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This must be the most compelling and elegant summary you have written so far. Thank you for this.

I still struggle with any concept of “evolution” whenever I happen look around. “Mental consciousness [cannot] integrate the force of life to such an extent as to turn it into a spontaneously effective instrumentation“, indeed, but dear God we do try! Our petty self-centeredness knows no limits, or should I say that ultimately it will be just that, a point, a thing without a periphery, the triumph of a ghost? On the other hand, this so called “primitive man”, who lived in a bygone era of superstition, stupidity and death, enjoyed two important things that we miss. The first one is history, sixty thousand years give or take, which is a fairly decent amount in biological terms. What they did, whatever is that they did, which is unknown and unknowable to our minds, worked. The second one is attention (probably history is just a consequence of attention after all). De Martino and Eliade used to call this form of being “presence”, Heidegger called it “dasein”. In any case, what matters is that it bears no relation to what we call individual consciousness in the cartesian sense.

The interesting question is, do we think that we, scrapping for a two syllable footnote in life’s history book, can ever match the first without getting hold of the second? The answer from the individual ghost of modernity is yes, yes we can (as if he wasn’t actually talking!). But obviously we know that this is not true, the ghost is not talking “for ourselves”; we want instead to get hold of attention, which is still entirely up for grabs. We are still the same humans after all, not a single cell of their bodies was an animal cell. That is the true nature of hope. Everything else is a footnote.

From your quotes here I will definitely need to read SA, once I get there.

A couple of small comments on the text. “.. or something very much like it”, you can do it in simple terms with Polanyi’s idea of boundary conditions in the production of speech from vocabulary and grammar, or his analogy of holographic (material) images and the subsequent “vectorial quality of meaning”, which is entirely non-objective, mental if you like (see any of his essays in “Knowing and Being” or “Meaning”, he repeats the same idea everywhere).

This is kind of obvious, but your complementary presentation of an Ultimate Constituent versus a standpoint on the multiplicity of the manifested world, corresponds, parsi passu, to the converging of two historical worldviews: that of the Eastern Tradition with that of twentieth century Process Philosophy. The idea that the latter never went beyond the mere study of the relata events and relations, in order to hypothesise an immanent ultimate reality, is a well known fact, they were all scientists after all (see for example Langdon Gilkey or Steven Rockefeller in “Religion and Nothingness” companion seminar book). PIQM seems to be doing just that integration.

Had Einstein read Bankei, he would have immediately grasped that the answer to his burning question was right before his eyes. The answer to this so called “mystery” is called the Unborn. Bankei would say that the mystery is the definitive proof of the Unborn just as it is, like our hearing of sparrows chirping in the background. You would say, on the other hand, that the mystery is instrumental in the manifestation of the Unborn.

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Ulrich Mohrhoff's avatar

A shout of thanks to the Information Philosopher [https://www.informationphilosopher.com/about/] Bob Doyle for drawing my attention to a significant difference between the original German version of Einstein’s quote about the comprehensibility of the world and its English translation, which I quoted. In the English translation we read:

> One may say “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”

In the original German Einstein writes:

> Man kann sagen: Das ewig Unbegreifliche an der Welt ist ihre Begreiflichkeit.

More literally translated:

> One may say: the eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.

The rhetorically strong juxtaposition of “Das Unbegreifliche an” (the incomprehensible thing about) and “ihre Begreiflichkeit” (its comprehensibility) has sadly been lost in translation. The popular internet version “The most incomprehensible thing about the world/universe is that it is comprehensible” (with nearly 33,000 hits) thus is more faithful to the original than the “official” translation by Jean Piccard in “Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein” (Crown Publishers, 1954, p. 292).

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