It's Elemental

Tag: Respect

  • An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #6

    An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #6

    (New readers will want to start with the first installment.)

    We ended the last installment by discussing the esoteric nature of the injunction.  We continue this exploration, and bring this series to a close.

    LoF p. 81

    • In the command “let the crossing be to the state indicated by the token” we at once make the token doubly meaningful, first as an instruction to cross, secondly as an indicator (and thus a name) of where the crossing has taken us. It was an open question, before obeying this command, whether the token would carry an indication at all. But the command determines without ambiguity the state to which the crossing is made and thus, without ambiguity, the indication which the token will henceforth carry.

    This re-affirms that the mark has both a first and second-order character: it names the state of its content (its indication), and it is an instruction (its injunction) to mark that name, to make that distinction which yields that state. Thus every mark is both an indication and an injunction.  It is an indication of a content and an injunction on how to get there.

    LoF p. 82

    • We may consider how far, in ordinary life, we must observe the spirit rather than the letter of an injunction, and must develop the habitual capacity to interpret any injunction we receive by screening it against other indications of what we ought to do. In mathematics we have to unlearn this habit in favour of accepting an injunction literally and at once. This is why an author of mathematics must take such great pains to make his injunctions mutually permissive. Otherwise these pains, which rightly rest with the author, will fall with sickening import upon the reader, who, by virtue of his relationship with respect to the author, may be in no position to accept them.)

    All this actually relates to the task of the esoteric teacher, who (more…)

  • An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #4

    An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #4

    (New readers will want to start with the first installment.)

    We ended the last installment having come to realize something of the esoteric significance of the taijitu, or yin-yang, form, in something of an extended tangent. We return now to the text.

    GSB himself seemed to understand the importance of the Laws of Form, even if there were some of these more subtle specifics which were not apparent to him (or at least which he did not explicitly recognize).  Having reached this point (literally we are still on page 1 of LoF), the vast majority of the rest of the work in LoF is seen to be secondary.  Yet there are many valuable indications which deserve connection to esoteric principles, and the point of this exploration is to show that such connections are not arbitrary. So, to return to the actual content of LoF now, after this long but foundational detour, we can note that he says:

    LoF p. 5

    • Let any token [of the mark] be intended as an instruction to cross the boundary of the first distinction.

    That is, every mark is an invitation to cross it; every distinction is a call to make that distinction, not to simply point it out, but also to DO it, to MAKE the distinction.  In other words, the whole thing is ACTIVE, not passive, it is not descriptive but PRESCRIPTIVE.  Of course, the esoteric significance of this should be obvious, because precisely what distinguishes esoteric work from, say, philosophy or other disciplines, is (more…)

  • unknowing and the creative moment

    There are some things about creativity that have been on my mind.  I have been trying to hone in on the qualitative experience of the creative moment… what does it feel like to be creative?  What kinds of qualities distinguish the feeling of being creative from other types of feelings, like the feeling of ‘producing’, ‘innovating’, and so forth?  What makes a creative moment creative?

    It seems to me that in the experience of the creative moment, there is always a place where knowing runs out… where consciousness finds itself in a state of openness, as if surrounded by space.  In particular this feeling seems to be accompanied by the sense that the normal boundaries of the ego are loosened, expanded/expended, but not yet replaced or filled with anything.  This is specifically true with respect to the actual genesis of the creative activity, while during the activity this sense can be replaced with a feeling which Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called ‘flow’.

    In every case that I can think of (for myself, that is), creative moments are states of being characterizable by a sense of potential, of a sort of future-coming-into-the-present — but notably always without knowledge or specific anticipation.  It is a very hard state to even think about because it seems that thinking itself — at least in the normal, ego-centered thinking of much of daily life — is suspended, as if in the air.  And even in thinking ‘about’ the creative moment, there is almost a lacuna of consciousness around the creative moment itself, as if consciousness met a border that it could not cross with its normal configuration… so I have the feeling that it is as if some part of consciousness travels ‘underground’ or perhaps ‘above’, into the ‘sense of awaiting’ that permeates the surrounding ‘space’.

    You can see that the normal tendencies of speech have a hard time when applied to a moment which seems to transcend encapsulation.  One usage of languge serves to delineate, define, demarcate, depict, circumscribe, form, or otherwise pinpoint (alchemically this would be representative of the Earth element).  My initial questions are, in a sense, Earth questions, with language leading towards and assuming this Earthy aspect.  Yet by its very nature the object of the inquiry is perhaps unable to be Earthed – so I find a contradiction even in the asking of the question.  Thus a paradox: if it were possible to actually describe in words the qualitative essence of a creative moment, the creative moment itself would necessarily remain undescribed, even de-described.

    Therefore some questions:

    Is language as evocative rather than descriptive enough of a tool to allow thinking about creativity to proceed?

    Do all creative moments share some specific qualities, perhaps at a meta or meta-meta-level?  Or is it impossible for creative moments to be bound at all by any possibile prescription?

    With respect to the individual experiencing a creative moment, what kinds of processes occur qua the experienced sense of self/other?  That is, what happens to the sense of self in such a moment?

    Related: Are creative moments ever something that can be ‘mine’ in the same way that I can speak about (a perhaps naive) experience of ‘my’ pain, ‘my’ thoughts, and so forth?

    Also related: To what extent do ‘others’ play a role in creative moments that ‘I’ experience?

    Lastly: If we were seers, able to perceive the activities of the spiritual worlds, how would we describe what is experienced by a single human being in a creative moment?

    Newton's Third Law

  • Concerning functionalism

    I have this feeling that appeals to functional equivalence (or even similarity) are somehow, well, disrespectful, or at least intrinsically misleading.  Functional appeals ‘work’ because they abstract very specific relations from an otherwise fully real and completely embedded situation, and show how regardless of how those relations come about, if they do, then for the purposes of our inquiry, we are satisfied of their equivalence.  In other words, if I want my taxes done, I don’t care whether it is done by a computer, a certified tax accountant, or a 5-year old prodigy, as long as I pay the same amount and get the same results.  

    My problem with functionalism (in all its forms, not just with respect to functional theories of the mind), is that function accounts necessarily reject aspects of a whole system which,given a different approach, would render any initial functional consideration of equivalence not equivalent.  

    In other words, given the example above, although considered solely and specifically for the very restricted purpose of ‘having my taxes done’, they three systems are functionally equivalent, the computer, the tax accountant, and the 5-year old are equivalent only in a functional sense.  By being only functionally equivalent, and only in this very specific situation and for a very specific purpose, we see that a certain violence is being done with respect to the constancy of the respective wholes under (or rather not under) consideration.  There are secondary, tertiary, and n-iary non-trivial effects consequent in each case that are different.   

    When seen as complex, relational wholes with inextricable and unique qualitative embeddedness in a multilayered and recursively evolving world dialogue, the functional relations identified by functional appeals are revealed as non-generalizable reflections of some particular set of distinctions which, if they were different, would necessitate different functional relations.  

    More simply, functionalism has no ontology and ignores epistemology.  

    This is not to say that appeals to functionalism are to be avoided.  On the contrary, what makes functional appeals so powerful is precisely their ability to ignore everything that is determined to be unimportant for a given system in order to reveal some higher-order similarity.  The problem arises in that functionalist explanations are not very good explanations, because they always avoid asking the question “Who?”  That is, who is making the determination concerning the particular functional relation to be considered in a specific circumstance?  There is always someone who must initially decide – upon a basis not explicable from within a functionalist standpoint – what the criteria are for a given system to meet a particular functional definition.   

    This functional blind spot is very similar to the way in which the classic scientific method includes an aspect which is manifestly non-scientific: the hypothesis.  In giving a name to this undetermined, mysterious and non-controllable source from which all of its knowledge  comes from and returns to, the logic of science seemingly ‘co-opts’ this ‘hole’ in its otherwise orderly workings through a process of more or less complete ignorance.  Where hypotheses come from and what they consist of has nothing whatsoever to do with the scientific method, but determines every single piece of scientific knowledge it produces and the entire course of science as a whole.  Functional explanations are similar in that they ignore the source of the distinctions upon which every functional identification rests.  Science can only say that ‘given such and such a hypothesis, the following logical relations would hold’, just as functional explanations can only say that ‘given such and such a functional role, system A and system B have functional equivalence’.  But because every system is non-arbitrarily intra and interconnected, the choice of what constitutes a given function has non-arbitrary consequences that are ignored at the peril of the coherence of the very functional similarity proposed.  

    Thus functionalism is disrespectful in that it does openly include and account for the source of its functional determinants.  When functional appeals are used in a manifestly pragmatic way, I can forgive this oversight.  But when functional appeals are used as explanations, I object, because in such cases functionalism begins to overstep itself by disingenuously posing itself in an ontological persona, leading to claims such as “if a computer functions in just the same way as a human being, then it must have a mind, because this is how we explain what a mind is.’  This is ontological violence pure and simple, and basically amounts to saying that to have a mind is to function as if one had a mind.  But the hidden move here is one which necessarily already assumes – without any justification whatsoever – the particular distinctions (and not others) which account for what it means to ‘function as a mind’.   

    In other words, functional appeals are a mask for our ignorance.  They are useful because when we are in a state of ignorance, they allow us to make distinctions which ground further thinking, but they outlive their usefulness when the relations they propose are ossified at the expense of the potential – always inherent in any real system – for multiply alternative distinctions to serve as the basis for completely different relations