Matter-Energy
“Energy cannot exist except in connection with matter.”
(James Clerk Maxwell, 1877, “Matter and Motion”)
Energy can be a vague term, even at its most precise. Electromagnetism is one phenomenon which we call energy, but so too is thermal and kinetic energy, or even more puzzling “potential energy”. Aha, this may be a clue as to what physicists mean by energy. Energy can be thought of as an abstraction which is like the ‘money’ of physics. It is a way to keep track of the exchanges which characterize the behavior of matter, specifically how ‘work’ is distributed in material systems. Energy in physics is a conceptual category of units like joules, newton-meters, calories, electron volts, foot pounds, British Thermal Units, horsepower, kilowatt hours, megatons, reciprocal centimeters. This science of calculating work; what is necessary, what is wasted, what is expected, etc, is applicable to many different functions of engineering. Everything from jet engines to jacuzzis can be understood in terms of work, mass, temperature, acceleration, illumination, momentum, power (work per unit time), etc.
I have heard it said that energy is simply the canonical conjugate to time – i.e. everything that happens in time or through time but which is not time itself. Energy is what happens to matter when observed from the outside. The idea potential energy is about an expectation of what *can* happen with a given set of interacting objects or substances. If you ask a physicist about emotional ‘energy’ you will likely see their expression change to one of a restrained growl and they will, in their most polite and tolerant voice, explain that they really have nothing to do with each other, other than perhaps some loose correlation with action potentials among neurons in the brain. Indeed, the energy content of a brain in profound distress and one which is effused with excitement is likely indistinguishable.
Neo-phrenological views of consciousness will attribute the difference to the location of the excitement within the brain, but the energy itself, the volts, are neither good or bad, happy or sad.Energy is just physical oomph. Newton meters refer to the abstract quantity of net force required to accelerate a mass of one kilogram at a rate of one meter per second squared, for a distance of one meter. Since temperature is really the same thing as the aggregate measure of moving molecules, it can be seen that energy could not actually refer to substance-like things which occupy space, but rather energy is a way of keeping track of how substances are being pushed around. It happens in a precisely ordered way, governed by immutable tendencies toward conservation, symmetry and equilibrium. This does not, in my opinion mean that the more poetic, human connotations of energy as human experience are mislabeled. Bridging the two, however, I think requires extending both the physical concepts of energy to meet us halfway and the concepts of experience should be extended halfway to meet physics. Instead of seeing human consciousness as a high level qualitative effect produced by low level quantitative functions, we should consider that all phenomena are a mosaic of quantitative-seeming public events and qualitative-seeming private events. In this way, physics is modeled as a continuum between outer, impersonal locations and inner experiences of a sub-personal, personal, and super-signifying nature (i.e. sensation, cognition, intuition).
Experienced from the inside, energy is like ‘effort’ and ‘sanity’ – a throttling of countless conflicting agendas, semantic momenta set into motion through meaning and experience, intention and will on many levels. When we see this from a distance, it makes a completely different (public) kind of sense. It isn’t a question of wondering if your charge will ever be released and hoping that the nearby quantum ensemble will be the opportunity you have been waiting for. When you can see the Bird’s Eye view of the story, it isn’t as much of a story. If you’ve seen one chemical reaction, you’ve seen em all. You know how it ends. From the inside, energy really is all about sorting out incoming significance (affects) and controlling one’s outgoing effects (motives). This is what work is all about. The better your discernment on the input, the more efficient and focused you can be on your output. From this, it’s a short leap to see how the importance of refining and purity figures into industry and mass production. Minor tweaks in the work being done translates into major improvements in performance when scaled up.
Getting deeper into what energy really is – the canonical conjugate of time is a good place to start. It’s a very esoteric place to start, but it is the most accurate cosmologically. Energy is the pointyness of the arrow of time. It is the Go! and the show, while what we think of as time is really a mirage as seen from the point of one arrow looking at the collective sea of points from every other arrow in the universe which we can relate to perceptually and intuitively. Energy is the gate which filters our what might happen into what can and can’t happen, and what does happen. Energy is the inflection point from which the fluid timeless now intersects with spatially fixed objecthood, that spacetime divider of flux and state known known as ‘reality’ – different from every vantage point, but united in primitive contexts.
Energy is not the uni-verse, which unites and reconciles eternal psyche and existential space perspectives as a boundaryless whole, bur rather it is the trigger which initiates irreversible effects into the public half of the cosmos from the private dream. Energy is the expression of motive intention as motor effect. The collapse of the wave function if you will. QM has it upside down in order to preserve the continuity of a universe evacuated of intention (always a funny intention to have – to intentionally model the universe as devoid of the possibility of what your theory is made of). It can be seen that way too, with intention as background and probability in the foreground, and on that level it is almost as true.
I would imagine there isn’t much difference between the choices that ‘energy particles’ make and randomness, but as with other kinds of emergent properties, that small sliver of intentionality hidden in the noise has a way of finding that same quality in its neighbors and amplifying it deliberately. That’s what’s going on now, I think, as ‘I’ write these words. I am not energy, but I am using energy to turn myself inside out – to spend my interior capital in an irreversible way that moves the story of my life, as well as yours along – not through time, but time through experience. Energy records sense in matter. It is how we *make* a difference that makes a difference.
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A while ago I brought up a friend’s discussion of ‘isness’ and ‘aboutness’ as primordial principles, which I like, and which coincide with some of my own ideas about absolute primitives. I was able to link a lot of ideas about space and time to these, as well as the idea of private phenomenology or subjectivity correlating to time and public realism or objectivity correlating to space. Not just correlating perhaps, but ontologically identical. Two canonical conjugates as dual aspects of a neutral monism of awareness/discernment (same thing) called sense.
Tonight I am adding another dyad to the mix: position and disposition. Since the Cartesian revolution, we in the West have succumbed completely to portrait of the universe as particles in space. With quantum mechanics, energy itself has been quantized as positions of probabilistic selector-beings – pure position-ness suspended in fields of non-position. The uncertainty principle (if it still holds) underscores the unique relevance of the mutually exclusive nature of position and momentum.
We know what position is. At least, through Descartes vision we think we know what position is well enough that we are very comfortable with the appearance of it. Points on a line, grid on a manifold, etc. If we try to bring this model into the real world however, that’s where the uncertainty sets in. Our notion of position really depends on our capacity to compare the dispositions of what we are using to measure something’s position. x=5, y=-1 is a description of how far a point is from x=0, y=0 on a rigid reference body of abstractly calibrated distance units. It’s an ordered manifold of dispositions. These are literal dispositions – expectations of where something must be relative to the places which it is not, but could be*.
I would extend this notion of disposition to encompass all qualities about the thing in question other than position. Momentum, for instance is a story about where something has been and where it will go, and what the consequences might be for other bodies involved. Energy, whether potential (a measure of what dispositions can be produced) or kinetic (a one dimensional measure of actualized dis-position), thermal, chromatic, emotional (tactile, visual, limbic disposition qualities, respectively), acoustic, etc. All of these are dispositions – stories about what’s been going on and what might happen next.
Think of the hands of a clock. Each tick is a disposition. Telling time requires that we can detect the change from one position to another, and that we can infer a story of sequence through that change. The position of the hands must be understood as a snapshot of repeating cycles. This is all happening in our imagination. It’s not really in the hands of the clock, they are just gears or circuits cycling meaninglessly. They are not taking the time temperature of the universe, because there is no such thing.
Position, in a more Einsteinian sense, is a temporary agreement of dispositions about other dispositions. If you knew precisely where you were relative to the major bodies of the solar system, you would know exactly what time it is. They are the same thing. Your exact position in space is the only objective measure of time that there can ever be – and space is only a figure of speech. What we are really talking about is your position relative to Earth, Sun, Moon, the rest of the galaxy, etc. If you were to suddenly anchor yourself to some absolute Cartesian coordinate of ‘space’ you would be hurtled off of the planet at a speed of hundreds of thousands of miles per hour.
I’ve already tried to say too much here (what else is new?), but where I was going with this is that position is a public agreement of dispositions and disposition is a private affect. What is an affect? It’s an emotion or state of mind, feeling, etc, but I think that it can be defined in these physical terms as the private disposition. Taking it further, the private disposition as affect is actualized as a public disposition (effect).
I don’t know if I can communicate why this is important, but I think that if we take these simple ideas about position and disposition, we get bodies and biographies. Dispositions as an affective charge behind the effects and behaviors which we participate in over a lifetime. It’s not a field or a force, not energy or light (though all of those qualities give us clues), it is experience. It is time, but not clock time (which is a spatial derivative of averaged time), memory time. Dream time. Proto-psyche is the primordial landscape of the universe, and cosmos is the grand disposition from which all positions find (and lose) their mooring.
*To quote my friend Stephen’s definition of space.
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Is Matter Concentrated Energy?
Posted by multisenserealism on May 17, 2012
Would you have any objection to postulating that all matter is a form of concentrated energy (E = mcc), and that all energy is aware-ized?
I agree in a sense but I think we can go further than that. I would say that energy is nothing except awareness in the efferent-output mode (motive), and matter is awareness in the afferent-input mode (sense). E=mc² gives us the measure of how the two modes relate to each other. When we talk about energy, we are referring to a quality of dynamism of experienced events to persist through time and across space. The idea that matter is concentrated energy is more true if we mean concentrated in time than concentrated in space as density.
To say that matter is concentrated energy conjures an image of a bright glowing haze being squeezed into a particle, which I think we could say is figuratively true, but not literally. It is *as if* that were happening as far as particles can be destroyed and there is an explosive dynamism produced in surrounding matter, but I don’t think that there is actually any bright glowing haze to begin with. If we use a sense-based model instead, with energy as nothing more or less than the experience-behavior of things (particles, objects, cells, bodies), so that empty space cannot in any way contain energy, I think it makes more sense in addressing our experience, and no less sense as far as interpreting physics. Energy is a notational concept of how things happen to matter statistically, but I think our mistake is to model it as a pseudosubstance that literally exists.
Instead, energy condenses as matter not through space but through time. It is not frozen energy but an accumulated history which has been perceptually collapsed due to the defining conditions of our subjectivity. We see a slice of the whole history of the thing from the outside as a 3D object.
Remember too that both fission and fusion produce energy. Most of that energy is not from particles being turned into energy but from mass being lost as nuclei either “move into the same apartment together” under fusion and thus save on “rent”, or in fission by breaking up big businesses by selling off divisions. It’s interesting that it works both way – apparently because of the Iron Peak: Matter lighter than iron wants to be heavier – it’s looking for roommates. Matter heavier than iron wants to get rid of employees. That’s my goofy understanding anyhow. I think that particles can actually be lost but the amount of energy generated by that is surprisingly low. The power is in changing the relation of materials, not in converting them directly to energy.
It’s really a whole different way of looking at energy that I’m trying to get across. Once we can let go of our inherited 20th century models of energy and try out the sense-primitive model instead, I think we recover a great deal of our native realism. We experience energy directly. We see light, we feel heat, we hear sound. None of those things can be described in any meaningful way as objects in space. Our instruments and observations only tell us what they are experiencing, how the event changes them. The 20th century gave us a brilliant unifying vision of energy as an underlying quantitative omnipotence, but I think that is only true in the most physical and qualitatively flat sense.
I think a new understanding of energy must recognize the disunity of sense channels; the qualitative deepening of material experiences driven from top down significance attraction as well as bottom up accumulation. By breaking up the monolith of physics, we unify the outermost definition of the cosmos with the definitions which are evolving within (biology, neurology, anthropology, psychology, etc.). By breaking up Einsteinian spacetime relativity into sense-motive perception, we unify qualitative subjectivity with quantitative objectivity.
Multisense Realism 
Why can’t awareness be a fundamental property of energy? Just as all energy has the capacity to do work, all energy has the capacity to be conscious.
Awareness could be a property of energy, except that energy is a model of how substances change from a universal voyeur’s perspective. This is a quantified abstraction which, if taken literally, really has no need for any kind of experience to be attached to it. We can explain the universe in terms of energy, but there is no link back to the possibility of a real observer. It makes more sense the other way around, to say that consciousness is a fundamental property and that energy is inferred from the objectification of consciousness. It would make sense that consciousness needs matter and energy to tell better stories, but matter and energy wouldn’t need consciousness for anything at all.
In an absolute sense, consciousness and energy are the same thing, only looking in a mirror. Energy can’t look in a mirror though, for the same reason that your own reflection can’t look in the mirror back at itself…it isn’t ‘really there’ in an absolute sense.
“energy is a model of how substances change from a universal voyeur’s perspective.”
Is there a non-conscious model, one that describes change in non conscious terms, and that does not invoke “energy”?
“This is a quantified abstraction which, if taken literally, really has no need for any kind of experience to be attached to it.”
Are you saying “energy” is a quantified abstraction?
“We can explain the universe in terms of energy, but there is no link back to the possibility of a real observer.”
There is a possible link. The universe is a result of observers.
“It makes more sense the other way around, to say that consciousness is a fundamental property and that energy is inferred from the objectification of consciousness.”
Why does that make more sense to you? Does consciousness feel like a fundamental property sans energy? My experience is that consciousness is always associated with energy. I cannot think of how to separate consciousness from energy. How do you do it?
“It would make sense that consciousness needs matter and energy to tell better stories, but matter and energy wouldn’t need consciousness for anything at all.”
So the consciousness you speak of sounds kind of like the ghost-in-the-machine.
“In an absolute sense, consciousness and energy are the same thing only looking in a mirror. ”
The identity we can call the ghost-in-the-machine, is looking into the completely separate-from-it mirror of matter and energy. That metaphor, as I understand it, and please correct me if I am wrong in my interpretation, seems to have several problems.
“Energy can’t look in a mirror though, for the same reason that your own reflection can’t look in the mirror back at itself
You are saying that energy is not aware of any matter, the matter of a mirror for example. You are also saying there is no energy, really. Does all that you said makes sense if you believe energy is not actually itself aware, even that in the absolute sense, there is no energy? It is true if you believe that energy has certain properties that cause it to blindly interact with matter. (using the non-conscious model you are going to describe to me.)
“…it isn’t ‘really there’ in an absolute sense.”
Your saying energy is not? I think it would be foolish of me to try to argue about the ontological status of energy with you. You believe what you believe. I do admit that I do have a hard time understanding exactly what you think there IS.
“Is there a non-conscious model, one that describes change in non conscious terms, and that does not invoke “energy”? ”
None is needed if energy isn’t primitively real. All changes are ‘conscious’ (not conscious to us as living human beings – we are only conscious of human experiences)
“Are you saying “energy” is a quantified abstraction?”
Yes. Energy is no more absolute reality than ‘money’.
“There is a possible link. The universe is a result of observers.”
That’s what I am saying. The universe is nothing but observers who are only indirectly aware of each others observation.
“Why does that make more sense to you? Does consciousness feel like a fundamental property sans energy?”
Because I can make up a whole world right now and populate it with characters without incurring any relevant energy cost. Whatever nominal neurological changes there are in my brain do not contain any reference to the fiction being experienced.
“I cannot think of how to separate consciousness from energy. How do you do it?”
Easily. I don’t assume that energy is real from the beginning. I have no choice but to assume that experience is experience though. Energy is a concept we use to generalize the qualitative interactions of matter. It is nothing but ‘doing-ness’. What do we know of energy beyond sense experience? The feeling of heat, the look of objects being illuminated or moving. It’s experience shared through imitation/reflection/amplification.
“So the consciousness you speak of sounds kind of like the ghost-in-the-machine. ”
Consciousness is the machine too, its just the far end of it. There is no ghost, just experience through time. No machine, just bodies across space. They are dual derived aspects of the same fundamental sense.
“The identity we can call the ghost-in-the-machine, is looking into the completely separate-from-it mirror of matter and energy.”
No, nothing is ultimately separate. The identity is the back door of one thing looking at the front door of everything else. The back door feels like experience, the front doors look like bodies.
“You are saying that energy is not aware of any matter, the matter of a mirror for example”
No, I am saying that energy is nothing but what the matter does, and matter is nothing but the mirror image (anomalous-orthogonal mirror image that is) of experience (experience being like the ‘vertical axis’ and matter being like the horizontal projection (flattened representation) of all other vertical axes).
” It is true if you believe that energy has certain properties that cause it to blindly interact with matter.”
The properties are that if you are not the thing that is interacting, the interactions seem blind. It isn’t a property of energy (not literally real) but of awareness (the only thing that is concretely real).
“Your saying energy is not?”
Yes. Energy is nothing but what it seems like matter is doing from our point view when we other material objects as instruments to interact with each other.
“I do admit that I do have a hard time understanding exactly what you think there IS.”
For us, human experience is what there IS. What else should there be?
“ All changes are ‘conscious’ (not conscious to us as living human beings”
Not sure what that means. What are you saying “change” means? The foreground white space on my screen (here) went from empty white foreground to black letters on a white background. Are you saying I am not conscious of the molecular and electrical activity of the particles that compose the screen?
I know that I can feel the difference, I can feel the flow, in my mind. But, I suppose, one can wonder what “feel” is. What do you say “feel” is?
Why did you put the first ‘conscious’ in quotes?
“– we are only conscious of human experiences)”
How do you distinguish between “conscious” and “experience”? Ned Block, for example, has said, (and I am not saying he is right but that his is an example) that phenomenal consciousness is experience. He does not say PC is of experience.
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“We can explain the universe in terms of energy, but there is no link back to the possibility of a real observer.”
Joe wrote: “There is a possible link. The universe is a result of observers.”
“That’s what I am saying. The universe is nothing but observers who are only indirectly aware of each others observation.”
We must have misunderstood our sentences. If we explain the universe in terms of energy, there is no link back to the possibility of a real observer. is that right? Where you talk about explaining the universe in terms of energy alone, I think and talk about explaining the universe in terms of already conscious energy. Then I would agree that the universe is composed of observers, atoms, molecules, stones, animals, people…and these observers are all indirectly aware of each others observations. I am aware of the desk I sit at, and the desk is, to some simple extent, aware of me.
If energy were not conscious, then I would agree with your statement that there is no link back.
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Joe: “Why does that make more sense to you? Does consciousness feel like a fundamental property sans energy?”
Craig: “Because I can make up a whole world right now and populate it with characters without incurring any relevant energy cost.
Joe: How does one make up anything without using energy to do so?
Craig: Whatever nominal neurological changes there are in my brain do not contain any reference to the fiction being experienced.
Joe: Are we talking about different levels of awareness here? The nerve cell is unaware of your experienced fiction, it is closed to the nerve cells. But, are the nerve cells aware of the neurological changes, are they open to the nerve cell? The nerve cell experiences the neurological changes?
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Craig: “I don’t assume that energy is real from the beginning. I have no choice but to assume that experience is experience though.”
Joe: A tautology? Is that helpful?
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“Energy is a concept we use to generalize the qualitative interactions of matter. It is nothing but ‘doing-ness’.
Joe: I have difficulty conceptualizing “qualitative interaction” and ” ‘doing-ness’ ” without invoking the concept of ‘energy’. I suspect you have a similar difficulty in thinking about the reality of “action”. Action is not a thing, it is a way of being. I guess, to you, ways of being are not real.
When you say energy IS NOTHING BUT, I read that as saying energy is something, even if it is doing-ness in quotes. That’s something. But, this is just the ontological question that Quine wrote about in his essay, “On What There Is”.
Craig: What do we know of energy beyond sense experience? The feeling of heat, the look of objects being illuminated or moving. It’s experience shared through imitation/reflection/amplification.”
Joe: I think I will take a breather, let you respond to my questions if you want. I just want to say that as far as knowing of energy, I refer to Socrates’ comment in the Meno:
“Thus the soul, since it is immortal and has been born many times, and has seen all things both here and in the other world, has learned everything that is.”(81c)
” What are you saying “change” means?”
Change means that there is an experience of difference. Some state that represents an alternative to a remembered state.
“Are you saying I am not conscious of the molecular and electrical activity of the particles that compose the screen?”
I am saying that you are directly aware of one level of description of an event, and you are aware of other indirect descriptions of the same event. There are other levels of description which you are not aware of, but some systems of your body, cells, molecules are aware of.
“What do you say “feel” is?”
Feel is not reducible to any simpler terms. Feeling can be called different things – perception/participation. Afferent and efferent phenomenology. Sensorimotive presentation. Whatever you want to call it, it’s what you experience. Subjective qualia. You can make distinctions and say that ‘feeling’ has a more emotional connotation than awareness, sensation, or perception, but it’s just because we are really complex subjects with many channels of sense.
“Why did you put the first ‘conscious’ in quotes?”
Because the connotation of the word conscious tends toward full cognitive-human self awareness, whereas the kind of change I am talking about includes everything from the fusion of hydrogen atoms to the spinning of galaxies. Conscious may not be the right word to express how alien the experiences associated with these phenomena are, especially when we stop referring to them in terms of our own human scales of time and space.
“How do you distinguish between “conscious” and “experience”?”
To me, conscious is more of a special case of experience – an experience of being aware of experience. The nature of subjectivity is such that these terms are quasi-interchangeable though. Awareness is a fugue, not a mereology. It’s neither material nor immaterial, it is orthogonal to materiality.
” If we explain the universe in terms of energy, there is no link back to the possibility of a real observer. is that right? ”
Right, I think it’s like trying to explain agriculture by looking at the bookkeeping of a farm.
“If energy were not conscious, then I would agree with your statement that there is no link back.”
Then you are close to my view, the main difference being that I see no reason to think of energy as a separate thing from experience and I have never encountered energy other than as an idea derived from experience.
“Joe: How does one make up anything without using energy to do so?”
It’s not that you don’t use energy, it’s that the energy used isn’t important. It’s a trivial physiological event in an ocean of trivial physiological event, yet it can change the world. The Taj Mahal is made of stone blocks, but it doesn’t make sense to define the Taj Mahal as a collection of blocks – if anything, it is the blocks that are serving to embody the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal is both the stone and the design, but the blocks are just blocks.
“The nerve cell experiences the neurological changes?”
Yes, what we see as a nerve cell is also one of our many sub-selves. All of our cells are copies of the same cell that have specialized in different ways, each having experiences which contribute to our own (remember, phenomenology scales up as a continuous fugue, not as discrete nested objects as they appear on the geometry side of the cosmos).
“A tautology? Is that helpful?”
To assume that it isn’t helpful assumes that the reality of experience has to be explained in terms of the theory of experience which we generate within experience.
“Action is not a thing, it is a way of being. I guess”
Action has no existence independent of something that is acting. There is no disembodied ‘action-ness’, therefore no primitively real ‘energy’ Energy is what matter does to matter. Period.
“even if it is doing-ness in quotes. That’s something.”
These are linguistic abstractions. Are the spaces between these letters ‘something’? They can be. It doesn’t matter as long as we get the sense of the relation – the juxtaposition of matter-energy and sense-motive.
“Socrates’ comment in the Meno:”
Cool. I think soul is like energy. It is way to articulate phenomenology as an object, as a thing, but the reality is that it is experience itself, it is that from which thingness emerges (as an orthogonal juxtaposition). Immortal and learned? Sure, most likely. Maybe buried beneath our ordinary awareness quite a ways, but yeah, where else is there for experience to go after it has been experienced? It all has to fit in the ‘now’ somehow.
Craig,
I was playing:
Craig: ‘… the reality is that it is experience itself, it is that from which thingness emerges (as an orthogonal juxtaposition).”
Joe: For the purpose of discussion, the terms “action” and “identity (thingness)” must be separated, but basically no such separation exists. I’ll explain why.
An identity, such as an experience, is an action.
You might express this in terms of mirrors
Craig: I am saying that energy is nothing but what the matter does
Joe: What matter(identity) does is it acts. Energy is matter acting.
Craig: and matter[identity] is nothing but the mirror image… of experience[action]
Joe:In a mirror there is always this imbalance from one reflection to another. If you stand just right between two mirrors, the images repeat over and over into the seeming distance.
Craig: (experience[action] being like the ‘vertical axis’ and matter[identity] being like the horizontal projection
Joe: Action, on the vertical axis, because of its nature, would seem to destroy identity, since action must involve change, and any change seems to threaten identity.
It is a mistaken notion however that identity is dependent on stability. You are constantly changing, but still remain Craig. Identity, on the horizontal axis, because of its characteristics, will continually seek stability, while stability is impossible.
It is this dilemma, between the vertical axis inherent drive for change, and the horizontal axis constant attempts to maintain stability, that results in an imbalance. The by-product is consciousness of self. For consciousness and existence do not result from delicate balances so much as they are made possible by lack of balances.
Experience is an action that is conscious of itself. Without identity, action would be meaningless, for there would be nothing upon which action could act. In your words, “Action has no existence independent of something that is acting.” Action must, by its very nature, of itself and its own workings, create identities.
The energy of action, the workings of action within and upon itself, forms identity. Yet though identity is formed from action, action and identity cannot be separated. Identity is then actions effect upon itself.
Craig: “There is no disembodied ‘action-ness’, therefore no primitively real ‘energy’ ”
Primitively real energy acted within and upon itself. It is the nature of energy to act. Since it had nothing to act on, no identity to act on, it acted upon itself. An identity is a dimension of existence, action within action, an unfolding of action upon itself -and through this interweaving of action with itself, through this re-action, an identity is formed.
Craig: ‘Energy is what matter does to matter. Period.”
Matter does things to matter. Matter acts. Action shapes what matter becomes. Our actions shape the person we become, and what we experience. We don’t just experience, we act, don’t we?
Our personal identity is the sum of all our experiences, all our actions. Right?
There is an assumption in this that, in the beginning, there was nothing, no things, no identities. There was only what you called primitive energy. I describe how I believe awareness/consciousness, and with it matter/identities came about. You seem to assume the eternal existence of awareness, citing no origin. And then go on to describe how matter and energy in terms of awareness.
I acknowledge that there consciousness is a complex issue and that there are likely many ways to understand it. I happen to think that my approach allows for practical application. Yours seem to try to be more explanatory than practical.
““action” and “identity (thingness)” must be separated, but basically no such separation exists”
I agree. I call action ‘motive’ and identity ‘sense’. They are the active and passive modes of the same.
“What matter(identity) does is it acts. Energy is matter acting. ”
Matter isn’t identity. Identity is the sense that we make of experiences. Matter is the objectification of sense.
“If you stand just right between two mirrors, the images repeat over and over into the seeming distance.”
It doesn’t feed back because sense-motive-time and matter-energy-space are orthogonal. The former is everything that the latter is not. I am using mirror figuratively, in reality the mirroring is between an unreflectable presence and a reflectable non-presence.
“Craig: (experience[action] being like the ‘vertical axis’ and matter[identity] being like the horizontal projection ”
You’re close but not quite getting what I mean. Experience is not action, experience is subjectivity. Matter is not identity, it is objectified sense. Disowned experience.
“It is a mistaken notion however that identity is dependent on stability. You are constantly changing, but still remain”
Identity isn’t dependent on anything. Stability is dependent upon continuity of experience, which is represented to itself as identity.
“It is this dilemma, between the vertical axis inherent drive for change, and the horizontal axis constant attempts to maintain stability, that results in an imbalance. ”
There’s no balance because they are orthogonal to each other. Change is nothing but a comparison of stabilities. Stability is nothing but the invariance through change. They are two sides of the same coin.
“consciousness and existence do not result from delicate balances so much as they are made possible by lack of balances.”
I would not say lack of balance, just fluctuation or perturbations of sense. Self consciousness is more about the complexity of multiple layers of sense rather than the primordial symmetry of phenomenology and realism.
“Action must, by its very nature, of itself and its own workings, create identities.”
I’m saying though that action has no nature at all. It is the things that are acting which accumulate natures through their actions. You can look at it the other way too, but it is more abstract. It may not be incorrect, but I find it more natural to think of objects accelerating than acceleration itself becoming objects.
“Primitively real energy acted within and upon itself.”
This pre-figures physics though so I don’t think it qualifies as actual energy – it is will. Enthusiasm. Motive. To be objectified as a pseudosubstance like ‘energy’ I think requires that there is a context of material objects or at least space.
“through this interweaving of action with itself, through this re-action, an identity is formed. ”
Yes, but only because the potential for identity to form is already inherent in the backgrounded inertia from which the action is foregrounding itself against. I have been down this line of thought before and found some interesting things. Acceleration makes things which are not accelerating as intensely seem like they are static. This is the primordial sense-motive relation, like yin-yang. Neither is ultimately definable as more primitive than the other – they define each other inseparably as foreground and background.
“Matter does things to matter. Matter acts.”
Yes, and whenever it does, there is a transfer of energy.
“We don’t just experience, we act, don’t we?”
Absolutely, but why do you say that action isn’t an experience? I say that experience is both perception (sense) and participation (motive or will…or you could say action, but that can be made passive and observational, so the province of external realism rather than personal effort).
“Our personal identity is the sum of all our experiences, all our actions. Right? ”
I think it’s much more than that. It is the sum of all of the experiences and actions which cross paths during our lifetime and beyond. My identity has roots that go back to the Big Bang. Culture, genetics, geology, etc.
“There was only what you called primitive energy.”
I don’t talk about energy being primitive. I talk about energy being made up, like money.
“You seem to assume the eternal existence of awareness, citing no origin.”
Not human awareness, but yes, time and eternities are categories within experience, not the other way around. There is no possible origin of anything other than in sense, as sense is possibility itself.
“I happen to think that my approach allows for practical application. Yours seem to try to be more explanatory than practical.”
Ultimately the truth is the only thing that matters. Practicality and instrumental reasoning are important, but where ultimate questions are concerned, explanatory power is really the only thing worth discussing. Practicality is eating and reproducing. We don’t need to know who we are and why the universe makes sense to accomplish that.
Joe: “What matter(identity) does is it acts. Energy is matter acting. ”
Craig: Matter isn’t identity… Matter is the objectification of sense.
Joe: I was not clear. Matter acts. What we identify as matter acts.
Also, what is your sense of personal identity? consciousness of self. Not your sense of separating yourself from objects.
Craig: Identity is the sense that we make of experiences.
JOe: So there is a you, an identity (you), and an experience. How do you separate the boundary of the rest of the world from the observer?
That is a more mystical question because you are asking about the consciousness of a human individual (which is hyper-complex) rather than the basic nature of sense. To begin to approach the question I think I would look at identity as the total narrative of a lifetime as well as the fractal-like self reflection of every moment within it. It depends on your state of consciousness also. If you expand your scope (altered by drugs, dream, yoga, etc) then the boundary may seem to become more translucent or transparent…which may be the same thing as pushing the envelope of the total lifetime narrative by expanding the experienced now…something like that.
Joe: Also, I said, Energy is matter acting.
You did not disagree. Right?
Yes I totally agree. I mean you could go with a negative-orientation and say that matter is energy interacting…and that’s true too, but it’s like saying that these letters are white shapes with black gaps. Such a view may be instrumentally useful or enlightening, but if taken literally I think is disorienting. Our natural sense is that when you throw a baseball, it is a baseball moving, not movement baseballing. If we heat up coffee, it is hot coffee, not heat that is coffeeing. The interpretations at the quantum level that would appear to flip flop this – zero point field, vacuum flux, etc, I think are ultimately disoriented because they assume passive senseless mechanism rather than perception-participation among diffracted monads within monads.
Joe: How do you separate the boundary of the rest of the world from the observer?
I want to restate that in terms of our discussion:
How do you separate the boundary of the experience of rest of the world from the observer?
Craig: It doesn’t feed back because sense-motive-time and matter-energy-space are orthogonal. The former is everything that the latter is not.
Joe: I will have to come back to this after I read the relevant background.
Craig: I am using mirror figuratively,
Joe: That does not seem to help me understand.
Craig: in reality the mirroring is between an unreflectable presence and a reflectable non-presence.
Joe: “Unreflectable presence” and “reflectable non-presence”, are opaque terms, oxymorons it seems to me anyhow.
I’m trying to say that if I were say were using the idea of a mirror literally I would expect matter and energy to have a one to one direct correspondence with sense and motive (perception and participation), but instead, it is a completely anomalous correspondence. It’s how much you enjoy a song on one end of the mirror and the weight of the CD that the song is on on the other side of the mirror. Totally opposite in every way, but similar nonetheless in a figurative sense – both sides have an up and down, but on the west side that means location in space or a quantitative increment/decrement. On the east side, up and down is about mood and status. Superior and inferior. High and low quality.
” (experience[action] being like the ‘vertical axis’
Craig: Experience is not action, experience is subjectivity.
Joe: Sorry, I was being careless. Again to clarify, experience is not action itself. Experience is the result of 2 steps. First, the imbalance between action and identity which created consciousness of self, then leading to the second, the dilemma created by the attempt by consciousness of self to separate itself from action. Experience is then subjectivity, as you say, but more specifically, the seeming subjectivity of the ego.
Here again, you are getting into more of the specifics of human individual consciousness rather than sense or awareness in general. Psychology really. That is a much tougher thing to model for me. I agree, yeah there are conflicts and seeming structures like ego…very complex stuff that I think recapitulates the entire evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. We are the condensed experience of a bunch of animals, fungi, and bacteria. It’s ugly in there. From what I have picked up so far, the ego is the site of focal contraction and dilation. Expand the ego and you contract your sensitivity but squeeze more voltage into your strategic motive power…you see more moves ahead and become more extroverted, political, and reptilian. Relax your sensitivity and you open yourself up to introverted intuition. You see more of the magic in your experience but you are less able to control and project your own individual will.
Craig: Matter is not identity, it is objectified sense. Disowned experience.
Joe: I have been using “(… .. )but it is causing problems. Matter is an identity we experience. The experience of matter is then the result of the 2 step process.
Craig: Matter is disowned experience.
Joe: Not sure what that means.
Joe: It is a mistaken notion however that identity is dependent on stability. You are constantly changing, but still remain”
Craig: Identity isn’t dependent on anything. Stability is dependent upon continuity of experience, which is represented to itself as identity.
Joe: You sound like you think we are in disagreement here. I don’t think so. Yes, I said it was not dependent on stability because that is often an assumption.
Craig: Stability is dependent upon continuity of experience,
Joe: Yes. That does seem to be the case.
Craig: which is represented to itself as identity.
Joe: “Which is represented to experience as identity” makes sense.
————————–
Joe: It is this dilemma, between the vertical axis inherent drive for change, and the horizontal axis constant attempts to maintain stability, that results in an imbalance.
Craig: There’s no balance because they are orthogonal to each other.
Joe: Please excuse me, I guess I do not really understand “orthogonal”. I thought I could express what I see as an imbalance in terms that you use. I was mistaken.
Perhaps we are closer when you say that stability is dependent upon continuity of experience. I would say that the continuity of experience is the result of an imbalance. A see saw continues as long as there is an imbalance, for example.
“The experience of matter is then the result of the 2 step process.”
Yes in the sense of it being a second order logic or ‘being once removed’, but not in the sense of there being a linear process where things are first experiences and then become matter. I say that matter is disowned experience because everything that you can perceive as matter is owned by something other than you, while all of the experiences that you can own directly are not describable as matter.
“”Which is represented to experience as identity” makes sense.”
Yes, I like that.
Re: Imbalance, yes a see-saw (or a see-saw made of see-saws) is a good way of seeing one aspect of the orthogonality. What I am trying to get at with that term (anomalous is another term) is that, to paraphrase Deleuze talking about Carroll, the difference is between the dinner table and the multiplication table. One end of the see-saw is the meaning of the word ‘see-saw’ without the word, and the other is the wooden plank/level moving up and down.
Sorry yeah I lost that one going from mobile to browser. Senility vs technology…we have a winner!
If I could, I would delete my 2 previous replies. I am trying to understand something.
How do you separate the boundary of the rest of the world from the observer? The observer experiences, or is it awareness that experiences and there is no observer.
You wrote, on the online forum, jcs-online, “The who is us. Natural persons using natural language. We are actual whole phenomena in the universe who exist and insist exactly as we seem to, and also in other ways, including the opposite – as bits of matter in space.”
Couple this with, “Matter isn’t identity. Identity is the sense that we make of experiences. Matter is the objectification of sense.”
Taken together, the 2 statements almost seem to contradict each other. I wonder what you would mean by personal identity, since matter is not identity.
Ok I tried to delete the previous two – hopefully it worked and I got the right ones?
Maybe this will help:
Think of Who as the opposite of What. The former is the ‘I’, the subject. The latter is the object, the bits of matter. What turns the who into a what is the juxtaposition of one partition or diffraction of the who against another partitioning of the who. Now there are two whos separated by spacetime who see each other as whats.
See also my last two s33light posts too if you want more in this vein: http://s33light.org/post/31132367037 http://s33light.org/post/31120276858
You should see the comment where I did answer this now…long story short, sometimes you can’t separate the boundary, but when you can, you can define the boundary in terms of either narrative consistencies in your entire lifetime or more of a spacetime locality…”Here I am”.
Craig: What turns the who into a what…
Joe: Again, I wonder what you would mean by personal identity, since matter is not identity.
Identity is the who. It’s the fundamental thesis from which the antithesis of space-time and the synthesis of matter-energy are derived. Personal identity in the sense of a human being’s identity is much more complicated. It’s the multi-level who which corresponds to experiences on multiple levels of materials and functions.
Craig: you can define the boundary in terms of either narrative consistencies in your entire lifetime or more of a spacetime locality…”Here I am”.
Joe: maybe I have not made it clear as to what I am looking for. Do you have anything in your store that resembles a soul? Maybe you don’t carry that item. So, for example, I take my Self to be part of a soul. My soul is not something I have, it is what I am. I take a soul to be a Gestalt of aware energy. Ultimately, I am a part of God. Associated with that soul are patterns of energy representing a unique series of experiences, a consistent narrative that identifies me. Something like a memory.
I think that soul, Self, I, mind, ego, me, and mine are all loosely related terms for identity aspects within the realm of ‘who’. My only insight about it is that they are names for a capacity for proprietary experience (i.e. public to private sensory perception and private to public motive participation). All of the common terms must, in defining themselves, objectify the referent – which, in this case is ‘that which cannot be objectified’. For this reason I think that words like soul and self are misleading because they tend to imply a structure rather than an experiential continuity through which structures are encountered.
Joe: “Action must, by its very nature, of itself and its own workings, create identities.”
Craig: I’m saying though that action has no nature at all. It is the things that are acting which accumulate natures through their actions. You can look at it the other way too, but it is more abstract. It may not be incorrect, but I find it more natural to think of objects accelerating than acceleration itself becoming objects.
Joe: When you drill down into matter, do you imagine that at the sub-plank level, for example, or at the level of Higgs’ bosons, that there are hard glassy objects? And those hard glassy objects are composed of even smaller objects, ad infinitum?
I wonder if the idea of energy speeding up, or slowing down is just foreign to you. Perhaps you just reject any ontological status for energy, can’t imagine energy becoming more and more concentrated until it seems to be solid? Until we sense it as solid.
I think that while our observations of the microcosm have given us valid data, our interpretations of them are, in an absolute sense, completely inside out.
What I suspect is that subatomic particles are closer to shared ‘atomic moods’. I suspect that even atoms are less like solid objects and more like selves who signal each other with particulate-seeming signs. I think that it may be that as we get further down the microcosm, matter is less and less objective and more and more intersubjective. It’s hard to separate this effect though from the more anthropic limitations of our own perception. Atoms are infinitesimally small and primitive compared to our bodies, but if an atom was the only thing in the universe, there would be no such frame of reference, and the atom might contain all of the eternal potential experience of the entire universe.
Energy speeding up is a feature of perception that arises from a perceiver within one inertial frame being able to access and compare remembered perceptions. Speed is objects changing their location relative to a subjects expectation of the same. If you had only one object in the universe – like a ping pong ball, there can be no speed since there is no other frame of reference. The only place to be is where the ball is. I no longer think that ‘energy’ can be concentrated into a solid, only that the way matter is distributed can change through energetic actions and reactions.
Craig: All of the common terms must, in defining themselves, objectify the referent – which, in this case is ‘that which cannot be objectified’.
Joe: Energy, awareized-energy that is, is not an object, it is a way of being. Being conscious. I think you have trouble relating to that. My description of ‘soul’ as a Gestalt of aware-ized energy, for example, does NOT objectify the referent. A portion of the soul, however, can form what appears to us as a body. The body is, therefore, within the soul. That body appears to be an object, but that is, as they say, Maya.
My soul is an identity. My body, is an identity. But, they are not objects in any material sense. They are simply ways of being.
” My description of ‘soul’ as a Gestalt of aware-ized energy, for example, does NOT objectify the referent”
It’s tricky, but yes it does still objectify. You are saying that is a something (gestalt of energy) that is aware. I am saying that there is no energy there, only a capacity for awareness and participation. There is no level of description for it where it is an embodied structure of any kind – it is a continuity of experience and that is all.
It can be said that the body is, from the subjects perspective, an identity – an important character and setting in the life of the person. It is also a non-identity meat machine in other people’s lives. In a mosquito’s life, your skin is a restaurant. In a water molecule’s experience, your body is sort of a thick cloud. These are not illusory appearances, they are the concrete realities in the lives that are not yours. Neither is your familiar experience of your own body an illusion – but it is a very different kind of realism from the public exterior perspectives. Your experience of your body is autobiographical and private, an interior fugue of memory and expectation, sensation, reflection, etc.
Craig: they (“soul, self, I etc) tend to imply a structure rather than an experiential continuity through which structures are encountered.
That IS what a Gestalt of aware energy is. It is a structure of aware energy with experiential continuity through which other structures of aware energy are encountered. Just like I am encountering you.
“That IS what a Gestalt of aware energy is. It is a structure of aware energy”
No. Not trying to aggravate you, but saying that something is ‘a structure’ is mutually exclusive to what I am talking about. I am saying that all we can actually experience of ourselves is a continuity of experience which has no structure at all. I and you are figurative and elliptical designations, not explicit descriptors of who we actually are. To say ‘I’ is not to say ‘a structure of aware energy’, it is to say ‘this person who is speaking as the subject’. If we were to try to create a universe from scratch, and had to draw up blueprints for subjectivity, it would not do to manufacture structures of aware energy. That doesn’t accurately reflect what it really is, which is simply private, proprietary, signifying, figurative, continuity of perception and participation… no ‘energy’ required. Energy descriptions add nothing to the description and only detract. Energy how? How many joules are in a soul?
Joe: “Primitively real energy acted within and upon itself.”
Craig: This pre-figures physics though so I don’t think it qualifies as actual energy – it is will. Enthusiasm. Motive.
Joe: Well, very close. Desire is the womb through which all things have their birth or beginning.(a quote from an ancient text in the Library of Congress, attributed to one Hermes Trismegestus). It is not the “actual” energy of physics. It is the inside vitality of the inner universe, filled with the desire to fully materialize itself, and in conflict with its inability to do so.
Craig: To be objectified as a pseudosubstance like ‘energy’ I think requires that there is a context of material objects or at least space.
Energy is NOT a substance either, can be conceptualized correctly as a substance only as matter.
Talk about “space” goes beyond range of this discussion I think.
Yes, energy and motive/desire/will are very close. It all has to do with what I call the primordial syzygy relations. https://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/aslide4.jpg
Energy is nothing but your de-personalized view of motives that aren’t your own. The less you can relate to the motives of the thing, the more it is de-personalized and assumed to be automatic and unconscious (which may or may not contain some objective truth, depending on how anthropic the universe really is).
Energy is not a substance, but it is treated as a pseudo-substantial commodity, like money. Photons are energy and are treated as particle-wave structures/mechanisms. I am saying though that they do not exist independently of matter at all. The energized qualities of matter are imitated directly from node to node or monad to monad, not as a projectile/disturbance traveling literally between them across a vacuum. Energy works like a smile or a dance. There is no smile literally flying across the street from one mouth to another. There is no dance that is independent of the dancers shared imitiation-expectation.
Joe: “through this interweaving of action with itself, through this re-action, an identity is formed. ”
Craig: Yes, but only because the potential for identity to form is already inherent in the backgrounded inertia from which the action is foregrounding itself against.
Joe: “Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest, or the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion.” wikipedia
Inertia is not a property of energy. And yes, the potential for the creation of identity is part of the infinite basic unpredictable nature of All That IS, what some people call God.
Craig: I have been down this line of thought before and found some interesting things. Acceleration makes things which are not accelerating as intensely seem like they are static. This is the primordial sense-motive relation, like yin-yang. Neither is ultimately definable as more primitive than the other – they define each other inseparably as foreground and background.
Joe: O.K. Yin:yang :: action:identity. Neither IS more primitive than the other. They co-exist. The creative by-product of this relationship is consciousness of self.
“or the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion.” wikipedia…Inertia is not a property of energy. ”
Isn’t all change in the motion of an object an increase or decrease in it’s kinetic energy? I don’t know if this helps but here is a page with a lot of equations called The Inertia of Energy http://mathpages.com/rr/s2-03/2-03.htm
“The creative by-product of this relationship is consciousness of self.”
I agree. I don’t even know that I would call it a by-product. That juxtaposition (along with the capacity for meta-juxtaposition) is all that consciousness or self actually is. They are the same thing.
Joe: Thanks for the link Craig.
Consider a part of the quote from the Bhagavad Gita, “the primeval being…”. How do YOU understand the term “being”? as an object, a noun, or as a verb. What do you think?
Kevin: “As a result, the acceleration of an object subjected to a given force depends on the frame of reference. ‘
Joe: Kevin Brown has his own framework for creating his world, his zeitgeist. That’s fine. That’s his thing. What you are suggesting is transposing his framework onto mine, interpreting what I say in terms of his framework. For example, the acceleration of an object, in his frame, becomes a change in consciousness in mine.
Kevin: Since acceleration is a measure of the object’s inertia, this implies that the object’s “inertial mass” depends on the frame of reference.
Joe: “depends on the frame of reference” is right. Inertial mass, can be defined as a quantitative measure of an object’s resistance to acceleration.
Kevin: Now, the kinetic energy of an object also depends on the frame of reference, and we find that the variation of kinetic energy is always exactly c2 times the variation in inertial mass, where c is the speed of light.
Joe: Kevin’s is a circular argument in my framework.
Kevin: Thus the Lorentz covariance of the inertial measures of space and time implies that all forms of energy possess inertia, which in turn suggests that all inertia represents energy.
Joe: So he speaks of inertial measures of space and time. He frames his world view within what he calls space and time. In my frame, space and time are created, only as a portion within my entire frame.
Joe: “Matter does things to matter. Matter acts.”
Craig: Yes, and whenever it does, there is a transfer of energy.
Joe: The transformation of energy is one of four universal properties of consciousness
Joe: “We don’t just experience, we act, don’t we?”
Craig: Absolutely, but why do you say that action isn’t an experience?
Joe:I said that? Do you remember where, in what context?
She that must be obeyed is telling me to stop!! Gotta hop.
Heheh, well it’s probably good to have to take a break. When you return…What are the other three universal properties of consciousness?
2) value fulfillment, also called growth
3) stability
4) spontaneity
Those seem like they have more to do with human psychology than principles of consciousness itself to me, but ok.
Craig: Those seem like they have more to do with human psychology than principles of consciousness itself to me, but ok.
Joe: 1st, an errata, #3 is durability, not stability.
Of course. Personal reality is the result of the nature of consciousness. So, for example, by #2, plants, all animals, even all minerals, seek to be all that they can be. It is what has been called the life force, the impetus of seeking to grow.
#3, durability, is just the Law of Conservation of Energy written in terms of aware-ized energy, the Law of Conservation of Consciousness: Consciousness can be neither created or destroyed.
#1 Transformations of energy take place all the time, but no energy is ever lost. (see rule#3)
Joe: There is an ambiguity in my response to your , “Those seem like they have more to do with human psychology”
Of course it seems like it has to do with human psychology. Our psychology is a result of the nature of consciousness.
O.K. I got it. Action is only one half of experience. The other half is identity.
Exactly. Something has to be able to detect the difference between the before and after state of the action. I like motive or participation for action and sense or perception for identity. Action and identity have their charms too, but action to me feels very physical.
I think of more of a ‘sense’ that is pregnant with motive intent before that intent is actualized as a motor consequence in the public exterior world. Motive is proto-motor but it is as-if-motor within its own frame. When you control your attention, you exercise direct telepathic control over your brain chemistry. As this motive is propagated in a one-to-many fashion from the mind-brain as a whole to body as a whole, it is reflected as changes simultaneously on the tissue, cellular, and molecular levels of the body (physiological, biological, and chemical ‘energy’ is what we might call the process that is actually experienced changes in the body, cell, and molecule.
“feels physical”?
doesn’t that tell you something about energy?
Yes, it tells me that energy only relates to causality of physical bodies.
I think we are in reasonable agreement on the 2nd paragraph. I thought of the phase, “preaching to the choir.”
Joe: O.K. almost through it:
“Our personal identity is the sum of all our experiences, all our actions. Right? ”
Craig: I think it’s much more than that. It is the sum of all of the experiences and actions which cross paths during our lifetime and beyond. My identity has roots that go back to the Big Bang. Culture, genetics, geology, etc.
Joe: So, O.K., in your framework time is linear, it is simultaneous in mine, but I think we are both in agreement as to what constitutes our personal identity, the narrative that is the totality of our experience.
You might appreciate this quote from the Princeton philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre:
“For the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity…The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide.” (After Virtue”
Craig: “You seem to assume the eternal existence of awareness, citing no origin.”
Not human awareness, but yes, time and eternities are categories within experience, not the other way around. There is no possible origin of anything other than in sense, as sense is possibility itself.
Joe: I agree, Time and eternity are creations, categories within experience. I agree that what you call “sense”, which seems related to what I call “consciousness” , is the source of every THING.
I don’t agree that there is no possible origin of sense.
The reason why I say there is no possible origin of sense is that origination itself is only a sense-making concept that supervenes on sequence or time. For something to have an origin, there has to already be a such thing as the possibility of origins – which is already sense.
Joe: “I happen to think that my approach allows for practical application. Yours seem to try to be more explanatory than practical.”
Craig: Ultimately the truth is the only thing that matters.
Joe: Why is descriptive knowledge better than procedural knowledge?
Craig: Practicality and instrumental reasoning are important, but where ultimate questions are concerned, explanatory power is really the only thing worth discussing.
Joe: Why is descriptive knowledge better than procedural knowledge?
The difficulty in knowing the difference between what is true and what is not is challenging. We both probably have different criteria. What are your criteria?
For me, discrimination is a simple matter with the application of a basic rule: The thought that contains joy contains truth. The words that are the clearest contain truth. The thoughts and the words that give me the feeling that is the grandest feeling, the feeling that contains love, contains truth.
Joy, truth, love.
These 3 are interchangeable, and one always leads to the other. It doesn’t matter in which order they are placed.
Craig: Ultimately the truth is the only thing that matters.
Joe: If I did not have love and joy in my life, truth would be meaningless.
Craig: Practicality is eating and reproducing.
Joe: I don’t agree. Is survival your goal, or is fulfillment your goal? I believe we are 3 part beings; a mind for truth, a body for joy, a soul for love. For me, since I do not believe that I am only my mind, therefore truth is only a part.
Craig: We don’t need to know who we are and why the universe makes sense to accomplish that.
Joe: If survival is the only goal, eating and reproducing are significant. If truth is the only goal, then making sense comes first.
My approach is practical, true, and loving.
To me love, joy, truth, and survival are different ways of sensing or making sense. Truth is what makes the most sense – reveals the most agreements and richest qualities of agreement.