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“The Universe as ‘Pure Activity’ ”
“On ‘Seeing a Chair’” (1)
“On ‘Seeing a Chair’” (2)
“On ‘Seeing and Hearing an Aeroplane’”
“On the So-called ‘Heterological Paradox’”
“On the So-called Velocities of ‘Light’ and ‘Sound’”
“On the so-called ‘Velocity of Light’”
“The Epistemological Status of the Physical Constant ‘c’”
“The Internal Velocity of ‘Illumination’ and the External Velocity of ‘Light’”
“The Temporal Function of Microscopy”
“The Empirical Experience of ‘Time’, and its Symbolic Expression”
“Spatio-temporal Relativity within the Visual Field of the Individual - an inference from the everyday use of written words”
“Should Zero be regarded as a number?”
“The Semantic Function of ‘Zero’, the ‘Logically Null Class’, and the ‘Meaning of Equations’ ”
“The Statics and Dynamics of Meaning” (1)
“The Statics and Dynamics of Meaning” (2)
“The Meaning of Meaninglessness”
“The Fundamental Nature of ‘Meaning’” with an Appendix: “The substitution of symbols - the use of ‘mean’ in dictionary definitions”
“The Basic Assumptions underlying Symbolic Communication - The Limits of Meaning and Truth”
“The Epistemological Primacy of Difference - Introduction”
“The Epistemological Primacy of Difference”
“The Epistemological Priority of Error”
“The Empirical Origins of Geometrical Concepts”
“The Empirical Origins of the ‘a priori’ elements in Geometry and Physics”
“The Experiential Origins of ‘Number’”
“The Origin and Basic Function of Concepts”
“The Relation of Verbal and Symbolic Expression in Direct Experience” including an Appendix: “The Solution of Three Classical Paradoxes”
“Self-referring Expressions, and the Paradoxes arising therefrom”
“The Limits of the Ethical Value of Truth”
Some Related Research Documents & Concluding Note
"Nature, by an absolute and uncontrollable necessity, has determined us to judge as well as to breathe and feel." "All our reasonings concerning causes and effects are derived from nothing but custom, and belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our nature."
"If we believe that water refreshes, and fire burns, 'tis because it costs us too much pains to think otherwise."
David Hume - A Treatise of Human Nature - quoted by J.D. Solomon
In this essay I am attempting to adumbrate a cosmology which is in some respects completely at variance with anything that has been suggested either by scientific or by religious thinkers. Scientists and men of religion, in pursuance of their distinct but not entirely unrelated aims, have been led to attribute supreme values to some hypothetical element, which manifests itself in experience but is in some way independent of it, and which is "absolutely" invariant.
This is because their fundamental aims are mainly concerned, in both cases, with human security.
Science is concerned with predicting the likelihood of certain events and, in the case of unpleasant ones, of devising methods of avoiding them. The "Laws" required for predictive purposes will obviously be certain "invariant" tendencies or observed patterns of process, and are expressed by invariant structures, or arrangements, of invariant symbols, each ultimately derived by invariant methods of measurement of some "entity" which is quantitatively variable but qualitatively invariant. Furthermore, the symbol which refers to the "variable" must ultimately be replaceable by numbers which stand for "constant" pointer-readings. Thus the whole of the scientist's methodology leads him inevitably to regard invariances as the chief desideratum, and it is not surprising that he has tended to overestimate their unconditional value.
Religions have also been concerned in the main with helping mankind to overcome fear. This emotion is evoked in the first place by the experience of violent and unexpected change, and is revived whenever we encounter any experience which we regard as a sign for such a change.
Here again, the obvious undesirability of excessively rapid and intense change has led to an emphasis on the desirability of some element of stability, but this does not justify the attribution of supreme value to "absolute" invariance, which is a feature of most religions, inasmuch as "God" is regarded as "completely" unchanging.
It is clear that a certain measure of stability is preferable to utter chaos and uncertainty, but what both the scientist and the men of religion have done is to set up, as an "ideal", the extension to infinity of the transition from chaos to order, and this is of very doubtful ethical value.
The cosmology which I am adumbrating here involves the rejection of all "absolute" invariance. To this extent, but only to this extent, it can be regarded as both anti-scientific and anti-religious. I regard it as quite coherent with commonsense experience, and propose to formulate it in terms which any reasonably educated person will understand, although some may boggle at the imaginative (but not irrational) leap which is needed to arrive at the final stage.
For my starting-point, I take the realisation which led Einstein to formulate his theory of "Special Relativity", namely, that "distant simultaneity is unobservable".
"Objective" events are needed by physicists, and Einstein's problem was to construct descriptions of such events from a multiplicity of observations which were seprated by very large intervals, and often by observers moving very rapidly relative to one another. There is, however, no reason to suppose that this principle becomes invalid when intervals approach zero, in which case, "absolute" simultaneity is only observable at a "point".
Now I do not believe that any philosopher has seriously maintained that "points" are parts of empirical experience; we are therefore justified in drawing the conclusion that we never actually experience "absolute" simultaneity.
The raw material for our experience must, in fact, be a pure flux of succession. Probably we only "scan" it at intervals, our scanning rates being confined, as a rule, to certain frequency-bands in which we have become interested for practical reasons; they provide us with signs which serve us as guides for the avoidance of unpleasantness, and vice versâ.
Careful introspection reveals that we can never even entertain two thoughts with absolute simultaneity; inasmuch as we are aware of them as two, there must be an interval between our acts of awareness. We can look at a symbolic formula representing a symmetrical relation, such as "A===A", and as long as we regard it as a single Gestalt, we are performing a succession of acts of awareness which do not differ appreciably from one another. But as soon as we regard it as expressing a relation between the two "A"s, it at once becomes asymmetrical, for the simple reason that we read from left to right! There is, in fact, always a prescribed order for reading any symbolic expression; a skilled mathematician may do it so rapidly and automatically that its occurrence seems to be "instantaneous", but, if required, he can always expound the order which he has employed. The same considerations apply to people who can take in whole sentences, or even whole paragraphs, at a glance. a "glance", though exceedingly short, is not an "instant", and temporal succession is still involved.
Similar transitions, probably still more rapid, must be involved in our awareness of every boundary within our fields of vision. From all this it would appear that the basic tempo of conscious activity must be far more rapid than anything conceived of as yet by the physicists. Hume was right in considering that it must be of a different order from that of bodily process and activity, which provides us with a communicable time-scale.
The translation of a quasi-simultaneity into a flux of pure succession, and the reinterpretation of the flux in terms of a quasi-simultaneity, is nowadays a matter of daily routine. The television camera translates approximately simultaneous visual structures into a pure flux of intensive quantity - in this case electromagnetic - and corresponding variations of intensive quantity - in this case intensity of illumination - are flashed across the screen. This is still a pure succession, but the viewer has no difficulty in extracting the "picture" from it.
What I am suggesting here is that the raw material of experience must be analogous to the "transmission wave", from which we extract such rhythmic patterns as happen to be of interest to us. The rhythms of the "wave" itself are so rapid that we are not normally aware of them at all. Now visual awareness certainly provides us with the greatest multiplicity of "simultaneous" entities, so that if the contents of our visual fields can be our interpretations of a flux of pure succession, it is clear that the notion of "absolute simultaneity" can be dispensed with as a necessity for "private" experience.
Nor can it be necessary for communication, since there is obviously always an interval between the initiation of the effort to behave communicatively and the observation and interpretation of the communicative behaviour. Dialogue, however, does appear to require the temporal overlap of the communicants' existences, since they can influence one another. It is at this point that we have to make an imaginative leap if we wish to completely eliminate the notion of "absolute simultaneity" from our conceptual apparatus.
What we have to do is to abandon the assumption that our own existences must necessarily be thought of as continuous. This involves no more than the acceptance of the view that we could not possibly experience the periods of our "non-existence".
Once we take this step, we can postulate a tempo of activity so rapid that it is re-creating the whole universe myriads of times in a single second; each of us is a "cinematographic" section of the flux, occupying no more than an infinitesimal portion of the whole. And just as the cinema-goer is oblivious of the moments of darkness which conceal the replacement of one "still" by the next, so also are we oblivious of the relatively much longer periods of our own "non-existence".
Each of us, while he exists, is the flux, and has power to modify it. I am clearly regarding the "stuff" of the flux, like that of the transmission wave in television, as "intensive quantity" - a quality of both thought and feeling.
We can now give real meaning to the "Thou art That" of the Hindu sages. The ultimate units of such a Universe are all sentient beings, each of them, for the brief moments of its existence, being "Brahma". They are all that is "actual", and it is actuality rather than "reality" which is the Source of all importance. They are all, at least potentially, in causal relationship with one another, and they share a universal æsthetic, and an urge to the enrichment of experience, which we can well think of as the "Divine Discontent".
We are in effect regarding the Universe as Brahma enjoying himself as "many" instead of as "one". It is even possible, using a musical metaphor, to suggest a motive for "creation"; Brahma might have conceived the idea that polyphony - music in many parts - is richer than melody, which is only one, and exploded!
This view is certainly in accordance with the "big bang" theory at present in vogue with the astronomers. It is also similar in some respects to Newton's view that God set the ultimate "particles" of matter moving at random, but decreed that they should all obey the inverse square "law" of gravitation.
I agree with Newton that an element of chance must be involved in any genuinely new creation, but differ from him inasmuch as I do not believe that any natural "law" is given once and for all; the "Divine Discontent" is constantly creating novelty and modifying existing laws, although many of them certainly appear to be extremely stable.
For me, the "laws of nature" are manifestations of the more invariant, habitual tendencies expressive of the "public opinion" of the Universal Society. There is no reason to regard them as unalterable, and certainly not as "perfect". Like our own habits, they have developed not so much with a view to increasing enjoyment as to diminishing disenjoyment. We should realize that our greatest enjoyments are always associated with departures from habitual behaviour, provided that they are not so drastic as to involve us in calamity. So, bearing in mind that each of us is "That", we can fairly assume that this principle is applicable to other sentient beings.
I am, in effect, taking the view that the notion of "law" is derived from empirical experience of the operation of the human variety, and that its extension to "nature" is a much later development. This point is of considerable ethical importance, since idealisation of the "invariant" element in "natural" laws has repeatedly led to attempts to establish systems of human law which are as rigid and inflexible as some "natural" laws appear to be. Invariant "order" has been eulogised as an end in itself; this seems to be a serious ethical mistake.
Some measure of stability has its value, but only in so far as it enables us to avoid excessive intensities of change which, when they exceed a certain level, bring suffering to each one of us - and thereby, presumably, to "Brahman".
But the nature of life - as distinct from that of "inanimate" phenomena - is to diversify, to a certain extent at random, since, in the inevitable absence of "perfect" foresight, some guesswork is always involved. I believe that Einstein was profoundly mistaken when he said that "The Old Man doesn't play dice"; "He" - or, rather, we, as "His" incarnations, are playing dice the whole time, but we only try to repeat the throws which please us, and, more importantly, to avoid those which give us pain. There is a random element in all creation, since if it is genuinely new, it must be disorderly in terms of any pre-existing order. There can therefore be no "science" of creation, but only of preservation, i.e. the repetition of creative acts which are in fact repeated.
The rhythm of the re-creation of the Universe is a provisional "absolute", but, since there can be no upward limit to the possible tempo of "activity", no final "absolute" is possible. For each of us, the provisional "absolute" is the most rapid tempo at which we "scan" our experience; what we call "unchanging" are tempi that are very slow by comparison. The richness of our experience is provided by the interplay of the numerous scanning tempi that we actually employ; the higher tempi reveal a greater profusion of structural detail. The obvious analogy here is with the "slow motion" camera; the more rapid the succession with which the pictures are taken, the more detail they reveal.
The emergence of a scanning rate of unusually high order is what we call the attainment of a "higher level of consciousness". Certain individuals appear to attain a level well above the normal; when they are successful in translating the subtle structures experienced at that level into audible and visible phenomena, we call them "geniuses"; when they attempt to do so but fail, we regard them as "lunatics". When they are partially successful, we call them "mystics".
One very important element in this cosmology is the complete elimination of the notion of "zero". Science and religion alike have regarded change as relative to "zero" change, or invariance, which they take to be "absolute".
I think that this is partly a consequence of the subject-predicate structure of language, in which the "subject" always refers to the least variable, most "substantial" element under discussion; this is because it is the least changeable elements of experience which are most reliably communicable.
The substantive has therecome become the foundation-stone of all languages, and this circumstance has powerfully reinforced the tendency to seek the "absolute" in the direction of minimum change. If, however, we regard activity as what is positive, "zero" simply becomes a convenient fiction for the purpose of indicating an intensity or tempo of activity which is relatively of infinitesimal importance.
At the highest levels of consciousness, which represent the scanning-rate which reveals the greatest subtlety of structure, the intensity of experience is negligible compared with that of sensation, and therefore, in terms of sensation, approximates to "zero". I do not think anyone will wish to deny that the memory of any structure experienced in sensation is infinitesimal in intensity compared with the sensation itself; it is a distant echo of it. Likewise, unless unpleasantness is experienced at the sense-level, it is never intense enough to be described as "pain"; discordances in thought are of relatively minor consequence, and may even be pleasant, as in the case of much verbal humour.
These circumstances have given rise to a strong tendency to disparage sense-enjoyment, and to exalt the "mental" variety - so much so that they have come to be regarded almost as mutually exclusive.
This view is a mistake. It is true that if a sentient being concentrates exclusively on enjoyment at the level of sense, this may debar him from attaining the higher levels of consciousness of which he is capable. But the optimum condition would seem to be one in which he experiences the greatest subtleties of structure at the highest tolerable levels of intensity.
I would like to suggest that human "incarnation" is an attempt to enjoy with the "guts" as well as with the "mind", and that although success has so far been limited, the attempt is well worth continuing. For this purpse, the coordination of experience at different levels of consciousness is clearly necessary, and special techniques may be required to keep in touch with the highest levels.
"Complete" success is out of the question, since subtlety of structure and quantitative intensity are both potentially infinite. In any case, it would mean the end of all hope, and, as R.L. Stevenson sagely remarked, "It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive".
"Eternal hope" is indeed the ethical watchword appropriate to a Universe of Pure Activity. It discovers supreme value, not in the "unchanging", but in the "eternally operative" - the ultimate differential of change itself.
- Shalom & Welcome! - 
© The Neith Network Library 2002
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Updated 00:01 1/8/2002.
