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Posts Tagged ‘philosophy’

Time and Energy

February 24, 2021

This post is based on something I vaguely remember Sally Gillespie [linked in] [twitter] [Routledge] [Johmenadue] saying. This is almost a self help post, but I feel that somewhere there is something I don’t understand about reality lurking beneath. I don’t know what I’m doing here. So please excuse what is crass – or tell me in the comments so this can be better and more focused.

Time is fundamental

Time is like the currency of human life.

What you build and become comes out of time, or emerges from time.

Time is the first thing you have, possibly the only thing you have, no matter how short that time proves to be.

If you want to be a musician you have to devote time to music. If you want to be a sportsperson you devote time to your sport. If you want to be an academic you devote time to thinking, to reading (at least some other academics), observing/participating in what you are interested in and writing. If you want to be a successful or influential academic, sports person or musician, you also probably have to devote time to self-promotion and networking. This can be painful to some of us, but its nearly always true. Even if someone discovers you, you will nearly always still have to spend time in the networking. Think how much time J.K. Rowling had to spend to get her novels published in the first place. Or you can hope someone discovers you after death, and you can live with the difficulties (and advantages) of that. Or you can devote your time to becoming peaceful, or kind, or holy, where being a known success can be unimportant.

Of course devoting time, will not always lead to success, but it seems fundamental to what you become.

Energy and Time

As well as devoting time, you have to devote energy. If you just passively watch sport, you may gain an appreciation of the sport, you may even gain some skill, but you probably will not become a sportsperson. You need to put energy into a practice, an active involvement in doing. If you want to become a sports commentator or an expositor, you need to put energy into doing that.

You cannot use energy without time. You can perhaps use time without that much energy if you are meditating, but even meditating requires some energy and persistence when you had rather do something else. So energy and time seem related. In general ‘productive’ time requires energy.

Paradox of habit

Most of my blogs argue in favour of recognising complexity and even chaos. The main lesson is, I think, correct: humans cannot completely control the world or themselves. We always benefit by paying attention to the inevitable unintended consequences of what we do. We need to flow with reality and work with reality.

The way we spend time nearly always builds some kind of organisation or disorganisation.

It is probably useful, should you wish to build on what you have done, to aim for some kind of organisation in your approach, or what I’ve called creating ‘islands of order’. Sometimes being chaotic can be good. Sometimes being ordered can be good.

Devoting time to ‘something,’ builds organisation of necessity – whether that organisation/disorganisation is useful or not. Building organisation builds habits. Building disorganisation builds habits. Whatever we do in time repeatedly may build habits.

More or less by definition we can say that, ‘well organised habits can give momentum and direction to our work’, and ‘badly organised habits can disrupt momentum and direction’. For example, our society’s current form of economic organisation builds habits which disrupt our attempts to attempt to build momentum and direction for restoration of ecologies. To build momentum and direction we not only need to use time to recognise the complexity of the world, but (paradoxically) we need to take time to build well organised habits which help us observe and react to that complexity, and help build resilience, help reduce the crisis and lead to restored ecologies.

Practicing an hour a day on whatever we care about, will help us succeed. This is using time in an organised way to produce organisation in what we devote ourselves too – and that makes learning easier. This is part of becoming, and again we cannot avoid building habits. If we habitually (but perhaps unintentionally) produce disorder, or self-defeating habits, then that is what we produce.

Sometimes we may have to be prepared to throw habits away to get better, or learn something new, but that does not subvert the basic point. Humans build habits through time and energy, and they build their self-organisation, and approach to the world, in those habits.

This is the paradox. Human use of time and energy makes habit and some kind of organisation, this may not always be constructive or helpful; but it will be there. Habits may undermine what we want to do or need to do. It is probably good to ensure the habits we build are useful to flourishing and survival.

Loss of time

Time is not like a currency, because you cannot accumulate it. When its gone, its gone. As your life is time, your life is gone along with time. You have only what you have built with that time, deliberately or/and otherwise.

Things that ‘steal’ time from you steal your life and energy. Every second, your life is shorter, but every second has given you the time to build something (including habits), to be, or to become and you can’t help but choose to build, be and become. I’m not implying you will only become what you want to become, that requires attention to complexity, and useful organisation.

You build (your being? your existence? your habits) even if you ‘waste’ your time. Some people who are imprisoned or enslaved manage to build constructively – Nelson Mandela for one – but this is not easy, and there are probably limits. The point is that sometimes imprisoned people can engage in becoming, more consciously than people who are free (even if freedom is a massive advantage), because they can realise time is vital, and can manage to devote time and energy to that becoming and their constructive habits, more than to their imprisonment or slavery.

So, whatever our condition, we may need to attend to time, energy and the form of organisation/disorganisation we are building for ourselves and the world. Perhaps, to some extent, you have to co-operate with the loss of your time, to lose it completely.

In most cultures nowadays we waste the land as well as waste time. We probably waste time unconsciously just as we waste land unconsciously. But we need land just as we need time. What do we stand on, if not time and land?

Respite

Life and energy require respite. You cannot just use time to work at what you build consciously. You need rest. In other words to fully use time, you must apparently waste time. But this waste need not be laying to waste, but building respite, or building a useful island of order and recuperation. You can use time and energy to build your capacity to use time well, by doing nothing. Resting, lying fallow, is essential to time (as it is to cultivated land), but it can waste time as well. As usual, a process can be both useful and harmful depending on how it fits with organisation.

We don’t know what time is, we know it appears to pass, and it appears to consume, but it is what allows us to become, and to form the temporary ‘order’ of habit. It is why we need energy. One reason we need to eat.

I guess the point is to put time and energy into where your heart is, if you can feel where that is. If you can’t then you may need to put time and energy into finding where your heart is. You might also need to find out what habits are needed, and build on them, being prepared to change habits as you learn more. Another slogan is “learn by doing”.

The future

As a culture, we may need to stop ‘wasting’ our time or using our time unconsciously, and put our attention on to what we can find out about is happening, and that involves being aware that people will try and ‘steal’ our time, by sending us to places which waste time. Yet paradoxically, perhaps, we can only find out what is real, by being prepared to waste time.

But without spending our time and energy in some kind of organised way that recognises the potential of disorder, the world will be harder still for those who come after us.

To repeat: “Time is the first thing you have, possibly the only thing you have, no matter how short that time proves to be.” It is effectively your life.

Tags:Energy, philosophy
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Complexity and Philosophy

February 22, 2021

Complexity theory, challenges standard Western philosophy, which is possibly why so many people seem to find understanding it difficult. This is a place where I will put those challenges as they occur to me.

1) Interdependence and interaction

Everything that exists, seems to exist in interactive ecologies.
‘Being’ seems connected.
All ‘individual beings’ depend on others for their particular existence. Lone individuals, as far as we know, do not exist as ‘lone’ for their entire lives/existences.
Buddhist ideas of ‘dependent causation,’ ‘dependent arising’, or ‘dependent origination’ seem to be reasonable approximate descriptions of what actually happens (although we do not have to accept their usual statements about reincarnation).
As a consequence of this idea of interdependence, it appears that humans are not separate from ‘nature’. They depend on ‘nature’.

2) Flux and process

Everything which exists is constantly in flux along with everything else. Life flows.
Some processes are much slower than others, and so they might seem static from a human point of view, but they are still processes.
There may be no eternal, or static, units of being.
‘Archetypes’ and ideas are probably local and temporal.
We assume that ‘regularities in process’, or the laws of nature, can be unchanging, but we don’t know for sure – certainly everything else changes. Stars do not seem constant over billions of years.
Small events can produce large scale change in certain circumstances (which we may not be able to define in advance).
Taoism seems to be useful beginning for reflection

3) A degree of unpredictability and uncertainty are normal

Humans cannot predict exactly what will happen in the future, but we can often make good guesses. We can also make very bad guesses.
This is just a fact of life.
Unpredictability does not mean pure randomness. Evolved complex systems generally oscillate around a stable point – this is called homeostasis and produces a degree of regularity in the flux, at any moment.
This degree of regularity means that while we may not know exactly what will happen next we may have some idea. We can expect that people will fall downwards towards the Earth. Our house will not disappear, even if it could collapse. We do not expect that, without some major intervention, pigs will grow wings and fly under their own power.
The system does not appear completely random, but it is not completely predictable. A word which has been coined for this state of affairs is “impredictability”; it aims to recognise the normal reality of ‘regularity within limits’ together with the apparent lack of complete certainty in anticipation.

4) Problems of models and understanding

In complexity, the only true models of the systems are, generally, the systems themselves.
As humans generally do not have a complete understanding of all the complex systems involved in a situation, they cannot completely control complex systems, although they can affect them.
As a result unintended consequences are a normal feature of human life.
We have to live amidst this uncertainty, regularity and unexpectedness. We should expect unintended consequences.
Dogma is almost certainly going to prove incorrect and inadequate as a guide to the future.
A statement about what is true at one moment, may not be as effective or accurate at another moment.
Being aware of what we don’t know is probably useful to survival, but it is also useful not to simply hope that events will not go badly despite our expectations. We don’t normally hope we can jump out of an aeroplane in full flight without any other technology and survive all the time.
Uncertainty about the absolute truth of any statement is probably more prevalent than real clear certainty.
Statements have degrees of approximation to reality.
We learn by doing, and by attending to unexpected, or discomforting, events, and fixing them as best we can.
If we develop policies we should probably regard those policies as experiments, and be prepared to modify them as the results come in.
Recognising degrees of failure is important to living within complexity.
That statements may be ‘true’, does not mean there is a thing we can call ‘truth’.

5) Boundaries, are not always clear

The boundaries between living and dead are not always precise.
‘Matter’ interactively organises, or self-organises, as well as dissolves.
As we are constantly in interaction the boundaries between beings are not always precise. We breathe each others’ air, we absorb and transform language, ideas and food. We share continually with other beings.
The boundaries between human and non-human are not clear. Mitochondria may be parasites. Most of your weight may come from organisms which are not genetically related to you, but which affect, or even drive, human process.
It does not always appear easy, appropriate or entirely accurate to separate a system from its ‘environment’ for purposes of study. This is especially so, if we then proceed to try and render the environment inert, without ongoing interactive effect on the system.

6) Minds and Systems

Interdependence and boundary vagueness imply there are no lone or purely bounded ‘minds’.
Minds are interactive, they grow and learn in interaction with each other and the world. They learn together.
Minds do not appear to end with the individual’s skin, or with the individual.
Thinking occurs not only with others, but through learnt language, technology, cultural tools, and ‘natural phenomena’ (trees, objects, creatures, rooms), and the responses and resistances felt, used and observed.
Minds are possibly distributed through ecological systems; we learn amidst minds, encouragements and resistances.
Human minds (and possibly others) are not born intact or complete – we all have childhoods and learn as we develop.
Using our adult mind as a guide to minds or awareness in general, is likely to be fallacious.
Not all minds have to be the same, and mind of some sort seems dependent on, and distributed through, the world.
That humans seem to have relatively good minds, does not mean that other beings are without minds.

7) Non-Harmony in Holism

That everything depends on the presence of others, and interaction with others, implies holism. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the whole influences the parts. The individual is born into, or thrust into, the whole. The individual does not exist without the whole. Yet the whole is not necessarily harmonious.
Evolution occurs because of imbalance and failure. Failure to replicate completely perfectly, failure to survive, failure to meet competition, failure to adapt to change in the rest of the system.
Competition is real. Co-operation is equally real.
As has already been proposed, if a system has been stable for a long time, it is probably relatively harmonious and homeostatic. It is likely to be robust and resilient within limits, but should anything significant change (weather, a new creature arrives, a normal creature has an abnormal reproductive burst, a geological event occurs) then harmony may be disrupted, and change may occur quite rapidly. We may not know precisely what events are ‘significant’ in this sense, until afterwards.
Systems can heal, if we stop disrupting them, but not always.
Complex systems are adaptive; that is they work towards balance and homeostasis, but that balance and stability need not be beneficial for all members of the system. Complex systems can appear to be maladaptive from the perspective of those they are eliminating. There is no guarantee that humans and ecological systems will always be able to live together. There is even less guarantee that all social systems can exist in interaction with all other complex systems.
While we humans are part of a whole, we are not One in the sense that we are all the same, or all similar, or all working harmoniously together all the time. Complexity implies variety.
Attempts to enforce ‘oneness’ will almost certainly have harmful consequences for everyone.

8) Hierarchy?

Complex systems may have hierarchies, in that some systems (for example planetary) include or overlap with many lower level systems (such as a stream or a lake).
However, those more general systems ‘higher’ in the hierarchy may not fully determine what happens at a lower level, although they may influence events.
Complex hierarchies are not ideal human hierarchies in which those people at the top command those below, or have a better life than those below, because they supposedly deserve it.
What happens below has a large degree of independence, and can eventually influence the top level systems, as has occurred when bacteria started producing oxygen billions of years ago, or when humans started to destroy planetary boundaries.
Complex hierarchies involve transmission of influence, in both directions.
Real human hierarchies are often like this as well.

9) Order and Chaos are intertwined

What we might call order and chaos are co-existent, not different realms.
Human attempts to produce order, often produce what the orderers call chaos or disorder. Especially if the ideas of order are dogmatic or ideal, rather than attentive to reality, flux and unintended consequences.
Complete order approximates death.
Life is disorderly. The more alive something is, the less predictable it is.
‘Sustainability’, in the sense of maintaining a particular order forever, is impossible. However the only alternative is not just destruction, as it can be possible to work within the flux, and help maintain a beneficial homeostasis.
Ethics can never be about establishing complete order, but it could be about making temporary homeostatic ‘islands of beneficial order’ for all or most beings.

10) Ethics is situational and uncertain

As ecologies flux, no situations are ever completely the same. Relationships change.
What is right, just, or ethical in one situation may not be in another, no matter how similar they appear (they will differ).
Ethics is a form of decision making with regard to a probably uncertain and imagined future. Ethics cannot be abstracted from the other systems present; political, religious, technological, ‘natural’ or whatever.
Ethics becomes visible when there is ethical dispute. Dispute is central to ethics. Ethics will probably never guarantee harmony.
Most, perhaps all, ideas and actions have ethical consequences, as they play out through the system.
The consequences are likely to be unintended.
Ethical ethics may involve care and attention to unintended consequences, after the act of deciding, to make sure the results are ethically acceptable.
Insisting a decision is ethical without attending to results will probably lead to disastrous, or cruel, behaviour.
Ethics is probably part of our understanding of the cosmos and how it works.
Because of uncertainty, ethics involves imagining what we need to do, and what the consequences of those acts will be.
Ethics involves imagining the reactions of others, and the level to which we can identify with those others.
That is ethics may be built upon imagination, empathy and sympathy.
If we imagine a complete difference between ourselves and others, then our ethics towards those beings will probably be different and harsher.
As events are interconnected, and boundaries are uncertain it is not easy to say where ethical ‘ethical responsibility’ ends.
As ecologies promote life, we probably should not abstain from ethical responsibility towards ecologies, should we wish to survive.
David Hume’s point still stands, that because human ethics is based on the way humans behave, does not mean that such behaviour is necessarily ethical. A descriptive statement is not necessarily a proscriptive statement. There may be an unbridgeable gap between an ‘is’ statement and an ‘ought’ statement.
There may be no basis for ethics independent of ethics. Ethical relativism is not immoral (as often claimed), it could be an ethical position, which involves a hesitation to condemn.
Ideas of God may not not provide a basis for ethics. However, the ethics associated with God, can provide a ethical basis for judging the reports of that God’s behaviour. Is it consistent? Is it good? Or do we have to excuse God from behaviour we would judge as bad if performed by someone else? Can any supposedly all-powerful and all-intelligent God who punishes people with eternal torture be described as purely good?

11) God

If God created, or engineered, a world of variety, complexity and uncertainty (for us), what does that tell us about God?

Tags:complexity, ethics, philosophy
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An Ignorant Summary of an idea by Martin Hagglund and its relation to ecology and climate action

May 12, 2020

Hagglund develops the idea that religious life is a mode of alienation, but this rather mundane idea has interesting consequences…

If we live life as if our real life was somewhere else after we are dead, we suffer from “a devaluation of our finite lives as a lower form of being.” We tend to assume that “finite life is not enough, that there has to be something beyond it.” Even the potential destruction of everything is trivial compared to eternal life. As St Paul says:

Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

With this attitude, there is no way of relating to the world, to people, or to animals and plants as they really are. Hagglund claims that:

To be invulnerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care.

This is the way the Christian Religion (not alone) has tended to argue – our concentration should be on the eternal not the passing. This focus is magnified because the stakes are so high – either death and/or eternal pain, or eternal life free of misery. A case could be made that this is a Christian innovation, ‘Old Testament’ Judaism is not the same – there seems to be no inherent transcendent immortality project).

This spiritual tradition is probably why it has been so easy for the west to dismiss animals as if they were empty (soulless) machines, and the world as if it was dirt, while simultaneously trying to prevent change and freeze the ideal, when change is the way of natural processes. The world we live in is not a being (or beings) in its own right, with its own necessary imperatives, but something to be abandoned, or bent into the unchanging image of the eternal. Hence, to the religious, action to preserve the world in its fluxing imperfections can seem ridiculous – God will end the world sometime anyway, so what’s the point of trying to preserving the non-eternal.

We can have people assuring us, that the world cannot pass away without God requiring it to be so, when the question is whether a livable world can pass away, and what do we do to prevent this.

He says:

I’m trying to show that it’s not just that eternal life is unattainable. It’s actually undesirable, because if you remove the possibility of death you also remove life, if you remove the possibility of grief you also remove joy. These things go together.

Nietzsche, if I remember correctly, argued that in a religion of omnipotency there can be no tragedy, because everything has to end up as God wills, and that must be good, no matter how much suffering there is – we ultimately loose our ability to relate to others because suffering fits into that demanded good. If people die horribly then God has either taken them to heaven, or damned them to hell. In either case feeling upset, in itself, is an expression of disloyalty to God’s omnipotence and peace. And this is a point made repeatedly by theologians from Augustine to Luther and Lewis.

Hagglund suggests that, in practice, many religious people do care about daily life, and are distressed by the loss of those they love (even if they are supposedly eternal) and, to that extent, they are either non-religious or their religion is undermined by necessity of living and their humanity. Similarly ‘secular’ people undermine their secularity by attempting to deny or avoid finitude and death as is argued by Ernest Becker’s denial of death thesis.

Religious people often suggest that atheism is a religion; here Hagglund is returning the favour and arguing that religious people are really secular to the extent that they are human and not what we might call ‘spiritual cybermen’ – all human imperfections removed.

However, if our finite lives are all we have, then time is the basis of all experiential value – “and the best form of society is the one that maximises our freedom to use that time as we wish…,” “everything depends on what we do with our time together.” There is a sense in which ‘time is life’ as there is no known life without time, and without that life occurring through events. The search for a society which allows maximum free time availability and usage, is part of our way of relating to the world.

Whatever its strengths, Hagglund, argues that capitalism can never be a system which maximises free time and hence freedom, since the system will always tend to enforce the use of whatever time ‘surplus’ you can generate in its service. That is, in service of further growth, more consumption, and further job-work. We can add that your survival, both moral and practical, depends on working at the commands of a boss, or an organisation. Capitalism is a system which is anti-democratic at its heart, although you can be taught to believe freedom involves flitting from one boss to another, and buying products you don’t need.

When we sell our labour, or thoughts, or commitment, for a wage so as to survive in the only way allowed to those who are not independently wealthy, we are selling away our lives. “Capitalism, even if it rewards you with great wealth, will always want more of your life.”

We can notice that despite attempts in the socialist 20th century to reduce working hours and ensure that workers earned enough to feed and house their families and spend time each week off work, that since the triumph of neoliberalism from the 1980s onwards, work hours have increased, many people need to work in more than one job to survive, and in the US people may work and need food stamps to survive. All the “labour-saving devices” we own tend to just free us for more job-work – and this is despite consistent promises during the last 100 years that constructive leisure for ordinary people would increase through free markets and mechanisation.

Given the demands of capitalism, people in our everyday world tend never have any time and feel overwhelmed and empty, even while they are working away their lives in the hope of eventually having free time – which, for most of us, will never eventuate, or eventuate only briefly in our old age, when we probably cannot use it any more, or are saving for our increasingly time starved children.

To lead a free life, it’s not enough that we have formal rights to freedom. We must also have access to the material resources and the forms of education that allow us to own and engage the question of what we ought to do with our time together. What really is our own is not property or goods, it’s the time of our lives.

Capitalism, as an ideal and as a practice, may also be based a need to engage in ecological destruction of the ‘dirt world’ to make cheap goods, and these destructions will eventually end the possibility of free time. It has probably inherited this contempt for ‘material nature’ through our spiritual traditions.

My love remarked the other day that with the COVID quarantine, that as well as us having lower pollution and poisoning, it seemed that people were walking and engaging with their local world and even their children. With some control over their work, or lack of work, they were in some moments, relating to the real world again. She wondered if this might lead to a change of attitude, that could translate into a reluctance to meekly go along with eco-destruction.

I, being a pessimist, think it more likely that once they get submerged in the endless demands of job-work, that they will stop feeling the world, and feel harassed again. Indeed one function of a job, is to fill up your time, stop you from thinking and feeling, and help to allow the system to keep on grinding to destruction, and others to make a profit.

Perhaps people become so miserable in their jobs, that it helps global destruction. People come to want it all to end, as destruction is the only freedom they can see as ever arriving, and hence they ignore the signs, or welcome them….

Freedom in capitalism can also be constrained, because of the apparent ultimate need to make a monetary profit. We cannot engage in the discussion of what we value apart from this need for (powerful people to) profit. So we are inherently limited in our response and our values and driven by the need to cut what may be important away to decrease cost and increase profit.

We have to hold open our understanding of the deeper problems with how we measure value in our society in general… we ultimately need a revaluation of value rather than a mere redistribution of wealth

This is similar to Ruskin’s criticism of capitalism’s destruction of ethics, relationship and beauty. Capitalism cannot be the answer to a question it cannot ask.

Haaglund apparently concludes that democratic socialism is the answer, but this assumes that capitalism has only one “opposite” when there have been many different systems of governance and organisation, although not many geared to maximising free time since we retreated from hunting, gathering and casual cultivating.

The harm is not just in capitalism, it is, for example, clearly possible to have a military society in which your time is totally consumed by training and by war, and you never have time for life.

In any case, the building of possible new ways of life do not “exist independently of the way we are sustaining and devoting ourselves to them.” Which to me is another way of saying the means must be in harmony with the ends – wherever possible.

The ends are also finite ends – there is no theocratic paradise here or elsewhere. The fragility of what we aim for is intrinsic and valuable. Indeed value can depend on the fragility. If we aim at the eternal, there may be no value as it cannot be lost and reality is elsewhere. Perhaps only by knowing we could destroy the world can we come to not take it for granted.

Even if we achieve an emancipated society, we’re always going to have to sustain the forms of justice to which we are committed at the risk of failing to do that, and that’s part of what makes it a living project.

Whatever you think of all this, it seems to me me the question of how we work towards a society which enables us the maximum time to devote to lives that give us meaning, without deflecting the meaning to the transcendental and away from the earth, is perhaps one of the most important questions there is.

Quotations:

From this review:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/02/this-life-martin-hagglund-outgrowing-god-richard-dawkins-review

and this interview:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/05/this-life-martin-hagglund-review-interview

Tags:activism, free markets, philosophy
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Rationality defines the unreasonable?

March 3, 2020

I come from a world in which people who call themselves ‘rational’ can dimiss the experiences of others as ‘irrational’ largely because they do not understand how such experiences work, they can explain the experiences away, or they think the experiences are inherently implausible by their standards of rationality.

Likewise I meet people who see rationality as a curse that is leading us to destruction and actively attempting to destroy all the things that matter, and shatter our relationship to that which ‘is‘ (the cosmos, nature, ‘spirit,’ imagination, feeling etc.)

Personally I see this cultural opposition between rationality and experience as destructive. Rationality is only ever as good as its axioms and evidence gathering techniques.

Thought systems highly influence (and limit) the way we can see the world and the way we experience the world. They often lead people to seek self confirmation, and can become a prison, whether we call them rational or irrational.

If reality, experience or the best theories we have say that your rationality is wrong or limited, then it is rational to change what constitutes rationality, although it is often thought not to be.

Newtonian mechanics overturned the rationalist objection that ‘action at a distance’ was occultism. Newton also proposed the (at the time) irrational argument that he had no conceivable explanation of why gravity worked (“I make no hypotheses”) and this did not matter. Eventually, people adapted and got use to the idea his mechanics could only explain the patterns of gravity’s working, and that was good enough (for the moment).

Obviously relativity theory, non-Euclidean geometry and quantum mechanics all threw out what had previously been considered rational axioms. In discovering and explaining more experience, these theories broadened and overturned what became seen as a limited rationality, which impeded investigation. Rationality adapted.

What people call rationality is often used to simplify or delete experience, thus removing complexity from the world, when complexity is vital to understanding the world.

At the moment there is a long fight going on in popular philosophy and in science to insist that what we call Mind is emboddied and not abstract, and that we do not understand the supposed limits or potentials of Mind (partly, it seems to me, because we tend to separate it from matter, or reduce it to what we think of as matter). Because of our history it is hard not to fall back into something resembling a mind body opposition and separation, or to say one is derived from the other, without recognising that this changes ‘the other’.

Feeling and embodiment is part of thought and human recognition of situations, and this has to be recognised. If some people need to be shattered by the grief of what is happening in the world, in order to think about and perceive the world differently, then that is what is needed. It is not rational to deny this, even though some people will claim that such feeling, or action, is irrational, and possibly fear it.

If people need to really realise that animals other than humans have minds and feelings or kinship with humans, in order to relate to those animals, or in order to understand or value those animals and help prevent them becoming extinct, then that is part of reality, and understanding it is rationality in action; dismissing this need is not rational. Neither is it rational to insist that animals do not have minds at all, because their minds might be different. Nearly everyone treats animals they know as if they have minds and feelings, because mindful behaviour in those animals seems obvious.

If dreams and imagination can bring people insights into life, it is not rational to dismiss them as “only” dreams or “only” imaginings. Just as it is not rational to dismiss making symbolic responses to a problem and do nothing; as symbolic responses can motivate ‘real’ responses.

As many people know, sometimes new ideas which help us understand things arise from dreams, from images, from what we call intuition. This arising can appear irrational, but it is irrational to ignore it.

Some people have what they call spiritual experiences, sometimes these do seem irrational, or even faked to gain fame, power, influence or money, but it is irrational to dismiss the whole class of these experiences, or their effects and possible effects on the world. Those people who fake rationality do not discredit rationality and those who fake spirituality do not discredit real experience. Such experiences are probably fairly normal (at least according to surveys and my experience of others), and given their normality, surprisingly under-investigated. Psychologists, such as Jung, who have been interested in such experiences have persistently been accused of irrationality or occultism because of the interest. Yet it is part of life, and should not be condemned if we wish to understand humans.

We will never dispose of religion, even if some of really want to, and it seems fatal to abandon it to power-hungry abusers or fanatics.

Those people who have these experiences may fear their experiences will not survive investigation, but perhaps that means the tools we have used for investigation are not useful.

Sometimes people appear to get wound up in defending the emotional or felt truth of their axioms against the evidence. In which case we can say the axioms are acting as defence mechanisms rather than truth mechanisms. Some say that science strips away the poetry of the universe, but in reality science is another, slightly more coherent, poetry.

Sometimes I am told that some research shows that rightwing politics tends to be more ‘rational’ than left, and I’m usually confused by this, as a lot of (but not all) rightwing politics seems to involve shouting, name-calling, threats, irrational discrimination, assertion of falsehoods, and avoidance of complexity. Non of which seems particularly rational. (See “Trump 2020 Hurting Your Feelings Isn’t a Crime” sweat shirts and “Liberal Tears” coffee mugs). However, it does tend to deny empathy, concern or tender feeling for others (while making harsh, or purely competitive, feelings ok) and I suspect that is what makes it seem ‘rational’ to those who think it is. If humans are feeling creatures, and base their relations to others on feeling, then it is not rational to deny it. The fact that this kind of rationality is so irrational in its behaviours, implies its ‘reason’ is a defense against gentle feeling, and this defense might be useful to survival in a neoliberal society.

To reitrate: rationality which does not recognise reality is not rational, and needs to change, and change what it defines as irrational.

As a mode of thought, rationality conditions what people see in the world. Hopefully, if it is disrupted enough, then we can chuck aside non-working axioms and evidence procedures and start again with new ones.

The processes which lead to new ideas and paradigms are generally going to differ from, and produce ideas outside, established ‘reason’ and its axioms. These insights are inherently going to be seen as ‘irrational’, because they do differ from previous rationality and its axioms. This does not mean all insights are useful, they need to be tested in practice against reality, and modified or abandoned as required

This adaptation and exploration is rational. It is not always what people who claim to be rational do.

Rationality also needs defence.

Firstly, while people often say ‘science is leading us to destruction’, this is simply not true. It is because of science that we have known for 40-50 years we are heading for ecological destruction. Scientists have been warning us repeatedly but we, and our leaders, have not listened or have refused to listen.

Secondly, it is not remotely rational to pollute more than the environmental ecology can process. It is not rational to poison the ecology and think we can get away with it. The planet is finite, it is not rational to think in terms of endless planetary extraction. It is not scientists, or rational people, who are telling us its ok to pollute or ignore ecological destruction and climate change. It is not scientists, in general, who have campaigned to keep fossil fuel corporation profits high. Some may have done so, but by doing so they foresook their calling and their rationality in favour of continuing paychecks.

Our society is not destroying itself because it is too rational, it is destroying itself through certain forms of irrationality, hope and the power relations that enforce those irrationalities because they seem essential to a particular class of people. Our politics is not rational and it aims at overcoming scientific-ecological rationality, in the name of neoliberal economic and sometimes spiritual thought.

Rationality works to improve and systematise what we know, and to work out test points for that knowing.

Rationality also offers tools for making arguments, refining arguments, and testing argumenets. If the tools are not adequate for what you need to do, then make new ones, which seem rational. This is what we had to do in the social sciences and humanities, and we will never know if any adequate tools are possible. The tools need to be relevant to the task.

Rationality is useful. The understandings provided by science, are useful to us. It is easy for humans to self-deceive, rationality provides some tools for easing self deceit, and for communicating experiences to others.

There is no necessary collision between rationality and experience, or rationality and survival. Retreat from science will not help us any more than retreat from human psychology and spirituality will help.

Tags:complexity, philosophy
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Based on Alan Smithson’s Kairos

March 2, 2020

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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