The threshold between quantitative physicality and qualitative phenomenality may lie nowhere else than in the limits of perceivability. The pulsing microseconds of light eventually coalescing into a smooth and felt glow. The syncopation of sound waves melting together into the flowing emotive tune. Stimuli begin to blur together at the fringes of what we can keep track of. Eventually the alternations between the positive and the negative feather into one homogeneous fuzzy state, where neither yes nor no can even be detected anymore. Every substance arising from a microconglomerate. Every color and tone from a wave frequency.
It is indeed troubling that as the world continues displaying its ability to be "already there" at every moment that it is undeniably also only being "already there" TO ME-- relative to my very specific being here/now at a specific place and time. Hence every being there is only conceivable as a being here from which I am, quite impossibly, completely absent in both space and time. The relativity of it, the contingency of it, thus collapses into the spurious absolutivity of objective location. No longer projected as from a physical body in an all-containing grid but as from a transpatial and transtemporal pure conscious state. The "view from nowhere" so to speak.
We seem to assume a sort of clear and absolute demarcation between our consciousness and the unconscious, metaphorically territoralizing both modes of being like two adjacent yet inviolable kingdoms. And yet every night, ever so gradually and effortlessly, we sink from the state of conscious awareness into the state of less conscious awareness, little by little proving that the distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness is only a matter of incremental degrees-- the alchemical Magnum Opus---and is nothing more than a fictional and self-serving dividing line.
The myth of the scientific metaphysics of physicalism, of an absolute and static reality entirely separate from us and exclusive of our experience of it, has left us each stranded like castaways in our own subjective bubbles. It may function well in reducing everything down to their components and mechanizing reality into an infinitely complex and self-contained automaton, but only at the expense of estranging us all from the immediacy and qualitative value of our experience. Staticity and in-itselfness and automation is the name of the game here. Quanta the ontological unit underlying everything as opposed to the qualia of consciousness. We need to rethink the whole merological premise here of compositional/summational being. We are after all active participitants and agents of reality. First movers and instantiators of a reality forever ever on the cusp of becoming and morphing into novel states of being.
In a dark room an apple is no longer red. In space it no longer weighs anything. Outside of my mouth it is no longer sweet. Outside of my grip it is no longer round or solid. And when I die it will never have been anywhere at all. What after all was it that was making the apple an apple at all? The dream is real only as long as it lasts.
The "not" at the center of the knot
The scientific ideal of objective knowing is certainly ambitious. That the object being known about is phenomenally apparent outside and in, in both its external surface features and in all the components within making it up all the way down to quarks. The interactive processes as well as all the structural 3D geometrical relations between all these parts of itself. The external relations the object has with the world as well as the etiology of its origin. But the actual attempt at such is rather disappointing.
Do such transparent semantically-nested presentations of phenomenal properties and relations and events, ever only viewable inside the analytical mind, unveil anything like a terminus, a non-mental limit, which can be said we are even knowing about? The guiding IDEAL of the in-itself object is certainly there. Like the unreachable horizon defining all our "being heres". But where and, more importantly, how is it ever encountered?
Turns out it is nowhere known at all but rather just a necessarily extrapolated locus of coherence that is supposedly going on independently of all thought and observation. The scientific chimera of a totally opaque and non-thought about being always infinitely buried deep inside the snarl of phenomenally-manifest properties and ideas we endlessly strive to untangle. In the end Berkley was right. All we ever really know are our thoughts and ideas.
“Contrary to what phenomenology- which is always phenomenology of perception- has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.”— Jacques Derrida
If there was a way of making sounds that made you and others see things that were captivating but weren't really there---a sort of entrancement by noise-making to enter fantastic worlds and ages beyond the here and now--we'd call it story-telling. But that it happens at the same time and reflectively as seeing all we DO see as ALSO meaningfully-related stimulations of these sounds makes it much more than that. In time it becomes our whole way of being-in-the-world, speaking becoming internalized as thinking, and seeing becoming internalized as consciousness.
Sense-making is a multi-realizable activity. We can engage in such thru speaking to and listening to others. But the disadvantage here is the requirement for another to listen and speak to--a requirement more or less being met in this age of social media.
Another way of sense-making is writing and reading. Writing is like speaking with our eyes and our hands instead of our mouths. What is said is less immediately expressive and more descriptively referential. Speech frozen in time, becoming editable, premeditated, and self-aware at every point. More like architecture than like art. And the listeners have all become prospective readers of our sense-making who understand it more as contemplative soliloquy than as communicative colliloquy. Speech severed from being spoken or meant at all and existing in some vacuum of pure thought-aboutness where it can take on a more absolutely true and universal relevance.
To be an opposite of something, you have to at least be the same KIND of thing. There are no opposites between things that are in different categories. Water can thus seem to be the opposite of fire, but democracy or parsnips can't. So we have to ask ourselves, what is the sameness of kind that allows the mental to seem to be the opposite of the physical? Or the subjective as opposed to the objective? The abstract vs the concrete? What is their shared ontological category--the neutral diameter-- making possible their very diametricality? Perhaps they transcend common categorization altogether. That the source of their disjunction is also the source of the conjunction--the dialectical process of each being the inverse of the other.
Consciousness and reality are locked into a closed loop, each presupposing the preexistence of the other. The only way out of their endless circularity is twisting the loop once, as in the case of a Mobius strip. It is here in this twisting, in this inverting, that we discover how each inevitably and naturally leads to the other without ceasing to be opposite the other. We ourselves are both conscious and real at once. And it is this mutual and timeless creation of each out the other that we find ourselves beyond the loop.
Categories are to members as space is to objects. Categories provide the whole context of possibilities opening up the members to being relationally constructed morphemes to each other.
Take males and females. The category including both of these is simply gender. In this semantic space all possibilities of sameness and difference must work themselves out. A male is the opposite to a female, and yet they are both genders. But the category itself, being a space, is a continuum of smoothly inclusive generality. The property of gender is thus not statically or objectively defined like the members but a dynamic activity of fusings and distinctions. Thus while one can be an objective and static gender, I am only such by the constant interplay of gendering and ungendering going on underneath it all. My experience reveals me to be constantly constituted and gendered by the shifting contexts defining masculiniity and
femininity. In some situations I will me less male and more female. In others more male and less female. In yet others I will be androgynous.
I am less concerned about static things like dimensions and space and time than I am about the phenomenal processes of dimensionalization and spatializating and temporalization. I like to observe how these things intermingle and change each other. Like how an infinitely thin 2D plane like a surface can curve and warp hyperdimensionally to produce 3D forms and shapes. Or like how an infinite array of infinitesimal points can add up to a 3 dimensional pointless continuum called space. Even the mysterious entity we call time is a flowing mixture of synchronizations and serializations and harmonizations never ceasing in its turgid dynamic creativity. Phenomenology is the introspective and extrospective experience of how seeming objective and in-themselves things are always happening and changing in our very act of being conscious them.
There is a blind spot in both our eyes where the eye is connected to the body. The brain fills in that spot with similar colors and details as those surrounding it. I think the brain has a similar blindspot where it connects to our body. Like the eye, it paves over that blank portal with sights and sounds and sensations that fit with the overall experience. It thus maintains its illusion of being self-contained and infinite, when in fact there's a wormhole routing it straight into the universe of physical matter and energy.
Cognition objectifies even as consciousness subjectifies. Thus I am always waking up as being outside myself in a world fragmented into hollow bundles of my own private qualia. A dimension of scattered identities only out there to the extent that they are also simultaneously in here in my own phenomenal experience. I conceptually enworld myself even as the world sensualizes itself as me. We perceive and conceive at the same time. I am in the world but not of the world.
Dilemmas of memory..
1) How is it that I can suddenly remember that today is my birthday? "Today is my birthday" is a present fact. Or more precisely, a semantic statement of such. How can I remember a present event? Where was I before that I could even forget it? In the past? But that would mean I forgot it being in the future. Are present and future events also things that have in some sense already happened? That can be remembered or forgotten just like past events are. Perhaps its the difference from episodic and semantic memory. Of remembering an experience as opposed to recalling a missing piece of information.
2) Can I remember the very event of my remembering? I certainly can, but it's hard. I can remember I was remembering my childhood an hour ago, as a past event in itself. But it is the strange effect of memory that it dislodges us from our present experience. And with no present experiences going on beyond that of the remembered experience, what is left there at that moment to remember? To tag that memory as even an experience that was happening presently to me. Hence the power of the memory to make me non-present to my present experience, as if now being only in my own past myself and effectively missing or blanked out from all my future remembering.
3) We normally experience our present as an interval inclusive of both the just fading experience and the just happening experience. Depending on the difference between these two experiences we thus tend to blur the just fading past and just dawning future here at their threshold, novelty tending to distinguish them more sharply and repetition tending to broaden them into one self-same now. Thus does doing nothing, or doing the same thing over and over again, tend to eternalize us in a dreamful space of simultaneous possibilities and "otherwises"---the natural and organic generation of thought and imagination and daydreaming out of the enlargement of our specious present.
Phenomenology is the rather vaulted ambition of thinking about anything, not in terms of the underlying semantic matrix of concepts and propositions, but in terms of its very being--its very apodictic presence--as the necessary outcome of thoughtful consideration itself. Like how Descartes showed the inevitable truth of the mind-body split and changed our paradigm forever. Thought no longer as discursive or constructive reasoning but as the careful tracing of the inevitable origin of the thought about from the very act of thinking about it. The in-itselfness of the object of thought resonant with the in-itselfness of consciousness itself. Like how mathematics is to scientific theory. Or Mozart to his symphonies.
"Philosophy, in any proper sense of the term, cannot be proved. For proof is based upon abstraction. Philosophy is either self-evident, or it is not philosophy. The attempt of any philosophic discourse should be to produce self-evidence."---Alfred North Whitehead
The study of our evolutionary past is ironically raising questions about science's own empiricist mandate---that truth is only known thru the sensory investigation of the physical world. Evolution suggests that this notion of theory as representational of and correspondent to a objective reality is inadequate. For evolution truth has always been instrumentalist and pragmatic. It has always been whatever theory or belief system best enabled us to survive and thrive as a species. Hence our long history of tradition and mythologies and worldviews more suited to human liveability than to objective accuracy. The premise of science itself, that real knowledge is valuable in itself, is subverted by the history of our species always dissatified with just what is there and arbitrary in its nature. That truth is ultimately whatever works the best. The epistemological horizon not as what is most faithfully reproduced but as what best enables our reproduction.