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The body is never a passive subject indifferently receiving information about the world. It is always pre-engaged with and actively focusing on what it perceives. The hand that feels is also the hand that caresses. The eyes that see are also the eyes that focus on. The ears that hear are also the ears listening for.

So this whole notion of the vacuous and passive receptacle of experience known as the "subject" is a mere confabulation and myth. No wonder we cannot find any evidence for it. Subjectivity only arises thru the experienced contrast between the action and the sensation, the intentional and the felt. It is precisely here, in this fusion/split between two simultaneous unconscious and conscious states, that we will find the essence of consciousness. Not as a smooth and absolute property like voltage or mass but as the intertwining of agency and sensitivity. The brain only knows what it is simultaneously grasping for. We only comprehend what we are simultaneously apprehending. The infamous Cartesian duality originates here, with all of its extrapolations of physicality and mentality, material and conceptual.

"Tacit cogito" is a concept from philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty that refers to a pre-reflective, embodied self-awareness that exists in our "lived body" before conscious thought. It stands in contrast to René Descartes's "I think, therefore I am" (\(<<!nav>>cogitoergosum<<!/nav>>\)) because it grounds consciousness in our physical engagement with the world rather than in abstract thought. This "silent" or "tacit" self-awareness is the foundation for all other thought and certainty. 

Key aspects of the tacit cogito: 

Embodied existence: The tacit cogito is not a disembodied mind but an awareness that is inseparable from the body's experience. It is the self-unifying sense of being that arises from our physical being in the world.

Pre-reflective: It is a fundamental awareness that precedes conscious, articulate thought. Our "I think" arises from this deeper, unreflective feeling of being.

Interaction with the world: It is experienced through our active involvement in a situation. Certainty is not a product of intellectual abstraction but comes from the act of doing and being engaged.

Contrast with Descartes: Merleau-Ponty's concept moves away from Descartes' intellectualism. For him, consciousness cannot "swallow" the world because it is always already situated within it through the body.

Tacit knowledge connection: The term also shares similarities with the concept of "tacit knowledge"—knowledge that is unstated and experiential. The tacit cogito is this kind of deeply embodied and unspoken form of self-awareness."

It has always been my experience, both in myself and in others, that certainty of belief always comes at a price, which is a proportional loss of imagination. I see this in both religion and science. It's as if in being able to assert dogmatically that such and such is so that we thereby lose the ability to grasp what is possible. Rigid belief then as a shoddy substitute for creative inspiration. The need to be right and validated elevated over the peace of intuitive understanding. The comfortable recitation of trite and formulaic pronouncements over the expression of something truly novel and sublime. Ego empowerment and argumentation over seeking the truth and enlightening discourse.

“One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word ‘I,’ particularly when it is used in representing immediate experience, as in ‘I can see that red patch.’ It would be instructive to replace this way of speaking by another in which immediate experience would be represented without using the personal pronoun; for then we’d be able to see that the previous representation wasn’t essential to the facts. Not that the representation would be in any sense more correct than the old one, but it would serve to show clearly what was logically essential in the representation.”---Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, pg. 88

"One short and simple evidence that ‘I’ is a misleading representational technique: we use the word ‘I’ to conflate countless different meanings. When one says, “I am hungry,” they use ‘I’ to refer to a body which physically requires food. When one says, “I was sad,” they refer to a previous state of mind that their former self possessed. When one says, “I feel happy,” they refer to the state of mind that their current self possesses. When one says, “I should be more kind,” they refer to both the current self and their future self, saying that both of these identities should change their actions to be more kind. So what does ‘I’ mean? Is it your body? Your current self? Your past self? Your future self? Your general identity? Using the misleading word ‘I’ allows you to escape all these questions."---Jeremy Hadfield

In fact we never have any experience of this phantasmal I. It is only posited and assumed to make our thoughts and actions intelligible to ourselves and to others. It is an example of a useful fiction, retained only insofar as it provides coherence and rationale to all our experience and choices. Like the illusory centeredness of our own bodies in the circumference of the visible world. At most it is only a metaphor for the immediate accessibility and aboutness of everything we experience and do and say. A mythical extrapolation from the fundamentally intuited fact that everything that happens in your life is just for you.

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Truth is hopelessly perspectival. No one experiences it in its completeness. They only experience it from certain views and angles, some of which will be logically contradictory and inconsistent with others. The fable of the 5 blind men describing an elephant comes to mind. One sees it as like a rope. Another sees it as like a tree trunk. And so on. All the perspectives are true, and yet none of them are THE truth.

“Each sentence that I write is trying to say the whole thing, that is, the same thing over and over again and it is as though they were views of one object seen from different angles.”---Wittgenstein

(Nov 6, 2025 01:55 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]It has always been my experience, both in myself and in others, that certainty of belief always comes at a price, which is a proportional loss of imagination.

Then your experience is limited. I am both creative and have a high degree of certainty.

There's a big difference between having a lot of knowledge and being able to think efficiently. A college professor would be an example of someone very knowledgable about facts and such but who does not really think much. An inventor or a handyman otoh is someone who may not have a lot of factual knowledge but who knows how to think well and solve problems. And very often the best thinking happens in spite of all that we know and not because of it. Unfortunately what has long passed as education in our society only strives to make students more knowledgable instead of showing them how to think. Which makes sense as good thinkers tend only to question and destroy the whole idea of institutionalized knowledge itself. To release thousands of thinkers onto the world every year would be a dangerous and subversive enterprise, threatening all that society holds sacred and unquestionable.

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(Nov 6, 2025 05:56 PM)Syne Wrote: [ -> ]

(Nov 6, 2025 01:55 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]It has always been my experience, both in myself and in others, that certainty of belief always comes at a price, which is a proportional loss of imagination.

Then your experience is limited. I am both creative and have a high degree of certainty.

What is it that you are so certain of? And why?

Plenty of things, due to observation, reasoning skills, etc..

It is strange to me that the more we sink into our own minds, descending into the imaginative flow beneath our ordinary outward awareness, the LESS specific things seem to become. It actually becomes LESS about you and your immediate situation and more about timeless and universal themes and ideas and metaphors. This is direct confirmation of the presence to us of the collective psyche underlying our superficial ego consciousness. The way things start forming patterns and connecting together from underneath--in the expanding recesses of some more comprehensive and universal intelligibility. And that's why the deeper the writer or artist goes into themself the more they has to say about the human condition.

"We are internally related to everything, not [just] externally related. Consciousness is an internal relationship to the whole, we take in the whole, and we act toward the whole. Whatever we have taken in determines basically what we are. Wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. If we can have a coherent approach to reality then reality will respond coherently to us."----David Bohm

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“If it’s a pure expression of yourself no matter what it is or what medium, it’s going to shine. It’s going to resonate. You could look inside of yourself and you could have a canvas and you could paint a dot in it, but if that is where your creative purpose is taking you then it needs to be that dot.”― Rainn Wilson

Consciousness or thoughtful consideration makes present even as it is also blanking out or making absent. We are always conscious of our immediate surroundings only insofar has we cease to be conscious of our body there in it. The body essentially becomes the blank space or absence in which the thought about presence occurs AS presence and takes shape. This is true for language as well, only making present what it is saying by becoming transparent in its saying it. Or even thought itself, present to its considered idea or memory or perception only as our act of thinking it disappears and seems not to be happening. Sartre grasped this ontological interplay between being and nothingness, showing how these two dialectically contrast and define each other. The appearance of unmediated Being thru the disappearance of its medium. The simultaneous manifestation of and concealment from presence in our phenomenal experience.

"We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use."

Lao Tzu, "The Tao te Ching"

“That all opposites—such as mass and energy, subject and object, life and death—are so much each other that they are perfectly inseparable, still strikes most of us as hard to believe. But this is only because we accept as real the boundary line between the opposites. It is, recall, the boundaries themselves which create the seeming existence of separate opposites. To put it plainly, to say that "ultimate reality is a unity of opposites" is actually to say that in ultimate reality there are no boundaries. Anywhere.”
― Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth

Magic or what I shall call "ontic anarchy" doesn't happen for any function or purpose defined in terms of the reigning paradigm. It doesn't happen because it teaches us anything or helps us to survive.. It happens for its own sake. Like art and literature and poetry and music it happens because it is instigated or stirred up, subverting the institutionally-inculcated worldview and its built-in self-confirming logic. It arises as an absolute enigma, as an impossible rupture in the backdrop, defying and dissolving all boundaries and laws and demarcations we have been programmed with since childhood to superimpose upon the world. It strikes at the core of secularist physicalism that defines everything we think we know about the world and mankind. And once you see that THIS can happen, you acquire a growing suspicion that far more extraordinary things are possible and simply waiting for enough attentive souls to embrace it in their lives. Magic can and does happen, only needing belief and open-mindedness to help spark its transformative and purifying catharsis in this world. It is the energetic and incandescent fusion on the edge between unconscious mind and material enworldment.

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.” --Roald Dahl