Cosmos Café: Integrating Science, Art, and Time [6/5/18]

I agree he won’t change his tune as many Neo-Libs love his anti-post-modern diatribe and will pay him big bucks to keep it going. Now I’m no fan of Derrida but I would never call him Evil with a capital E. He sort of misses the point. Derrida was an Algerian Jew.

The first wave of Post-modernists came out of the trauma of the Holocaust and ended up at the New School or ended up in Paris left bank, trying to purge themselves of the Nazi mythic hysteria and tried to locate the sources of Totalitarianism and tear them up by the roots. It was Hannah Arendt who said the roots were not in Germany but in the American Slavery loving South where the Nazi ideology was born. I agree as most of my southern relatives talked just like Hitler. They were in some ways very conservative enclaves.

But when the post-structuralism impulse came in the 80’s to USA it happened with the backdrop Andy Warhol and shiny suburban surfaces that made a joke out of everything and that was the movement went very sour. Anything goes. Debunking meta-narratives became the meta-narrative and made them powerless to fight against the Scientism and Neo-Liberal trickle down economics. I dont sense that Peterson understands this at all. Trickle down economics is an unnecessary evil. He seems to assume Capitalism is the same thing as Democracy. Corporate take overs of public assets ( especially by foreign actors) is the great danger to democracy, not Marxist theory.

Now I have problems with Marxism, too, but not because it critiques Capitalism but because it ignores Nature. It is not just about who owns the means of production but is about how that impacts Nature. So Marxism needs to be updated, not discarded, so that an Ecological Civilization can emerge. And the Soviet Union practiced something more like bureaucratic Capitalism that utterly failed, and looks like what we are becoming. That is why Putin gets along fine with Neo-Liberalism. He owns much of the real estate of Upper East Side of Manhattan.

So we need cool heads and warm hearts to make a viable Ecological movement to happen and Jordan Peterson I fear has neither.

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I’ve been summoned!
Yes, I’m familiar with Mr. Tarnas. Cosmos and Psyche is one of the two most influential books I’ve ever read. Although I wouldn’t call his writing or speaking styles very accessible…
His website ( Essays | Richard Tarnas) has two essays I recommend often:
TWo Suitors, which is the intro to Cosmos and Psyche and then the Epilogue to The Passion of the Western Mind — which he purposely wrote before Cosmos in an attempt to get himself some credibility before plunging into the less acceptable Astro-text. He and Stanislav Grof spent time at Esalen in the 70s doing experiments with halucinogens and psychedelics in conjunction with studying astrological transits. So he knew where his work was headed…

Other sources of interest for y’all might be the Archai Journal (online), everything going on at California Institute for Integral Studies’ Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness program (Tarnas is faculty there), work several folks are doing with Archetypal Cosmology (which aims to blend psychology, astrology, biology, math, mythology) including Keiron LeGrice…

… and then a lecture Rick has done several times about heroic communities. Clearly this community here is an example of that :slight_smile:

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Excellent suggestions, Amanda. I am very inspired by CIS. I follow Matt Segall and many of the scholars coming out of that noble institution. I am curious about your observation about heroic communities.

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@ccafe: This has actually nothing to do directly with this thread, it is only because we talked about next week’s topic during our last session.

Having just checked my RL calendar, I see that I’m not going to be able to make our get-together on 12 June. My brother and sister-in-law from back home will be here for a short visit, and even though I love all ya guys to death, family comes first. As far as I can see there is nothing preventing me from showing up again on the 19th.

Point is: y’all can do whatever tickles your fancies.

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Some inspirational sounds (some of) you may or may not remember, ahead of our Life Divine gathering tonight—

—via an older buddy who was or wasn’t there (I didn’t ask).

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Hey Amanda, want to join us for an upcoming Café to talk about Cosmos and Psyche? Maybe we could read an essay you’d recommend, plus watch that video posted above, and you could help us begin to work with Tarnas’ ideas?

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Totally! Everything on my life is on hold until after the local burning man regional event, but after July 17 I’d love to do that.

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Cool. I’ll message you to coordinate a date.

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A follow up on the quest for a grand unified theory (aka ‘theory of everything’) in physics:

…which, though I know the mathematics and research methods are incredibly sophisticated, sounds like so many angels dancing on the head of a pin to me! Multiplicities of possibilities of probabilities…quantum particle jambalaya.

Perhaps the field is ripe for a new breakthrough or paradigm shift, which maybe will be stirred by some particular observation of real occasions, leading to some bold new unifying idea. This tends to happen in the creative process generally, and I imagine it will happen for modern physics too. I wish them luck!

Instead, many of us have switched from the old top-down style of working to a more humble, bottom-up approach. Instead of trying to drill down to the bedrock by coming up with a grand theory and testing it, now we’re just looking for any hints in the experimental data, and working bit by bit from there. If some measurement disagrees with the Standard Model’s predictions, we add an interacting particle with the right properties to explain it. Then we look at whether it’s consistent with all the other data. Finally, we ask how the particle and its interactions can be observed in the future, and how experiments should sieve the data in order to be able to test it.

The bottom-up method is much less ambitious than the top-down kind, but it has two advantages: it makes fewer assumptions about theory, and it’s tightly tethered to data. This doesn’t mean we need to give up on the old unification paradigm, it just suggests that we shouldn’t be so arrogant as to think we can unify physics right now, in a single step. It means incrementalism is to be preferred to absolutism – and that we should use empirical data to check and steer us at each instance, rather than making grand claims that come crashing down when they’re finally confronted with experiment.

Interesting article, @madrush. Sobering perhaps, too, although physics has hit such snags before and come through. Regarding the earlier issue of consciousness inside the theories, the problem at the quantum level is that, for example, although Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle seems to involve an “observer”, and the so-called “collapse” of the wave function, for example, when the Schrodinger Cat’s box is opened (remember, the cat is assumed be both alive and dead before the box is opened, due to the peculiar design of the poison delivery system) seems to require the action of someone, neither of these phenomena seem to require an “intelligent” observer, instead, they seem to require a “perception process”, that is, an “act of perception”. This seems closer in principle to what Whitehead or William James was talking about, that is, that the universe includes processes that can be associated with either living or non-living entities (Whitehead) and which can be viewed as “perceiving” - what Whitehead calls “prehension”, or that the universe is made of “pure experience” (James) so that so-called inanimate objects have experiences the same way humans do (well, with some differences). I have started reading James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism after spending years promising myself to do so, and the first thing he does, in the first two pages, is to throw out the idea that something called “consciousness” exists! Instead, he suggests that “conscious function” exists, but there is no distinct entity called “consciousness”. It is a startling but intriguing position to take, and one followed up by Whitehead and Deleuze/Guattari later on. Food for thought.

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So who or what does the conscious functioning? Is there an agent of some kind calling the shots? Debunking the agent ( it is all unconscious and you are a packet of genes and neurons) has led to what we have now. So it all gets watered down into various kinds of behaviorism, and the black box theories and views from nowhere. The triumphal Freudians filled the gap, and rear its ugly Nihilistic head. Psychology has been a reductive disaster.

This is not what James wanted, as he was a student of paranormal and psychic research. Bottoms up/top down are flawed. We need good observers with a skilled phenomenology, not sloppy Heidgarrians, nor the frat boy type of observer who drank too much beer the night before but a really good observer, tuned into propriocpetive and interceoceptive capacities, the ’ invisible architecture’, aware of in here and out there in a seamless field effect display. A trans-individual in alignment with all her chakras. In other words someone who can gather clean data about a performance and then do it on purpose rather than just a random assortment of odd accidents.

Observers who are not aware of what they are doing when they are observing are not very good modelers, for they get stuck ‘out there’. We need people who can self-model while in motion, participant observers, who pay attention to attention, intention and relational pulses simultaneously in more than one frame. Sort of like a Shakespeare who can act and write and improvise in a group all at the same time. Such a person is not among us yet but we could start to set the stage for that kind of performance if we trained all of our waves, from the narrowly focused to the immersive and diffuse. Our factory model education kills this capacity.

I regret that the Steven Rosen guest event did not happen. He is working a new kind of fractal psychology that used good phenomenology. I wanted to interface his ideas with what Clean Language actually does, which could shift the paradigm.

Alas,this does not seem to be the direction that the Cafe has taken but I am confident that maybe Quantum Poetics could handle such big topics with a Batesonian twist? I think a weekly forum, for all of its charm, is not a disciplined enough place for developing modeler’s mind(s) signalling from the field within fields. But I am on the look out for adjacent possibilities…

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That’s interesting, Geoffrey. But I’m curious, wouldn’t the “perceptual process” require an intelligent observer to observe it (i.e., the process or act) to determine what was perceived regarding the cat?

This is very interesting, too, and I’ve been getting multiple signals that I need to review James at some point. I haven’t yet listened to @jfmartel & @phord’s talk on this very subject, but it would seem like a great place to start.


I thought this was in the works, but would need to be scheduled more in advance than we typically do. Why don’t you coordinate with @Lisa and schedule it whenever is possible for Steven and the two of you (and whomever you’d like to invite)? It doesn’t have be a “Café” event per se. If you want it to happen, make it happen!

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There is some controversy around that, @madrush, Many argue that, indeed, an intelligent observer is required - that the wave only collapses in the presence of an intelligent observer. But others argue that any interaction with a separate quantum system will also cause wave collapse - that it isn’t perception or measurement per se, but interaction that is at issue. Is the observer really necessary? However, this begs the question of what is a pertinent system, since systems are rarely defined unequivocally. What I’m trying to say is that there is still a lot of controversy over this question, which remains an area of open inquiry. It is not necessarily “resistance” to the role of consciousness within the problem, but rather the fact that no formal, unequivocal mechanism has been identified to model or understand how consciousness might be present. The experiments are still open to differing interpretations. There’s a new book (2018) by and for physicists about the collapse called Collapse of the Wave Function - unfortunately, the book is prohibitively expensive (150$ to 200$).

As I understand James (he is not “easy” to understand, however), he is positing a kind of “conscious field” instead of agency. We are very close to the idea of “agencement” as it came up in the discussion on Erin Manning’s book - indeed Erin draws heavily from James’ work in making her arguments. And remember James was writing before Heidegger, before Whitehead and the others. I think his writing is worth investigating in more detail - it contains the germinal forms of many of the ideas that resurge in other writers/philosophers over the course of the 20th century.

I, too, would like to see Rosen come on as a guest, if we can get this organized. He straddles the worlds of physics and integral ideas in ways that are unusual and I suspect highly knowledgeable.

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Yeah Rosen is not doing simple stuff and I appreciate that some don’t want to do the heavy lifting that others are attracted to. A special edition might be for those who like that kind of thing.

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I think you are right about that. I find myself drawn to James very much as he is one of the few psychologists who writes really well. It is said he wrote psychology like a novelist and that his brother, Henry, wrote novels like a psychologist. That is wonderfully ironic. Simondon, whom Benerji writes about, is also concerned with agency but none of this is light reading. What I had tried to do with our exercise last time on the Manning call, was to explore how the use of pronouns is actually very different at the micro level from person to person. I have yet to review that episode but I imagine there are some actualities that we can amplify further and start to develop the Semiotic Self in much greater detail. We are lagging way behind in the phenomenology department. We are, in my view, communicators in motion between dimensions. But this is probably a bigger project than what can happen on a Cafe. Irreducible Mind, which we briefly touched upon, has tons of stuff on James.

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5 posts were split to a new topic: Exploring Simondon

Geoffrey, I agree that on the so called ‘measurement problem’ (wavefunction collapse, etc.) there is lot of controversy. However, most of the controversy is about the ontology of the wavefunction not if the collapse needs a conscious observer. I know of almost no physicists who defends the “role of the conscious observer” in quantum physics (Wheeler was perhaps a notable exception). The point is that the laws of QP, and which involve the ‘wavefunction collapse’ or ‘state reduction’, did not come into being with the existence of human observers, but are inherent laws of the material cosmos and which exist since the times of the Big Bang billions of years ago, i.e., much earlier than any conscious observer could exist (at least in the physical domain). What people interpret misleadingly is the fact that quantum phenomena are contextual, which means that the very same quantum system responds to an experiment according to the experimental setup. To put it bluntly, if one measures a quantum system with a specific experiment it appears with some properties, if one changes the experimental arrangement, the same system with the same initial conditions appears as having eventually the opposite properties (typical example: the wave-particle duality of the double slit experiment). This however has nothing to do with a conscious observer, it is something that holds also if nobody is observing.

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Well, I have seen some discussion of this more at the edges of mainstream physics, but I agree with your assessment. I’m more interested in the wave function itself and the wave/particle duality as having some relation to the « field effects » we have been discussing, although that, as you pointed out in the discussion with Debashish, is also pure speculation. I think the jury is still out on whether quantum physics has much to say about consciousness. What we’ve been discussing lately is Rovelli’s work on quantum gravity and its relation to thhe phenomena of time, which seems a more rewarding pursuit.

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Yes, relational time and relational quantum mechanics is interesting and one might also draw some parallels with Sri Aurobindo’s vision of matter and space-time. Meanwhile… I will go through this session and read this thread more in detail to understand better what you have elaborated on.

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Here is the link to the Rethinking Time thread, @MarcoMasi : Rethinking Time

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