Past, Present, and Future, Body Mind and World

As physical organisms, we are continuously constituted by what just happened, where we are now, vis a vis an environment which possesses gradations of intrinsic meaning. Three ontological divisions are here, all happening within the material transformations occurring within our skulls. You, the reader, are operating through these principles right now - as your brain - with its molecular/spatial-geometrical history (modes of dissipating energy) is currently reading a computer screen (present) even though the past (your physical structure) contains within it intrinsic considerations - predictions - of the future.

The mind - the present - is ontologically "crunched" between a physiological process (brain) with an intrinsic sense for what it needs from the environment to generate coherency for itself - this pertains to the "future" afforded by an environment.

You - you are spread across three temporal dimensions, sandwiched into the present - not realizing that it is the present alone, each continuous iteration of it, which offers the way forward into a deeper ontological reality. If you have not begun such a "pilgrimage" - into yourself, your thoughts, feelings, and most of all, your motivations, you will not have attained self-knowledge, which necessarily means knowledge of how the outside (future) affects your inside (past) and what you can do in the present to reconcile their antagonisms.

What Just Happened (or How the Past Matters)

By definition, no Human is evil, simply because every Human is literally constituted by its lived-references. If the meaning you have within you happens to be sadistic or masochistic, this is only because someone in your past, or more likely, a recurring pattern in your relational living, has involved an interaction with a mind that is organized in sadistico-masochistic ways. It's not a mystery why its there, although Humans who relate in such ways remain blasé about etiology, or romanticize and mystify their feeling-relations as if some truly deep, terrifying and foreboding reality were seeking to become realized...Nietzsche, Wagner, D'Annunzio, etc, express mentally ill but well-read minds that refuse to recognize the profound ontological meaning-significance of the developmental process on how reality constitutes itself. It's a simply matter of symmetry and symmetry breaking. Physics. Yet the Wagners, Nietzsches, etc, think and confuse themselves through their own languaging - to which Nietzsche undoubtedly the most self-conscious of the bunch, recognized, yet could barely fail to recognize that "the way out" of his battle with reality was not questioning without a sense of resolution - but a discovery, a very simple, yet intuitive recognition, that love is that which anchors the mind into a state of coherence - which necessitates "naming", or representing that truth in verbal/symbolized form. To say "love is the truth", is not a neutral act, but a psychological act which helps configure and stabilize neural patterns that move more and more towards the golden-mean i.e. maximum coherence.

The chauvinistic culture of machismo is a linguistic-symbolic "brake" on neurological/affective functioning, leaving the linguistic narrativizing mind to work in essentially $hitty conditions, forced by negative affects and repetitive negative interpersonal interactions to both reify an egotistical (pleasure inducing) assertiveness about "how the world is" (you would be lying to say every utterance about how you think things are doesn't relieve you in some way of some internal frustration) as well as leave you and your body functioning in a less emotionally and metabolically robust way.

Where You Are, and How You Got There

The environment and your body are actually one process. Your vision of the world is not "just in your head", as the asinine neuroscientists and psychologists like to think. Rather, and in fact, a visual percept entails the outside object, light, and your brain. Light in fact proves to be the "integrating" element inasmuch as it light is what integrates the existence of the external object with the visual properties of your eyes, and the transformation of the instigating outside energy (photons) into meaningful information for the organism.

To exemplify this idea, consider the Neanderthal and its unusually large occipital lobe bone - the back of the head. This largeness of this bone in the back of the skull has been interpreted by anthropologists like Robin Dunbar as a metabolic compromise made by the hominid body-brain at higher latitudes, where there is less light, and therefore, less time for finding food. Dunbar's approach, the time-budget model, is an important way of reflecting on the evolution of organisms.

“The time budget models are, conceptually, very simple. They begin from the observation that an animal can survive in a given habitat only if it meets it energy and nutrient requirements and ensures the cohesion of its social group. Nutrient needs are met by allocating time to foraging (which includes both feeding and travel) and social cohesion is satisfied by allocating time to whatever activities enable this – in the case of primates, social grooming. This leaves just one other major activity category to worry about, namely resting time. This is not rest in the sense of having nothing better to do, but time that the animal is forced to spend inactive either to avoid heat overload during the middle of the day or – a particular problem for species with leaf based diets – to allow digestion to take place.” – Robin Dunbar, Human Evolution, pg. 84-85, Oxford Press 2016

To forage at higher latitude and thus meet their nutrient-requirements in living, the Neanderthal visual cortex expanded in its discriminatory powers - with more neurons decoding light coming in from the Neanderthal's large eyeballs, lies more information-processing capacity, and therefore, greater nuance and subtlety in low-light conditions.

The Neanderthals appear to have been a simple bunch not very different, anthropologists believe, from today's inuit. Indeed, todays inuit have bodies very similar to the Neanderthals - following the same physical laws: shorter limbs and thicker torsos conserve energy better than longer limbs and thinner torsos - witness western African limb ratio's, where the same heat principle works but to the opposite effect.

The point of this conversation is to point out that the temporal dimensions of past-present-future are lateralized, with the body recycling past-knowledge, and the environment 'activating' the directionality of those movements, and so, serving as the pole which prediction works against.

The mind, then, is truly in the present - in the now - although to this somehow exempts the mind from probing its past, and recognizing its relation in the outside world, is to dabble in this worse sort of delusion - a delusion that is surprisingly common and powerful in the world.

If the mind probes its past, discovers its connections to the future (or environment), what sort of ontological effects does that have for reality?

If the mind sees and knows coherently - and thus subtly - it binds the past - the body - with the future - the world, into the reality and signification of the mind in the present. Such a reality, of course, is what our traditions call 'paradise', or 'eden'. To recognize it as such entails being in it. Yet none of us look upon that concept or world from that world. We are all - because we are dynamically constituted beings - nursing some degree of entropy, or injury, or trauma, and so we think with fear, with trepidation, and some degree of unease.

Knowledge is real, because it reconfigures, and realigns, the mind which knows - and knows from a particular STATE, and correlates the state it knows within itself - including its brain - to the world as it exists out there. A mind which knows coherently experiences as a side-effect, happiness, pleasure, wellbeing, satisfaction, and a "lightness of being" that is resilient against disruption.

a reply to: Astrocyte

What I find fascinated about our living body is the way living processes work. It's like life is a ball rolling down a hill. The ball is always rolling down the hill. And the hill is fall away causing the ball to move. It's like a treadmill of hill and ball rolling together. The energy involve with living once kicked into motion continuously resets itself to continue the burn of energy. Life has a very strange loop back of burning energy to the potential burning energy. Plus the ability to create a new ball rolling down the hill is pretty cool too.