Describing matter (an ontological meditation)

[Magical Realist]

Can you describe matter? Can you tabulate the distinctive qualities this thing has that makes it specifiable as just this thing and none else. I find it extremely hard to describe matter. The moment I describe it as colored, it's transparence as water or glass suddenly comes up. The moment I try to label it as solid dark clumps, sky blue air and plasma burst forth in luminous hues. Fire is matter. Electricity is matter. What the hell is matter made of? Just quarks they say--pure particulate structures not reducible to anything else. But what does that even mean? Pure particles without substance?Geometical forms without content? With description there is always the possibility of comparison. But when you're talking matter, what else is there to compare it to that can clarify its being to us? It is the assumed substrate for all our sensory-projected constructs. Tangible and intangible, visible and invisible, localized and ubiquitous, animate and inanimate, it defies all our attempts to pin it down. It is all these things, and if there is anything to dark matter and bose-einstein condensates, probably much much more besides.

Naturally this meditation enlarges what we mean by physical reality. For if matter is such an inexplicable generalization or indeterminate variable, a sublime and power-packed substance that is both everywhere and nowhere at once, what do we even mean by physical any more? Is the distinction between mind and matter useful to us ? Was it ever real to begin with? Abstractions within abstractions all the way down. That's how you know you're in a construct.

[Image: kaleidoscope71.jpg]

[C C]

V. I. Lenin: The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable -- "things-in-themselves" -- matter "outside of experience" and outside of our knowledge. They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of "experience" and knowledge. When they say that matter, by acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the "unknown," nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge? The materialists lapse into "Kantianism" (Plekhanov, by recognising the existence of "things-in-themselves," i.e., things outside of our consciousness); they "double" the world and preach "dualism," for the materialists hold that beyond the appearance there is the thing-in-itself; beyond the immediate sense data there is something else, some fetish, an "idol," an absolute, a source of "metaphysics," a double of religion ("holy matter," as Bazarov says). Such are the arguments levelled by the Machians against materialism, as repeated and retold in varying keys by the afore-mentioned writers. --Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

Even though Lenin was just mocking the criticisms of that Russian hybridization of marxism and Machian positivism... It's ironic that in the course of integrating their thoughts together, he actually seemed to be making their point better than they had.

[Magical Realist]

Physics and chemistry were birthed from the dark throbbing bloody womb of medieval magic and alchemy, as obsessed with understanding the nature of physicality as ever before. Newton was as much an occultist as a scientist. Back then the two were not mutually exclusive. And to this day, with every penetrating peek behind the backdrop of matter, we find ourselves closer yet to the original magical paradigm--of being submerged in a living conscious prima materia from which our very thoughts and desires spring up as if from nowhere! Jung keyed in on this--understanding the link of the physical to the psychically archetypal under the embracing concept of the unus mundus:

"In the final analysis the idea of an unus mundus [one world] is founded, as he [Jung] says:

"on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity ... . [E]verything divided and different belongs to one and the same world ... . [Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, pars. 767-770]

"... Jung stresses, however, that there is little or no hope of illuminating this undivided existence except through antinomies. But we do know for certain that the empirical world of appearances is in some way based on a transcendental background. [Footnote: In the sense of 'transcending consciousness.' I will always use the word 'transcendental' in this sense.] It is this background which, suddenly as it were, falls into our conscious world through synchronistic happenings." p. 9

"Although the nonperceptual potential continuum or unus mundus appears to exist outside time, certain dynamic manifestations of it break through into our ordinary temporal sphere in the form of synchronistic occurrences." p. 11."===http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot....e-von.html

This correlates to David Bohm's concept of the Implicate Order:

"[T]here is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of our whole and unbroken movement.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order