Author: gnox

Willy-nilly

A person can do what he wants, but not want what he wants. Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.

— Schopenhauer, On The Freedom Of The Will (1839)

In the last of his 1903 Harvard lectures, Peirce pointed out that ‘self-control of any kind is purely inhibitory. It originates nothing’ (EP2:233). What then is the ground of the guidance system governing the practice of a bodymind? Ultimately, says Peirce, ‘it must come from the uncontrolled part of the mind, because a series of controlled acts must have a first’ (EP2:233).

The same goes for acts of meaning. All of our reasoning, including the very form of the process, originates in what is “given” to us in perceptual judgments. Every such judgment is ‘the result of a process’ which is ‘not controllable and therefore not fully conscious’ (EP2:227). Consciousness takes up the task of controlling the process, domesticating it, harnessing a ‘logical energy’ which is originally wild. In its Firstness it is spontaneous and free, and yet the very origin of self-control. Logic as the ethic of inquiry is the heart of self-control in the use of symbols, but is grounded in a process continuous with direct perception, even with creation.

A consciousness for which the world is “self-evident,” that finds the world “already constituted” and present even within consciousness itself, absolutely chooses neither its being nor its manner of being.

What then is freedom? To be born is to be simultaneously born of the world and to be born into the world. The world is always already constituted, but also never completely constituted. In the first relation we are solicited, in the second we are open to an infinity of possibilities.…

We choose our world and the world chooses us.

— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 527)

There’s a split in the infinitive from to have to have been to will be.

— Finnegans Wake, 271

Starting point

It’s difficult to see the picture when you are inside the frame.

— anon

So long as I keep before me the ideal of an absolute observer, of knowledge in the absence of any viewpoint, I can only see my situation as being a source of error. But once I have acknowledged that through it I am geared to all actions and all knowledge that are meaningful to me, and that it is gradually filled with everything that may be for me, then my contact with the social in the finitude of my situation is revealed to me as the starting point of all truth, including that of science and, since we have some idea of the truth, since we are inside truth and cannot get outside it, all that I can do is define a truth within the situation.

— Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 299

To seek Buddhahood apart from living beings is like seeking echoes by silencing sounds.

— Layman Hsiang (Cleary 1999, 93)

Seeking enlightenment apart from the world
Is like looking for horns on a hare.

— Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 23)

Selfies

Some spiritual traditions regard the ultimate reality as the Self. Others regard the Self as an illusion. The correctness of each view is self-evident.

This sentence contradicts itself—or rather—well, no, actually it doesn’t!

— Douglas Hofstadter (1985, 7)

Primal flow

The sacred text is what the sacred river is currently reading, the streambed of consciousness.

(Stoop), if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop) in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all.

— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 14

Drawing nearer to take our slant at it (since after all it has met with misfortune while all underground), let us see all there may remain to be seen.

— Finnegans Wake, 113

The act of meaning the sacred text involves collision and collusion with the limits of language.

Beware lest ye be hindered by the veils of glory from partaking of the crystal waters of this living Fountain.

— Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas ¶50

But give glad tidings to those who believe and work righteousness, that their portion is Gardens, beneath which rivers flow. Every time they are fed with fruits therefrom, they say: “Why, this is what we were fed with before,” for they are given things in similitude; and they have therein companions pure (and holy); and they abide therein (for ever).

— Qur’án 2:25 (Yusuf Ali)

Homage to Uexküll

We owe the concept of Umwelt to Jakob von Uexküll. In a 1934 paper he introduced it to the reader as follows:

This little monograph does not claim to point the way to a new science. Perhaps it should be called a stroll into unfamiliar worlds; worlds strange to us but known to other creatures, manifold and varied as the animals themselves. The best time to set out on such an adventure is on a sunny day. The place, a flower-strewn meadow, humming with insects, fluttering with butterflies. Here we may glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow. To do so, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of its colorful features disappear, others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes into being. Through the bubble we see the world of the burrowing worm, of the butterfly, or of the field mouse; the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us. This we may call the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal.
…
We thus unlock the gates that lead to other realms, for all that a subject perceives becomes his perceptual world and all that he does, his effector world. Perceptual and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt.

— Uexküll, in Favareau 2009, 90-91 (translated by Barry Stone and Herbert Weiner)

Uexküll’s ‘soap bubble’ is a precursor of the perceptual or ‘cognitive bubble’ introduced in Chapter 6 of Turning Signs. The closure of ‘perceptual’ and ‘effector worlds’ is a version of the meaning cycle concept.

Perceptipation

meaning cycle

… we perceive what we are adjusted for interpreting …

— Peirce, EP2:229, CP 5.185

Perception is an act of imagination based upon the available information.

— Frank H. Durgin (2002, 88)

The neural patterns and the corresponding mental images of the objects and events outside the brain are creations of the brain related to the reality that prompts their creation rather than passive mirror images reflecting that reality.

— Damasio (2003, 198-9)

The world appears to us to contain objects and events. This way of looking at the world is so basic as to seem to be a consequence of the way the individual human central nervous system develops in its very early stages. Yet our stimulus world is not partitioned in this way, and certainly not uniquely partitioned in this way.

— Mark Turner (1991, 60)

Whatever we call reality, it is revealed to us only through the active construction in which we participate.

— Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 293

The simple fact is that no measurement, no experiment or observation is possible without a relevant theoretical framework.

— D.S. Kothari, cited in Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 293

Gist of the twist

He is cured by faith who is sick of fate. The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That’s the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman’s tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas.

— Finnegans Wake, 482-3

Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …

Water dissolving … and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean!

Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
Into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones
There is water underground

Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
After the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime
Water flowing underground

And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway lead to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? … Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself
My God! … What have I done?!

Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
Into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones
There is water underground

Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
After the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime
Water flowing underground

Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Look where my hand was
Time isn’t holding us
Time isn’t after us
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
And here the twister comes
Here comes the twister
Same as it ever was …

— David Byrne, Talking Heads, ‘Once in a Lifetime’

Multiple perspectives

… the world is richer than it is possible to express in any single language. Music is not exhausted by its successive stylization from Bach to Schoenberg. Similarly, we cannot condense into a single description the various aspects of our experience. We must call upon numerous descriptions, irreducible one to the other, but connected to each other by precise rules of translation (technically called transformations).

— Prigogine, From Being to Becoming, 51