Stonepharisee

The Phenomenal Arises

For each organism, a NOW, a HERE, and an I all co-arise. The present moment, which is the same thing as the domain of the phenomenal, which is also the coordinate system that we ineptly refer to as “my head”, which is the domain we ridicule when we poke fun at solipsism, all that is real.  Perfectly real.  

To understand how it arises, we need to look at the interface between the organism and its surround.  It is not trivial to point to that interface.  Is it the retinal surface or the screen?  That depends upon how we cast the organism or subject.  Not all actions make sense when considered with respect to biological imperatives.  They make sense with respect to other domains.   When we observe the variation at the retina, or the flickering on the screen, it does not yield up its secrets.  It contains both subject and world, locked in a dance.   To make sense of it, to go from mere movement to structured behavior or skilled action, we need to posit a frame of reference.   Language ensures that that frame of reference shifts constantly.  With language, broadly construed, uncountable domains of joint and several action arise, adding nuance and ontological lightness to being.

So if we consider the screen to be the interface, what are the domains we see?  We see the film directly.  If we look instead at the eyes, we can still see the film, in the synchronized movement of a million eyeballs.  Recently, neuroscientists peered at near real-time activity in visual cortex.  They were able to reconstruct a fuzzy imprint of the film.  But it is seen most clearly on the screen.  That then sets the framework within which a specific kind of meaning arises.  

If we consider the written page to be the interface, again we see meaning defined at that level - language narrowly viewed now as a written medium - and if define the interface to be elsewhere, it becomes harder to interpret what we see.  So following the eyes is not a good guide to the import of the page.  The eye movements are relatively unspecific; they leap from word to word, but the direction of gaze does not caress the serifs on the edge of the capital T.  That high-frequency detail is available only directly on the page.  And yet you can’t not read.  If shown a word, you can not fail to read it, and regard it as mere marks.

Defining the interface serves to fix the relata.

The fear of being a cell

As we understand more and more of what it is to be an individual, we see more and more how the individual is constantly threatened with loss of agency by integration into higher order forms of structure.  We cling dearly to the independence of the individual, and we have grown a certain distaste for collectivist views of human nature that would apportion us the kind of role found in ants, or the individual cells in a liver.  Ants, to some extent, live for the colony.  The liver cell seems, from this position, to be entirely beholden to the liver for its sense of purpose.

We like to think of ourselves as freer than that.  We like to think of a domain of potential action that is shaped largely by our own ambitions and desires.  The notion is quaint.  When we look at the ant or the liver cell, we can see how, for each, there is a sphere of effective action, and its form arises from the interplay between the individual endogenous dynamic and the collective dynamic. And we can see that we must be similarly constituted, and that we should interpret the phenomenal accordingly.  No small order.

P-world theory helps out here. If we reify the notion of phenomenal experience, or psychological present, or solipsistic mind, we can stop identifying with it, and we can allow for multiple interpretive frameworks to justify our intentional action.  Many of those frameworks will be at the organ/colony/nation/club/mob level.  We need to consider not only co-temporaneous groupings, but historically distributed groupings.  I behave in this manner because I am a European, or a Catholic, or a Shaman.  Identity thus becomes fluid.  

Let’s just get used to this …

Time.  Can’t live with it, can’t think around it.

If I say that time is an illusion, you say you heard that one before, and it failed to change the world.  You’re still here, living at one second per second.

But I can then show you that your story demands the existence of an isolated bubble of experience, a solipsistic mind, as a necessary referent of the word ‘you’.  Now, time flows.  That is very real.  It is also a phenomenal fact.  It is something that is true of the P-world. But then you find, upon closer analysis, that the P-world is a fiction.  There is no such bounded domain.  And with that, time freezes.

Neat trick.

Collective Constitution

It would behoove the pharisee to say a little about what he means by the term ‘Collective Constitution’.  Again and again I will maintain, against the present conviction that the mind is a private place, that we are collectively constituted, and that we, together, bring this world into being.  I need to unpack that a little.

First, note that it is ‘this’ world that we bring into being.  A world that is viewed from a perspective.  Not a mind-independent world.

The things that populate that world are not static and unchanging.  Only things that change, or have a differential, can persist through time.  Consider your chair.  As you think of it, you perceive it too, becoming aware of its support, its firmness, perhaps its location with respect to the rest of the room.  Those flickering thought/chair strands are part of what it is to be any chair we can talk about.  So the chair, and the attention paid to the chair, and the way the chair is woven into our behaviors and constraints, all this is built in time, and out of time.  This is hard to visualize.  Here is a help.

Consider the motion of an ear of grass, atop a slender stalk, surrounded by millions of other strands of grass, in a vast field, across which the wind blows, causing ripples.  Now consider the motion of any one ear.  From the outside observer’s position one might posit a first order decomposition of the entire motion of that ear to be roughly the composition or superposition of two kinds of sources.  On the one hand, there is a component to the motion that is to be best explained with reference to the properties of this particular stalk of grass and its ear.  The stiffness of the stalk, for example, and the mass of the ear that crowns it.  There is another, independent, component, however, and that is best understood with reference to the collective phenomenon of the wave or ripple that comes from without and is an emergent phenomenon defined over the field, and not with respect to any specific individual stalks.

That much is clear to the outsider.  But from the point of view of the ear, it cannot hope to dissect its own phenomenal world in this way.  So too, I can not dissect the chair I meet.  As well as something like color, the chair I meet has some economic value, some aesthetic attributes, it is property, it has a well-specified function in my household, and so on.  All of these clearly have their origin in collective or community patterns of behavior that are picked up, and that steer behavior as surely as any notional individual agent.  

Sign of the times

We live in an age and area in which we assume that the individual is the prime mover. Collective phenomena are understood to reduce directly to the acts of individuals.  This is a very serious error.  No level of explanation is privileged, and the individual will appear to be of sometimes greater sometimes lesser complexity, depending upon the circumstances in which we view him/her.  

Along with this obvious fiction is the notion that we each inhabit a solipsistic private world of experience.  This is harder to see through.  One way, and the way adopted here, is to reify this notion, and think through the consequences.  This is the P-world construct.  It is a theoretical entity that must exist, if there is anything to the story of private minds.  It will become clear, however, that no such private domain exists, and we are never separate from the world we inhabit.  We, and our worlds, are collectively constituted.

The point of this tumblr

This is essentially a private conversation between me, myself, and I.  It is attempt to document, in time, the interests and face, and point, of a character called the Stone Pharisee.  I have no idea what will happen.