More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In using language we break up what is in reality inseparable, uncountable, immeasurable, into chunks: we substitute words for elements in experience, and these words, as Bergson puts it, ‘ever after will cover them up; we then attribute to them the fixity, the discontinuity, the generality of the words themselves.’44 That is certainly the danger.
And for anything to ‘arise’ – rise up – tend, grow, change – there needs to be a degree of architective resistance within the connective flow. In this the right hemisphere and left hemisphere are, as ever, complementary. And this architective resistance, causing something to endure for a while, manifests in mind as conceptual thought – much as, I shall later argue, it manifests in space as matter.
Nature as a whole co-operates in every product.
What he calls the ‘products’ of Nature – the fruits of Nature’s generative quality, wherein its very essence lies – are never wholly distinct in themselves from Nature or from one another. They are only superficially ‘thing-like’.
It is easy enough – indeed it happens automatically, and unconsciously, for us now – to see the mechanism and the parts; what is hard, without re-training one’s attention, is to get back to seeing the living whole.
For Schelling, the emergence of thinking subjects from nature is part of a process whereby an absolute subjective consciousness comes to know itself. The process of consciousness is creative not just of what it comes to know but of itself, which are ultimately one and the same thing: ‘What in us knows’, says Schelling, ‘is the same as what is known.’
In music, as in the living world, change is permanent, stasis is transitory. ‘What is perceived’, writes Thomas Fuchs, ‘is not a sequence of discrete tones but a dynamic, self-organising process which integrates the tones heard to create a melody’. Self-organising, note: it is an ‘automatic synthesis, not one actively performed by the subject’.88 In other words we have to escape the effortful sense of constructing something if we are to allow a flow simply to be.
By transcending language one may see the world as unique wholes that themselves together constitute unique wholes at a higher level, and so on without limit.
This primacy of union over division, however necessary division might be, is reflected in the fact that one can move from an extended whole in space or time to parts (though losing almost everything on the way), but not from the parts to the whole.
What he points to is that we mainly do not think in language, but record thought, after the event, in language.
Symptom complexes in the cognitive and affective domain, he reasoned, could also be seen as reflecting exaggeration or diminution of responses to the environment, similar to those in the motor domain.177 Dysmetria of thought, then, would according to this hypothesis, eventuate in disjunctive and disproportionate elements of social interaction.178
As I suggested in The Master and his Emissary, the ‘binding problem’ – how all those little ‘modules’ we have identified get ‘put together’ into one more or less seamless whole – may be an artefact of our chosen epistemology.
Organisms move as a whole, and their movement is characteristically fluid: machines work by action of part on part, and their motions typically lack organic fluidity. And in a sense what the schizophrenic subject, and to some extent the autistic subject, experiences is something like a mechanisation of time, experience and the body.
Observations and perceptions affect movements, and movements affect observations and perceptions.
upon analysis, we find that we begin not with a sensory stimulus but with a sensori-motor coordination … and that in a certain sense it is the movement which is primary, and the sensation which is secondary, the movement of body, head and eye muscles determining the quality of what is experienced. In other words, the real beginning is with the act of seeing; it is looking, and not a sensation of light.
‘The fact is that there is no sort of consciousness whatever, be it sensation, feeling, or idea, which does not directly and of itself tend to discharge into some motor effect.’
Consciousness is always consciousness of something, reaching out and going to meet something beyond the self; not a self-enclosed Cartesian theatrical display, but a reverberative process, already aimed towards the real, living world – out of which it also comes.
Analysis wants measurement, and measurement begins the process of immobilisation and fragmentation. Yet it is never quite equal to what it measures.
What this means is that analytic thinking will never be up to the job of providing a complete account of reality, and what it lacks will be hardly trivial, but what is in every sense vital to the project of philosophy.
And not only that, but, again Bergson-like, there are not things that flow, but there is just – flow, which manifests as things flowing; it’s the flowing that is the ultimate reality.
Space and time are not containers in which we live, but aspects of being.
Yet, despite this, space has the means to be generative: it is the potential for motion, and gives rise to form, which is what we see, precipitated out of potential, in space. In the project of differentiation – of species, of individuals and in all the creative flow towards generating new, unique creatures, events and circumstances – space is required, otherwise all would collapse into unity.
Time and space express the universe as including the essence of transition [time] and the success of achievement [space]. The transition is real, and the achievement is real. The difficulty is for language to express one of them without explaining away the other.7
Space could be seen as a property of fields of energy – fields, therefore, of potential creation.
The book of the universe is one of pattern: and mathematics is just one way of looking at those patterns. The patterns come first in water, earth, fire, and air: maths comes afterwards, abstracting those patterns.
To believe that all is within our grasp, is surely a failure of imagination, one that, I contend, leads in turn to a failure to apprehend the deeper meaningfulness of existence.
Technology is one expression of the desire for power and control over the world, which is of course the primary motivation of the left hemisphere, in which it repudiates the right hemisphere on which we rely for our sense of depth in every sense of the word.
Take the example of spatial depth: on the one hand, unlike a flat, two-dimensional screen which rebuffs our approach and draws attention to itself as an object of observation, depth draws us into the possibility of connexion.
The ways in which distinct (but never wholly separate) entities are related are more important than the relata, the things so related.
We see the general not by turning away from the particular, but by looking intently at it so as to see into it, whereby the value of the particular is not in any way negated, but taken up (aufgehoben) into something greater beyond. Similarly, I suggest, we find the soul not by turning away from the body, but by embracing it in a way that spiritualises the body; and we find the sacred not by turning away from the world, but by embracing it, in a move that sanctifies matter. The soul is both in and transcends the body, as a poem is in and yet transcends mere language, a melody in, yet
...more
It seems to me likely that neurology, philosophy and physics should all be approaching a similarly structured reality, albeit from different paths, and therefore seeing different aspects of the same whole.
Physics is Pragmatist in its approach to truth. It does not claim to describe reality, but to offer models that work.
We can measure no aspect of a particle without in some fashion interacting with it, and that interaction changes the particle’s nature.
Physical quantities are not integers but real numbers – continuous numbers, with an infinite number of digits after the decimal point. The known laws of physics, Matrix fans will be disappointed to learn, have features that no one knows how to simulate on a computer, no matter how many bytes its memory has. Appreciating this aspect of these laws is essential to developing a fully unified theory of physics.
In the attempt to describe quantum reality, ordinary language simply breaks down.
The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.’
If reality is such that our knowledge is intrinsically, not accidentally, incomplete; if it is intrinsically, not accidentally, uncertain; if it is intrinsically inexpressible in everyday language, requiring exceptional, non-denotative, highly metaphoric, ‘poetic’ use of language to get beyond the limits of language; if we must deal not with facts but with connexions; if entities are never wholly separable from other entities; if the process of a knower coming to know is interactive or reverberative, each changing the other – not distanced, inert and owing nothing to the presence, and possibly
...more
A good deal, I submit, that would bear out both his and Bergson’s view of the universe: that it is neither wholly discretised, though discretised enough to generate individuals; nor wholly continuous, though continuous enough to be ultimately unified, and that the discreteness arises secondarily out of the continuity.
The building blocks of our theories are not particles but fields: continuous, fluidlike objects spread throughout space … The objects that we call fundamental particles are not fundamental. Instead they are ripples of continuous fields
‘All particles are waves in a universally distributed continuous shared field that envelops each and all of us: values in the field change with space and time,’
Wave and particle are two modes of being of the same field phenomenon: this makes possible the coming together of union and division, of continuity (the wave) with discreteness (the particle) within a single uniting phenomenon (the field).
The quantum of a field is what was conventionally conceptualised as a particle. According to QFT, the continuity of the field is more foundational than the particle-like quantum: the wave-like property of a field collapses into what behaves like a particle, and thus the ‘particle’ is an emergent property of the field.
‘At a fundamental level is nature discrete or continuous? I see no evidence whatever for discreteness. All the discreteness we see in the world is something which emerges from an underlying continuum … Quanta are emergent … they are not built into the heart of Nature.’
Common sense is choosing, wherever possible, the simplest, most intuitively satisfying explanation that is consistent with our observations. This is not the same thing as accepting intuition blindly
Whereas QM posits a world of particles, and its equations give the probability that the particle is at a given point, QFT posits a world of fields, and its equations give the strength of the field at a given point.
‘An electron is nothing like, say, a tiny pea. An electron is simply an energy increment of a spread-out matter field.’
Matter is whatever occupies space and has mass. Or rather ‘exists spatially’, since space should not be thought of as a container for ‘things’. But it must have mass.
And what is mass? Fascinatingly, mass is the tendency of an entity to resist – changes in course or speed. This should resonate, since, from a purely metaphysical point of view, I have been arguing that, though flow is generative, nothing comes into existence except by means of resistance to flow. The recalcitrance of mass gives rise to the possibility of enduring form.
Light gives rise to mass and the material world we see. Without light we could see nothing: without mass there would be nothing to see.
In classical physics mass is a measure of inertia. Similarly in QFT the effect of mass is to slow down the speed at which a field evolves and propagates, so mass plays the same inertial role in QFT as it does in classical physics. But this is not all that mass does. This same term also causes the field to oscillate, and the greater the mass, the higher the frequency … the energy of a quantum is represented by oscillations in its field intensity: the more energy, the faster the oscillations.
