Category: Outside In

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)

Facts are living turned inside out.

— David Byrne and Brian Eno, ‘Crosseyed and Painless’

for philosophy … experience can only mean the total cognitive result of living …

— Peirce, CP 7.538

Sufi advice from Rumi:

When you learn a craft, practice it.
That learning comes through the hands.

If you want dervishhood, spiritual poverty,
and emptiness, you must be friends with a sheikh.

Talking about it, reading books, and doing practices
don’t help. Soul receives from soul that knowing.

The mystery of spiritual emptiness
may be living in a pilgrim’s heart, and yet
the knowing of it may not yet be his.

Wait for the illuminating openness,
as though your chest were filling with light,
as when God said,
Did We not expand you? (Qur’an 94: 1)
Don’t look for it outside yourself.
You are the source of milk. Don’t milk others!

There is a milk fountain inside you.
Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.

You have a channel into the ocean,
and yet you ask for water from a little pool.

Beg for that love expansion. Meditate only
on THAT. The Qur’an says,
And He is with you (57: 4).

Barks, Coleman; Jalal al-Din Rumi. The Essential Rumi – reissue: New Expanded Edition (p. 255). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Zen wisdom holds that ‘face-to-face transmission’ of the dharma can only happen between one Buddha and another. Yet there is something strange about calling it ‘transmission.’ One buddha-mind is not a bucket into which another pours the dharma; rather your teacher, by means of a turning word or some other sign, triggers your realization of buddha-nature.

Some things can only be transmitted face-to-face, such as the ‘treasury of the true dharma eye’ (Dogen) – perhaps because the two buddhas playing the roles of teacher and student must read each other’s ‘body language,’ including verbal language, in ‘real time.’ But full-time occupation with transmission of the way did not stop Dogen from reading and writing, or from guiding his students in their own reading practice, as he did quite directly and forcefully in many of his recorded talks. He learned early on from his teacher Rujing that ‘It is a mistake to regard the scriptural teachings as outside of the ancestral path’ (Tanahashi 2000, 13). So even though Zen represents ‘an independent transmission apart from doctrine or scripture’ (Abe 1985, 105), scriptural teachings are not outside of the Way as Dogen sees it.

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

— Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity (1933, p. 58)

We say that the map is not the territory, but if the territory includes the map, there must be a point on the map that represents itself. ‘On a map of an island laid down upon the soil of that island there must, under all ordinary circumstances, be some position, some point, marked or not, that represents qua place on the map, the very same point qua place on the island’ (Peirce, CP 2.230; see also EP2:161-2, BD ‘Imaging’). The same must be true of any “map of the world,” any iconic sign which takes its context as its object. Hence any viable guidance system inhabiting a being inhabiting its world must involve self-reference.

Here we have a map of the Island, lying flat on the Island itself. It doesn’t cover much of the surface of the Island, yet it represents all of it, iconically, to you. The Map is a sign whose object is the actually existing Island and whose interpretant is the form of the Island in your imagination. This representation exemplifies what Peirce calls Thirdness.

Now suppose your point of view rises high enough above the Island (above the Earth) that you can see all of it, as if on Google Maps or Google Earth: the map on the Island is visible only as a single point on the googlemap. But now suppose that the googlemap is capable of unlimited resolution, so that you can zoom in on the map far enough to view it in what we call ‘actual size.’ Now you realize that there is a point on the map (the original map, the omap) which represents the map itself lying on the surface of the Island. And now suppose that you can keep on zooming in on that very point until it grows to the actual size of the omap. Now it is no longer a point but a large set of points (an infinitely large set, actually) representing the place on the Island where the omap lies, and representing the omap itself to you. Still, on this map within the omap which represents the omap, you can mark a point representing where the omap lies on the Island. But if the omap itself is capable of infinite resolution, you can keep on zooming in on map after map – and on each map, you can mark the same point representing the omap within the map, and zoom in on it to find another actual-size map with that same point on it.

Now, as everyone knows, infinite resolution is a fantasy and a ‘point’ with zero dimensions is a mathematical abstraction. But in our thought-experiment, the Island is real, and the omap is actually lying on it. So if the dream of infinite resolution could be lived, there must be (at least) a point on every map, no matter how many times you zoom in on the map in it, which represents the next point you could zoom in on in real time to see the next map represented on it. And if you reverse the process, no matter how far you zoom out, that same point must be there on the map on which the location of the map is marked.

We have been using the word point in reference to a τόπος, a place. But a 0-dimensional point cannot contain anything. Topologically, if a “map” (a surface) is continuous, and no place is marked on it, there are no points on it at all. No matter how far we zoom in, we never arrive at a place that contains no other places. Just as everything that exists (‘stands out’) in any given universe is a discontinuity in it, every point marked on a line or a surface, or in a space, is a discontinuity of it.

Yet the making of a mark creates the possibility of representing the relations between marks on a continuous surface or in a continuous space. The representation is iconic, but the relations depicted in it may be real. Such a representation of existing things or events creates the possibility of observing real relations between them, relations which have a specific character independent of any particular observation of them. If those relations are real, then the universe in which the relata are marked must be really continuous. There can be no definite discontinuities except in a continuum; nothing can mean anything except in a meaning space.

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 ‘one of the key guiding intuitions of the enactive approach and neurophenomenology’ (Thompson 27), advanced in the late 20th century by Francisco Varela.

Appearance is the obverse of attention. Each is given to the other when they are undivided.