Biochemistry Vs. Intersubjective Meaning

Physics says the world is made up of particles, and that these particles are subject to the force of field vectors. Frank Wilczek fixed John Wheelers idiom with the following description:

“energy-momentum tells space-time how to curve.

Space-time tells energy-momentum what straight is (in space-time).”

Energy-momentum = particles; Space-time = fields. There the Yin and Yang at the root of the physical world which makes us all up.

Interestingly, when we think about our psychological lives, and in particular, our affective, feeling life-world, there is this tendency to see our feelings as purely a function of 'biochemistry'. This biochemistry reductionism, however, fails to apply the facts of more fundamental sciences which tell us that particles are guided by fields. If my brain and body is a bunch of complex biochemistry, what is the field that this 'particle' is interacting with? If the biochemistry of my body is Yin, what is the Yang? Answer: Other Humans.

The activating, and animating influence of feelings in our lives derives from others. We overlook this because we like to think that the feelings we have about ourselves are a function of how "great" we are in some essential sense; but this is dissociative and ridiculous. You're a physical system embedded in a dynamical environment with analogously structured physical systems. We're built to know one another; to feel one another's intentionality by how their bodies move, how their faces look, and how their voices sound. Meaning surrounds us long before anyone utters word. In fact, the most emotionally impactful and meaningful experiences are non-verbal. A hug when I'm feeling sick or depressed means much more to me than what a person says. Indeed, if I'm feeling bad and someone asks me "do you want something", the impact of the effect has nothing to do with the question and everything to do with how they said it. If there's kindness and concern in the voice, it penetrates me and adds an energetic oomph that otherwise wouldn't exist. My very conscious intent to detect the intent behind the tone adds to the experience, but my conscious intent isn't necessary for my body to register the meaningfulness of the tone in itself.

In the realm of mental illness, many people are overwhelmed by a pharmaceutical industry that more or less farms humans; we're marketed to in outlandishly manipulative commercials, and offered chemicals that more often than not will make you more sick in the long term than any value they can offer in the short term. Worse of all, we become prisoners to the logic of the whole gambit: again and again they repeat the meme: "you have a chemical imbalance", and after hearing after the umpteenth time, its become a deep-seated belief deeply sedimented in the cultural environment around us. People then think,"how can I feel better unless some chemistry comes inside of me? I need a particle - a pill, to put in my mouth and swallow, in order to feel good." The logic is faulty, however.

Just as a particle in matter is transformed by the incorporation of a quantum of energy from the field its embedded within, so to is the biochemistry within our systems transformed by the incorporation of meaning in the intersubjective field we're embedded within. The same principle.

The delusion then is taking a physically separate object as literally isolated, as if it wasn't dynamically contiguous in logical ways with other like-systems. This analogy is very basic. When I look at a rock, I see matter, which is somewhat analogous to what I am insofar as I am made of matter. When I see a cell, its a living system which strives in the same way I strive. When I see a frog, I see a face, a tongue, and other analogous structures to what I have. And so on on up to the human beings who are most like us - who have the same feelings and attitudes that we do. People like this 'resonate' with one another because their structures are very symmetrical/analogous. These interactions are just as real and just as causative as biochemistry; and indeed, theres something superior to them vis-à-vis biochemistry.

Good thought, never made that connection of relativity theory to the Spirit-matter matrix. I would suppose the ether, Spirit, field, or whatever you want to call it, is where matter get's its programming and direction. It follows meticulous laws that are all invisible. Despite the fact that invisible forces are the reason for matter's existence, we still have the tendency to disregard the invisible because it is not visible to our basic senses.

The real power for transformation comes from working love into these invisible realms and realizing that our minds have synchrony and access to the universal invisible Mind from which we came.

a reply to: cooperton

Liked your last paragraph.

So many religious systems from my perspective have the whole understanding of gross vs. subtle matter reversed. The Universe is not trying to "escape" matter as some Gnostic or certain Hindu visionaries imagine, but rather, the Universe wants to be embodied. The Universe seeks this embodiment as a function of the dynamical laws inherent in its evolution from the Big Bang.

I believe very deeply in the power of love, but love is not merely "in the head", but as you wrote, is deeply and fundamentally ecological; It an 'emergent property' of the synchronizing capacities between the human being and other human beings (since love is always dependent upon and emergent from interactions with other humans). We speak about this emotion as if it were something inherently 'inside' of us, where "spiritual" is made to mean something solipsistic. But the reality is the reverse: spiritual means 'subtle', which means that it is about the subtle connections that exist between the transformations occurring within us and between ourselves and others. The entire system is dynamically continuous, even though at the purely visible level, objects are partitioned from one another. This partitioning isn't necessarily unreal, in the sense that it gives rise to a sense of genuine conditions that define individuality. But it isn't the basis of things; there's a deeper reality more fundamental than the surface-level interactions that define our status as individual organisms.