I want to highlight a few more excerpts from an ongoing discussion on quantum enlightenment at IPS. The conversation has often been abstruse and inscrutable but in these excerpts it took a momentary turn into intelligibility for me.
Tom:
What is consciousness, this stuff de Quincey calls non-physical? And how does it sum everything?
Balder:
Can you clarify what you're saying? What is the everything that consciousness discloses, in your view?
It is this language "everything" that cause me confusion as well. I get a lot of what Tom says in relation to my posts elsewhere but it seems that this "whole" is a unity-in-totality we directly experience phenomenally, and this somehow and actually allows for things like instant teleportation across vast expanses of space and time. Metaphorically perhaps, but in actual physicality? It's those implications that don't make sense for me.
For example, light itself, which might "experience" a space/timelessness, has physical limitations, i.e. a measureable velocity. True, it's the measurement that interacts with the phenomena (light) that "imposes" that limitation. But I thought that was a quantum given, that there can be no separation of the phonemena from its measurement situation?
Tom:
Unity operates as a deep background factor, the necessary always-one frame constraining or giving feeling to foreground differentiations. Here, foreground is set loose to do what it does: differentiate or branch. Background unity might be said to be the deep implicit factor that, among other things, helps to spread the effects of a new differentiation in a manner coherent with past differentiations.... The everything is the necessarily implied unity. To extrapolate, because differentiations are relative, are other referred, any form of becoming is situated.
theurj:
A couple of your qualifications clarified this for me:
Unity operates as a deep background factor...the deep implicit factor...the necessarily implied unity...
It makes sense as an implied unity or whole, but one that remains forever implied and never completely explicit in its totality. And all of which does not allow us to instantly teleport to the far reaches of the galaxy. Yes, we have in some sense a connection to the entire galaxy, but again, only implicitly and not in any 1-to-1 relation where I'm consciously aware of what's going on over there on the other side, say through ESP with my master mentors in the Sirius system. The latter is where it gets woo woo for me. Or to use a postmeta trope, where it starts to get all Deepak on me (i.e. deep ack).
Balder:
That's what I was trying to get at...that a moment of knowing carries with it a felt unity and can be seen as a complex, folded field of relationships -- which, I agree, is a field of co-implication.... I had been thinking about bringing in a few related words -- multiplicity, implicate, explicate -- which all turn around the word 'fold,' where fold seems to imply a unity-in-differentiation, a unity that is mutually implicit with differentiation and profusion of forms.
Tom:
I personally think this sense of unity operates as right-brain intuition.
theurj:
Your “intuition” reminds me of this post discussing Plato's “hybrid or bastard reasoning” requisite for apprehending khora, the latter which “has a kind of eternity: it neither is born or dies, it is always already there, and hence beyond temporal coming-to-be and passing away; yet it does not have the eternity of the intelligible paradigms but a certain a-chronistic a-temporality.”
On p. 2 of that thread I linked to this article, which suggests that the bastard reasoning which apprehends khora is "as if in a dream," quoting the Timaeus. This is extended into artistic creation and divination, both through inspiration from the divine. I would concede that indeed the apprehension is through this type of creative inspiration but that the source is not some essential ground but rather our very embodiment, and it is our unconscious wisdom coming through, both bodily and socio-culturally via the lifeworld (Habermas, for example). The latter are in fact various layers of "embodiment" we discussed earlier, from physical to social to hermeneutic (Levin also talks about this).
Balder:
Within the context of an articulated 'enactive' worldview, there will necessarily be implied the 'non-enacted' -- as a grace or gift, 'always already,' a sort of IOU to the Kosmos. But because it is 'twin-born,' it also appears to be 'enaction-dependent' and therefore, to the extent that I 'name' it, also an 'enaction' (as a 'given' in the context of such enaction). They're tangled up.
theurj:
I like the way Pieterse puts it in this post:
“God’s reality is coterminous with its instantiations,” i.e., “radically relational, which means it has no reality apart from its concretions in historical and social situations.”
Tom said: "At yellow, one jumps out of deficiency needs---the leap into being needs... represents the first realization that evolution develops in stages…[through] a non-linear leap."
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of the “real and false reason” thread. On p. 1 I asked whether modeling stages requires a different kind of math than used in the MHC, for example, with its linear progression of nested sets. I suggested Roca’s use of a nonlinear math of uncertainty, which might have some relations with QM?
Page 2 goes into how postformal cognition appears differently depending on the model used, and that models like Wilber's and the MHC are still using a formal math that seems inadequate to explain this shift to a “being” mode. I explore Torbert and Gebser on this. For example, as distinguished from the more formal Hegelian transcend-and-include thesis-antithesis-synthesis on which the MHC is based Torbert describes the Magician/Clown thus: “Ego identity disintegrates, creates mythical events that reframe situations, blends opposites, treats time and events as kairatic, symbolic, alalogical, metaphorical” (186-7). The whole notion of a Hegelian dialectic is replaced by understanding that core dualities cannot be “resolved” into a higher integration but rather a Magician “blends opposites” dynamically according to context through analogical, metaphorical narrative. This is further reinterated in his last stage, Ironist, who “cultivates a quality of awareness and action that highlights dynamic tensions of the whole enterprise” (189).
Here is an excerpt from Torbert’s 2008 “Developmental Action Inquiry” noting this shift from structural approaches (akin to your deficiency needs) to being with regard to ambiguity, a key ingredient in QM:
“Unlike people at conventional action-logics, who tend to…avoid ambiguity, all…postconventional samples saw creative potential in ambiguity…. The Individualist endured it; the Strategists tolerated it; the Alchemists surrendered to it; and the Ironists generated it. ….in a figure/ground shift, the Alchemists and Ironists experienced ambiguity as the creative, ongoing element of all experience. This finding is consistent with the change from a primarily cognitive/structural approach to…a primarily attentional/spiritual approach in the shift from Strategist to Alchemist.”
As to developmental “leaps” instead of progressive stages, I like how Weiss puts this in the “ladder, climber, view” thread. He starts by noting that the Hegelian model uses what I’ve come to call false reason, in Gebserlingus deficient rationality, which misses the discontinuous nature of how stages “develop” via mutation:
"Weiss said that Gebser was clear that his work did not describe a linear evolution, development, or progress of consciousness…. Gebser used the term 'mutation'to describe the process of moving from one consciousness structure to another, but this was not intended to reduce the development of consciousness to a biological metaphor. Rather, he used this term to emphasize the discontinuous nature of the various structures of consciousness. The word 'mutation' connotes the sense of a leap that is more sudden in comparison to the gradualism of Darwin's biological evolution…. But crucially for Gebser, the later mutations do not 'transcend and include,' as in Wilber's model of evolution. Instead, they are discontinuous and autonomous modes of awareness, each of which has its own intrinsic validity, and for which the perception and appearance of time and space are radically different."