Creation is not just the creation of what is observed.
CREATION, in the ultimate sense, would be the creation of the observed as well as of the observer.
Is this the “Bigger Bang?”
What does this do to QUANTUM MECHANICS?
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Wow! What a conclusion by Will Durant to his book, The Story of Philosophy. What a wonderful expectation it contains of American philosophy.
Click to access 12-conclusion.pdf
I am reading about George Santayana, the first of the American philosophers covered by Will Durant.
Santayana seems to believe in seeing things as the are (animal faith) and in minimizing speculations. He is quite witty. He has already given me a few laughs.
Click to access 11-contemporary-american.pdf
Santayana likes Democritus and Aristotle. He calls himself a materialist but I would call him reality-centric. He still sees spiritual reality separate from physical (or material) reality and not as different aspects of the same reality. He doesn’t see abstraction as another dimension of reality.
“He doesn’t see abstraction as another dimension of reality.”
One more time, I cannot find that video and have some sort of mental block on the name of the video on your blog regarding abstraction. I searched Vinaire.me for abstraction but I don’t see it. . . Please.
Try searching by “Korzybski”. Here it is.
Thank you. I really find that little commentary helpful.
It is interesting that the question of soul comes up invariably with philosophers. It would be interesting to compile the views of various philosophers on the subject of “soul”.
I think that when the ultimate reality is trying to figure itself out, a filter called the “universe” is generated.
When the ultimate reality looks at itself through that filter, the idea of soul pops up. The ultimate reality shrinks itself to the belief that it is that soul.
“The ultimate reality shrinks itself to the belief that it is that soul.”
“Ultimate reality” seems to be an oxymoron. I think it takes a self with filters to believe. Before that, there is only a progressive coming together and iteration until a self appears. The self seems to beget more and more self. Like the little whirlpool in the current in the river. It sort of appears, develops and the dimishes and disappears though all the water is still there and moving, though there is no more whirlpool. So it goes with the self.
I think that the self is there in some form or the other as long as an identification (name, body, profession, possessions, etc.) is there. Another dimension of self would be the amount of focus it commands (very light focus to very heavy focus)..
. . . very light focus to very heavy focus on self as body.
When I am mindful, I have less attention on myself as body, less identification with self as body. This is probably what the exteriorization is about. But transferring that attention on self as body to oneself as thetan eventually has a similar result of being self-centric egotism and simply alter-ising the attachments — less attachments on self as body and more attachments on self as spirit — elan vital
Haha! Isn’t it! Spirit has taken the place of the body in terms of identification (or attention being fixed). It is interiorization of the second kind.
Interiorization of the first kind is body.
“Interiorization of the first kind is body”
Now that is interesting. Is it? (sequence)
I have a feeling that there is an interiorization of a third kind, and that is what I am handling currently on myself through SUBJECT CLEARING.
The ultimate reality is saddened with each death, because in that process it has lost an identity that it was identifying with. Here is a pretty good observation by Santayana,
“I believe there is nothing immortal. . . . No doubt the spirit and energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us; and, cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moved.”
But the self-centric filter of Santayana is there. It prevents the ultimate reality from recognizing itself.
“It prevents the ultimate reality from recognizing itself.”
In this doctrine, the ultimate reality is unknowable, so there is nothing there to know. What would ever become conscious of perceiving itself, would be itself as filter, nothing more nothing less.
Exactly.
The seed is ‘desire to know’, which, is a filter.
You surprise me! I would have thought you had done this and posted it already! Well!
I don’t have really sat down and done a serious study of all the philosophers. I can do it now that I am retired. 🙂
LOL! I have no doubt! 🙂
Santayana is looking at spiritual as a pattern within the physical. He says,
“The soul is only a fine quick organization within the material animal; . . . a prodigious network of nerves and tissues, growing in each generation out of a seed.”
I seem to be headed in the same direction. I believe that primitive awareness lies as a pattern in electromagnetic fields.
Santayana looks at Bergson’s elan vital with scorn. He would’t have much cared for Hubbard’s thetan.
I have to make time to look at that.
Me too, It is Occam’s Razor.
Santayana acknowledges the importance and necessity of religion, but finds a proper understanding of this subject lacking. He is critical of the theistic presentation of God which he finds to be literal in Occidental theology. He recognizes the self-centric nature of Man. But he loves the poetic beauty of Catholicism. He is more reality-centric. About religion he says,
“Religion is human experience interpreted by human imagination. . . .”
Maybe when he says religion he means what I call spirituality. Spirituality is what we do when we consider ourselves. Religion for me is a tool of political control and is what we have when we tell each other what to think about ourselves. What I think he is looking at regardless of https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=picayunish%20meaning>picayunish words when he says “interpreted by human imagination”, I hear him saying abstraction.
That is correct.
Mindfulness helps you see that there are blades where you see a disc.
There is quite a bit to abstraction when we couple the thought of it to perception. For instance, we see motion at 30fps. In Korzibsky’s example, the blades need to slow until our vision can pick out the blades from the disk.
Visual is just one perception. The most powerful peception is mental that can perceive electrons around an atom. What I am saying is that a series of scientific experiments with a rotating fan can easily determine that the fan is made up of certain number of blades of such and such shape that are rotating at a certain speed to visually blur into each other.
I’m just saying that you have to develop an idea that something else is going on besides a disk.
What do think of the idea of “filter” or “abstraction”?
I like Korzibsky’s model for its simplicity and for its macro-size. In the example, the disk is truly what the pinwheel seems to be until the disk is more closely scrutinized. Then it’s seems that it truly is a pinwheel, until we scrutinize it more closely. However, it is truly what it seems to be in each frame of reference, until we change the frame of reference. And so it seems to go with relativity. Reality seems to be its own frame of reference, or more than one. I’m not sure.
In my investigation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity I found two key frames of refernces – matter-centric and ether-centric.
In the recent investigation of awareness I found three key frames of references – body-centric, self-centric and reality-centric.
The reality-centric frame of reference seems to lie between matter-centric and ether-centric frames of references. I see ether-centric approaching BRAHMA as the disturbance levels decrease.
Now, reality-centric can have its own gradients depending on layer of inconsistencies associated with reality. These will have to be looked at more closely.
Korzybski seems to be using the word ‘abstraction’ in the same sense that we are using the word ‘filter’.
Yes I think so.
The great problem of philosophy is to devise a means whereby men may be persuaded to virtue without the stimulus of supernatural hopes and fears. Santayana says, “a truly rational morality or social regimen has never existed in the world, and is hardly to be looked for… the avenue of moral development must lie, in the future as in the past, in the growth of those social emotions which bloom in the generous atmosphere of love and the home.”
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So it all boils down to sane education. That is true, and that is exactly my effort at the moment.
https://vinaire.me/research-on-learning/
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That is a good place to target one’s energy.
Hence, in part, the patriotism of the people; they know that the price they pay for government is cheaper than the cost of chaos. Santayana wonders whether such patriotism does more harm than good; for it tends to attach the stigma of disloyalty to advocates of change. “To love one’s country, unless that love is quite blind and lazy, must involve a distinction between the country’s actual condition and its inherent ideal; and this distinction in turn involves a demand for changes and for effort.”
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This is a good observation by Santayana. One must be educated on the country’s inherent ideal.
When watching beautiful new movies like Star Trek, I find myself distracted by the sparkling cleanliness of their ships and in the midst of action scenes my thoughts sometime stray to wonder who does the janitorial in these futuristic and more perfect societies?
Well the reality is that you know it a movie, and these are sets in some studio. Once you know that then you can focus on the message of the movie, and not be distracted.
On the other hand, race patriotism is indispensable. “Some races are obviously superior to others. A more thorough adjustment to the conditions of existence has given their spirit victory, scope, and a relative stability.” Hence intermarriage is perilous, except between races of acknowledged equality and stability. “The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the English, were never so great as when they confronted other nations, reacting against them and at the same time, perhaps, adopting their culture; but this greatness fails inwardly whenever contact leads to amalgamation.”
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This I find discriminatory. Yes, there are differences in races but such differences should not be institutionalized. Efforts should be made through education to bring rationality and harmony all around. This has been the effort in Southeast Asia.
“The great evil of the state is its tendency to become an engine of war, a hostile fist shaken in the face of a supposedly inferior world. Santayana thinks that no people has ever won a war.”
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This is the feeling I have about current state of America. I am sad to see America go that way. It is like Scientology.
“Where parties and governments are bad, as they are in most ages and countries, it makes practically no difference to a community, apart from local ravages, whether its own army or the enemy’s is victorious in war. . . . The private citizen in any event continues in such countries to pay a maximum of taxes and to suffer, in all his private interests, a maximum of vexation and neglect. Nevertheless . . . the oppressed subject will glow like the rest with patriotic ardor, and will decry as dead to duty and honor anyone who points out how perverse is this helpless allegiance to a government representing no public interest.”
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A government should be for the people. If it is not then it forces support through threats of oppression. Any patriotic feeling must recognize that.
“The universal order once dreamt of and nominally almost established, the empire of universal peace, all-permeating rational art, and philosophical worship, is mentioned no more. . . . Those dark ages, from which our political practice is derived, had a political theory we should do well to study; for their theory about a universal empire and a catholic church was in turn the echo of a former age of reason when a few men conscious of ruling the world had for a moment sought to survey it as a whole and to rule it justly.”
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A world that contains ignorance cannot be ruled justly. The goal should global education and not a global government.
Perhaps the development of international sports may give some outlet to the spirit of group rivalry, and serve in some measure as “a moral equivalent for war”; and perhaps the cross-investments of finance may overcome the tendency of trade to come to blows for the market of the world. Santayana is not so enamored of industry as Spence was; he knows its militant as well as its pacific side: and all in all, he feels more at ease in the atmosphere of an ancient aristocracy than in the hum of a modern metropolis. We produce too much, and are swamped with the things we make; “things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” as Emerson put it. “In a world composed entirely of philosophers an hour or two a day of manual labor – a very welcome quality – would provide for material wants.” England is wiser than the United States; for though she too is obsessed with the mania for production she has in at least a portion of her people realized the value and the arts of leisure.
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It is an interesting observation how “production” has come to rule, and the art of leisure is waning. It is like getting increasingly interiorized into the “body”.
It is becoming more of a “body’s survival” culture with increased production. Nobody seems to be getting much pleasure out of education on the finer points of life.
He thinks that such culture as the world has known has always been the fruit of aristocracies.
“Civilization has hitherto consisted in the diffusion and dilution of habits arising in privileged centers. It has not sprung from the people; it has arisen in their midst by a variation from them, and it has afterwards imposed itself on them from above. … A state composed exclusively of such workers and peasants as make up the bulk of modern nations would be an utterly barbarous state. Every liberal tradition would perish in it and the rational and historic essence of patriotism itself would be lost. The emotion of it, no doubt, would endure, for it is not generosity that the people lack. They possess every impulse; it is experience that they cannot gather, for in gathering it they would be constituting those higher organs that make up an aristocratic society.”
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It is true that the lower strata of a society are more interiorized into the “body” than the upper strata. The upper strata of the society could be more interiorized into “self” though. Only in highly developed cultures we may see more reality-centric approach to life.
It takes time, discretionary time to study and to create art, or to think and research and to do new science. It is hard for field hands to have energy for personal enhancement or scientific research at the end of the work day.
It should be possible to make one reality-centric during one’s schooling up to High School.
He dislikes the ideal of equality, and argues with Plato that the equality of unequals is inequality. Nevertheless he does not quite sell himself to aristocracy; he knows that history has tried it and found its virtues very well balanced by its defects; that it closes career to unpedigreed talent, that it chokes the growth, in all but a narrow line, of just those superiorities and values that aristocracy would, in theory, develop and use. It makes for culture, but also it makes for tyranny; the slavery of millions pays for the liberty of a few. The first principle of politics should be that a society is to be judged by the measure in which it enhances the life and capacities of its constituent individuals; “but for the excellence of the typical single life no nation deserves to be remembered more than the sands of the sea.” From this point of view, democracy is a great improvement on aristocracy. But it too has its evils; not merely its corruption and its incompetence, but worse, its own peculiar tyranny, the fetich of uniformity. “There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar, anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity.”
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This is an interesting commentary on Aristocracy and Democracy. It makes much sense. Democracy would improve only with education.
. . . and yet to me, “lettered individualism” seems to be the new aristocracy. Like Scientology, this new aristocracy pledges itself to beautiful and poetic platitudes yet do not cut their own lawns nor clean their own toilets.
Well, if they are contributing to the society in a more brainy way for which they are being compensated enough to hire people to cut their lawns and clean their toilets for them, then that is normal.
There a few models for utopian societies such as B.F. Skinner’s WALDEN TWO, but who do we get to participate? Even the Amish are diluting and their young are drifting off.
A society has to be organized in a practical manner.
Santayana says, ‘There is tragedy in perfection, because the universe in which perfection arises is itself imperfect.”
This is beautiful prose but what does it mean? I believe that the universe may appear imperfect but it is the most perfect filter that there is… or, in words of Korzybski, this universe is the most perfect “abstraction.”
There are a few ways to look at that.
“What is the part of wisdom?” he asks; and answers “To dream with one eye open; to be detached from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are.”
I guess this is Santayana’s version of mindfulness.
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Yup.
Santayana:
“The goal of speculative thinking is none other than to live as much as may be in the eternal, and to absorb and be absorbed in the truth.”
Criticism by Will Durant:
But this is to take philosophy more seriously than even philosophy deserves to be taken; and a philosophy which withdraws one from life is as much awry as any celestial superstition in which the eye, rapt in some vision of another world, loses the meat and wine of this one.
“Wisdom comes by disillusionment,” says Santayana; but again that is only the beginning of wisdom, as doubt is the beginning of philosophy; it is not also the end and fulfilment. The end is happiness, and philosophy is only a means; if we take it as an end we become like the Hindu mystic whose life-purpose is to concentrate upon his navel.
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Now, now, Mr, Durant that is going too far. Life is not just living in the filter. Haha!
I think Mr. Durant needs to see the movie, MATRIX.
Will Durant looks at George Santayana as an expression of America that is determined to move out of its old comfortable cocoon for a new adventure, but it is not quite sure of itself yet.
After all, we must say just that, too, of his philosophy: it is a veracious and fearless self-expression; here a mature and subtle, though too somber, soul has written itself down quietly, in statuesque and classic prose. And though we may not like its minor key, its undertone of sweet regret for a vanished world, we see in it the finished expression of this dying and nascent age, in which men cannot be altogether wise and free, because they have abandoned their old ideas and have not yet found the new ones that shall lure them nearer to perfection.
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