energy (that would make it QM) that make up the cloud, so it’s tough to visualize. I just think of the glow around a light bulb in the fog, then imagine the glow without the bulb creating it, then the glow without the fog. Adding to the difficulty, quantum electro dynamics (QED) was the precursor to QFT. 4:08, 9/27

Objects in Math

10/01/08, ~3:30pm, A², Wells St. 

Here are a couple of references applicable to my monologue.

In mathematics, the mathematician Stewart Shapiro says “we … treat … positions as objects [his italics] … [Some mathematicians] assert that numbers are objects …. Places-are-objects … are bona fide objects12.” Later he says that “ante rem realism [the idea that redness, for example, exists even if no red objects exist] … comes closest to capturing how mathematical theories are conceived … [It] delivers … [the] structure of structures.”13

Another writer, K. Neal, says “[the] traditional idea of discrete number versus continuous magnitude was challenged in the early modern period in several ways.”14 This might satisfy the reader who tracks the origins of scientifically accepted ideas, such as Shapiro’s assertion that numbers are objects. John L. Bell gives a nice online history15 of discrete and continuous amounts.

Regarding this, in 2005 I wrote16:

In other words, math itself focuses entirely and only on objects, despite any arguments about what constitutes an object.17 In current advanced “metamathematics” that Shapiro later describes, mathematical work shifts its focus from the objects to the relationships among them.18 But the math still consists of relationships among objects, things that are distinguishable and inert, things (physical or mental) that can, because they are objects, have a relationship. (“Relationship’ in math means simply that, for example, the numbers four and two are related by division, multiplication, squaring, or are sets containing or contained by each other, and so forth.)  Wells St., 4:07 p.m.

ANW, QFT, 100 Years of Movingness

10/02/08, Swtwtr, 10:48 p.m. 

More notes. After spending the past hour or two in this café with carpenter-philosopher Paul Spence, beginning with comments about Whitehead’s process philosophy and Hattich’s QFT linkage, he began pointing me to other writers. These other writers are major names in scholarship, particularly in philosophy (Paul’s undergrad major), so we surfed the net from name to name. Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, old William James, and others. This also led him to lead me down a variety of tangential writers including Gregory Bateson, Jerome Lettvin, Stephen Jay Gould, Warren Sturgis McCulloch, and then some general stuff (e.g., “what’s a spandrel?” and “who will buy me a house, food, and so forth while I spend a few years reading all the books you just suggested?”)

Needless to say, for over a century my notion about movingness as a fundamental characteristic for completely understanding the universe, its contents, and us and our minds has enjoyed serious attention by some luminaries of thought. Not a bad evening, considering our nominal positions (i.e., jobs) in life. A bit disheartening – I had felt utterly confident my notion was novel – but also assuaging in that I have some substantial predecessors upon whose shoulders I can stand, if I can add something new after studying them.  11:09pm

…

Life, movingness, self-sustainability

10/21/08, ~1:30pm, A², Wells St. 

In ANW’s MOT19 he says, “Wherever there is a region of nature which is itself the primary field of the expressions issuing from each of its parts, that region is alive” (p.22.) This has more than philosophical implications here at the beginning of the 21st century in the U.S. where extreme religious conservatives (who, to me, appear like updates to the Inquisition’s precursor minions) engage in contortional logicisms over abortion.

ANW’s line heavily depends upon the extensive discussion that he had provided earlier about specific words. “Expression” is the chapter / lecture title in which the line occurs. The word as he uses it indicates an individual manifestation of near-infinitesimal, primal impulse; he even says “there is nothing average about expression … [I]t is essentially individual. … No conscious determination is … involved; only the impulse to diffuse.” [p.21] He considers “expression” the antipole along a continuum opposite “importance,” a word to which he devoted most of his prior chapter. The way that he uses “region” probably equates to our contemporary physicists’ usage of the word “field.” And “diffuse” seems to intend to encapsulate “one of the simplest characteristics of … nature” to execute [carry out] a moment of impulse. The line, and the book in which it speaks, is deceptively simple but also easily misunderstood without his other definitions. Nonetheless …

Assume that ANW has given us a functional definition of life. Also assume we understand that it depends fundamentally upon our acceptance of his notion of an actual occasion – a moment of movingness engaged in moving. Now add his assertion that each individual, fundamental “expression” originates from nature’s simplest action, impulse expressing itself, diffusing from non-spatial (point-like) will/willfulness/intent out into spatio-temporal reality (without rejecting the possibility of expression/diffusion into “spiritual” dimensions.)

This sequence does not, for ANW, constitute life. Rather, as he later says, individual expressions of sub-atomic-scale impulses then collect into centers, and those form coordinated collectives at grander scales, until we arrive at living animals, plants, and people. Long after he died, mathematicians and physicists have begun studying “attractors” and “basins of attraction” using mathematical chaos theory. Even later, current complexity theorists have spent (to date) about two decades rigorously researching self-organization of entities by lesser entities. Thus, ANW’s cursory leap from the infinitesimal to a living body should not be dismissed; there’s lots of new evidence on his side. Does this effectively validate, with current science, his philosophical definition?

His definition provides an elegant, logical conceptualization of life, and it focuses on its critical essentials. But, in a phrase that mathematicians use all too often, ANW’s definition of life suffers in that it is “necessary but insufficient.” This means he missed something. From where I sit and write, 70 years after him, the notion of “self-sustainability” has become very popular, and it exposes the weakness of his words. It makes sense to me that life might amount to an organized field that consists of lesser and lesser organized fields of miniscule individual impulses “expressing.” This, though, is inadequate and simple to show.

Remove any well-organized living field from the larger field of which it is a part – e.g., a liver, lung, or wart – and that organization of impulses collapses, i.e., dies. It cannot self-sustain, despite its obvious animacy. You may challenge me that a part is not expected to live on its own. But take an intact paramecium – a microbe – out of the water and it dies; so too does any plant or animal when removed from the earth to the void of interstellar space. The necessity of an environment for any entity (living or inert) has enjoyed study by complexity scholars, so that work may be of use, but that work does not affect the definition of life.

Self-sustenance of a self-organized field of nature’s fundamental impulses engaged in expressing (manifesting might be a better contemporary word) movingness within some environment improves (for me) ANW. Yet this, too, remains insufficient. Self organization occurs among atoms that form inert crystals that, once formed, self-sustain from simple balance of atomic forces: they persist by resisting change, internally and from external action. So life – at least for a definition – while requiring self-sustenance requires more. Integrity / wholeness might help define it, but I think that nature’s fundamental impulse to act originates in the existence of the quality I call movingness. Further, I think that any expression / manifestation of movingness can coalesce with others into any form, either of inert or animate macro-structure. The distinction (inert/animate) depends only on identifying those that balance impulses for stability & permanence, and identifying those that balance only some of the impulses in order to permit dimension-less impulses to manifest / express in grander collective impulse expression.

While probably inadequate, I think these notions improve ANW’s definition. Self-sustaining activeness acting (I prefer movingness moving) in self-organized forms that self-regulate movingness’s expression so as to permit grander expression of impulse improves ANW, I think. But, of course, I might revise this, toss this, or forget it. Regardless, the closest I’ve come to uncovering a purpose for movingness moving, or impulse expressing, is architect Christopher Alexander. In his four volume Nature of Order,20 he appears to conclude that all structure, all form, all action at all scales of the universe seems to serve no greater – nor any lesser – purpose than to experience delight. He didn’t phrase it that way, but I prefer my choice of words.Wells, 3:45pm, 10/21/8

Add, 11/09/08, Swtwtr, ~11:20 p.m. 

Purpose, as far as an ANW actual occasion is concerned, and in my view rather than his, becomes a question only to us. We who are enormously complex self-organized “fields” of innumerable occasions understand purpose; an actual occasion cannot possess nor execute purpose because it is smaller than purpose. Rather an occasion occurs and that “expression” constitutes purpose, simultaneously creating (per ANW as interpreted by Krause) time and space by occurring. Our high level notion of purpose cannot exist at the beginning; the beginning creates purpose and the quality of purpose at any and every higher scale. If an actual occasion manifests / expresses, then such an event must be appropriate and possible while non-manifestation must be inappropriate or impossible. I’m trying here to recognize that the very occurrence of an occasion defines “correct” and “good” and positive purpose and furthermore that successful manifestation definitively constitutes self-reward. In the absence of high level emotion we may have found the “atom” of emotion.

01/16/08, ~2:15pm, A², Wells St. 

Animism

At Grizzly Peak’s Den (a pub in A²) last night, one of my pals, Spence, referred to my thinking and writing about ANW and AOs as an “attempt to show that everything is alive,” which amounts to what old school anthropologists call primitive animism. He understood me exactly wrongly. I’m trying to thoroughly dismiss forever any notion of animism and the juvenile Eurocentric misunderstanding of primeval movingness misconstrued as aliveness.

Movingness is a pure, simple quality of reality as we perceive it; it is as pure as discreteness or “particleness.” Movingness, following ANW’s postulation of fundamental AOs, manfests as action, motion, movement, and change. This has nothing to do with aliveness, initially. Aliveness, both for ANW and for me, follows and grows out of movingness moving rather than preceding it. Aliveness cannot precede motion; that would commit the error of circular logic, putting life into the mix so as to explain life as the result. Neither movingness nor moving require aliveness. However, life, living, and aliveness do require movingness to manifest as motion that subsequently takes alternate forms as inert or living.

Without movingness, aliveness cannot exist, thus neither can life. But without movingness expressing as an AO, neither can inert, non-living reality exist. Aliveness cannot precede (at least in terms of the form) non-aliveness. I suppose you could begin with livingness manifesting into living then dying, but then you’d confront a needless conundrum of your own making: how does living matter become inert and then – the age old question – ask where does the aliveness go (and what keeps the discrete, particle-like inert from also exiting ordinary reality)?

AOs begin not from animistic livingness but from motion permitted by the potential to move that movingness provides. Motion at the root of nominal reality becomes structure, not merely inhabits it. Some forms of motion – and collectives of motion – “close” and appear inert: stabilized, self-sustaining motion. Others remain open and, individually and collectively, become self acting, initiatory systems, i.e., living forms. Animism is idiocy or an arrogant refusal to properly understand movingness in the ground of being from which both the living and the inert can and do arise. Motion from movingness begins everything, not aliveness.~4:20 p.m.

Definition of Movingness (incomplete)

10/27/08, Swtwtr, ~10:00 p.m. 

Spence notes that I haven’t yet explicitly defined “movingness.” Pulling up what came before, I assemble some of my remarks.

On page 2 I said ,“It appears to me that occasions and events have as their defining characteristic a quality I call “movingness.” P.4 I said, “This requires us to balance an object’s discreteness with an event’s movingness.” And I also said, “in addition to the discreteness of discrete things stands the movingness of action.” P. 5: “Only movingness – the characteristic that precedes motion – can permit motion and action apart from particles of energy to exist.” P.6? “An actual occasion amounts to nothing more than the tiniest, briefest expression of activeness/movingness. … As ‘movingness moving,’ no particular thing engages in or performs the action; this is the most critical and difficult concept.” P. 8, “the apparent inseparability of motion from matter is illusory, an illusion borne of the persistence (since the Big Bang?) of the pairing rather than of proof of inseparability. The first … seems straightforward: structures and events both evolve. The second, though, requires us to imagine dancing that occurs without dancers.” P.10 “movingness significantly differs from discreteness. This means, in my terms, that thinking that itself depends upon a core belief in discreteness as a sufficient characteristic to account for and explain the universe and its contents.” P. 11: “Movingness provides a complement to the discreteness of objects.” & “we can just as rationally account for objects as footprints in space that appear after action has occurred. The object is a husk formed in space by action that lacks an actor.” & “…give the non-discrete notion of movingness direct attention as a requisite precursor belief that makes those aspects of reality tractable.” P. 12: “movingness as a precedent requirement would have taken a central place in his musings … and it would have led not merely to organism but to all manner of compoundings and complexities of motion, both living and otherwise.” P. 19: As I use “movingness” it refers both to change/changing and to the persistence of change (or, at a minimum, duration.) Particles possess and exhibit persistence of non-change. This/that individual object (regardless whether physical or abstract) persists as itself. This/that motion – remembering that I’m referring to action without an actor, objectless action acting -- differs from an individual object in its persistence in time, I think, more so than space.” P. 23: “I think that nature’s fundamental impulse to act originates in the existence of the quality I call movingness. Further, I think that any expression / manifestation of movingness can coalesce with others into any form of inert or animate macro-structure.”

These do not constitute a definition. But they collect aspects of my conception.

Lest I forget, my non-standard term has occurred elsewhere, rarely, but in published news reviews. Only one other usage appeared in my internet search. More than one writer uses it as a gauge of emotional impact, e.g., the”movingness” (emotional impact) of a song, painting, or event (as, the impact of witnessing a disaster or its aftermath.)

My earlier remarks seek an explicitly non-emotional, so-called “objective” word for a characteristic (or a property) of motion; and that the characteristic precede motion just as discreteness precedes an object (physical or abstract.) Maybe instead of precede I should say that motion and objects each require their respective characteristics; or that our minds require clarity about the two properties in order for us to be able to distinguish objects from motions. As the Stanford writer (cf. my p. 18) says, the discreteness of the discrete has become a focus of academic attention. Perhaps I’d best uncover the published discussion, but the mere existence of one heartens me; it will reveal the kinds of concerns that I must address before breezily defining my parallel characteristic. Until then, I note that emotion might play a role.

Movingness that “expresses” into an actual occasion seems, to me, entangled with emotion. ANW invokes “impulse” and entangles such impulse with a deific intent (and possibly with deific emotion, but that discussion exceeds my scope.) For my purpose emotion seems more a result of movingness than an origin of its manifestation. For me movingness “expressing” as motion, as an actual occasion, can become emotion or become a balanced system of motions as in an atom or a stone.

Motion and emotion

{more, 11/7/08: } A balance of motions produces a complex system that, observed from outside the complex of activity, appears inert, appears impenetrable, passive, and subject to relocation by an external force. Despite consisting of motion and only of motion, stabilization of its component activities closes it into a particle or compounding of particles apart from other objects. Motion thus takes on an appearance of absence of motion: inert and devoid of initiative or intent. This appearance of emotion-less-ness alerts me – simply for recognition that it is an appearance and not necessarily a fact – to the possibility that emotion might consist of, rather than initiate, action. Furthermore, it then encourages me to focus my attention on motion and its dependence on movingness in order to understand both “inert” matter and animate matter like people and our brains, minds, and consciousness.

A brief aside: anthropological research has a long and unfortunately persistent history of describing minor indigenous cultures as “animistic.” Western studies – rooted in old Euro-centric expectations – repeat the attribution without challenging the embedded attitude. Simplifications now pervade popular culture with derision of native people's who naively think that “everything is alive.” Modern bilingual Native Americans seem to have failed, so far, to explain that their cultures and languages (thus their ways of thinking and perceiving) easily distinguish an inert rock from a lively plant or animal. Some , though, have learned of quantum physics and exclaim that such exotic physics become simple in native language and thought. It seems to me that the prospect of putting movingness at the base of reality and discreteness after it would account for indigenous peoples' misunderstood worldview: they presume movingness, not “aliveness.” Motion can take form as a closed, stable system (particles, objects) or a stable non-closed system interacting with its surroundings, i.e., “life.”

Hate/Love :: Fear/Trust :: Constraint/Liberty :: Die/Live

11/07/08, Swtwtr, ~08:00 p.m. 

An almost utterly unrelated note: Hate vs. love means fear vs..trust. As I wrote earlier, parental deism becomes personally interpreted according to each person’s childhood experience of parental behavior; thus “love” eludes definition as it has as many meanings as there are, and have been, people. On the other hand, although it varies “trust” enjoys a single understanding among most people, even across cultures and languages and eras. Checking several definitions I find that trust usually means that one of us can rely on another to act in a particular way. For my purpose the critical distinction points to the lack of (our) supervision that seeks to ensure such (expected) action; reliance refers to our behavior rather than the source of it. Trust overtly dismisses fear by accepting any risk of nonperformance. Retaining a fear of inaction or inappropriate action, then, must yield an opposite expectation and an opposite behavior and opposite internal experience, i.e., a feeling. And so arises what become the varieties of negative experience, ranging from doubt, mistrust, and distrust ending in hate.

Fear as the root of hate is not a new idea, nor is the notion that fear is the opposite of love and trust. I said this is almost unrelated to my larger purpose because the distinction and root of the distinction play a role, I believe, in the transition from movingness (which allows) to motion (which manifests, or “expresses” in ANW’s terms.) It plays this role:

I can’t sensibly insert or presume that emotions as complex as fear and trust exist at the deepest and tiniest levels of reality; I can do so, but not sensibly so. I would argue in a circle by starting with them in AOs and then proclaiming new knowledge when I find them again in human beings. So without them I can only suggest that motion simply occurs. The absence of fear in a momentary actual occasion can, unfortunately, also mislead us to presume that in its absence trust plays a role (or vice versa.) That, too, would begin a circular argument. No emotion, sense, sensibility, expectation or other higher level of cognition can preexist an actual occasion; those must arise later, evolving from occasions. Occasions occur for no greater reason than they can, not because trust in an ability to occur prompts them do so, nor because fear permits them to occur and constrains them otherwise.

{insert, 11/17/08 } Trust and fear cannot play a role in an actual occasion. That would require that some complex consciousness preexists expression of movingness into motion, an actual occasion, one that also has the advanced refinements that permit choosing among options like trust and fear. Despite ANW’s eventual claim, the presence of any such mentation is unnecessary (although this will take some explanation later.) Furthermore, any such primacy would force evolved consciousness to consist of nothing more than it’s own preexistence. Worst of all, an attempt to examine consciousness as an end-product of smaller (less complex) parts and processes cannot assert that it began with consciousness; that’s a plainly circular argument. So neither trust nor fear, nor any other complex mental computation or process, can account for an occasion’s manifestation. Indeed, by defining it as a fundamental, infinitesimal “unit” as it were that, by manifesting, produces physical and temporal reality I can only conclude that actual occasions have no cause: occasions cause all that is so cannot have a cause other than themselves. Nothing (real or abstract or spiritual) precedes an occasion as any such predecessor would only have existed if occasions had occurred to produce the “predecessor.” Ultimately, not only is there nothing prior to an actual occasion, there was not even nothingness.

For those with lingering hopes of a deity in this scenario, have no fear. If any deity exists then it-he-she could consist of actual occasions, akin to an adult human that only exists because a fertilized egg became one through replication of cells. Whitehead and successor scholars of his process philosophy reach the opposite conclusion, inserting deism to account for occasions. While plausible, I find it unnecessary. Our universe in all its dimensions can arise as it has, and can include deities. Occasions suffice, without any grand precursive cosmogony. But note that simple unnecessity of a deity does not constitute denial of a superfluous one. {  3:54pm}

{11/07/08 } It might entertain me to speculate, here, about the origins of fear, trust, and the rest. That, however, comes later when I have more time. For now I simply note that lack of constraint, management, and innate “desire” appear – in my view, modifying ANW’s – to be the underlying character of the physical universe, whether material physical or immaterial physical.21 The universe has no manager, coordinator, nor director because absence of constraint (but not necessarily absence of consequence) makes one unnecessary. With this I can reasonably expect, then, to find unmanaged activity (randomness, spontaneity) to appear at grander and grander scales and in all forms. It sounds like a recipe for chaos, for entropy, despite the orderly unfolding of the laws of physics into replication of a small variety of nominally similar subatomic particles, structures, and well-structured life forms that evolve the experience of emotion and act from it.

Fear/trust corresponds to constraint/liberty. But they arise from yet another opposition. Either later or earlier (if I re-organize this) an actual occasion must account for its opposite. “Rest” occupies that pole, not merely inaction, nor absence, nor suppression of it. Oh, I also forgot to mention die/live, although that pair should be obvious. But, another time; I need to check my email.  10:15 p.m.

Events as Objects

12/05/08, ~1:15pm, A², Wells St. (temp sleeping room) 

Those of us who speak English typically use words that refer to events that are linguistically objects, not action. For example, we discuss the motions of weather as if specific combinations of actions create large objects that take actions on their own: “a” or “the” thunderstorm drenched some area with water, a hurricane or a tornado destroyed property and killed people, or a drought prevented effective living by people, animals, and plants. In fact, and with our full awareness of the fact, those large events consist only of innumerable smaller events. We understand that changing temperatures affect the direction and force of the winds as well as altering the dispersion or condensation of humidity – airborne molecules of water – which altogether then interact with conditions on the earth’s surface (land or lake) to form the particular grand weather event. It is only our language that makes the complex of natural actions into an object.

“Event-objects” can act

Nonetheless, large, coherent events can and do behave as if they are objects with “lives” of their own.

“Event-objects” and their actions occur at all scales

… from “strings” to storms to supernovae …

“Event-objects” create normal reality

… (return to ANW to examine his “impulse” as source) …

Action and Rest

I do, thus I exist. I rest, thus persist. {my own encapsulation. 11/25/08, @ ERC State St.}

Instantiation of Action and Rest

?11/13/08, Swtwtr, ~09:00 p.m.? 

“Instantiation” is a somewhat new – or recently in vogue – philosophical word. Wiktionary22 gives two definitions for the verb “instantiate:”

“(1) (transitive) to represent an abstract concept by a concrete instance; [and] (2) (transitive, object orientated computing) to create an object (an instance) of a specific class.”

This poses a problem for me. Specifically, I am decrying the nominalization – the conversion required by the nature of my language, English – of action into an object. An actual occasion that manifests or “expresses” itself into existence is only linguistically, not physically, an object. Instantiate seems to be the proper word for the actualization of an actual occasion simply because the general idea of action becomes a particular example. Instantiation differs from concrescence. ANW gets credit for identifying a new (as compared to ancient Aristotle) fallacy of logic: he called it the fallacy of “concrescence.” This error amounts to incorrectly or inappropriately treating an abstract idea as something substantial, or making it concrete, hence concrescence. English and many other languages consistently perform this; it presents a problem that complicates what could be simple in some less popular “processy” languages like those of the Native North Americans: Cherokee, Apache, and the Algonquians.

01/07/08, ~12:15pm, A², Wells St.: 

In English, citing an example of an abstract idea – like cherries or blood as instances of redness instantiate in the particular color – regularly misleads most people to concrescence. Red cherries hardly confuse anyone about redness as a mere characteristic rather than a fruit-like object. More arcane or abstract notions, however, easily lose their separability from the instantiated object; an object that was intended to assist us in understanding something about an elusive quality often becomes the representative for the quality, and then replaces – the fallacy of concrescence – the quality. Revering the U.S. Statue of Liberty could, for example, replace and bury the elusive quality we call universal individual liberty (instantiated when the U.S. established itself) simply through misplaced concrescence of instantiation of the quality.

Political diversion

(Needless to say, nefarious people deliberately push in the direction of misplaced concrescence. Universality of liberty is pushed toward liberty only for some [arguing survival of the fittest.] Individual liberty is compromised, for example, by re-labeling a powerful group as a single entity, arguing that is behaves like an individual, thus is one. And of course liberty itself is compromised by those who insist upon preventing harmful liberty, ignoring that not even a deity in any form in known history has ever succeeded in prevention. Liberty occurs regardless, and harm can only bring consequences either in nature or society. Combinations of these and other nefarious intentions then entrench themselves, then are easily manipulated. These are treated as facts [instantiated conceptual objects] that permit actions that selective collective initiative take to concretize a “self” in place of, and against, personal freedom and unbound by consequence. A sequence like this occurs and recurs throughout history throughout the world as monarchy, as dictatorship, as monopolistic capitalism, as tyrants, warlords, bankers and CEOs, corrupt elected officials, and such. All these people are easy to identify by their self-serving goals, their denial of individual choice for others, their preemptive prohibitions, their distance from other humans, and their imposition of their own misplaced concrescence upon people.)

Back to Action / rest

Returning to AOs and action …. Action is, itself, the instantiation of the quality I call movingness. A particular act, such as an AO, is the proper concrescence of action. Thus: movingness -> action -> act. For me, an AO constitutes movingness engaged in moving, or just movingness moving. Like ANW says (as interpreted by Krause23), this instance of motion does not take time, it causes or creates time and space by making its move. She also says that an AO is a “concrescence of prehensions” and that AOs are insufficient for a metaphysical scheme. I am more concerned with AOs as the root of a physical rather than metaphysical system, so consider them sufficient. Nonetheless, AOs as concretizations of action acting highlight another critical issue.

Considering the absence of both space and time in the absence of an AO, what happens to the quality movingness without an AO? The mathematical idea of “null” might apply, knowing that “null” differs from merely zero (0) in that zero specifies the point of nothingness while nullness specifies total absence even absence of that specific zero point. However, ANW’s explanation of an AO already acknowledges nullness, but movingness as a characteristic than can either manifest or not requires a different view.

Rest, not nullness, seems to me the complement to motion. Rest is not potential energy, either. Potential/potentiality conjures the notion of energy waiting, like a compressed spring in a trap or a child’s toy. Rest, by contrast, has no energy (and if AOs themselves precede physical reality then rest cannot yet possess energy that AOs have yet to create.) Yet rest opposes motion. Movingness as the underlying quality required for motion to occur (and thus for AOs to manifest / express) possesses either two faces of its coin, two ends of a spectrum, interior and exterior natures, or some other range or gradience through which it may express or not. If we accept ANW’s AO as fundamental, then movingness’s range from rest to action permits AOs to express, to manifest, to create space-time, with or without constraint by laws of physics or of deities. Movingness resting and movingness moving (initiated vs. passive) provide a range from which both nonexistence an existence manifest (as it were, since nonexistence cannot manifest except as an artifact of English linguistics.)

AOs show movingness moving; rest accounts for the existence of movingness that permits AOs to manifest.

In this domain outside of existence in which mere characteristics exist, a domain that I can only call possibility and can only call a domain (which is an object) for lack of language applicable to pre-existence, all that ever was, ever might be, or could be imagined might exist. More than movingness might “live” there, although possibility has only revealed movingness and its motion and rest. In regard to this, Krause again summarizes AWN saying “… an actual occasion in its self-creative process … is a modal individualization of the substantial activity. … The underlying activity does not ‘exist’ … it is the ground for all determinacy … and possibility [of instances of action or of actual occasion.]”

Break time  01/07, 03:05pm

Theonymony, again: words of neuro-mysticism vs. deity meanings

12/18/08, ~5:40pm, A², Espresso Royale, State St. 

Becoming distracted from some paying work, theonymony came to my mind, arriving because nothing here yet connects it specifically to consciousness and the paying work has me predisposed me toward thoroughness and detail.

Theonyms (deity names) seem to me to be direct evidence about the nature of consciousness. I have conjectured that their origins come from the analogic24 nature of language production – meaning how we convert concepts, notions, and other brain activity into language. Mystical experience typically defies normal attempts to convert it into words, regardless whose language or how many languages the person can call upon. Nonetheless, its impact all but demands that the person convey something about it to someone else. Thus, if deity names began as metaphors and metonyms about personal mystical experience, then the semantic roots of such names directly connect not to ephemeral entities but to brains, minds, and consciousness. The connection presents challenges to any scientist who wants to prove it, but it makes simple sense to me.

Proof, or at least plausibility, involves many scholarly subspecialties of neuroscience and linguistics. For one thing, over 19,000 deity names with ancient origins each – note this: EACH – require deep etymological research. That will then only provide a general geographic origin and only a vague sense of the meaning lurking within the word that morphed into a deity name. Impossibly, we know that we cannot ever know the intent behind choosing the meaning of the word that became the name. We could not, for instance, confirm that a deity named Baldy (I made that up) referred to a hairless mystic, or to some profound purity he or she perceived during a trance. Another linguistic specialist would have to call upon today’s most recent advances in language production studies to establish a link between the ancient meanings and the varieties of mental activity that might lay behind each meaning. Then, of course, the linguists would probably talk to a specialist in comparative religion. After comparing hundreds of theonym roots and (possible) meanings, those results would sensibly be compared to the religions they serve and be compared both linguistically and culturally. Unfortunately this would point more towards what happened after the words were first coined in unrecorded history. Nonetheless, the comparison of changes during that history could be examined in reverse to establish similar original intentions and, thus, point to mental activity.

As for neuroscience, we now have very advanced technology and expert researchers actively engaged in examining brain activity during mystical experience. With living people as subjects the researchers can also ask a lot of questions and elicit direct replies about the actual experience. This gives us a good picture – along with a wealth of anthropological and psychological research into mysticism – about mystical experience and the language used to describe it. Putting it together with the linguistic and religious / spiritual history and, most importantly, acknowledging that human brains have changed very little in the past 100,000 or more years, some clever, industrious, and well-funded individual can engage in a statistical analysis of the meanings behind the ancient theonyms and compare those to the meanings of living mystics’ words.

I have few doubts about the results to expect, even knowing that they will be imperfect. That is why I’m writing about ANW’s actual occasion, about movingness as the quality that must precede the expression / manifestation of any “actual occasion,” about consciousness as an intricate and vastly complex, organized, grand actual occasion that self sustains its coherent existence, about the necessity of rigorous logic in examining consciousness, and about theonyms and theonymony as evidence for individual minds to directly experience themselves as what I can only call a permanent (or at least persistent) event.

Now I have to return to work.  It’s 7:04 p.m.

12/23/08, Swtwtr, ~11:55 p.m. 

Consciousness from AOs

Returning to speculation about consciousness … the point of focusing on ANW’s actual occasion, manifesting from “impulse” (which he addresses more thoroughly than will I) is simply this: a deity and its preexistent consciousness cannot, or at least need not, precede manifestation of an AO. This is critical. With a plethora of AOs the science of complexity theory has shown that unpredictable, and non-in-built characteristics and properties will emerge as if out of nowhere. Furthermore, complexity research shows that more than mere characteristics can and do also emerge: whole, integrated, coherent, self-sustaining systems also come into being and do so as if out of nowhere. NO pre-plan, no ordination of the result precedes a fine result. Granted, those systems that arise are statistically rare but non predictable.

It is in this sense, then, that AO’s are sufficient to create consciousness rather than emerge from it. AOs are the “atoms” of consciousness and consciousness the emergent event-system that can arise from them. Once it becomes a “whole” it – despite not being an “it” at all, but an event – can act (in the sense of initiating action) and cause effects beyond itself.Café’s closing ….  12:12 a.m. Note (1/12/09 ): Some scholars in consciousness studies have become known as “emergentists” because they argue that consciousness emerges – appears as if out of nowhere – from the neural activity of the brain. Others dispute these ideas, and some even argue that what appears to have emerged is actually only an illusion, like moiré patterns that appear between two simple window screens.

12/29/08, ~12:30pm, A², Wells St.: 

Deities from AOs, not vice versa

This constitutes my response to ANW’s circular (in my view) theologic argument. ANW reduces all reality to AOs; I consider those AOs sufficient for producing a coherent consciousness. But ANW attributes the origin of AOs to a deity. As I see it, he repeats a medieval theological (Catholic) fallacy: Everything has a cause except God. The exception contradicts and disproves the premise that everything has a cause. Naturally I ask, if some result can arise that has no cause, why must that be a god? An infinitesmimal AO – especially since it is defined as cause-less impulse expressed – causes existence and can, as the least/smallest result that lacks a cause, be the ultimate cause without a predecessor. AOs can become, eventually, a deity, not the other way around (where deific choice would endow nonexistence with “impulses” that become AOs that subsequently create ordinary reality.) Actual occasions can, logically at any rate, suffice to create the universe. “Can,” here, acknowledges that such sufficiency for creation is not sufficient to dismiss or deny any deity altogether, just to dismiss a requirement of one playing any role in “creation.”  1:02 p.m.

01/09/08, ~12:30pm, A², Wells St.: 

An AO creates itself. In doing so it creates both a bit of and a moment of ordinary reality. Nothing can precede creation (otherwise whatever precedes it would play the role that AOs play) except possibility. As I see it, the single possibility that succeeds in permitting self-creation is that mere quality I call movingness. Colorfulness, wise-ness, discreteness, and all the rest occur only if movingness moves.

Myths and motion

In regard to movingness moving, Australian Aboriginal creation mythology makes this explicit, but only if we read it non-literally. For them, “dream-time” precedes creation. Only preexisting primordial possibility without distinction or manifestation constitutes dream-time; potential time and space and action seem like jelly (their metaphor, not mine), and creation begins only when moving begins.25 Apparently I logically arrived at a variation of their mythology before I stumbled upon them browsing at Borders Books. Theirs gave me support, if not confirmation, that motion and only motion creates (or at least that someone besides me believes so.) And, too, if my logic holds true then their mythology has more defense and defensibility than mere nebulous tradition can provide.  ~1 pm

01/16/08, ~4:31pm, A², Wells St.: 

Another similar ancient myth resembles the Aboriginal Aussie story. Joseph Campbell summarized26 a Hindu creation myth, which I’ll abbreviate even more. The eternal gods called a truce in their eternal wars in order to “churn the Milky Ocean” for its “butter of immortality.” So they used the Cosmic Serpent as a cord with which to turn the churning spindle, and churned for 1,000 years. Poison arose that Shiva captured and drank so that the gods could return to churning. Eventually the tireless churning yielded up the sun, moon, medicines, and “ambrosial butter.” The details provide many entities for believers, of course, but the myth shows me that motion – much more than the deities – plays the key role in creating a universe. Motion creates, in Hindic, Aboriginal, or many other mythologies. Motion requires movingness, not the discreteness of particles.  ~4:53pm(Note, 1/27/09 11:15 pm, Sweetwater’s, A² ): To understand the use of the serpent, search the internet for “treadle lathe.” This is a pre-industrial lathe that uses a rope wrapped around a stick of wood or small log. Pulling the rope connected to the treadle and pulleys spins the bit of wood to permit carving. A similar arrangement would spin a butter churn’s spindle back and forth.  11:20 p.m.

01/10/08, ~1:11pm, A², Wells St.: 

Emergence

Emergence in scientific papers has a specific meaning that differs from its common usage. Normally we use it when something or someone comes from within something or some place into our field of view. We see a house, then a person steps out of its door, emerging from within it usually surprising us. Scientific papers, especially those in the field of “complexity studies” and “complexity theory,” use the word for particular kinds of unexpected things and phenomena that appear in research. These unexpected results are not the same as the ones that, by re-assessing and backtracking, can be explained. It applies only to emergent phenomena that cannot be predicted, cannot be explained by the normal rules and careful review of what preceded it.

Author and physicist M. Waldrop gave water as an example.27 Current science knows virtually everything that we can know about the simple water molecule H2O (although science perpetually seeks and finds new knowledge that can change everything.) However, despite all this knowledge, and knowledge of all the laws of physics and chemistry, and math for complex calculations, no one can explain the origin of a property that “emerges” when many trillions and trillions of water molecules collect: sloshing. Yes, science can and does understand fluid dynamics very well now, but sloshing’s origin cannot be explained by starting with molecules and great quantities of them. The characteristic, the property, sloshing emerges without explanation. This seems like a minor little detail, but more than mere properties emerge.

Entire systems emerge, systems with organized internal workings that take action (have initiative and volition) in the larger environment in which they exist or have come into being. Such systems are called “self-organized” because no one and nothing commanded its components to perform the peculiar sequence of actions required to build the resulting system. Nor does a plan preexist to serve as a blueprint. Instead, each of the pieces – regardless whether they are atoms, ants, or people – simply do whatever they do. But if enough of them occupy the same environment, then properties and systems form themselves, that is, they emerge. “Enough of them” means billions. The same number, the same minimum quantity, seems to apply to almost every kind of active entity that might coalesce into an emergent, self-organized system. A complexity researcher28 identified that number – the quantity of agents at which “phase transition” from a mass to a system occurs – and used the Greek letter lambda () for it in his published research. It’s about 13 billion which is 1.3x1010 in scientific notation.

How 13 billion of something can, without a plan, become something new and different from its parts – it’s not like a brick building that looks rectangular like its rectangular parts – required years of research by many people. As I write this, the process has been reduced to a few general rules taught in universities and elsewhere. These principles provide an undetailed schematic for emergent systems. Because they apply to atoms, to cells, to people, stars, and more, scientists use the word “agent” generically for any active entity. An emergent system involves at least 13 billion similar “agents.” That’s 1.3x1010 atoms, cells, people, or whatever.

Add 01/16/09 ~8:40 p.m. 

These systems build themselves without a plan, an intention, a coordinator, or overarching control. Instead each of the individual agents does what it knows how to do under the conditions in which it acts. The only “rules” that the individuals obey are the facts within themselves that they “know.” The scientists call this the “rule set” (set of rules) that guides them in their actions. For example, an atom of oxygen has an electric charge; therefore, any time that an opposite charge comes near, the atom will move toward the new atom. In nature, oxygen atoms normally form pairs, symbolized in chemistry as O2. The atoms only obey their own pursuit of electrical balance; no supervisor pushes them together. Naturally, the pursuit of electrical balance also allows oxygen to connect with many other kinds of atoms with which it can achieve balance: with iron it makes rust, with hydrogen it makes water, with carbon it makes carbon monoxide or dioxide, and so forth. Then billions of, for example, water molecules have different “rules” that allow it to become steam, water, ice, and to – collectively – provide a place in which other atoms and molecules can obey their own rules: iron in water grabs oxygen from the water to form rust, salt crystals dissolve, and various bacteria, fish, and plants can thrive in sea water that provides an environment in which they can move and feed and breed. And no intelligence needs to create or guide the complex balanced system of individuals to form other than absence of interference with the fulfillment of innate proclivities of each small part and each smaller part.

The diversity and complexity of the known world and universe seem – after 20 or so years of research by hundreds of researchers in many, many specialties – confirm and reconfirm that simple agents that obey a simple set of rules – which are in-built, not from above, having emerged from lower levels of physical reality – show that emergent properties and emergent systems successfully generate grander properties and systems.

But the systems also change over time, both as individuals age and as generations of them emerge. They change because they adapt to changes in the environments within which they act or live and act. Often the emergent systems proliferate so extensively that their proliferation itself alters the environment. Thus the systems must change, adapting to new conditions. This is why Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann coined29 the term “complex adaptive system.” Some complex systems lack adaptability and crumble under duress, just like a rock lacking the flexibility of wood breaks. Complex systems may flex, others may change entirely, thereby ensure their survival by adapting.

Gotta go, but my train of thought is to imagine the complexity and adaptability of systems composed of Whiteheadian AOs.  9:23 p.m.

01/19/08, ~11:38pm, A², Wells St.: 

Complex systems emerge as coherent, integrated, self-sustaining entities capable of taking action. They now also contain an advanced internal rule-set that has arisen from the simpler rule-sets of the component active agents. This process occurs and recurs among agents, and up through the lesser and grander scales (“sizes”) of systems, from atoms to quasars. Systems emerge as multitudes of similar agents collect. Similar systems emerge similar agents behaving similarly. From a plethora of similar systems with higher level rule-sets a grander system emerges. And on it goes. Looking, as we do, from a high level down to the lower, lesser, and finer scales it can appear that our marvelous hearts, minds, and souls consist of nothing but random action by miniscule parts; Francis Crick30 took that view in order to argue that souls are illusions. Others argue that advancing complexity permit emergence of advanced properties that are not illusory but real. This emergentist attitude claims that consciousness emerges just as naturally as sloshing among water molecules.

These views of complex systems, while derived from verified scientific research, suffer from science’s dependence on objects, objectness, and a presumption that discreteness suffices for describing our universe and its contents (including us.) After struggling for years to refine my notion of movingness and motion without a mover, then serendipitously discovering that Whitehead, Bateson, and others had presented similar thoughts a century ago, it became clear that an AO gives me action without an actor but adds the benefit of ANW’s stellar intellectual reputation.  ~12:18 p.m.

01/29/08, ~6pm, A², Amer’s on State St.: 

Nor is the trail the travel

Korzybski,31 reprising my earlier mention of him, famously said that “the map is not the territory” in order to caution people against inappropriate conclusions about the territory using nothing more than a map. In my talking and writing about motion, movingness, life and consciousness a similar admonition comes to mind.

In the territory(s) of physical reality we see life moving itself, plants reaching into the earth and air, creatures moving all about, and all resting at regular and irregular times. Creatures conveniently often leave tracks in the soil and snow, fish in bob-visible (but detectable) wakes inventor, and so forth; trees are, largely, the trail itself left by the thin living cambria(?) layer between the wood and bark. Trails and trunks indicate that living itself passed through the territory.

The trail is not the traveler nor, especially, the travel, the motions of which animacy seems to both consist and manifest. This much – trail ≠ travel – is obvious. But the obvious indicates the subtle.

I believe life consists of motion and movement. This, too, reveals its truth when life leaves, departs from the body of matter: death. Metaphysics and metaphysicians typically grapple with life, death, notions of afterlives, and occasionally pre-life possibilities. But ordinary physics can and thus must address it. It can do so if it begins not with matter but motion. Scientific reduction of matter to smaller and smaller bits doubtless has a parallel reduction of motion to lesser and lesser movements with ANW’s actual occasion as a preliminary minimal motion, a physical but non-material impulse.

This is how I found my focus on movingness. This quality is motion’s parent as discreteness is matter’s. It, and it alone suffices to explain the “structure,” as it were, of living, livingness (animacy) and life. It alone grants us the opportunity to derive both inert matter and living matter. It alone resolves any dispute or confusion about mind vs. matter, life vs. non-life, and any question about the emergence of life from non-living matter. As I’ve said, motion from movingness that is engaged in ANW’s “impulse” of an AO precedes both life and matter. “Life” and animacy are not in-built in physics (as Europeans attribute to animistic native peoples), but discreteness and movingness are.

Since an AO lacks an actor for the act that an AO is, physics has an immaterial but physical iota of reality that requires investigation, study, and – for scientific validity – testability and reproducibility. The trail begins here.

The trail that movingness engaged in moving – or movingess moving, to use fewer words – leaves behind is, as Kraus interprets ANW, space and time. Motion, having occurred, leaves the inert space-time that is created because, quite obviously, movingness has already departed! Departure does not necessarily constitute termination of motion any more than a footprint indicates death of the traveler. This explains my initial admonition: draw no unjustifiable conclusions based only on information provided by the trail (in this case, space-time is that trail.)

Space-time constitutes only the husk, the trail, the wake, the evidence that motion has happened (in the past, tellingly.) Motion may recur in extant space-time. Indeed, I’d argue that a quanta of energy is an AO continuing, recurring, or arousing other AOs. And I could argue that matter – currently in physicists’ “Standard Model” believed to consist of 16 particles, all but one of which have no weight (mass) at all – consists of AOs that return to their origin, either once for all eternity or persistently forever, forming what appears from outside like an object.iii

The departure of movingness from most of space-time that it has generated has multiple implications.

To where does it go or return – a question made especially inconvenient by the requirement that an AO generates any space or time to which might go? Does its absence, with the remnant space-time husk as the historical record of evidence of an AO, suggest that ALL of space-time constitutes the past? Does no present/current time exist? Or does the present consist of the immaterial physical activeness acting (and resting) that AOs are?

For this moment, at this café table in Amer’s on State St., only making my distinction between the trail left behind and what action made the trail can be considered assured.  7:51 p.m.

02/01/08, ~1:50pm, A², Wells St.: 

Structure, action, and delight

Structure and action might have some relationship to one another. The action(s) of structure(s), and action and structure each devoid of the other, such as an actorless act and an inert object seem to me to indicate that the relationship is optional. I thought I’d make that note but haven’t the time just now to develop it, or take it where I want to go. Architect Sullivan famously said, “Form follows function” in order to turn other architects eyes away from design of a structure and toward the activities that particular structures must permit and, ideally, enhance. His remark recurs in my mental broodings about AOs. For a century his words have been examined, challenged, asserted, repeated, and pervaded well beyond his profession.

At the scale of an AO, “form” and structure do not and cannot exist either without nor until “function” acts (occurs.) Sullivan’s assertion, then, concerns more than the design of homes, hovels, hotels, and hospitals; it summarizes the fundamental method for creating an entire universe, its contents, continuity, and purpose. A century later architect Christopher Alexander published his magnum opus32 that effectively concludes that the ultimate purpose of structure is to please its maker; he does not say it this way, but it seems to make an experience delight the purpose from which structure arises.

Unfortunately, delight does not yet exist at the level of an AO regardless its ubiquity at grander scales of existence: there is only impulse that becomes an actual occasion. Again, this can suffice. But the point is that “life” cannot arise from space-time – which constitutes structure – any more than domesticity can arise from a pile of boards. No, instead structure arises from motion just as a pile of boards become organized by an impulse to cook dinner (and some tradespeople.) AOs pose the problem that impulse has no emotional content – indeed, emotion arises from a complex organized system of impulses each generating moments of movement (just as buildings are made of bricks, not bricks of buildings) – so cannot “seek” delight as architects do. When and why, I ask, do impulses pulse and become AOs that create space and time structure behind them? 2:48pm

TO DO / TO WRITE:

AOs, theonyms, mentation do connect

[My p.10 “…theonyms, actual occasions, and actual mentation do connect..”]...

origin of fear, trust, rest

[my p 30-31 “…speculate, here, about the origins of fear, trust, and the rest. That, however, comes later when I have more time.”]

movingness differs from discreteness

[p. 11 “… later make a good argument for it – that movingness significantly differs from discreteness … and how it differs”]

See the .pdf version to continue reading.

Footnotes & Endnotes