Before The Pump Was Invented, What Did The Heart Do?
The purpose of this question is to make us see that our ability to understand the world is limited to what we know; but what we know is the cognitive product of what we experience — thought being encompassed within what is experienced — and experience is the result of interpreting what happens in our lives based on what we already know.
Which is to say, everything we directly perceive, feel, and think, is passed through the filter of our already conceived knowledge of, and understanding of, the world and ourselves. So we are limited in our attempts to understand something new, owing to the need to not just meet this new knowledge with an open mind, but also the need to understand how it fits together with everything else. But sometimes new knowledge does not and will not fit in.
When this happens, we find that we are cemented in place when we attempt to break free of the bounds of our limited knowledge and understanding of how the world works. And there are many false halts along the way to a new way of perceiving how reality works.
I was recently reading Jung's essay "Synchronicity: An Causal Connecting Principle," and was struck by his assertion that, "It seems more likely that scientific explanation will have to begin with a criticism of our concepts of space and time on the one hand, and with the unconscious on the other." The 'unconscious', in my way of thinking, standing in for all the usual ways of explaining away the difficulties and impossibilities of consciousness and all it brings. While space and time are the theatre in which it all plays out, and which somehow are always already there, even in conceptions of nonduality, but that makes it a triple, not a one.
I read you essays, Mr. Mohrhoff, with anticipation of time well-spent on matters of great interest to me. I would like to suggest that all ideas of causality, and even Jung's "acausality," are the problem in our mental calculus, and that what underlies both the macro, as well as the micro, and as well, the stochastic (spontaneous), appearances is not a thing, not an entity, not even a conceptual one -- for they are relics of our causal worldview as the agents of whatever we are attempting to conceptualize -- and that at its heart, reality is responsive to conditions and latent possibilities in a coherent, yet within that coherency, creatively spontaneous, naturing of everything. This is Condition and Response versus Cause and Effect, so no agency needed. It's a complex subject that undefines as much as it defines, because that is how any truly new paradigmatic understanding of reality must proceed.
Jung learned about the conceptual difficulties created by the quantum theory from his friend Wolfgang Pauli, one of the “three musketeers of the quantum revolution.” In a letter of 1922, Niels Bohr (another of the three) wrote: “my personal opinion is that these difficulties are of such a kind that they hardly allow us to hope, within the world of atoms, to implement a description in space and time of the kind corresponding to our usual sensory images.” This is why one has to distinguish between a classical and a quantum domain. In the former, which is accessible to sensory experience, concepts based on sensory experience can be used, while the latter can only be described in terms of statistical correlations between events belonging the former.
A century after Bohr wrote that letter, it is clear that (where physics is concerned) scientific explanation not only begins but also *ends* with a criticism of our concepts of space and time. So it can’t be true in all generality that “space and time are the theatre in which it all plays out, and which somehow are always already there.” They are the theatre which is always already there as far as the experienced world is concerned, but not where the origins of both the world and human experience are concerned.
You may argue, as some of Bohr’s colleagues have tried to, that we need new concepts, which are applicable to the quantum domain. Trouble is, if we lose the concepts that owe their meanings to human sensory experience, all we can meaningfully communicate about is mathematics. Which is how we communicate about the quantum domain, with remarkable success, even though we have no causal explanations for the quantum correlations. Replacing causality by acausality won’t help. It’s like replacing evidence of absence by absence of evidence. It’s less than nothing.
You say that reality is spontaneously creative in responding to conditions. This is how some QBists now talk. The conditions are the setups of experiments that are performed. Reality is spontaneously creative in that it responds to these conditions in unpredictable ways (or not at all). There are indeed no causally sufficient conditions for the coming into being of a measurement outcome or experimental result, let alone a particular one. But this is just describing the quantum-mechanical situation in pretty words, not (the basis for) "a truly new paradigmatic understanding of reality."
As I said, we remain cemented in place. I am not describing the quantum-mechanical situation at all. If you are curious, there is material on the subject that you can find. Responsive Naturing versus Causal Determinism. But I won't try to explain it here. I appreciate your having taken the time to respond.
I don’t agree that only a divine intervention will get things moving. Perhaps as current ‘thought leaders’ die off, there will be a new renaissance. The current paradigm, that of causal determinism, was adopted as part of the scientific ‘revolution’ just a few centuries ago, and since then, Science has become schizophrenic. On one hand, Science says everything is strictly determined by the laws of nature that scientists have formulated, and neither free will, nor conscious intent have any involvement in what happens; but on the other hand, everything is indeterminate on the quantum level until consciously observed by us with the intent to ‘measure’ it. The micro-macro distinction is like the ‘two-truths’ doctrine in Buddhism (for example). One truth is held to be the real truth, the other is an accommodation to students who have not yet, or cannot, break free of their old understanding of how things work. Our ‘classical’ scientific view, as successful as it has been, is nowadays an accommodation for the lack of a unified understanding of quantum and classical phenomena. We don’t need to wait for a higher power to gift us anything, we just have to chip the cement block off our feet, by shedding causal determinism. But not by replacing it with its negation. Responsive naturing is neither.
Actually science doesn’t say that everything is strictly determined by the laws of nature (as formulated by scientists). It also isn’t correct to say that everything is indeterminate on the quantum level until consciously observed or measured. It is a matter of how things can be *described.* You cannot *say* anything about the quantum/micro level except in terms of correlations between events at the classical/macro level; so you cannot say that, unless or until observed, everything is indeterminate there. See the difference? It’s subtle. As Einstein said, “subtle is the Lord, but He is not malicious.”
"Actually science doesn’t say that everything is strictly determined by the laws of nature (as formulated by scientists)." This appears to be a half-statement. So, in modern Science, "law" means "habit" or "preference" only? Usually, a rebuttable contains some form of positive assertion other than "no, you're wrong!" 😊 And just to foreshadow my later response, science doesn't say anything, technically, scientists do, and scientists do say things like "everything is strictly determined by the laws of nature" and "mathematics rules all!" I see you feel otherwise.
I feel indebted to your optimism regarding the old thought leaders being replaced by an intellectual renaissance and not relying on a divine intervention.
Perhaps their replacement is a divine intervention. I am inclined to see it that way, chipping cement off our boots included. I just don’t feel the need to wait for something to happen, but to prepare the right conditions so it happens sooner, rather than waiting until later. I see the world this way—responsive naturing. I remember a biblical phrase from my childhood: “God helps he who helps himself.” I just understand it this other way: helping oneself means working to create the conditions that lead this responsive naturing to hopefully go the way you want. Everything is divine. It’s a different world, when you see it this way. Dixi et salvavi animam meam!
Difficult subject you have gone into, as someone already mentioned. I can’t comment on McGinn, but I’m admired at you taking it to read the entire book. I could hardly finish the quotations. The emergence of “consciousness” as a point singularity I cannot agree with, first of all because we know it is not true. You just need to move the clock back in time and tell us at which point you became endowed with that thing called “consciousness”. There simply isn’t such a moment. What there is, abundantly, is the positivistic tendency of turning adjectives into abstract nouns or, as Paul Weiss said it in The Living System: “promoting adjectives to the rank of substantives” and then, consequently, following the reductionistic trail in the usual manner.
What do we know? We know non-locality, or magic as you called it. Again, Weiss, “the patterned structure of the dynamics of the system as a whole co-ordinates the activities of the [so called] constituents”, that’s what he termed “macrodeterminacy”, and conscious organization does not lie outside of it, but is just another level in same the hierarchy. “[..] the top level operations of the organism thus are neither structurally nor functionally referable to direct liaison with the processes on the molecular level in a steady continuous gradation, but are relayed step-wise from higher levels of determinacy [..]”. Frankl called this property of mental systems the “self-transcendent quality” of being, that which points “beyond itself rather than being a closed system”.
Where does it point to? You simply cannot limit it. NK called it the “historical body”, that’s what our being conscious means. There is not a single part in the historical formation of our biological being that is not “consciousness”. Burtt, in all his brilliancy, defined the concept clearly, without fully subscribing to it: “There is no help for it, we must declare unreservedly that a consistent empiricism cannot stop short of maintaining that the mind is extended in time and space throughout the whole realm that is spanned by its knowledge and contemplation. How else can the facts be expressed?"(p.320)
Creative activity, purpose, value, spirit, without referring to these “macro determinants” it is impossible to talk about conscious being.
“The natural world after all is more the home and theatre of mind than its unseen tyrant, and man as expressing the functions of reason and spirit gathers to a focus far more of the flavour and creative fertility of the universe than the whole spatio-temporal object of his eager contemplation.
Mayhap we must wait for the complete extinction of theological superstition before these things can be said without misunderstanding. Such is the misfortune of modern thought as compared with that of Greece.”
I can’t remember who it was (was it Thomas, was it Wordsworth, or perhaps Borges? It might as well have been Spinoza) who said: “The first person who thought ‘I see a flower’ had a momentarily spark of self-awareness, but that one who said ‘the flower sees me’ penetrated the nature of reality”.
“The emergence of 'consciousness' as a point singularity I cannot agree with, first of all because we know it is not true.” — Ah! And how do we know this???
It seems you haven’t paid sufficient attention to even those McGinn quotes which actually make sense. The subject–object relation is the essence of consciousness as we know it (I’m not here talking of supramental consciousness which both originates and transcends the mental) and a defining aspect of mind. And there are very good reasons to believe that it pops into existence at once in its defining totality. There may be cases where we are not sure whether a creature is conscious, but whichever is the case, either it is conscious or it is not. As long as the subject-object relation is absent, mind is still involved in life.
Thank you for revealing the secret processes underlying evolution and manifestation. It is a truly brave endeavour and you have stated with impending clarity the role of involution. What caught my curiosity was your statement "Quantum observables must be defined by something that is accessible to direct sensory experience". Is it possible to define some units and parameters in the cognitive domain that include neurosensory stimuli and include them in the quantum physics experiments as observer data, or is this line of thinking fallacious and inconclusive?
“Impending” is the word! I hope the clarity is not too far out.
What do you mean by “neurosensory stimuli”? Things that stimulate the sensory pathways in the brain, or things happening in the brain that give rise to sensations? Often clarifying what one is asking goes half the way to an answer.
Before The Pump Was Invented, What Did The Heart Do?
The purpose of this question is to make us see that our ability to understand the world is limited to what we know; but what we know is the cognitive product of what we experience — thought being encompassed within what is experienced — and experience is the result of interpreting what happens in our lives based on what we already know.
Which is to say, everything we directly perceive, feel, and think, is passed through the filter of our already conceived knowledge of, and understanding of, the world and ourselves. So we are limited in our attempts to understand something new, owing to the need to not just meet this new knowledge with an open mind, but also the need to understand how it fits together with everything else. But sometimes new knowledge does not and will not fit in.
When this happens, we find that we are cemented in place when we attempt to break free of the bounds of our limited knowledge and understanding of how the world works. And there are many false halts along the way to a new way of perceiving how reality works.
I was recently reading Jung's essay "Synchronicity: An Causal Connecting Principle," and was struck by his assertion that, "It seems more likely that scientific explanation will have to begin with a criticism of our concepts of space and time on the one hand, and with the unconscious on the other." The 'unconscious', in my way of thinking, standing in for all the usual ways of explaining away the difficulties and impossibilities of consciousness and all it brings. While space and time are the theatre in which it all plays out, and which somehow are always already there, even in conceptions of nonduality, but that makes it a triple, not a one.
I read you essays, Mr. Mohrhoff, with anticipation of time well-spent on matters of great interest to me. I would like to suggest that all ideas of causality, and even Jung's "acausality," are the problem in our mental calculus, and that what underlies both the macro, as well as the micro, and as well, the stochastic (spontaneous), appearances is not a thing, not an entity, not even a conceptual one -- for they are relics of our causal worldview as the agents of whatever we are attempting to conceptualize -- and that at its heart, reality is responsive to conditions and latent possibilities in a coherent, yet within that coherency, creatively spontaneous, naturing of everything. This is Condition and Response versus Cause and Effect, so no agency needed. It's a complex subject that undefines as much as it defines, because that is how any truly new paradigmatic understanding of reality must proceed.
Hi, thanks for your thoughts.
Jung learned about the conceptual difficulties created by the quantum theory from his friend Wolfgang Pauli, one of the “three musketeers of the quantum revolution.” In a letter of 1922, Niels Bohr (another of the three) wrote: “my personal opinion is that these difficulties are of such a kind that they hardly allow us to hope, within the world of atoms, to implement a description in space and time of the kind corresponding to our usual sensory images.” This is why one has to distinguish between a classical and a quantum domain. In the former, which is accessible to sensory experience, concepts based on sensory experience can be used, while the latter can only be described in terms of statistical correlations between events belonging the former.
A century after Bohr wrote that letter, it is clear that (where physics is concerned) scientific explanation not only begins but also *ends* with a criticism of our concepts of space and time. So it can’t be true in all generality that “space and time are the theatre in which it all plays out, and which somehow are always already there.” They are the theatre which is always already there as far as the experienced world is concerned, but not where the origins of both the world and human experience are concerned.
You may argue, as some of Bohr’s colleagues have tried to, that we need new concepts, which are applicable to the quantum domain. Trouble is, if we lose the concepts that owe their meanings to human sensory experience, all we can meaningfully communicate about is mathematics. Which is how we communicate about the quantum domain, with remarkable success, even though we have no causal explanations for the quantum correlations. Replacing causality by acausality won’t help. It’s like replacing evidence of absence by absence of evidence. It’s less than nothing.
You say that reality is spontaneously creative in responding to conditions. This is how some QBists now talk. The conditions are the setups of experiments that are performed. Reality is spontaneously creative in that it responds to these conditions in unpredictable ways (or not at all). There are indeed no causally sufficient conditions for the coming into being of a measurement outcome or experimental result, let alone a particular one. But this is just describing the quantum-mechanical situation in pretty words, not (the basis for) "a truly new paradigmatic understanding of reality."
As I said, we remain cemented in place. I am not describing the quantum-mechanical situation at all. If you are curious, there is material on the subject that you can find. Responsive Naturing versus Causal Determinism. But I won't try to explain it here. I appreciate your having taken the time to respond.
Cemented in place indeed. Until there is an "Act of God" or a higher power intervenes and communicates a result closer to the truth.
I don’t agree that only a divine intervention will get things moving. Perhaps as current ‘thought leaders’ die off, there will be a new renaissance. The current paradigm, that of causal determinism, was adopted as part of the scientific ‘revolution’ just a few centuries ago, and since then, Science has become schizophrenic. On one hand, Science says everything is strictly determined by the laws of nature that scientists have formulated, and neither free will, nor conscious intent have any involvement in what happens; but on the other hand, everything is indeterminate on the quantum level until consciously observed by us with the intent to ‘measure’ it. The micro-macro distinction is like the ‘two-truths’ doctrine in Buddhism (for example). One truth is held to be the real truth, the other is an accommodation to students who have not yet, or cannot, break free of their old understanding of how things work. Our ‘classical’ scientific view, as successful as it has been, is nowadays an accommodation for the lack of a unified understanding of quantum and classical phenomena. We don’t need to wait for a higher power to gift us anything, we just have to chip the cement block off our feet, by shedding causal determinism. But not by replacing it with its negation. Responsive naturing is neither.
Actually science doesn’t say that everything is strictly determined by the laws of nature (as formulated by scientists). It also isn’t correct to say that everything is indeterminate on the quantum level until consciously observed or measured. It is a matter of how things can be *described.* You cannot *say* anything about the quantum/micro level except in terms of correlations between events at the classical/macro level; so you cannot say that, unless or until observed, everything is indeterminate there. See the difference? It’s subtle. As Einstein said, “subtle is the Lord, but He is not malicious.”
"Actually science doesn’t say that everything is strictly determined by the laws of nature (as formulated by scientists)." This appears to be a half-statement. So, in modern Science, "law" means "habit" or "preference" only? Usually, a rebuttable contains some form of positive assertion other than "no, you're wrong!" 😊 And just to foreshadow my later response, science doesn't say anything, technically, scientists do, and scientists do say things like "everything is strictly determined by the laws of nature" and "mathematics rules all!" I see you feel otherwise.
I feel indebted to your optimism regarding the old thought leaders being replaced by an intellectual renaissance and not relying on a divine intervention.
Perhaps their replacement is a divine intervention. I am inclined to see it that way, chipping cement off our boots included. I just don’t feel the need to wait for something to happen, but to prepare the right conditions so it happens sooner, rather than waiting until later. I see the world this way—responsive naturing. I remember a biblical phrase from my childhood: “God helps he who helps himself.” I just understand it this other way: helping oneself means working to create the conditions that lead this responsive naturing to hopefully go the way you want. Everything is divine. It’s a different world, when you see it this way. Dixi et salvavi animam meam!
Readers of Aurocafe ought to be given a chance to check out your spiel:
https://tranquilitysecret.com/great-responsiveness-is-the-theory-of-everything-that-can-bring-a-shared-understanding-to-both-9747be40473f
Perhaps this list of substantive articles might give them a clearer idea of it than just that ‘newsletter’ spiel: https://stilljustjames.medium.com/list/responsive-naturing-versus-causal-determinism-58a7a3adf7d6
Difficult subject you have gone into, as someone already mentioned. I can’t comment on McGinn, but I’m admired at you taking it to read the entire book. I could hardly finish the quotations. The emergence of “consciousness” as a point singularity I cannot agree with, first of all because we know it is not true. You just need to move the clock back in time and tell us at which point you became endowed with that thing called “consciousness”. There simply isn’t such a moment. What there is, abundantly, is the positivistic tendency of turning adjectives into abstract nouns or, as Paul Weiss said it in The Living System: “promoting adjectives to the rank of substantives” and then, consequently, following the reductionistic trail in the usual manner.
What do we know? We know non-locality, or magic as you called it. Again, Weiss, “the patterned structure of the dynamics of the system as a whole co-ordinates the activities of the [so called] constituents”, that’s what he termed “macrodeterminacy”, and conscious organization does not lie outside of it, but is just another level in same the hierarchy. “[..] the top level operations of the organism thus are neither structurally nor functionally referable to direct liaison with the processes on the molecular level in a steady continuous gradation, but are relayed step-wise from higher levels of determinacy [..]”. Frankl called this property of mental systems the “self-transcendent quality” of being, that which points “beyond itself rather than being a closed system”.
Where does it point to? You simply cannot limit it. NK called it the “historical body”, that’s what our being conscious means. There is not a single part in the historical formation of our biological being that is not “consciousness”. Burtt, in all his brilliancy, defined the concept clearly, without fully subscribing to it: “There is no help for it, we must declare unreservedly that a consistent empiricism cannot stop short of maintaining that the mind is extended in time and space throughout the whole realm that is spanned by its knowledge and contemplation. How else can the facts be expressed?"(p.320)
Creative activity, purpose, value, spirit, without referring to these “macro determinants” it is impossible to talk about conscious being.
“The natural world after all is more the home and theatre of mind than its unseen tyrant, and man as expressing the functions of reason and spirit gathers to a focus far more of the flavour and creative fertility of the universe than the whole spatio-temporal object of his eager contemplation.
Mayhap we must wait for the complete extinction of theological superstition before these things can be said without misunderstanding. Such is the misfortune of modern thought as compared with that of Greece.”
I can’t remember who it was (was it Thomas, was it Wordsworth, or perhaps Borges? It might as well have been Spinoza) who said: “The first person who thought ‘I see a flower’ had a momentarily spark of self-awareness, but that one who said ‘the flower sees me’ penetrated the nature of reality”.
“The emergence of 'consciousness' as a point singularity I cannot agree with, first of all because we know it is not true.” — Ah! And how do we know this???
It seems you haven’t paid sufficient attention to even those McGinn quotes which actually make sense. The subject–object relation is the essence of consciousness as we know it (I’m not here talking of supramental consciousness which both originates and transcends the mental) and a defining aspect of mind. And there are very good reasons to believe that it pops into existence at once in its defining totality. There may be cases where we are not sure whether a creature is conscious, but whichever is the case, either it is conscious or it is not. As long as the subject-object relation is absent, mind is still involved in life.
Thank you for revealing the secret processes underlying evolution and manifestation. It is a truly brave endeavour and you have stated with impending clarity the role of involution. What caught my curiosity was your statement "Quantum observables must be defined by something that is accessible to direct sensory experience". Is it possible to define some units and parameters in the cognitive domain that include neurosensory stimuli and include them in the quantum physics experiments as observer data, or is this line of thinking fallacious and inconclusive?
“Impending” is the word! I hope the clarity is not too far out.
What do you mean by “neurosensory stimuli”? Things that stimulate the sensory pathways in the brain, or things happening in the brain that give rise to sensations? Often clarifying what one is asking goes half the way to an answer.
I mean the physical and electrical components of the cognitive mechanism of the human brain or physical mind.
Some people may claim that it is possible but I have no idea how it could be done let alone whether such a thing has been done.