In 1958, Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger published a small book
entitled "Mind and Matter", wherein he provides a solution to the age-
old dualism of body and mind, which can be discussed in this thread.
Before entering one might read what has already been written in the
preceding threads on "mental causation“, “artificial intelligence“ and
"the hard problem":
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4011660/4011660-6339202163360784388
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4011660/4011660-6340564349463117826
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4011660/4011660-6318195368953810945
Part II
Hans-Joachim:
There is an interesting coincidence: The title of this thread is
"The mind-body problem in light of E. Schrödinger's "Mind and Matter"
(1958)". It employs the word "light"; but, although Schrödinger is a
renowned quantum physicist, I guess hardly anyone would assume
that it refers in this context to photons. Therefore, "light" has at least
two different meanings.
It's not unusual that words have different meanings. We talked about
information and meaning before, and I had referred to Günther, who
showed the more than astronomical difference between Shannon's
definition of information, and the broader understanding, which
includes meaning: The concept of information derived from
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same, but have different meanings, like pen, bank, book etc.
Now, let's deal with the question why photons (light) are not a part of
everything in this universe.
Because Information is neither energy nor matter.
Three weeks ago, we were dealing with this topic here on this thread.
Let me copy and paste the related passages:
Norbert Wiener said "information is information, not matter or energy.
No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present
day." And Gotthard Günther added: "information is information, not
spirit or subjectivity." No idealism which does not admit this can
survive at the present day.
Regarding information, Günther adds that it is principally impossible to
reduce the cybernetic concept of information to purely material-
energetic categories. This is exemplified by the fact that information
can be conveyed by any means, which shows its independence from
specific carriers.
In other words: Those who think that photons (light) are part of
everything in this universe, they assume that information needs
carriers which cannot be subtler than light. So, suppose the
information is carried by some material, you could argue that this
material is nothing but condensed light. But if the information is
carried by space-time itself, this argumentation doesn't hold any
longer.
The concept is summarized in the venerable Sloka from
Chandogya Upanishad of the Sama Veda (7.25.21):
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Well, just as our minds cannot see the brain structures, the neurons,
the synapses, the neurotransmitters and all the other molecules and
atoms in our heads (except they are opened by a surgeon), likewise
our minds also cannot see the photons, appearing randomly or in
synchronized patterns during mental/emotional activities. What we
see is a product of our imagination; imaginations, thoughts, ideas etc.
belong to the infosphere, they don't belong to the physical world.
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There is, of course, a tiny overlap in mere sensation. But even there, it
was found that the physico-chemical nature of the environment is
transformed by sensory cells into neuronal activities, i.e. rhythmic
patterns of action potentials or spikes, which basically represents a
binary code (from it to bit). So, even mere sensation belongs to the
infosphere.
cannot distinguish color. The cones, on the other hand, are active at
high light levels and allow us to see colors and fine details directly in
front of us. There are three types of cones, each of them having a
different sensitivity for light: Their peak sensitivities are at blue, green
and red light respectively.
So, for rods, it is true what I said: the information of a single photon is
just 1 bit; cones need a bunch of them to produce 1 bit. And as we
have four different types of photosensitive cell, our minds are able to
synthesize the colorful pictures we see in front of our eyes.
Once more, these facts show that sensation is interpretation. Or, as
Dan said the other day: "the attunement of the sensory cells to
particular aspects of the environment is an interpretation of the
environment. An organism constructs it's own environment by its
selective attunement. Transduction is interpretive."
Dan:
"This process of wave collapse is somehow similar to what we
described before: the signal is transduced from an analog to a digital
form; the photon is either there or not there, which means you can
write this as 1 or 0"
Hans-Joachim, I think you need to be careful with how "similar"
"somehow similar" is. You don't want to make the relationship an
identity, or else you will be at risk for making a category error. An
issue being discussed on another thread is whether or not it makes
sense to describe "wave-form collapse" as an act of perception. I don't
think it does, at least not without a whole lot of further discussion
about what it means to "perceive". I myself have been on the edge of
that same category error when I described transduction as
interpretive.
Hans-Joachim:
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same way, because you are manipulating it, providing your sense of
consciousness to what you do with it." Wherefrom I derived:
"Computer systems have no cognition by themselves, but they
become 'quasi conscious' by virtue of people interacting with them
consciously." Which means that these machines process information,
although they are unconscious.
You might argue that solid-state physics is also a mental construct
which can't claim to be more real than other reasonable statements.
So, whatever we conceive would belong to the infosphere, nothing
could be said about that which is beyond, and there would be no
choice but to fall quiet about anything "objective", which would be
"prior to interpretation, or apart from any perspective".
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Morphic fields
On the other hand, I saw a talk of Rupert Sheldrake yesterday, where
he presents a shortcut of his concept of the extended mind (https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YWiR6TRr4o). More generally he hinted
at morphic fields and morphic resonance. So, what do you think about
this approach? Do you think these fields could be measured with
physical means? Or could it be that they exist only in imaginary
space?
Dan:
I don't put much stock in Rupert Sheldrake's ideas. Too "New Age" for
my tastes.
Hans-Joachim:
But he also rejects the "Representational Theory" of perception and
mental functioning, and instead elaborates on the "Extended Mind
Hypothesis", which we'd discussed in our earlier thread on AI robots.
In this context, you'd referred to the early forms of Enactivism, which I
regretfully missed to study up to now.
You mentioned Putnam and O'Regan, so, I looked through John
O'Regan's thesis published in 2010: Re-Thinking the Extended Mind -
Moving Beyond the Machinery. Only, therein I couldn't find a reference
to mental fields extending into the space around (http://
uhra.herts.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2299/4824/
John%20O%27Regan%20-%20final%20PhD%20submission.pdf?
sequence=1). Sheldrake talks about mental fields again and again,
which I can accept and imagine easily, whereas the purely
psychological discourse is difficult for me to grasp. So, my question is
whether you would agree to a mental field, reaching out to our
environments, thereby allowing thinking as well as memorizing
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Hans-Joachim:
Thanks for your detailed reply. It is exactly as you say: my difficulty is
to imagine O'Regan's "purely psychological" reasoning, because he
rejects, as you say, any view of consciousness as a "substance"; he
takes it as pure interaction, pure "between", so it's basically
impossible to imagine, or "picture" his conception.
On the other hand, the concept of fields is quite different from that of
substances. Fields are understood to be dynamical, always changing,
in contrast to Platon's eternal, never changing ideas.
In physics, a field can be thought of as a "condition in space"
emanating from a point and extending throughout the whole of space.
In psychology, field theory i.e. topological and vector psychology,
examines patterns of interaction between the individual and the total
field, or environment. The concept first made its appearance in
psychology with roots to the holistic perspective of Gestalt theories.
From that text: "... We live in a psychological reality or life space that
includes not only those parts of our physical and social environment
that are important to us, but also imagined states that do not currently
exist.“
This is more or less what I meant with my notion of complex space-
time ...
He also said that concrete persons in concrete situations can be
represented mathematically; and that individuals participate in a
number of life spaces, which are constructed under the influence of
force vectors.
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Phenomenology
Dan:
"Nature is governed by eternal, changeless, immutable, omnipresent
laws. The laws of nature are everywhere and always“ and yet there is
consciousness and agency, which seem to defy the determinism
implied by laws of nature. There is freedom. I take a different position
in regard to mathematics and natural laws. Husserl spoke at some
length about the effect of "mathematization" on our view of the world,
and he traced this to Galileo. Part of the effect of mathematization is a
conception of the world as being made up of "things in themselves",
and the subsequent division by Descartes between consciousness
and the rest of nature. Husserl ushered in Phenomenology as a way
to get to a level of experience that pre-existed formalizations of
experience, such as mathematics and geometry. He did an interesting
analysis of geometry as being rooted in the concrete practices of
humans, actual planning and building which through reflection was
formalized into geometrical principles.
If you carry this observation to an extreme, you end up with the "anti-
realist" positions. Both the realist and anti-realist positions in the
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The discussion went on, and was even named 'science war'. A
response by Alex Levine as well as the following contradiction by
Steven Weinberg can be read at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/
1999/02/18/ts-kuhns-non-revolution-an-exchange/.
So, I would maintain that there is a profound conflict between
phenomenological philosophy and natural science over the status of
reality and truth. I think that a scientist who believes/realizes that the
reality of scientific phenomena is not given, but man-made, will not be
able to continue his work. Such an attitude is possible only for those
who survey the whole scenery from a historical point of view -
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Donald Davidson has a very nice response to Kuhn. I think the essay
is called "On the Possibility of a Conceptual Scheme". It is primarily a
critique of Quine, but also is a critique of the notion of "paradigms".
Dan:
I've been thinking about this:
"the laws of nature and the rocks on the ground are real in the same
sense“ and just how problematic a statement it is. There is no way to
divide the "laws of nature" from theories of nature. Statements of "law"
are theoretical statements. Theoretical statements are by definition
open to revision, subject to falsification. None of that is true of the
rocks on the ground. The rocks on the ground are not "laws", and nor
are they theoretical statements that by definition are open to revision.
Rocks and natural laws are real in very different ways, as they are
very different entities.
The entities that play roles in the theories that describe "laws" of
nature change in the course of history due to a combination of
increased accuracy and sociological and cultural factors. That is the
truth of Kuhn's thought. He was no idiot. He recognized the continuity
between paradigms and recognized scientific progress.
While our understanding of rocks may change, the rocks themselves
don't change with our understanding of them. Our understanding of
the laws of nature do change and they are both 1. our understanding
of the laws and 2. the laws themselves. In other words, the laws of
nature do not exist independently from our understanding of them in
the same way that rocks exist independently of our understanding of
them. Laws of nature and rocks are real in different senses of the
word “real".
world, that the world is actually, "truly" composed of fields and forces
which we can not directly observe, and what we observe as true is
really just a very practical simulation. You can see this occurring with
Galileo when he divides reality into primary and secondary qualities.
The primary qualities are what can be mathematically modeled, and
are the "real", the secondary qualities are what we sense, and are
taken to be less real than what we can measure and quantify. The
same issue was noted by Schrödinger, when he spoke of the
argument described by Democritus between the senses and the
intellect:
"Galenus has preserved us a fragment (Diels, fr. 125), in which
Democritus introduces the intellect having an argument with the
senses about what is 'real'. The former says: 'Ostensibly there is color,
ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and
the void', to which the senses retort: 'Poor intellect, do you hope to
defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is
your defeat.' "
Scientific realism ends up playing havoc with epistemology. The
subject is removed, the very subject who is behind the observations
and inferences. The grounding facts as observations are merely
fictions and constructions. Epistemology can not get off the ground.
Hans-Joachim:
What you say is convincing. Also, I had a vague intuition that our
conversation didn't depart too much from Schrödinger's book, which is
now confirmed by your quote of Galenus' fragment. It shows that our
thoughts are moving in a classical circle: What is real, what is true.
How to find a balance between the senses and the intellect. Which
perspective is supposed to be more suitable to our lives, the believer's
or the skeptic’s?
The cost is a missing of the forest for the trees, a losing sight of
broader contexts, and that is how we end up with human-generated
environmental problems, and ethically suspect uses of scientific
findings, like the atom bomb.
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Hans-Joachim:
I think he simply wants to say that these formulas are absolutely basic
for his work. Think of someone who does radioastronomy. The raw
Data don‘t say anything to him or her. Their meaning is derived only
after lengthy data processing. Likewise in many other fields.
Dan:
It sounds like he's trying to say more than that, Hans-Joachim. He's
making an existential claim. Also, what do you mean by "raw data"?
Uninterpreted information?
Hans-Joachim:
It's an endless stream of numbers pouring out of some receiver or
detector. In the early 1990-ies I did research on heart rate variability. I
had a prototype of a measuring device, and it produced such raw
data. They are uninterpreted, unprocessed and nearly ungraspable.
On the other hand, such measurements can also be understood as
acts of transformation. What is measured, c‘est une duree, and the
result is a number, provided by a device which contains the
information necessary for this transformation. So the data are not as
raw as generally assumed.
Dan:
Hans-Joachim, yeah, that's what I'd say, but I'd be repeating myself.
For practical purposes, I understand your use of the phrase "raw
data", but philosophically speaking, when I hear "raw data" I can't help
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but think of the old British Empiricist notion of "sense data", which has
no reality other than as a philosophical construct. We don't perceive
sense data and then interpret it. We perceive forms, patterns and
things. There is no point in the sensory system where it makes sense
to speak of "sense data". Even at the level of the primary receptors
the "data" is already interpreted through the motor pattern which
orients the receptor field in the environment. Perception occurs in the
midst of a sensory-motor loop. Perception is an active exploring of the
world, and not a passive receiving of impressions.
Hans-Joachim:
I understand what you say, and I fully agree, having understood the
issue after thinking about your valuable comments for a sufficient
time. Yes, I didn't see the difference of "raw data", streaming out of
some measuring device, and the nature of what is being measured.
I think it's very important to always remember that "information"
usually involves some mind being informed. This sentence alone
comprised the impossibility of information processing with no mind
around. Even the most simple forms of live perform information
processing, so, which mind could have been involved in those cases?
Dan:
Hans-Joachim, no need to be apologetic. It is my privilege to be
discussing these things with someone who has experience as a
practicing scientist. As you've said, science can not proceed without
the notion of a mind-independent reality, and I think that "raw data" is
an attempt to capture that quality of mind-independence. It just raises
very interesting metaphysical questions.
Hans-Joachim:
"Raw data" are quite close to that mind-independent reality, but they
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must be distinguished from each other: Look for example (as I did in
1 9 9 2 : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
2 3 1 5 7 5 4 1 3 _ I n c r e a s e _ o f _ H e a r t _ R a t e _ Va r i a t i o n _ a n d _ W e l l -
Being_After_External_Cold_Water_Application ) at the time period
between two heart beats. The measurement of that time produces a
number, and that number is considered as "raw data". But the time
between two heart beats has many other qualities, which don’t fit into
this number. Suppose you experience something shocking (it was a
thoracic cold wet sheet pack in my experiments), and you feel as if
your heart stops beating. That prolonged period of time will be
measured simply as a bigger number, whereas the experience is
complex, multilayered and profound.
Symmetry Breaking
Hans-Joachim:
AI is going to perform better than humans in all motor and rational
tasks. What remains to be done by humans? Some minority will be
able to keep pace with the technological developments, and they are
supposed to make sure that humans are always at least two
generations ahead of robots (Gotthard Günther). But what about
normal humans? Is it that they are going to live in reservations, like
native Indians in North-America? Or, even worse, like domestic
animals in modern farms? To avoid such scenarios, it is imperative to
develop specific human skills and talents, which can't be substituted
by robots: Our sense of beauty, our depth of understanding and
empathy, our individual consciousness, which can be experienced
only by ourselves. This introcendence is the source of all mental
activities, and it can, or better, must be developed by meditative
techniques. In order to avoid domestication, all should learn
meditation!
I'm also skeptical about the idea that experiments can be influenced
by mental activity. Recently, I received a paper dealing with this
question: The PEAR Proposition: Fact or Fallacy? by Stanley Jeffers,
Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 30.3., May/June 2006. It concludes that
"the answer to the question raised has to be no. There are reasonable
and rational grounds for questioning these claims. Despite the best
efforts of the PEAR group over a twenty-five-year period, their impact
on mainstream science has been negligible. The PEAR group might
argue that this is due to the biased and blinkered mentality of
mainstream scientists. I would argue that it is due to the lack of
compelling evidence."
Rather, I think that our minds can be considered as quantum systems,
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where the state of our nervous systems is derived from the vastness
of subjective possibilities. So, whenever we come to some decision or
conclusion, a so-called wave collapse occurs in our mind, which
transforms the many-valued logic of subjectivity to a simple two-
valued logic of objectivity. But this doesn’t mean dualism, rather it’s a
co-existence of dualism and monism, where the former is derived and
the latter is primary.
On the other hand you maintained that the world is given to us once,
not twice (as in a representation). So, where should all the worldly
objects, we are dealing with, exist, if not in- and outside of our brain?
My answer is: they exist in the vastness of our subjectivity. That
subjectivity is not at all confined to our bodies, rather it is connected to
the subjectivity of all other creatures, which amounts to Husserl's
transcendental intersubjectivity.
In contrast, our common sense says that the world is objective = real,
and our experiences are subjective = imaginary. In this dilemma, I
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prefer to decline the stance of "either/or", and adopt the "as well as"
instead. The result is a coexistence of monism and dualism, where
the latter is, however derived: Derived in the macrocosmic as well as
in the microcosmic scenario (macrocosmically in the sense that the
world began as an imagination of a Being Divine, and then
flocculated/coagulated to become objective; microcosmically in the
sense that in early childhood, we know nothing about a world of its
own, and acquire this concept only in the course of our life).
Consequently, we are naive monists in early childhood, dualists in
adulthood, and eventually undeceived monists in the old age.
I think that you are raising a similar issue that comes down to the
need to distinguish mind from brain. I agree that they are
distinguishable, but I don't believe they represent two radically
different substances. It might be that the distinction rests on our ability
to reflect, on the "raw datum" or given which is the fact that we are
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I agree with you when you point out that the brain is a necessary
condition for mind, but I don't think it is a sufficient condition. We also
need language, bodies, history and culture.
Hans-Joachim:
Dan, I understood that spatializing consciousness might turn out to be
a problem; so I already changed my wording from "imaginary" vs.
"real" space-time (which is somehow confusing for those who are not
in the mathematical terms), to "lived" vs. "dead" time, substituting not
only "imaginary" and "real", but also reducing "space-time" to "time".
The core of the model works with time as well as with space-time.
And, you are right, there is a tendency in spatial imagination to arrive
at a "static arena“.
Dan:
Thanks for clarifying that, Hans-Joachim. Bergson is hovering not too
far away.
Hans-Joachim:
It is a difference whether you conceive history, environment and
culture to contribute to the mindset of a person, or whether you take
the minds of individuals as being interconnected, forming large
networks, including all the history, environment and culture of these
people. Usually, we don't know how to accommodate such collective
spirits into our scientific worldview. Extra dimensions, however,
provide a practicable methodology. Only, once you add extra
dimensions, you are bound to show a way of interaction between
these and the ordinary frame. Without such a linkage the extra
dimensions remain meaningless. This is why I have to insist on
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As Günther wrote in the book cited repeatedly on this thread: "It would
be - remaining in the usual physical perspective - e.g. quite impossible
that on planet Earth self-organizing living beings emerge, which call
themselves in self-reflection "humans", and claim to have a "mind", if
not all reflection components of what we call consciousness and mind
are already in that hypothetical gas cloud and its surrounding space-
time dimension, from which our solar system was supposed to have
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This goes all along, until we reach Günther's "hypothetical gas cloud
and its surrounding space-time dimension, from which our solar
45
system was supposed to have originated." So, the question at hand is:
Where does that state of superposition exist? Where are the
possibilities before they break into actualities. The equations say, as
far as I know, that they are in "the imaginary". But what does this
mean?
Dan:
Hans-Joachim - Do these possibilities need to be anywhere before
they are actualized? Isn't location itself a product of actualization?
Hans-Joachim:
Dan, you are right, and I must concede that I didn't consider this
sufficiently. Location itself is definitely a product of actualization.
Sentience
Hans-Joachim:
By the way: The general term for describing the sentience of plants, is
tropism (=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropism#Types). It works not
only with plants, but also with bacteria. Various environmental factors
have been tested, including the effect of music. As a reference you
might have a look at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/
PMC4830253/
Dan:
There are a few good documentaries on plant sentience on YouTube.
I think one is called "The Secret Life of Plants", and it uses time-lapse
photography (or videography, I guess) to show just how complex plant
behavior can be, and how responsive plants are to their surrounds.
One example I remember involved a particular vine which only grows
on tomato plants. One of these vines was planted between two plants,
one of which was a tomato. Using time-laps photography you see the
vine weaving back and froth between the two plants until it determines
which one is a tomato, and latches on to it. The "cues" the vine had
been using were airborne chemicals produced by the tomato plant. It's
only one of many examples. There are also examples of particular
plants producing toxins only in response to heavy grazing by animals:
self-defense.
Hans-Joachim:
Dan, I agree with your statement saying that the unfolding occurs
potentially in each moment, which makes the transcendent immanent
- meaning, and I think you will agree that the symmetry breaking
continues: it's not only a matter of the first nanoseconds of the
Universe; one level where this can happen, is the production and
annihilation of force particles in the vacuum. The following video
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Complex space-time
Hans-Joachim:
Yesterday, I attended a meet up on attention economy. Among other
interesting topics, one speaker presented a reversible figure and
asked: where is the duck/rabbit? It's obviously not on the screen. Dan,
you are certainly familiar with such questions. What would be your
answer, keeping in mind our rejection of the Representational Theory?
Dan:
Nice question, Hans-Joachim. One thing we can say about the
location of the duck/rabbit is that it is not located in physical space, if
we take physical space to be objective space which contains objects
that are there, whether or not there is someone present to perceive
them. Obviously we need a subject present in order to talk about the
presence of the duck/rabbit. The location of the duck/rabbit is not
strictly a question of physical space. If you take location in a broader
sense than physical, running the risk of being accused of speaking
purely metaphorically, you could say that the duck/rabbit exists in
psychological space, or phenomenological space. We do experience
it as being in some sense "out there" on the page, but we are also
aware that it is "not really there" on the page, that is, we are aware of
it as a representation, not a physical reality, and more than that, we
are aware of it as an ambiguous representation that by it's nature
opens up "psychological space“.
I'd say that instead of the question "where is it", the question more
sensitive to it's nature is "how is it situated“. That is a question about
"location", but it includes cultural context.
Hans-Joachim:
Thank you, Dan, for this answer. I learnt so much in our
conversations. What helped me most was your benevolent
scepticism.
Dan:
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Hans-Joachim. I assume that the
reason you raised the question of the location of the "duck/rabbit" is
that the tempting response is that it is located in the mind, or in the
brain, as a representation. Where else could it be, and what else
could it be? That is among the classic moves in psychology conceived
as a natural science, which is other than the field of transcendental
consciousness which doesn't offer explanations. Psychology as a
natural science is all about explanations, and the explanation by
"representations" is a good example of the paradoxes that natural
science explanations end up in when it comes to psychology. You just
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Also, the objective space is not necessarily given from the beginning,
rather it can be constructed in the course of lived time (mathematically
by multiplying its unit two times with itself), ensuring that subjective
space, the field of consciousness and phenomenal awareness,
remains primary.
But, I think you gave the answer already when you said that you are
more interested in "the unfolding of a lived moment in time, rather
than the history of a pre-existing superstructure within which we exist
in 'dead time'."
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Dan:
Hans-Joachim, I think whenever the concept of space is introduced
that also introduces a sense of objectivity. Subjectivity slips away. On
the other hand, I have to admit that I do not understand what it is that
you are ultimately up to with modeling the relationship between lived
time and dead time mathematically.
Hans-Joachim:
Many thanks for this question.
When I started participating in the PhilosophyOfMind@LinkedIn-
discussions five months ago, my answer to this question would have
been less refined. But now, after almost 5oo pages of turning the
issue to and fro, I hope that the crucial point can be communicated
more efficiently.
Let me start with a general consideration: When we start counting, we
use our fingers to denote 1, 2, 3 ..., hence these numbers are also
called digits. It is generally understood that they indicate groups of
similar things in our external world. Later we learn, that all rational
numbers can be constructed from 1 and 0. We can use them to
describe our external world, and since Galileo Galilei, many believe
that "mathematics is the language with which God has written the
universe”. However, as soon as we close our eyes, we realize that
there is also an internal world. Some say it is unreal or imaginary,
drawing a line of demarkation between that which is real and can be
counted (res extensa), and that which exists in our minds and can
"only" be known (res cogitans). However, it remains completely
obscure with this approach how to overcome the barrier between the
two.
At the times of Galileo Galilei and René Descartes, complex numbers
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were already known, but they were regarded as useless. Actually, the
negative connotation of 'imaginary' goes back to Descartes, who
mocked about their crankiness. Leibniz was familiar with complex
numbers, but he couldn't find useful applications. It took another one
hundred years before Carl Friedrich Gauß discovered their diverse
applicability.
For us it is important to know that the imaginary unit "i" can be treated
like a "1", with the condition that it refers to another realm, i.e. to that
which is subjective, in contrast to "1", which is to be applied on the
objective world. "i" is the unit in the field of subjectivity, whereas "1" is
the unit in the field of objectivity.
Last but not least a word about the relation between models and
reality. The models are not to be confused with reality. They are only
for a better understanding: If it is difficult to understand reality, we can
build a model and study its behaviour. As long as it complies with
factuality and is additionally able to predict its progression, the model
fulfills its purpose.
Hans-Joachim:
Dan, I remember you saying that "whenever the concept of space is
introduced that also introduces a sense of objectivity. Subjectivity slips
away."
I agreed and I took this insight as a means to shed some light on the
transition from the second to the third chamber in P.R. Sarkar's model.
Now, I found two passages in Merleau-Ponty's works (cited in Noah
Moss Brender's essay "On the Nature of Space: Getting from Motricity
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Dan:
Hans-Joachim, the thing is that Merleau-Ponty was speaking of "lived
space". It is the ground of modeled, or "homogeneous space". The
"dialectical ferment" ontologically precedes universal space, which I
take to be a variation of homogenous space. None of this precludes
attempts to model the transitions between lived experience and
objectified experience, but it does highlight the fact that the models
depend on lived experience. I believe that that dependency
relationship is better captured by verbal descriptions than
mathematical models, but that might just be personal preference. In
either case, be it verbal or mathematical, the interesting things
happen where the model or the verbal description fail, which might be
the 4th and last aspect of the sound "Om", the silence on which the
articulation depends.
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