Author: gnox

Merleau-Ponty, quoted by Freeman (1999a, 164): ‘To perceive is to render oneself present to something through the body.’

Even if subsequently, thought and the perception of space are freed from motility and spatial being, for us to be able to conceive space, it is in the first place necessary that we should have been thrust into it by our body, and that it should have provided us with the first model of those transpositions, equivalents and identifications which make space into an objective system and allow our experience to be one of objects, opening out on an ‘in itself.’

— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 164)

Merleau-Ponty (1945, 169) says that ‘The body is our general medium for having a world.’ This use of the term ‘medium’ implies that a bodymind ‘has a world’ by inhabiting it, by occupying it. In another context, Rosen (1991, 41) uses ‘ambience’ for the world as distinguished from self, while using ‘environment’ for what is distinguished from a system as its background or surround. This latter distinction is made from a third-person point of view, which emerges from the modelling relation and ‘makes space into an objective system.’

In Peircean terms, we might say that mere appearing is the Firstness of the phaneron; that its presence to one is its Secondness; that the continuity of its presence, the continuing unfolding or evolution of relations within a multidimensional space, is its Thirdness.

Peirce (EP1:42, W2:227 fn4) remarked that ‘just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body[,] we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughts are in us.’ According to Yuri Lotman, we ought to say both:

The individual human intellect does not have a monopoly in the work of thinking. Semiotic systems, both separately and together as the integrated unity of the semiosphere, both synchronically and in all the depths of historical memory, carry out intellectual operations, preserve, rework and increase the store of information. Thought is within us, but we are within thought, just as language is something engendered by our minds and directly dependent on the mechanisms of the brain, and we are with[in] language. And unless we were immersed in language, our brain could not engender it (and vice versa: if our brain were not capable of generating language, we would not be immersed in it). The same with thought: it is both something engendered by the human brain and something surrounding us without which intellectual generation would be impossible. And finally the spatial image of the world is both within us and without us.

— Lotman (1990, 273)

The living, experiencing body relates to its environment by projecting its experience as an external world, by presenting it as separate from and outside of oneself. We can only mention this from a third-person point of view, because of course we do not experience this projection as a projection, but rather as the external world itself. Thus it is true to say that we have no knowledge of the external world, since all we have and all we are is the lived body. From a different but equally valid point of view, it is true to say that bodymind constructs an internal model of the external world, and that model constitutes knowledge of it.

The vertebrate embryo begins by wearing its brain on its sleeve. The nervous system whose activity will make it mindful of the external world actually develops from the outside of the embryo. In the process of neurulation (search that for details), the first stage in formation of the nervous system, the developing embryo turns itself outside in. Illustration (in cross section) from Wikipedia today:

Henry Corbin, in a 1948 talk about the comparative study of religion, called it a phenomenological discovery:

We are discovering that the I and the World, the modes of being of the personal subject and the regions of being which it explores, are not two things which get juxtaposed, but presences within each other, an interpresence, an indissoluble correlation, and a structure. It is within the general ensemble which can be termed the phenomenological orientation of the humanities. And there is also something analogous happening in the physical sciences.

— Corbin 1948 (1998, 23)

But this discovery can also be recovered from ancient scriptures.

As great as the infinite space beyond is the space within the lotus of the heart. Both heaven and earth are contained in that inner space, both fire and air, sun and moon, lightning and stars. Whether we know it in this world or know it not, everything is contained in that inner space.

— Chandogya Upanishad (Easwaran, in Harvey 1996, 38)

‘This world’? Which world? Can you put the works of the brain back in the lotus of the heart?

When i recognize you as another experiencing subject like myself, i assume that you have a world just as i do. This world, when you focus on it, is full of myriad creatures and wonderful life in full color and exquisite detail. But the most amazing circumstance of all is that the whole show, including your amazement, is all going on inside your head. Your experience is generated by (arises from, is the feeling of, ….. ) the functioning of your brain.

Now, i don’t know this in the same way that i ‘know’ my own world of experience. It’s a theoretical model, part of a virtual reality scaffolded by language. But it’s the only model that makes sense of the evidence – especially the case studies collected by neurologists, which demonstrate poignantly the dependence of normal mental functioning on an intact brain. When the brain is malfunctioning or damaged in some way, its owner’s experience will be altered in a correlated way. How can we doubt that experiencing is a performance of the brain?

And since i have recognized you as a subject like me, i have to believe that my experience – my world (including ‘you’!) – is also a product of brain dynamics. I have no experience of my brain, of course, because my brain is too busy doing the experiencing to also take a role in my world. (The one thing the spotlight can never illuminate is the spotlight.) In my world, my knowledge of my brain’s activity is a theoretical model just like my knowledge of your brain’s activity. Our shared, consensual world, insofar as it is mediated by language, is the mutually reinforcing network of these models. We can maintain this virtual world because we can talk about these models among ourselves, and apply them pragmatically, with predictable results in the real world, the one in which we live and move.

Your actions in my head,
my head here in my hands
with something circling inside.
I have no name
for what circles
so perfectly.
…
This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle’s eye a turning night of stars.

— Rúmí (Barks 1995, 278)

As Evan Thompson (2007) explains, external (‘transcendent’) events are ‘given as such by virtue of the intentional activities of consciousness.’ In this sense they really are external, yet they are ‘intentionally immanent’:

their status as external events for the system (as opposed to their status for an observer of the system) is a function of the system’s own activity. Their meaning or significance corresponds to an attractor of the system’s dynamics (a recurrent pattern of activity toward which the system tends), which itself is an emergent product of that very dynamics. The external world is constituted as such for the system by virtue of the system’s self-organizing activity.

— Thompson (2007, 27)

This is another way of saying that an external event (of which a system is conscious) is the dynamic object which determines a sign to determine an interpretant which is an event internal to the system’s dynamics. This is how the Thirdness of a sign ‘brings about a Secondness between two things,’ as Peirce put it; it makes one manifest as external to the other.

The NHS translation of Thomas 67:

Jesus said, “One who knows everything but lacks in oneself lacks everything.”

DeConick’s translation:

Jesus said, ‘Whoever knows everything, but needs (to know) himself, is in need of everything.

In the Book of Thomas which is also included in Nag Hammadi codex II, Jesus says to his ‘twin’ Thomas that

those who have not known themselves have known nothing, but those who have known themselves already have acquired knowledge about the depth of the universe.

— Meyer (2005, 210)

Strangely enough, this fits with the logical sense of depth (intension), which is intrinsic or internal to a term or symbol while its breadth (extension) is extrinsic or external. Given that we ourselves are symbols, as Peirce says, ‘everything which is present to us is a phenomenal manifestation of ourselves’ (EP1:38). Its presence to us necessarily involves its otherness, its Secondness to us, its externality, while the form this manifestation takes for us arises from the depth of internality: its Firstness is the form of what matters to the bodymind. The Thirdness of the phenomenon is the sign’s act of meaning, the semiosis.

Both within and without sentient beings is in itself the whole-being of the Buddha-nature.

— Dogen, ‘Bussho’ (Abe 1992, 146)

A living organism and its life processes involve a world or nature temporally and spatially “external” to itself but “internal” to its functions.

— John Dewey (1929, 227)