Paradoxes

I, like many other people, can experiences moments where reality tortures me. The issue lies in a loopiness; in a difficulty to neatly establish a way of thinking about thinking. Categorizing is tempting, yet reality throws in our faces exceptions to our ruling.

1) I know that my body shapes my mind. I know that, phlyeticly speaking, my brain and nervous system is based on myriad forms before me. Biological life on planet earth is all related: my nervous system is scaffolded upon that of lower creatures before me. Some lower taxa - the mammals share my limbic structures and reptiles are the originators of brainstem homeostatic functions.

Belief - humans believe. We believe, without our realizing it, as a way to hold off dysregulating affects: lower structures guide and structure higher functions: this is an undeniable lesson of evolutionary history: our higher functions are organized by lower functions: we tell ourselves stories about the world to hold off the conflicts of not knowing and not understanding how it is we understand at all: the greatest mystery was defined by Einstein long ago: that we can understand at all.

2) Do not let reality hold your thought! Realism is an illusion! Phenomenology is not all there is! We lie somewhere in the middle, in the spaces, between the spaces! Some people studied in one way of thinking - biology - cannot shift into another mode. The fears have crystallized in them one mode of thinking: shifting is dusregulating! Thinking, and acknowledging what is there - what is made available to us by reality - do not block it out! And yet, this is our impulse, the paradox of paradoxes: we are self aware beings, experiencing reality, as it were, from an alien perspective: yet all of this arises and relies upon the physical processes of biological organization. How do cells create consciousness? Why do some people insist on seeing consciousness as nothing more than cells? Why do other people insist on abstracting consciousness from its biological context?

To escape the conflict: to escape the tension. To move into a space - into body and matter, or into mind and its abstractiveness. We lie in the middle - between the spaces, between.

3) The environment builds biological bodies, and yet bodies develop centers of volitional activity, and return back to the environment what the environment has put inside of it. The laws of thermodynamics insure certain ways of relating: biological bodies are dependent upon the energy it receives from without, but cells, over time, become less and less able to replicate themselves with high fidelity. Reality, expanding reality, spreading outwards from the big bang, yet building life in the process, instates something called time upon us: we have only a little bit of it. And then.......?

What of our consciousness? Such a question doesn't occur to non-reflective creatures: that is, all other creatures. We speak of genes as if genes were the mystery, but they are not. The mystery is matter and how it constitutes itself. Two creatures can share many of the same genes yet end up looking, behaving and experiencing reality very differently from one another. The issue, then, is the organization and constitution of things. So what of our constitution?

4) The organization of our selfhood emerges, like the subjectivity of our minds from the matter of our brain, from the interpersonal spaces of our relations. Self is emergent, and exists upon, our relations with others.

Yet when we develop this selfhood, the stubborn hold of belief - of self belief - of being our own body and having our own mind - our own self - we abstract, we take our place, and forget, yet again, that we exist between the spaces!

Happiness, play. The imaginal play of writing and reading stories. The movies we watch and the books we read. Imaginal play - we play with one another: we are children who pretend we our adults! Again, ontogeny repeats itself - adult reflective capacities scaffolded upon childhood play: the institutions we develop, the way we orient and relate with one another. Some of it is determined by logical necessity, yet more is determined by our want for play.

5) The outside world, the objective world: the world of matter, the terrain of the realist. Objective things structure me, yet, a remainder exists: some things lie beyond explanation. My subjectivity - emerging from biological history: how paradoxical that the most biological of thinkers can overlook the thoroughly emotional nature of human subjectivity! and how sad - that instead of addressing and containing the conflict, people move into one side or another, into "only matter is real!" or "only mind is real!".

By embracing the conflict, we live the paradox.

Reducing the above to a précis would have made it more digestible.
That is if a meaningful response was required.

Nice considerations.

I sort of see it as being a 'Universal being', both physical and 'spiritual', I believe that both are able to communicate dimensionally. I say both as both are connected.

I believe that there are dimensions that are experienced that show the truth of this and it is the experience of these dimensions that brings the most powerful emotions that affects the holistic 'being'.

When one knows love of the deepest sort that transcends the physical then one is experiencing such dimensions.

As it happens, I am doing some research at the moment and just read this, which is apt and possibly ironic as one could consider the ''bringing something home'' as the need for the highest transcendental dimensional experience, as an innate belonging to Universal source:

We remain unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge, even to ourselves: and with good reason. We have never sought after ourselves—so how should we one day find ourselves? It has rightly been said that: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’; our treasure is to be found in the beehives of knowledge. As spiritual bees from birth, this is our eternal destination, our hearts are set on one thing only—‘bringing something home.’

— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

a reply to: Astrocyte

Beautiful, S&F
The never ending conflict between reason, the urges and needs of the body and the feelings and imaginary realms.
One wonders, if ignorance is bliss isn't very true in this regards. If I wouldn't know and feel, life would be a lot easier.

a reply to: Astrocyte
A great round of consideration and thought-provoking questions!

Paradoxes are inevitable for the mind because it always tries to be subject to whatever it is observing. In other words, it presumes a particular point-of-view and then tries to explain from that standpoint.

One of my favorite paradoxes is to consider what the room you are in actually looks like in reality. That the room exists is self-evident to the mind, but what does it actually look like?

From anyone else's point-of-view, the room looks different than it does for me. To know what it looks like in reality, every possible point-of-view would have to be taken into account.

If you took pictures from various points in the room, even just 5 or so such pictures super-imposed, would make the room look very different, not necessarily even distinguishable as a room.

So what does the room actually look like then?

Very well thought out thread, and rich in writing.

Conciousness, thought forms, a spectrum of feelings/emotions... hardwired into a nervous system, of a biological-chemical body.

We are the entirety of it all. We are strange beings

a reply to: theabsolutetruth

I believe that there are dimensions that are experienced that show the truth of this and it is the experience of these dimensions that brings the most powerful emotions that affects the holistic 'being'.

These are the sorts of contradictions that some types try to avoid. Why does reality present itself to us in certain ways sometimes? Or rather, and I think this goes more to the heart, why do some people insist on reality being only one way?

When one knows love of the deepest sort that transcends the physical then one is experiencing such dimensions.

Yes! This is the mystery, for me anyways. I'll be the first person to admit that death scares the $hit out of me. Who wouldn't be afraid of it? Yet, I find 'ulterior motive' in whichever direction I find myself moving. If I want to justify consciousness following death, is it because of that fear? If I don't, aren't I being overly assertive, and therefore, replacing the discomfort of uncertainty with the pleasure of certainty? lol. It really is funny, how the unconscious influences our perceptions, and even leaves us, ultimately, in this netherzone, neither here nor there. Yet, what we CAN do, is accept the mystery, and boldly accept life for the journey that it is.

Of course, speculation is interesting. And who knows, maybe one day we'll crack the mystery of how cells create consciousness and what the relationship between matter and mind is. But as of now, we haven't seemed to have progressed one iota in the mystery (and I study neuroscience!). Gerald Edelman, Patricia Churchland, Antonio Damasio, Eric Kandel, Stanislas Dehaene. These people would benefit from studying psychanalysis. It would humble them and rightly keep them where they should be: in the same place everyone else is: ignorance.

As to love. All I know is, when I'm experiencing anxiety, unable to sleep, worry about my schedule, my tiredness, and I fear it's going to get worse, the only thing that helps me is by turning my attention to some ontological 'center'. People often overlook this, but if you've ever faced the 'tremendous terror" (to quote william james), you find yourself instinctively positing 'something' out there to help you. God. Buddha. Or an idea we turn to. By moving our minds there, we find love and compassion. We feel, as children feel upon being born, the loving embrace of an "other".

Some neuropsychiatrists think that feeling we have of "being held" is a vestige of our infancy. It probably is. But does that get rid of the mystery, or does it only deepen it? I, for one, do not think it is necessary to conflate proximal and ultimate causes. The proximal source of my turning towards some "other" might in fact be related to my mothers love for me as a baby. But that doesn't explain the mystery of mammalian attachment. It doesn't explain the PROGRESSIVE (as per the evidence) evolution, from more abstract interactions between inside and outside, to the emergence of creatures which consciously, and knowingly, experience the feeling of love.

I think it was Nietzsche who said that the universe is one big metaphor.

We remain unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge, even to ourselves: and with good reason. We have never sought after ourselves—so how should we one day find ourselves? It has rightly been said that: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’; our treasure is to be found in the beehives of knowledge. As spiritual bees from birth, this is our eternal destination, our hearts are set on one thing only—‘bringing something home.’

Although Nietzsches 'supermensch' idea arguably did more harm than good, few thinking people aren't riveted by his prose. He was a person who felt the conflict in things. Didn't hide from it. Didn't try to build neat categories (as positivists do). And he left room for the mystery.

We are all the schizophrenic response to a one-dimensional being's self-realization... there wasn't a Big Bang, merely an I am.

a reply to: MasterJedi

I am that I am AMEN