Waves

There’s something deep, metaphysically deep, scientifically deep, drowned deep about waves. From the side they present periodicity and therefore time and causality as energy is transferred along the medium of the sea. Then we notice that boats bob up and down and the perspective of being directly in the path of the wave occurs to us. In the face of the wave the idea of the non-difference of cause and effect is operative. Every energy in the wave is transforming into its next phase ceaselessly. In the Sankhya philosophy this is known as satkaryavada. The vertical movement in the face of the wave is also a marking of time. Presumably speed pulls away some of that face, herniating it. Warp speed cap’n.

Neither being in the wave or to the side of it is an artefact of consciousness. Both are true views.


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SONNET 60

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time, that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

Whitehead meets Bhagwan Hamsa on Mount Kailas

(repost from 2012)

This misapprehension is promoted by the neglect of the principle that, so far as physical relations are concerned, contemporary events happen in causal independence of each other. This principle will have to be explained later, in connection with an examination of process and of time. It receives an exemplification in the character of our perception of the world of contemporary actual entities. That contemporary world is objectified for us as 'realitas objectivas', illustrating bare extension with its various parts discriminated by differences of sense data. These qualities, such as colours, sounds, bodily feelings, tastes, smells, together with the perspectives introduced by extensive relationships, are the relational eternal objects whereby the contemporary actual entities are elements in our constitution. This is the type of objectification which (in Sec. VII of the previous chapter has been termed 'presentational objectification'.

(from Process and Reality by A.N. Whitehead. Chap. II: The Extensive Continuum

From Sankara's commentary on the Brihadaranyaka Upanisad II.iv.11:

Objection: In everyone of these instances the mergence of the objects only has been spoken of, but not that of the organs. What is the motive for this?
Reply: True, but the Sruti considers the organs to be of the same category as the objects, not of a different category. The organs are but modes of the objects in order to perceive them, as a lamp, which is but a mode of colour, is an instrument for revealing all colours. Similarly, the organs are but modes of all particular objects in order to perceive them, as is the case with a lamp. Hence no special care is to be taken to indicate the dissolution of the organs; for these being the same as objects in general, their dissolution is implied by that of the objects.

I place these citations together to show that the dissolution of the subjective point of view arrived at by the progressive absorption of lower perspectives into higher ones, brings in its train the monistic condition of pure self-awareness, "one without a second". According to Whitehead the natural awareness of the subject is an atomised one because "The notion of a direct 'idea' (or 'feeling') of an actual entity is a presupposition of all common sense." (P&R) From that bare pre-theoretic intuition Whitehead concludes:

Some real component in the objectified entity assumes the role of being how that particular entity is a datum in the experience of the subject.

All actual entities are open to all other actual entities in a philosphy of organism. In short to divest the essential insight of the bewildering prolixity of Whiteheadian categories - everything is open to everything else and this openness is limited by the nature of each entity. But what is an entity? It is from our subjective point of view, according to the evolved interests of the human being, that we divide the world. Ecology has taught us, that, although these are natural to us, Nature continuously draws back into seamless unity the pieces we have cut out of the whole.

I believe that I can connect these two citations, not by an easy assimilation but by the telescoping that is a feature of both. In the way that actual entities are in each other according to the rubric of their eternal objects, do I dare to call them limiting adjuncts, so are the limiting adjuncts/upadhis successively dissolved. as described in the experience of the sage on Mount Kailas. That this is merely a fanciful connection with the philosophy of organism must be countered by the remark of Whitehead’s in Process and Reality:

This conception of an actual entity in the fluent world is little more than an expansion of a sentence in the Timaeus “But that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in the process of becoming and perishing and never really is.” Bergson in his protest against ‘spatialization’ is only echoing Plato’s phrase “and never really is”.

The words of the sage Bhagwan Hamsa on Mount Kailas mirrors the progressive dissolution of the stages between becoming and being:

Here my Manas merged into Antahkarana (heart); the antahkarana with the Manas merged into Chitta (mind-stuff); the Chitta along with Antahkarana and Manas merged into Buddhi (intellect); the Buddhi with Chitta, Antahkarana and Manas merged into Ahankar (egoism); and the Ahankar along with Buddhi, Chitta, Antahkarana and Manas merged into Absolute Brahma! I found myself reflected everywhere in the whole Universe! It was all one harmony - full of wisdom, Infinite Love Perennial and Bliss Eternal! Where was the body, its tenements and the ‘I’! It was all Satchitananda. (Truth, Wisdom, Bliss).

(from The Holy Mountain by Bhagwan Shri Hamsa)

Hume's Epistemic Thimblerigging

The feeling I have about Hume on Miracles (Section X Treatise is very like that I get looking at a skilled thimble rigger (shell game). Where does the miracle lie? Under the logical impossibility shell i.e. there is only nature and any event not natural i.e. supernatural, has never occurred. Looking for evidence for an impossibility is pointless. But when you point at that shell, miracle is discovered to be under the pious fraud shell so evidence is a possibility but it will never be enough to establish a miracle. And it’s a virtual logical impossibility too. By virtual here I mean that the impossibility of establishing that a miracle has taken place has the force of the logical while being empirical. There is something not quite right about that but the steady stream of diverting patter moves one on quickly.

Who are Hume’s confederates in the crowd. There is a physicist who nods at the ‘there is only nature’ and there is the philosopher, a lover of mazy modality. They win: the punters hardly ever. I say to people who question miracles - you shouldn’t believe in them. They don’t cohere with your world, they don’t matter for you. If they come to matter it will be because your world has altered.

De Quincey on Thought Experiments

De Quincey discussing Hume on Miracles (Section X 'Treatise') has a pertinent thing or two to say. His observations on the Queen Elizabeth resurrection story attested by her physicians are good and can be applied to the present mania for killer T.E.s

Prudent men, in such circumstances, would act as the judges in our English courts, who are always displeased if it is attempted to elicit their opinions upon a point of law by a proposed fiction. And very reasonably; for in these fictitious cases all the little circumstances of reality are wanting, and the oblique relations to such circumstances, out of which it is that any sound opinion can be formed. We all know very well what Hume is after in this problem of a resurrection. And his case of Queen Elizabeth's resurrection being a perfectly fictitious case, we are at liberty to do any one of three different things:—either simply to refuse an answer; or, 2dly, to give such an answer as he looks for, viz., to agree with him in his disbelief under the supposed contingency; without, therefore, offering the slightest prejudice to any scriptural case of resurrection: i. e., we might go along with him in his premises, and yet balk him of his purpose; or, 3dly, we might even join issue with him, and peremptorily challenge his verdict upon his own fiction.

(from Theological Essays and Other Papers Vol.1)

De Quincey's Palimpsest

Amongst the posthumous works of De Quincey is the essay The Palimpsest of the Human Brain sometimes included in Suspiria de Profundis. Find a copy at
suspiria de profundis
He shares with Bergson the strong conviction that at the moment of death your life is present before you in simultaneous review. This is a common report but only Bergson offers a metaphysics that naturalises it. The Frenchman destroyed all his notes before his death perhaps to secure his reputation from the judgement of scientistic sciolists. De Quincey destroyed nothing except inadvertently through the practice of reading by candlelight. How easy it is as you approach the light to get a better squint to set the page on fire. Or your hair, or both.

What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished.

further down:

The fleeting accidents of a man’s life, and its external shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the organizing principles which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed predetermined centres, whatever heterogeneous elements life may have accumulated from without, will not permit the grandeur of human unity greatly to be violated, or its ultimate repose to be troubled, in the retrospect from dying moments, or from other great convulsions.
Such a convulsion is the struggle of gradual suffocation, as in drowning; and, in the original Opium Confessions, I mentioned a case of that nature communicated to me by a lady from her own childish experience. The lady is still living, though now of unusually great age; and I may mention that amongst her faults never was numbered any levity of principle, or carelessness of the most scrupulous veracity; but, on the contrary, such faults as arise from austerity, too harsh, perhaps, and gloomy, indulgent neither to others nor herself. And, at the time of relating this incident, when already very old, she had become religious to asceticism. According to my present belief, she had completed her ninth year, when, playing by the side of a solitary brook, she fell into one of its deepest pools. Eventually, but after what lapse of time nobody ever knew, she was saved from death by a farmer, who, riding in some distant lane, had seen her rise to the surface; but not until she had descended within the abyss of death, and looked into its secrets, as far, perhaps, as ever human eye can have looked that had permission to return. At a certain stage of this descent, a blow seemed to strike her, phosphoric radiance sprang forth from her eyeballs; and immediately a mighty theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, every act, every design of her past life, lived again, arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence. Such a light fell upon the whole path of her life backwards into the shades of infancy, as the light, perhaps; which wrapt the destined Apostle on his road to Damascus. Yet that light blinded for a season; but hers poured celestial vision upon the brain, so that her consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite review.

((The woman referred to is his mother))

Illusion and Confusion and the Snake/Rope example

When discussing in Indian philosophy the snake/rope confusion we need to strictly distinguish it from an illusion. An illusion stays an illusion even when you know that it is one. The Muller-Lyer lines still continue to look unequal. Adalbert Ames’s illusions are uncannily persistent.ames room
The rope is no longer seen as a snake when we discover our mistake and that is an important epistemological point in Indian philosophy. In the Nyaya inflected account of the advaitin Dharmaraja Adhvarindra our default position re perception is to accept it as veridical until shown not to be on further acquaintance.

He writes in the section The validity of Knowledge is Intrinsic and Self-Evident of the chapter on Non-Apprehension:

The validity of knowledge generated by the above -mentioned means of knowledge originates by itself and is self-evident. To explain: Valid knowledge is that knowledge regarding something possessing a particular attribute, which has that attribute as its feature which is conducive to successful effort, and which includes recollection as well as fresh experience.

The term ‘effort’ refers to the factor of confirmation. The silver we pick up is precious and not a mere piece of nacre. Unsuccessful effort is to discover on closer examination that we were suffering from temporary confusion. Clearly this is different from illusion.

Veggie Hitler

Hitler was a vegetarian. That tells you where vegetarianism is at as a moral position. Really? No it doesn’t. Most people can recognise this as pure argumentum ad hominem, or playing the man not the ball. Here in Ireland though it seems to be the only argument we know or the one we find most effective. It goes after this fashion. First characterise moral opposition to abortion as Catholic doctrine. Then point to the moral failings of the hierarchy and say ‘who are these people to tell you what to do’. Above all do not discuss the intrinsic evil or otherwise of abortion. Slather on words like compassion, care, and trust. Good, fine, splendid; it worked and the solemn incantation of ‘no woman takes abortion lightly’ was belied by the celebrations in the square of Dublin Castle as though ‘our team’ had won a cup.

Enlightened Progressives 2 : Recidivist Troglodytes 1

Why now after all the almost daily stories about Mother & Baby Homes, Magdalen Laundries, and buggering Bishops have achieved their goal do we continue to be treated to their continuous repetition? It is I believe a mopping up operation now that conscientious objection by doctors who will not refer on women,and the likelihood of picketing of abortionist doctors’ surgeries are issues. Demonisation must continue so that repressive measures will be accepted. One in three people voted NO and in a proportional representational electoral system that is a significant minority. If they go too far it could affect those final seats in a 5i seat constituency.