A Human Mind

Since ancient times there has been a very simple equivalence made by simple Humans awed by an ontology that seemed to have a simple-explanation.

"As Above, So Below", was the primary insight, and the conclusion was: the outside and the nature of our insight are related phenomena: perhaps, even, they are dynamically connected.

A radical new ontology - developed at the beginning of the 20th century by Neils Bohr, and transformed into a relational quantum ontology by scientists like Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli - seems to be supremely at odds, though, with this ancient, dogmatically transmitted position of the "ancient magi".

This idea of "being a magician", or influencing the dynamics of reality through the assumed ontological correlation between mind and matter, is based, presumably, on real life experience i.e. on the experience that the mind really does possess the power to change material reality. This isn't a techno-material claim: it is related to whatever the mind is able to do: it is 'above' matter in such a way that the thinking of a mind can determine the emergence of a material form within "external" reality.

As someone with lots of time and a reader of many different things, I can't help but focus on what the biggest issue with the claim of the occultist: the notion of being an observer outside the system. The problem with this assumption is that all of scientific investigation into the nature of matter, the universe, living organisms and the emergence of the Human mind, makes this claim enormously implausible: that is, it's not merely that individualism "feels wrong" - but because it reality literally doesn't work in that way.

Cosmologists hate the "outside observer" claim because it unnecessarily complex and yields poor explanations for phenomena; additionally, it unnecessarily assumes that the bodies of which we are made - matter - and the consciousness it's organized-activities give rise to - "consciousness" - specifically at the 300 millisecond time-length, involving billions of interacting neurons, each one made of billions of interacting molecules - as discovered by neuroscientists and psychologists who study the relationship of the brain to consciousness - doesn't matter. Why are some people so deaf to the scientific evidences? Why can't they see that they are inextricably entangled with the reality they seek to explain?

The Problem of Conscience

Conscience is not one of those things you can kill - or suppress - or get rid of - as it's existence within the Human experience merely refers to the teleodynamic attractor - or way of being - that the matter which makes up a Human body naturally inclines toward. In other words, trying to destroy your conscience - or eliminate it as a causal force in the structuring of your "individual" existence as a dissipative structure - is about as possible as pushing Earth of it's "preferred" orbit around the much larger Sun.

The issue is how some Humans come to "reify" or render static - and unchanging - the forms, or concepts, which they become intellectually preoccupied with. If one does not have within awareness a sense of nature's a priori ontological existence, over the Human, one can become "taken away" by the unconscious wishes forced into mental awareness by an incoherent relationship of the conscious mind with it's own affective experience.

Formative Causation

If anyone here has read Rupert Sheldrakes "Morphic Resonance", the idea of studying modern aboriginal Humans to discover the behavior of Humans 200,000 years ago may be ontologically suspect, and thus, no where near as "legitimate" as philosophically and scientifically naive anthropologists would like to believe.

Rather, when an organism changes, it necessarily has an effect - small, but cumulative over-time - on the structures of 'symmetrical' beings i.e. creatures of the same species. Further, semiotically speaking, trauma amongst Humans (as occurred 75,000 years ago) would propagate a 'defensive orientation' towards others that would come to effect not one tribe, but all tribes who come in interaction with one another. In such a way, a period of coherence - representationally speaking, in the sense that Human culture may have once accurately reflected the dynamics of reality - could incline into a period of incoherence - with new relational structures and dynamics become "integrated" into larger phenomena: civilization, cities, Human egotism: these are "one phenomenon" - where the biodynamical system (Human) is channeled through the "external" world as it "intra-acts" (Barad's term) with entities that have taken on a "matter-of-factness" within the identity of the developing and existing structure - the Human.

Overtime, among the societies elite - inevitably males, as it is in other primates like Gorillas and Chimps - an "asymmetry" would form within the Human Tribal Relational System (HTRS: "haters" for short), such that strength and power and the pleasure of exercising it over others would come to organize the dynamism of Human bodies - both males and females. However, since the dynamic was based in the exercise-of-power-over-others, it naturally placed male values and emotional needs over female values; indeed, in a more ontological sense, the concept of "responsivity" and "accountability" to what is real, was shoved to the side, while the spectacle, the arbitrary, and the fantastical, were injected into Human experience.

Consciousness Does Not Help Sinners

The above comment is meant metaphorically, of course. The issue is, consciousness has to be a causally efficacious force if it is to be "naturally selected". But what is consciousness? The best answer I have read associated consciousness with Aristotles concept of "entelechy" - or the power to manipulate and form. Whereas this quality is essential to the emergence of life, with mind, consciousness is able to shape the flow of feeling within its own experience by acting upon the past. We exist as the "present" - or in the now - but we are constantly interfacing within ourselves with the future and the past, and indeed, it is here that the "self" is formed and given a developmental significance. The Self is REAL because each of us are constructed from "built-in settings" which acts upon us by inclining certain interpretations of reality. Negative faces directed at us always educe a negative, conservative reflexivity in a baby, but as life goes forward for a creature in such a context, that initial response becomes "entangled" within machismo, hyper-agentic flows of feeling which hide and conceal the original error.

This happens because consciousness within our present relational reality - ontologically "co-created" - forces the conscious mind to identify with power wherever it may present itself in relational existence. Consciousness has become the "hand-maiden" for feelings, because consciousness must accept the negative before it can widen its window of awareness into areas dynamically "dissonant" with consciousness entanglement with primitive identity states.

But culture is so incredibly powerful: the ontological attractors of our feelings are other peoples feelings. Our thinking is accosted by more basic realities like "needing to be liked" - which is operative all the time, whenever we assert.

"As Above, So Below", was the primary insight, and the conclusion was: the outside and the nature of our insight are related phenomena: perhaps, even, they are dynamically connected.

Not perhaps, the truth of that saying relies on the premise that everything came into existance from the same source, a universal mind or if you like a big bang (whatever your beliefs). Allowing us to make conclussions of other realms of existance from a principle of correspondence. Similar to the correspondence principle in physics that states that the behavior of systems described by quantum mechanics reproduces classical physics even though, one appears spooky to the other.

Causation and consciousness are abstractions. Everything expressed with words and language is pure delusion and arbitrary. Reality is a single continuous wave of energy with no beginning, no end, where everything is connected to everything else. Past, present, and the future are all reflections from a mirror that is always hidden from our full view. Not only is it hidden from view but it is too big to ever be focused on with our minds. In every part and scale of the Universe, there are rogue waves of energy convergence which are completely unpredictable and make our full understanding of nature's behaviors beyond our grasp.

originally posted by: glend

"As Above, So Below", was the primary insight, and the conclusion was: the outside and the nature of our insight are related phenomena: perhaps, even, they are dynamically connected.

Not perhaps, the truth of that saying relies on the premise that everything came into existance from the same source, a universal mind or if you like a big bang (whatever your beliefs).

When a star of sufficient mass collapses it creates a black hole. Now consider this idea. Our Big Bang was the result of a star of sufficient mass collapsing to a black in another space-time dimension. This is a much bigger view of time. Our space-time dimension is just one of an infinite number of Big Bang dimensions. And since there is no real evidence non-existence has ever occurred, given that something exists, the only conclusion we can make is reality has always existed even though it is impossible for us to imagine it so.

a reply to: glend

I'm not questioning the theory of correspondence: I believe it. However, I think it can form in two possible directions: a coherent organization pointing to a metaphysical definition of reality in terms of its presented dynamics, or an artificial, quasi-coherent organization that deviates from the natural tendency of things - accomplishing this deviation through "extraction" or manipulation - particularly of other Humans.

AS Tolstoy says, there are millions of ways to be dysfunctional - and hence thousands of human cultures each with their own distorted sense of coherency. But all 'Happy families are alike". They are responsive - hold themselves consciously accountable - to the realities they ceaselessly interact with i.e. one another, and are true to what they know about their own and other peoples basic nature i.e. to be sensitive because were sensitive to one another's signalling.

Tolstoy disliked Shakespeare for a good reason. There's so much confusion in this world because too many people put philosophy ahead of science i.e. they put a conviction they have over something that is empirically demonstrated to exist and be real. They put their "selves" over the nature of reality - presumably, their true Self i.e. the source of their nature.

Part of my interest in my writing is to convert people not through mere rhetoric i.e. arbitrary, needlessly frivolous speech - but through making meaningful connections - starting from quantum physics (the quantum nature of things) and explaining - ultimately - that there is no "outside": our consciousness is not "outside", but a production of all that exists within the Universe. We are a natural process within the universe headed, it seems, for a particular direction, no matter how much some of us may dislike that direction. This "omega point", of course, could probably be 2 things: each with a particular 'end' like quality to it: we kill ourselves by destroying the conditions required for Human existence on planet Earth. Or, two: we overcome the difficulties we experience within ourselves, and come to recognize the relational source of those dysfunctions: society, or the "collective self", or mutating identity of a collective humanity - now held towards the same referents through the force of the Internet - is becoming more real, and in becoming real, forms the "womb" of our collective being; the 'referent' underlying our self-awareness as a Self, is the very "anti-pole" to the completely external dimension of space-time-matter. Think Avatar - the scene where they go up to the tree and "hear the voices of the ancestors"; something just like that - quite amazingly - is generated through the existence of Humanity, which, being a materially emergent property of evolution on planet Earth, remains localized to the physical Earth, and hence, to the continued existence of Human Beings who generate the organized energetic conditions for the ontological continuity of the Human Self.

What this means is amazing: we discover our common identity as a structure emergent within the flow of material existence - and in discovering ourselves as "that" - or the Universe itself - can we "wed" ourselves - or our awareness of Self, with the dynamics of the process which creates and generates both the Universe as well as ourselves.

The notion of "alienation' is an effect of trauma. It is a "false ground" - built from the absence of recognition, and so a "destroyer of worlds" - or more basically, a vampire which maximizes entropy as it destroys the very conditions required for its existence. It is short-term logic - the antitthesis of the Native American wisdom which considers the effects of present actions on people '7 generations' on. That sort of foresight - awareness and regulation of the present self - is an atsonishing feat of self-regulation - an evidence of a superior being, albeit, one manifestly unable to deal with 'technologically savy' materialists and hedonists (western conquerers) bent on extracting work from all living things (and past living things i.e. fossil fuels) to build vale for themselves.

The project has worked and proved incredibly beneficial. But it's time to scale back and change the principals of organization. Thankyou - sir Francis Bacon and those like him - for your ingenuity, but risking destruction of the very physical conditions needed to maintain our own reality and existence as a being is the acme of insanity. It's time to "relax", to regulate yourself, and to admit, its the age of "the feminine", which simply means - as merely symbolism in the female mode of functioning - to respond and be accountable to what matters.

This also leads me to a final point: if the self which we together constitute is ontologically REAL - as I believe it is - that would then mean that whomever 'attends' to the contents of this self - or mentally seeks to correlate itself to the "object phenomena" - or referent - i.e. through some occultism, they in fact our doing nothing more than interfacing with the mode-of-being-which-supports-their-existential-functioning. That the self 'makes sense to you' is precisely the point: it is giving you precisely what you want to hear, but unlike Alladin's Genie, the wishes occur out-of-step with the way physical reality works, and so merely supports an entropic tendency within Human cultural existence that propagates itself through naive Humans making unjustifiable assertions about things which they incompletely understand.

That is, there is something very suspect about any spiritual practices that permit immorality in action, as if the creation of effects in the world around you through your actions wouldn't be 'held' within the system of your brain-body and the bodies which have been affected by your decision to act. When one recalls that all of reality is "cosmically enfolded" within the same Universe, there is no "outside": there is merely a dynamical system building fantasies as a way to keep doing what he or she derives some energetic advantage from. If someone decides to dissociate themselves from good or evil and posit a "3rd" that stands apart - as if, neutral from external reality - they separate the 'higher level' (i.e. the unitary collective self which generates consciousness) from the lower level (the dynamical material conditions it emerges from) - and thus, misunderstand that the "third" is not found through disowning the effects you create, but through integrating your experience of self with knowledge of the way reality works (Self), thus supporting things which are good for you (goodness, patience, etc) and avoiding things which produce entropy in Human affairs, and ultimately, damage our way of knowing and understanding reality (i.e. changing ontology) in a coherent way.

Evil - which is really the combined material conditions of existing Human institutions, its material infrastructure, or realization, and the Human beings themselves - is an ephemeral phenomenon - personal, in that it perverts a beautiful and intrsinically innocent thing (love, consciousness), but also fundamentally physical: controlled by laws of systems, cause and effect, and ontological emergence.

a reply to: Astrocyte


Its like reading 50 pages of Descarte and when you summarize every word he wrote it became;" I sat stoned in a bath tub and wondered how the imagination works "

All concepts arrived with the neolithic era, before that.. It was just primates and nature

a reply to: Astrocyte

My human mind had a hard time to comprehend all of this. Great work and effort though

a reply to: Astrocyte

I can see the logic in theory of correspondence but without understand the underlying impacts of the relationship between the self and the whole, its importance is lost on my simple mind. Sadly, most eastern philosophies/religions reveal that accepting that relationship is of paramount importance in the liberation of ones mind. So even though I want to believe it, I am not ready as yet, to accept it.

Perhaps that is why I am more attracted to Buddhism than say hinduism. Its teachings concentrate on escaping the pain in continually craving and clinging to impermanent states and things (something I can see as important). Its practice might eventually open ones mind to a greater understanding of the whole by removing the distraction of the self in its ego driven mania.

Thank you for making me think more about it.