I’m not really sure where I am going here, but this is the start of an exploration of Alan Smithson’s ideas in his book The Kairos Point. I’ve occasionally changed the vocabulary and the emphasis. It starts in a different place because I think that this new beginning is clearer.
This is not him, but it would not exist without him. Occasionally I point out what I think are differences, but I may have selected incorrectly, and misunderstood important points. Hopefully I have got some of the important points right, but there is much more to explore.
Introduction
Thinking in terms of one principle alone is reductive, and usually leads to ignoring data, or contradiction. The paradoxes around the idea there being one omnipotent and omniscient God come to mind. We end up with other principles to explain what happens: a principle of evil, or a principle of free will or something. All of which implies that God is not omnipotent, omniscient etc.
Thinking in terms of two usually leads to opposition.
Thinking in terms of at least 3 principles opens the field of thinking up.
The Two and the Three
The two can be thought of in at least three ways
1) Opposition. The two principles negate each other: matter and anti-matter. Thesis and antithesis. predator and prey.
2) Differences of degree. The two are both similiar and statistically and/or categorically different. By some, of multiple, measures they can look similar, and by others different. It may vary with individual examples (Male and female).
3) Binary. The two do not share anything in common. Logical operators, A and Not-A.
Once we have the three we might, as happened with me, get another way of seeing two, such as:
4) Complementary. The two need each other and influence each other, or emerge from each other. They form an ongoing process. Predator and prey. (Smithson got this straightaway)
We might collapse this into the triad:
- Difference; opposition; complementarity.
The Three opens things up beyond dyads, it forces us to look for other factors, and interactions. It suggests the possibility of multiple interactions, modifications and the spill of one category into another. It is, I hope, useful for talking about ecologies and climate change, although I will not be talking about climate change in this part of the exposition.
One of the differences between myself and Smithson is that he tends to talk of a duality between ‘nothing’ and ‘one’ or ‘wholeness’. I tend to think in terms of the triad:
- Nothing; One; Many.
Wholeness may not be harmonious in any appearance. Looking for the disorder, the unincluded, the ignored, the many, the conflicting is as useful to understanding as looking for the harmony, the co-operation and the oneness. Through this triad we are reminded that the ecologies we exist within are complex, and complexity has consequences.
Minds and Matters
Mind and matter are usually thought of as an opposition, or a binary. But it might also be possible to think of them as complementary, or as differing in degree in some set of qualities, or as also part of a triad: Mind; local ecology; Matter, or as part of a many pointing triad: Minds; local ecologies; Matter(s). I use the term ‘local ecologies’, because we have experience and live in a local ecology with ongoing processes, history, movement and change, rather than an abstract total whole (which we also exist within, but which implies another level of analysis, and can imply static-ness). If you prefer the singular triad Mind; Absolute Whole; Matter, then test it and see what happens.
In human reality we never observe mind without matter, or matter without mind. We never observe outside of some ecology or context – that is we rarely, if ever, observe outside of time and process. We function in (at least) the triad. We also observe what looks like multiple minds – of other people and things. We may notice what appear to be different types of matters, water, air, fire, flesh, wood, stone, metals, etc. We have previous learnings and experiences, which colour our present experiences, feeling and thinking. Minds involve feelings and bodies.
What we call Minds and Matters are part of (or partitioned out of) an apparently ‘durational’ Local ecological whole we do not understand. We might want to give one of our duality priority over the other, saying (all or some) matter emerges from mind (say the mind of God at creation), or (all or some) minds emerge from matter (as in conventional evolutionary theory), but the reality is that we observe both at the same time, as part of some processes in the local ecology, and we cannot observe one without the other, outside the ecology. Observation implies minds doing observation, and some ecology they exist within.
We don’t exist as minds without observation and interaction of ‘matters’ or of something else which appears not to be us (such as other minds). We think about minds using metaphors from matter, and vice versa to some extent (as in alchemy). We live amidst matters and other minds; again within the local ecology. We live amidst an interactive realm of feeling, even when we deny it, or name it as matter. We are never completely alone, completely without the context of the local ecology.
If we still want to think of ‘matter’ and ‘mind’, we can think of the interaction between them as circular, without obvious end, within the ecology which allows the circle to exist. If there was an end, there would be no observer and/or nothing to observe.
Mind -> Matter -> Mind -> Matter or
Matter -> Mind -> Matter -> Mind
and so on
To repeat, what we observe is at least a triad:
- Mind; Matter; Local ecology (or Reality).
Without local ecology there is nothing that we can call mind and matter. Mind involves that feeling and embodiment.
Reality pictures
There is also no mind without “reality-pictures” which are not the same as reality, but which emerge from that reality, and give “reality for me” and/or “reality for part of a culture”. ‘Mind’ is itself such a reality picture as is ‘matter’ or ‘local ecology’.
Reality pictures may be made up of thought and feeling patterns etc., or they may be partially made up by biological and material properties and interactions.
Reality pictures are real and have an effect. They may be what we call ‘accurate’, they may not be accurate, they may be partially accurate, or they may be accurate-enough to get by, but they are convincing at a certain moment to particular people in culture, history, place and ecology etc. They seem to affect how we behave, and thus have consequences.
Realising that the idea of ‘mind’ is a reality picture, complementary to the reality picture of ‘matter’ (and possibly deleting large amounts of reality, or the local whole or ecology, allows us to look at some of the confusions in the term and in the triad.
Confusions?
When we think of a ‘whole’, we tend to think of integration and harmony, rather than simply “what is,” “what exists,” or “what is happening”. We tend to delete the interactions within what exists.
However, there is no reason (other than this bias) to not think of reality as a interacting, confusion, with multiply (‘multiplee’) opposing, different, binary and complementary etc forces, acting. Animals feed off other animals and plants, one person’s interest may not agree with another, an exploding star may have dire consequences it never ‘intended’.
Smithson finds it necessary to remind people mind is real. Jung had to proceed likewise. I find this hard to understand. Surely people know their mind is at least as real and unreal as matter? Let us take it for granted, that minds are real, but we may not understand them remotely accurately, and our conceptions of minds may be wrong, as they may be of anything. For example, Western culture tends to delete feeling from mind saying feeling is irrational or beyond rational (part of soul?), thus helping to make mind seem like pure thought without interconnection. It is easy to talk of mind in this way, even when you are aware of the other view.
When we talk about ‘mind’ we tend to ignore minds. As if all minds where one mind. Which they might be, but they might not. Animals seem, to me to have minds, or feeling minds, which could be both different to human minds and share some features with human minds. They are are at least Differences of degree. It is also conceptually possible some types of minds are completely different, in ‘opposition’, binary or complementary etc. (Perhaps the minds of cephalopods). To Descartes and orthodox Judaeo-Christian-Islamic thinkers animals do not have minds – because mind comes from soul which marks human uniqueness – which may or may not be true; but it is certainly limiting. This limit makes us think there is only a singular binary (mind and non-mind). Their reality-picture of mind does not recognise the ecology part of the triad, nor the importance of previous experience or process to the formation of minds.
Mind-worlds and the whole
Likewise, thinking of ‘Mind’ tends to lead us into the Popperian position of there being a “world of mind” (not world of minds) which can be throught of as a huge library of knowledge, art, culture etc, and is (yet again) opposed to the world of singular matter.
However, it could seem the minds world is never completely independent of the ‘matters world’. The local whole or ecology, is never completely available to the parts, and the parts share different and often incompatible parts of these ‘worlds’. The singular ‘mind world’ idea does not immediately point to the diversity of mind worlds, or their distributed and shared natures, or to the multiple effects of ecologies, or even the availability of language, interpretation, storage and availability. Smithson tries to get around this by thinking of the mind word as holographic, but I’m not sure that helps.
Again mind does not exist apart from the possible confusion, mess and multiplicity of the ‘local-ecologies.’
Anthropologists tend to use the word “cultures” for something like “mind worlds,” and that plural reminds us that mind worlds do not exist as “one”, and they are supported by, and grow out of, varied customs, habits, feeling patterns, and interactions of people with the reality-wholeness from which they emerge (including other people). To some extent cultures are part of a ‘local ecology’ within ‘Absolute wholeness’. Cultures are material, and involve practices, and interactions, as well as conceptions.
Cultures are also not static they are processes undergoing change, like ecologies and minds; they do not merely accumulate stuff in a library: later work can change the meanings of past work. Australian culture is not identical to US culture, and is not identical to Australian culture of 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, even it if shares features and continuity. Neither of these older cultures can be said to be the real culture, even by precedence, as earlier cultures precede whatever we select, and all cultures tend to be influenced by other cultures.
To restate, cultures are time using (historical) processes, collaborations, competitions, incorporations and rejections of events, among other things.
One set of reality-pictures may obscure the presence and understanding of another set and vice versa.
More to come.
Summary
It is useful (but culturally hard) to think in threes to open up our thought beyond patterns of the one and the binary.
Wholeness may not be harmonious in any appearance, or in reality.
What we call Minds and Matter(s) always exist in an ecology (which includes other minds).
Mind, matter and ecology are themselves appearances arising through “reality pictures.”.
“Reality pictures” may be more or less accurate given a particular ecology. Reality pictures influence interactions with local ecologies or reality, and produce consequences, intended or otherwise
Western reality-pictures of Mind tend to ignore feeling, and time, interaction and development processes
Minds may differ from each other in different ways.
Cultures are not singular or simple ideas in Minds, even if they don’t exist without Minds. Cultures are material and interactive. They use time and change.
If we take change seriously then we can perceive reality is fluxing over time. We don’t have to look for a fixed or static whole to find reality, or think such wholes are harmonious or ‘one’. Our Minds and Matters also flux. Impermanence is part of life. Impermanence is changing.
Tags: ecology, philosophy
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