A Cocklestove Event

Scandinavian Art Nouveau Cocklestove 

November 10th, 1619. René Descartes was alone, he was frustrated, he was looking for solitude and warmth. He found it in a small room heated by a cocklestove. He went to sleep, and according to Descartes himself he had a vision from God about Algebra and Geometry, the Cartesian Way and a mechanistic model of the future which laid out how best to pursue thinking about stuff through the interactions between causes and effects.  And lo, no one yawned, instead the world soon became plodding and mechanical, magic was hidden under a rock, shopping became therapy and unless you were someone like Thomas Aquinas or had a hard on for choir boys or you were a con artist the church became a less and less attractive career choice. Thank God for Alfred North Whitehead, who was born in 1861, and who might have described Descartes' vision from God through the concept of Concrescence. A word that means: a growing together of parts originally separate. For Alfred, concrescence is a subjective process that allows a new Actual Occasion to come into being. During concrescence, the actual occasion, Prehends or Feels information or data from all past occasions. Guided by the Actual Occasion's subjective aim, the actual occasion synthesizes this prehended or felt information from the past into a new whole. Then when the Actual Occasion's moment of consciousness achieves a Platonic satisfaction, it dies. Whitehead called this corpse a Superject. A superject is a new solidified fact of the past waiting around for another actual occasion to give it a wink. And yet probably the most valuable point about Descartes Actual Occasion when he woke-up beside a cocklestove was that he reintroduced rigor and skepticism to western discourse, something we're constantly in danger of losing to the power hungry, the indolent trickster and the retarded.  

Whitehead's "Drops of Experience."

Path as insight

What's the difference between a Narrative and a Theory? A narrative is a sequence of events, people, emotions, a happy ever after until Trey  dies from eating a bad shrimp on the honeymoon. For pedants a narrative has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. A theory is an explanation for why something happens. A theory has to be testable, otherwise it might just as well be a narrative. The criticism brought against both Whitehead and Bergson is that the metaphysics of their Process Philosophy was more like a narrative than it was anything like a testable theory. In a very real way, the Book of Genesis is a narrative, it's not a theory.  In their understandings both Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson made a connection between matter and consciousness.  Whitehead's metaphysics has been called the Philosophy of Organism, he suggests that reality isn't a bunch of substances and objects, it's not stuff, it's a series of interconnected dynamic processes, it's the "drops of experience" constantly becoming that make up the universe. Whitehead's been praised for doing away with the mind body duality and he's been accused of coming up with a jumble of ill defined, incomprehensible words, such as "actual occasion," "prehension," and "concrescence." In the end the thing to understand is his claim that every actual occasion has a form of subjective experience. Excited? Me to.

Descartes to Whitehead

Path

Baxter and I are prone to the idea that Descartes was a real hit with the ladies. He lived from March 1596 to the February of 1650. It was a transitional period for Europe and like all transitional periods there was war, religious strife, hell on earth, Galileo got into trouble with the inquisitions, it was all happening. At a young age Descartes became a mercenary for the Dutch Free State, he became a military engineer, he was a mathematician, a philosopher who inherited property which he sold and converted into bonds which allowed him to concentrate on his studies. He became an interesting chap who changed his name a lot, he lived in a pub with one of his girlfriends, had a child with someone's maid, he accused someone of plagiarizing his work and on it went. Meanwhile in mathematics he made the connection between algebra and geometry which was the precursor to Calculus. In philosophy, with his I think therefore I am, he introduced us all to the duality of the mind/body problem and when a number of Princesses read his books he became a must have in the Salons of Europe and Scandinavia.  Baxter's question is, "What did we think consciousness was  before Descartes?" Part of the answer can be surmised in two books by a Doctor of the Church, Saint Teresa of Avila.  The Way of Perfection written in 1583 and The Castle written in 1577, both written before Descartes was born. The Way of Perfection is all about how to pray, the object of the exercise being to develop a relationship with prayer that put you in a position to talk to God, which Teresa believed was through silence, no words required. The inspiration for The Castle came to Teresa through a vision from God himself. It was an account of exactly what happened when you died, the varies processes you went through and your meeting with the almighty, or in Teresa's case her husband, Jesus. In those days, outside of Europe, where the process of centralization was a long way from even beginning to think about running a course, places like Nova Scotia or Central Africa, the sun, the moon, the stars, the distant hills were  conscious. If you winked at them, they'd wink back. Then on February the fifteenth 1861, Alfred North Whitehead was born in a seaside town called Ramsgate in Kent, England, to a remarkably well adjusted family well cared for by cooks, nannies and maids, a family that included polo players, teachers, madrigals and vicars.  

Der Individuationsprozess.

Cat in a Grump

In 1916, Karl Jung wrote an essay, called The Structure of the Unconscious, in which he discussed his version of a collective unconscious. This collective unconscious wasn't a field, like a Higgs Field, it was inherited through the genes and was lodged in the mind, it was common to all people, it contained the building blocks of Jung's universal unconscious archetypes which contributed to the totality of a human mind, or what Jung called the Psyche. Jung's psyche and its outer world connection engages the idea of a constant interaction, interpreting and reinterpreting, a self regulation which attempts to produce a balance between the conscious, the unconscious mind and the Ego. The Ego is the raw experience of being in the world, or more gently, the Ego is your sense of self, the thing that says what about me. Also, and worth keeping in mind, the archetypes from the inherited unconscious self are sources of patterns for what Jung calls the Persona, the social mask we wear, the Shadow, our repressed side as well as the Anima and the Animus, or the female and the male side of our psyche. So there's a whole set of invisible things happening in our minds and when it comes to something like a field such as the Higgs Field, Jung sees an underlying layer, the Collective Unconscious, which doesn't encompass the universe, we inherit and share this layer with all other people, nowhere else. Life for us people, Jung argued, was a life long process of achieving a balanced integration of the personal and collective unconscious with that self centered jackass Jung called the Ego.  This process of integration Jung called Individuation, a word that comes directly from the Jung's book 'Der Individuationsprozess.' Got to love German Language. With us people, especially in the Western World, the idea of a consciousness that encompasses the universe as well as us people, can sometimes produce psychic upset which can lead to delusional as well as unfortunate behaviors.