questions

  

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If we look at the basics of a perception we have sensory inputs, an information processor and the screen for the output. 

Unlike a computer that has a monitor or tv by which to output the final rendered product of information processing, life has done something far more extraordinary. 

We don’t have a computer screen inside of our head. Instead, the mind simulates the screen, as all the regions of the brain required to process sensory information are distributed within a 3D cellular matrix.


—Ian Wilson
Immersion Into the Human Experience

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What we see depends on the light entering the eye. Furthermore we do not even perceive what enters the eye. The things transmitted are waves or—as Newton thought—minute particles, and things seen are colours. Locke met this difficulty by a theory of primary and secondary qualities. 

Namely, there are the primary qualities, and there are other things which we perceive, such as colours, which are not attributes of matter.

Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an extremely unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what a theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to. 

There is now reigning in philosophy and in science an apathetic acquiescence in the conclusion that no coherent account can be given of nature as it is disclosed to us in sense-awareness without dragging in its relations to mind. The modern account of what the mind knows of nature is not, as it should be, merely an account of what the mind knows of nature; but it is also confused with an account of what nature does to the mind.

The ground taken is this: sense-awareness is an awareness of something. What then is the general character of that something of which we are aware? We do not ask about the percipient or about the process, but about the perceived.

Evolution in the complexity of life means an increase in the types of objects directly sensed. Delicacy of sense-apprehension means perceptions of objects as distinct entities. The phrasing of music is a mere abstract subtlety to the unmusical; it is a direct sense-apprehension to the initiated. 

For example, if we could imagine some lowly type of organic being thinking and aware of our thoughts, it would wonder at the abstract subtleties in which we indulge as we think of stones and bricks and drops of water and plants. It only knows of vague undifferentiated feelings in nature. It would consider us as given over to the play of excessively abstract intellects. 

But then if it could think, it would anticipate; and if it anticipated, it would soon perceive for itself.


—Alfred North Whitehead
The Concept of Nature, excerpts

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mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight

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And do you know what “the world” is to me?

Shall I show it to you in my mirror?

This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a sphere that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself–do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?

This world is the will to power–and nothing besides!

And you yourselves are also this will to power–and nothing besides!


—Friedrich Nietzsche
The Will To Power
(begs to be read aloud

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Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types.

It is of the essence of types, that they be connected.

Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered.

No fact is merely itself.


—Alfred North Whitehead
Modes of Thought

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there is no closed figure in nature

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The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence; every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.


—Alfred North Whitehead
Essays in Science and Philosophy

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There is no closed figure in nature. 

Every shape participates with another. 

No one thing is independent of another,
and one thing rhymes with another,
and light gives them shape.


—Henri Cartier-Bresson

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We need to sit on the rim of the well of darkness 

and fish for fallen light with patience. 

—Pablo Neruda

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