There is a period in Buddhist studies - not Buddhism, but Buddhist studies - called ‘Protestant Buddhism’. It was in vogue in the early 20th Century. It was popular to compare karma with ‘the law of cause and effect’ and therefore something like the science of momentum. That kind of sentiment underlies that whole passage, but it’s fanciful. The ‘chain of dependent origination’ is in no way ‘scientific’ in the modern sense. Its conception of causation is basically ethical. These are the ‘twelve links’ that drive the process:
12 Nidanas
Ignorance (Avijjā): A fundamental misunderstanding of the Four Noble Truths and the true nature of reality.
Volitional Formations (Saṅkhāra): Karmic actions, intentions, and habitual mental dispositions driven by ignorance.
Consciousness (Viññāṇa): The basic awareness that enters a new life or arises in a new moment.
Name and Form (Nāma-rūpa): The psychophysical organism; the division between the mind (name) and physical body (form).
Six Sense Bases (Saḷāyatana): The five physical senses plus the mind.
Contact (Phassa): The intersection of a sense organ, its object, and consciousness.
Feeling (Vedanā): The emotional or sensory response to contact (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral).
Craving (Taṇhā): The desire to hold onto pleasant feelings or push away unpleasant ones.
Clinging (Upādāna): The intense attachment, grasping, or identification with objects of craving.
Becoming (Bhava): The process of accumulating karma that leads to the next state of existence.
Birth (Jāti): The literal or moment-to-moment arising of a new existence.
Aging and Death (Jarā-maraṇa): The inevitable decay, sorrow, and suffering that accompany life.
This has nothing to do with physical causation.
Where that errs, is that the momentary elements in Buddhism (known confusingly as ‘dharmas’) are elements of experience, or experienced realities. There is never any suggestion that they are real in the objective sense that mathematical abstractions are understood to be in Western science.
Yes, there are convergences between Buddhism and Stoicism, no question about that, but again, stoicism lacks the soteriological intent that characterises Buddhism.
You forget perhaps that Mill was a phenomenalist. An im-materialist.
Scientistic types resent phenomenalists and misread them as subjective idealists. Lenin attack Mach as an enemy of materialism. So for me, aware of this history, it’s dissonant to hear materialists lumped with their adversaries, just because they all tended to agree on atheism or agnosticism.
Panpsychism has many flavors so I understand your hesitation. This may be why Whitehead’s student David Ray Griffin coined the term ‘panexperientialism’ – i.e. to distinguish it from the other variants of panpsychism. I’m pretty sure I’d get my ears bashed by Whitehead scholars for my interpretation, but I’ll spout anyway.
Whitehead built on Leibniz’s Monadology, converting it from a substance ontology to a process ontology. He addresses the synchronization problem by appealing to what he calls prehension – an inherited causal past that an Actual Occasion of Experience (AOE – an ‘atom’ of experience) shares with its contemporaries – so replacing external synchronization with internal synchronization that I find reminiscent of Fazang’s Net of Indra.
So something like a fire hydrant would be a collection of fairly disconnected AOEs that has no over-arching unity of experience receiving input from the collection. Whitehead calls this an aggregate (appropriating Leibniz’s use of the word, but turning it against him in order to argue for internal rather than external relations).
This is where I prick my ears up at Ontic Structural Realism, since it seems to dissolve the distinction between internal and external relations (which then become derivative).
Damn, I can almost hear my object splintered ontology in that. But are these AOEs similar to what would normally be arranged in the postulated temporally unified phenomenal streams of humans, for instance ?
So my attachment to objects, to there being “things,” is indeed their function as “unifiers.” Derrida writes of the iterability of signs. The “meaning” of the word “apple” may vary with context, but there’s something “enduring” in the sign “apple” itself.
Now Saussure sees that this unity is ideal. No two pencil inscriptions or vocal soundings are the same. Yet they are treated as inscriptions of and voicing of this “ideal” “thing.”
The “thing” has no true face. No numeral is the number 9 and yet 9 is no number without numerals effective in the world that “play this ideal role of 9.”
I’m curious how you would explicate this kind of phenomenon. For me, there’s a temporal approach. What is the continuity here ?
Leibniz regarded the human soul as what he called a dominant monad, a substance persisting through time. Whitehead replaced this with a dominant occasion that persists only fleetingly while it concresces from the input from its priors before perishing. It is the sequence of “inheriting occasions” that constitutes the enduring person.
I can’t help but make connections here with Rovelli’s thermal time hypothesis, with Avenarius’s evolution of the Central Nervous System, and with the quantized ‘action’ of quantum mechanics. There seems to be a profound convergence here, though I wouldn’t want to put it more strongly than that. Just following my nose.
You remind me of Wittgenstein’s language as use, and his analogy of the rope made of separate threads with no single thread running the full length of the rope. But I don’t know anything about Derrida or Saussure so I have no confidence that I even understand the question.
OK. Thanks. This is close to my own view. The past “only exists now” through the “stain” it “projects” on the oncoming revelation of world.
In an important sense, there is only “me now.” But this “me now” is the “result” of many previous “me-nows.” Is that about it ?
The same with objects ?
If so, this is why the technical name for “aspects” of objects is “moments.” “Aspects” is a handy visual metaphor for visual creatures, but what matters essential is temporal synthesis and interpersonal synthesis. We can arguably reduce interpersonal synthesis to temporal synthesis, maybe.
Where are the snows of yesteryear ? Seriously. The past is uncanny.
Beautiful metaphor. That’s it. Sellars took meaning-as-use from Witt and gave it more structure. And it’s basically what Saussure did.
This is how I understand Plato’s “unwritten” stuff. The result is not what is called mathematical platonism but something more liquid and beautiful and alive.
Can’t resist sharing a little on this rich topic.
On page 12, Saussure drops something wild, though seemingly innocent enough.
I have included only the elements thought to be essential, but the drawing brings out at a glance the distinction between the physical (sound waves), physiological (phonation and audition), and psychological parts (word-images and concepts). Indeed, we should not fail to note that the word-image stands apart from the sound itself and that it is just as psychological as the concept which is associated with it.
So the “sound” of the word “apple” is just as ideal as the “meaning” of the word “apple.”
Early machine learning classified handwritten zipcode digits. We do this constantly as we map from an infinite domain of noises to a finite set of iterable words.
Derrida generalizes Saussure. Certain scribbles are “treated as nines.” All sensory channels are subject to this analysis. The key thing is “difference.” Doesn’t matter what sounds or scribbles we use but only that we can differentiate between ideal categories. This allows the world to be richly significant. If this interests you, then early Derrida is a great resource. But don’t skip Saussure. I went back from Derrida to Saussure and enjoyed the original context, which makes the generalization more intelligible anyway.
Similar:
To paraphrase a sentence is to find an equivalent sentence. No “immaterial meaning” is transferred. An “approximately equally sigificant lifeworld object” is selected. By object I mean sound or gesture or inscription, etc. The “immaterial” is just our facility with finding and appropriately reacting to equivalents, you might say, especially in the case of “ideas.” Yet we “live” these “ideal categories” in “time.” This for me would explain some residue of “form rather than substance” not easily ignored. The “thing” is “nothing but” its temporally diverse faces, each unique. Like that rope you mentioned, which is a metaphor I somehow missed. I need to dig out Wittgenstein’s PI again.
I can see that… the past is what grounds our hopes and fears. Recall Wheeler: “Hope produces space and time?”
In another post you asked for quotes from Rovelli. I’m still zipping through his book The Order of Time (recommend it) and I’ve just come across his critique of Descartes’ Cogito. He argues that the conclusion must be derived from something more fundamental than “I think” – must instead be from “I doubt” (reminds me of Augustine: Si fallor, sum, a millennium before Descartes). He goes on:
“The experience of thinking of oneself as a subject is not a primary experience: it is a complex of cultural deduction, made on the basis of many other thoughts. My primary experience – if we grant that this means anything – is to see the world around me, not myself. I believe that we each have a concept of ‘my self’ only because at a certain point we learn to project on to ourselves the idea of being human as an additional feature of evolution that has led us to develop during the course of millennia in order to engage with other members of our group: we are the reflection of the idea of ourselves that we receive back from our kind.” (pp 153, 154).
Rovelli goes on to show how time is implicated. He says “We are histories of ourselves. Narratives.” He goes on to describe aspects of his history and then writes “If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.”
Mid-day over here, which makes me think of Rovelli’s thermal time hypothesis again – each of us a private universe with its own time (in an Einsteinian, relativistic sense, called “proper time”), but each of us sees the same universe by entering into new relations with others. A bifurcating and coalescing of microcosms. The Wigner’s Friend paradox resolved. Sleep well.
"I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cry-cross in the same way. – And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.
"And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a ‘number’? Well, perhaps because it has a – direct – relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.
"But if someone wished to say: “There is something common to all these constructions – namely the disjunction of all their common properties” – I should reply: “Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: “Something runs through the whole thread – namely the continuous overlapping of these fibres”.”
Nice. I read Heidegger’s claim that existence is time as pointing out this “own time.” Public clock time is a potent institution, but it is not “original” or “deep” time.
This own-time is “there” in the “same” objects showing ever-new faces. Like soundings of the same word in ever-new contexts, therefore signifying differently, and with a cumulative intensification and sharpening of this signification. So time and being are intensely related or independent. Being is “process” or “becoming” or time as ongoing revelation articulated by interpersonal beings given in moments.
Just got some Rovelli:
I summarize what modern physics has understood about time. It is like holding a snowflake in your hands: gradually, as you study it, it melts between your fingers and vanishes. We conventionally think of time as something simple and fundamental that flows uniformly, independently from everything else, from the past to the future, measured by clocks and watches. In the course of time, the events of the universe succeed each other in an orderly way: pasts, presents, futures. The past is fixed, the future open… And yet all of this has turned out to be false.
I never thought of GR as described in this next passage. Beautiful.
Here on the surface of our planet, on the other hand, the movement of things inclines naturally toward where time passes more slowly, as when we run down the beach into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst into the waves. Things fall downward because, down there, time is slowed by the Earth.
Things “want to slow down” in some very strange sense.
The quotes are from his book The Order of Time in which he also writes:
“In the wake of Husserl, Martin Heidegger writes – as far as my love of the clarity and transparency of Galileo’s writing allows me to decipher the deliberate obscurity of Heidegger’s language – that ‘time temporalizes itself only to the extent that it is human’. For him also, time is the time of mankind, the time for doing, for that with which mankind is engaged. Even if, afterwards, since he is interested in what is being for man (for ‘the entity that poses the problem of existence’), Heidegger ends up by identifying the internal consciousness of time as the horizon of being itself.” (p161)
I think Heidegger focused on humans because of our rich life in signs. Heidegger, following Dilthey and Yorke, was very fascinated by the evolution of meaning/lifeworld. Animals presumably have very little of this. Yet I speculate that non-human animals have an even richer sensory-affective reality. As if we trade something in for our rich historical conceptuality.
Octopi are insane, by the way. What’s the world like for them ?
A couple fragments from Yorke to support the idea that so many thinkers are saying basically the same thing.
The primary and exclusive datum is self-consciousness, which, although divided [dirimiert] into self and other, soul and lived body [Leib], I and world, inner and outer, is nonetheless, polarity [Gegensätzlichkeit] and articulateness [Gegliedertheit] in one. But self-consciousness experiences itself in the play and counter-play of its constitutive factors, that is, as something alive [ein Lebendiges]. This aliveness is the basic constitution. (ST, p. 8)
The separation [Trennung] of self and other, I and world, soul and lived body [Leib] is such an early separation, indeed, the first act of life, as it were, such that these derivatives appear as absolute, autonomous, and self-sufficient. (ST, pp. 11/12)
Thought can abstract from temporality. Indeed, every act of thought contains […] an abstraction from [temporality], inasmuch as thought involves an expropriation [of inner feeling]. By contrast, spatiality is the precondition of all thought.[11] (ST, p. 147)
That Greek metaphysics seeks the unchangeable and impassable is the result of the relative suppression of feeling and willing latent in all cognition, which abstracts from desires, feelings, and temporality (ST, p. 42). Put differently, the structural timelessness of thought as such is intensified in metaphysical thought where it becomes “absolute” (ST, p. 42). Yorck emphasizes that “negation of temporality” marks “the decisive metaphysical step” (ST, p. 66). Metaphysics constitutes the counter-move against the feeling of temporality (that everything passes away), as well as the liberation from the dependence on objects desired by the will. According to Yorck, the escape from temporality and attachment determines the entire metaphysical tradition up to and including Hegel (because even Hegel “ontologizes” life and renders it ontic) (ST, p. 83).
It’s an interesting idea, but for me personally, as a physicalist, I don’t see any reason to think our status as “observers” means anything special, and at the end of the day, I think we are clumps of the same stuff everything else in the universe is made of.
The idea that wave function collapse in quantum mechanics at all relies on a conscious observer is not supported by mainstream science at all. An observer in quantum mechanics is any particle, or field that interacts with the system that is in superposition.