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This is stupid philosophy (unreflective)

Seriously, I  just recognized that this is a philosophy of stupid, unreflective, in the sense of being without thought.  It is but not brainless; rather it’s a philosophy of pre-cognition.

The news today seems to suggest it is timely, particularly characteristic of this time and place – the US  July 4, 2019 – but I’m not thinking about poor thinking, thinking that is illogical and even cruel.  I actually experience a deep connection with the divine when I move into this space; it might be what Buddhism refers to as no-self, but that requires serious discipline and what I’m talking about may be caused simply by a neurological condition, or death. This or my exerience, as someone with epilepsy, if it occurs as a seizure or following a seizure. Whatever… that is not the point.  The point is, we live in the pre-cognition and then process it, as a thought, a brain activity of neurons firing and memories forming, and amazing smart ideas.  Yet those are all in the future when we’re actually just there, before all this thinking and perceiving occurs, and then it’s all memory.

There is our being that is not partaking in our narrative, our beginning, middle and end that is characteristic of this brain activity and cognition and history and anticipation.  Both memory and hope and even the thought of our presence we make up, surmise – we think all that and to think is to create a narrative, a build a structure.

Before we can do that we have to be here, which is not to suggest some idealist being.  We might – we certainly seem to – have a body.  I’m not disputing that this is biological, at least for us, and ontological for, say, a rock or a black hole.

Before we can think, create a mental image, plan an action or even not plan, even simply to breathe because our body tends to inhale what it needs oxygen, before we do anything or think of doing anything, or think and do nothing, we are.  And that presence that makes thinking about it, experiencing it as cognition, first of all just is; it is without thought, without knowing or even not knowing in the sense of having the capacity and not meeting it.  It simply, before and beyond the structure of time and time consciousness, is.

Then the neurons fire.  Then perception happens, as part of a process, a flow.   We perceive the flow.  We can’t perceive the present moment that constitutes a moment in the flow, though the flow is constituted by such moments.  The brilliant thoughts flow.  The present moment, our stupid self just is present.

It’s July 4th and I’m in the United States ready for fireworks and reflecting on democracy and how the present moments are all profoundly equal in the sense that all of us have a life that is really infinite apart from our place in history, of infinite value.  My infinity is no lesser or greater than yours,  no infinity measurably better or worse than another.  We value a human life, perhaps, more than an amoeba’s just because we are human, but really…. perhaps that’s just a bias.  A judgment.  Not beside the point, but beside the point I’m making here.  The flow that is constituted by a whole series of moments, before being actualized as present but past before it can be cognized, I need to turn my attention to next.  I just want to stress – that’s what is perceived.  What is lived is simply that presence with its infinite … I can’t say infinite dimension because that’s a contradiction.   It doesn’t have dimensions, which returns us to the narrative.  But I want to go there anyway, next.

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TRY THIS Chapter One begins…

The existence of the image, not its actual existence if it makes sense to speak of the existence of a black hole, proves the point:  We extract a narrative structure out of our own being, our physicality, our mortality and it’s given a name:  Is.

For mortals this is has a narrative structure:  We have a beginning, a middle, an end.  We are born, we live, we die.  There’s nothing ultimately true about that, other than our being mortal, but not really mortal.  We are more like Jesus.  Death has no dominion, except over that particular manifestation of our is-ness at the moment of death.  I don’t want to diminish that sense of dead is-ness.  I’ve been there, touched enough dying and dead people to know that it’s profound.  It’s just that it is a profound moment in a much larger story, some of which will be told at a subsequent funeral perhaps, or an expression of that chiseled onto a gravestone.  Still, life goes on.

Rocks might not have a narrative structure.  A black hole is all about not having a narrative structure.  And by perceiving it now as a photograph we confound our own nature and somehow that confirms everything.  Well, not really.

Back to the image.  It only comes into being because people in several different places put their data together and there you have it.

Click here:  First black hole image: How to watch …

sea.mashable.com

And here:

Detected Gravitational Waves …

sciencealert.com

And here:

Living Near a Supermassive Black Hole …

blogs.scientificamerican.com

And here:

Imaging a Black Hole …

wired.com

 

The supermassive black hole (big even by black-hole standards).

It was there all along, but we didn’t know about it.  Then we knew about it.  Now we ‘see’ it.  Well, not really.

(Is it hubris to say ‘we’ here, claiming some identity with the geniuses that figured out how to make this image, this proof of Einstein’s theories and of Steven Hawking’s theories, all that math – to the extent that I’m making some personal claim here to their knowledge I’m sorry?  I can barely tally up the bills to keep my bank account intact, to keep my checks from bouncing; I make no claims, just a kind of noticing.)

The image is not of one’s seeing.  No one person ‘saw’ the black hold and took a picture of it.  Rather, its a collaborative exercise of many people necessarily at some distance from each other, collective and accumulating the data that created one image of something very far away, that in itself is just the outer ring of its own timelessness.

What am I getting at?  That this is not a thing at all, this black hole or even the image of a black hole.  It is a sum of its many equations and projections that coalesce that we can knowledge, or knowing, or “This is it!”

Except, perhaps, stillness.  Unmediated.  Stillness.

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Kenny in sonnet form; Absent Reality

When I defended my PhD dissertation, one of the readers suggested it read like haiku, a very long haiku at nearly 300 pages.  So when asked this weekend to do a poetry reading I thought I’d take up the challenge, but rather aim for the sonnet form.  Try this:

 

Absent Reality

I.

Click your wine glass, ring a bell – any sound at all

will resound.

First you anticipate the sound.

You are going to make a sound; it is not sounding yet.

 

Then there is the sound you’ve made, present,

Seemingly present, but even as you hear the sound

Synapses firing, it takes a nanosecond

And the reverberations – past tense

 

when your brain registers the vibrations.

Gone.

 

II.

Everything we call ‘now’ is history  —

our personal and communal idea, a measured sequence:

we do indeed measure it.

It rules our days, how we schedule our work flow,

 

plan vacations, anticipate an encounter with our beloved

or remember last night with said beloved,

or our childhood.

We vaguely, reluctantly acknowledge it’s a story we’ve made up.

 

It might not have even happened.

We could make something else up.

 

III.

We could organize our lives according to the speed that our hair grows,

or by the sun, to shift with the seasons

as it generally, in fact, does

and we generally, in fact, do.

 

We hold these contradictory facts as true at the same time:

every day is twenty-four hours yet days are longer

in summer than in winter in the northern hemisphere,

the opposite in the south.

 

You might protest, “but this is just a confusion of the term ‘day’, semantics”

To which I reply, “exactly.”

 

IV.

So what about Kenny?

This two-D animated character created in 3-D – digitally –

Always was just flickering pixels, code,

Never drawn as we think of drawing, never pen to paper

 

That’s an after-effect,

a look that we call Kenny

who dies in one episode just to live again

next week, no explanation

 

this quirky little guy discloses contradictory facts we hold

with little difficulty in our four dimensions, fifth dimension:

 

v.

Life goes on, death is not so final.

Indeed, death might not much matter.

So much for time’s arrow;

it can be dismissed as a cartoon figure.

 

A black hole, a photograph.

You breathe, I breathe.  You go on and on

I go on and on and on.

Kenny, just flickering pixels, goes on and on.

 

You might protest, “Parker and Stone just made that shit up”

To which I might reply:  Exactly.

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And now this…

When I began a phenomenological investigation of digital media Kenny from South Park was my muse and talisman, a stress ball someone gave me that sat on my desk, still does.  The character that died in nearly every episode, speaks to me.  Ah, Kenny, how do I love you?  Let me count the ways:

First, for someone who loves movies, particularly animated movies, Kenny charms me.  For someone for whom the French expression for orgasm, petit mort (little death), rings true, Kenny’s little deaths resonate.  For someone with epilepsy and more than one near-death-episodes under my belt: Kenny, I can relate.

Yet the relationship between Kenny’s character and lived life is not merely personal.  Kenny’s storyline represents a truth revealed in digital media as a medium itself.  Timely. Just as digital media was coming online, a character created in 3D animation, then reduced to 2D for aesthetic appeal, captures a metaphysical truth revealed by the medium:  reality is gapped.  Pixilated.

It’s not obvious to biological beings, as it might be to a rock if a rock has consciousness, and might reflect on how rocks don’t necessarily experience consciousness as having a narrative structure.  They aren’t born, live, then die.  They don’t get up, do their day, and sleep.  However, lived life for biological beings, does have a narrative structure.  We are all about beginnings, middles and ends.    We sit down to eat, we eat, and then we finish our meal.  We’re born, live,  and then die.

It’s easy to miss the deeper structure of our own experience, that is infinite. Time really is relative, and the deep structure of the universe might not be contained within a narrative structure.

And now, there’s this:

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Picking up a pen, taking a walk, and the image of a black hole

As Christians move toward Holy Week –  the celebration of the last supper, foot washing, bread and wine turned to body and blood – my own attention turns to the incarnate, away from infinity to the here and now.  I contend that, yes, it’s just-passed as Edmond Husserl pointed out.  Yet it’s what we have, who we are, very bodily creatures that laugh and eat and cry with bones that break.

The very bodily existence that is ours is our way to a consciousness that we also have infinite life.

The way I got there is not just thinking about Jesus; I also eat the bread, drink the wine, and in some very real way (it’s talked about as ‘transubstantiation’) this is Jesus.

It’s the petit mort, the little death as the French refer to an orgasm, that is as good as it gets.  It is truth, if not ultimate truth.  Incarnate.

It can also be as bad as it is because it can be so good and sometimes isn’t.  The churches get packed on Good Friday.  Sometimes church attendance is greater on Good Friday than on Easter, and I guess it’s small wonder.  It’s not a stretch for many people to believe we’d kill an innocent, and in a courageous death (because surely Jesus could have avoided the cross, could have got away) we stand there stripped, ourselves, naked.  Feeling sad, vulnerable and stupid.

So when I take a walk, when I pick up a pen instead of my laptop, new ideas come and old memories float through my mind.  This is not true every week, but it is certainly Holy Week.

And as I prepare, there’s this.

The first-ever image of a black hole, captured with the planetwide virtual array called the Event Horizon Telescope

 

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Try this: To decry academic philosophy is not to reject the practice of philosophic inquiry

I’m just trying to situate these ideas, that Kenny dies in so many episodes, and then with no explanation appear again, and that this is sensible enough.  Odd, but hey, it’s worked for 24 seasons, God knows how many episodes.  I’m trying to make this okay for Kant, in light of Kant’s sublime, or Hume or…

It might work  But that’s beside the point.  My real concern is that this works for me, and so, why?  If not, why not?  And for you the audience, me as part of that audience, it’s not only okay, it delights us enough that we continue watching.  For years.  Or at least enough of us are delighted that the series continues and Kenny isn’t written out of it.  Shit, he’s in his 30s.  I keep comparing him to Jesus but really, at this point, Kenny’s lived longer if you think of him as not resurrected, just keeping on keeping on.  That’s different than Jesus, the risen Jesus.

Irrespective of what Kant, or Husserl, or Heidegger have to say about it.  And, of course, they are all long dead.  They don’t have Kenny’s superpowers.

Does it make sense to us?  That’s the only question that matters really, at first.  It seems to, yes, it seems to make sense to us.  But do I love this work, this life?  That leaves me silent, and that’s a good thing.

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A Problem in Philosophy

You so do not want to know what I’m reading…

It came to me as a question while reading Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness: why is this so correct and exact and yet not convincing?  Why do I need more than a philosophically sound argument, even one that I might judge to be correct in all its truth claims (even if it isn’t).

The issue may be one of practice, and philosophy is, in fact, a practice.  Phenomenology, beginning with the phenomenological reduction, is a precise practice.  It is satisfying and has led me to the more ancient practice of meditation, and seems almost indistinguishable from some meditative practices.

So this is not an argument supporting “the death of philosophy”.  I’m just arguing for philosophic practice to be one of embodiment and community, and the engaged philosopher.  There is indeed a philosophic community.  It is caricatured as a community of navel-gazers; that is how it is often characterized and ridiculed.  Maybe indeed the caricature needs to be appreciated for what it does, as any caricature does:  it exaggerates the actual traits that characterize the individual or the community.

The lack of extension, beyond oneself as an individual philosophizing and as a community that philosophizes, is what strikes me as problematic.  Yet here, with respect to time consciousness, we have a moment of intersection between physical sciences, theoretical physics, and neuroscience with philosophy.

Where can we meet and break bread together?

Well, yes, in movies.  See Babette’s Feast.

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Try this: Mind the gap in the code

 

 

Rene Descartes’ argument known as the cogito (“I think, therefore I am”, 1637) was updated as “the brain in a vat” argument.  The gist of Descarte’s argument is that the subject’s knowledge of their existence is certain (phrased famously as “I think therefore I am”) because the “I” couldn’t think unless the “I” exists.

The argument was that personal reflection can lead to certainty, yet the updated argument calls the quality of existence into question.  If the subject was merely a brain sustained in a vat and receiving stimulation/information electronically directly as brain stimulation, yes, it exists and knows of its existence.  However, subject wouldn’t know that this information was direct knowledge of experience or mere data it’s being fed. The brain suspended in the vat could receive data of, say, a hot stove being touched by the subject’s hand.  That data would be interpreted as a direct experience, even if there was no such stove and no such hand.  Still, logically there must be a brain.

These experiences are time-based, both the imagined brain and Descartes’ original subject. It would take a very short time, a fraction of a second, for the data to be received.  That would be in time; it would take time, so data of the present moment would not be available until it was just-past.  That is Edmond Husserl’s brilliant insight. There would be no data of the present moment processed in the present moment.

We do, though, logically and necessarily exist in that present moment, if we are indeed able to anticipate an experience and process an experience:  future and past, though just-past.

There’s a hole in our knowledge of our experience, that hole being our direct experience of the moment in which we actually experience it.  I refer to it as a hole, which has measurable dimensions, when in fact there are no dimensions to the present moment because they are not empirically known, i.e. observable.

The gapped quality of data is precisely what is captured by digital media.  There is information, in the form of code, that relates to pixilated images and, gapped, similar to the way an alphabet relates to the sound of a word.  It’s also gapped, similar to our actual existence, though different than our perceived experience.  The gap is the logically known but impossible to measure present moment, presence.  Lacking a narrative structure, the present is, then, infinite.

My approach here is phenomenological – try to say that quickly – but here is the difficulty: the phenomenological description of the present moment is that of absence; it is past.  There is an ‘experience’ in the classical sense of that word that entails consciousness but by the time it is experienced it is just-past because the experience itself is time-based and it takes some time to register that experience in the brain.

It is rather an experience of absence to the present then, without structure, as we’ve described it above.  That is what we might be certain about, but certain about what?  Without the internal structure of narrative time there is an edge, being anticipation of a future moment and the just-past moment presented to consciousness as “now”.  However, as a presence in time it is not actually now by the time it is registered to consciousness.  It’s experienced as now but, in fact, is just past.  That’s Husserl’s story and I can’t see how it’s not a clear description of our experience.

Here we are:  Our being is in the present that is without structure, outside of a narrative, of experienced time consciousness.

Our experience of digital media is similar.  It certainly seems seamless enough but code is just that: coded with gaps between each piece of the code, that produces pixels with empty space between each pixel.  It can be wondrously manipulated, and manipulates us to experience this as a seamless experience, when in fact it is gapped.  Mind the gap.

Without structure, between each pixel, each piece of code, the gap replicates each moment where we may be conscious but, without the structure of the narrative elements of past and future, always also there in the present infinite space.

The abundance of movies about time travel, gapped reality, make-believe universes where games are played out — what is in the present moment comes into being and disappears — suggests we know at some level that digital media is playing with us, playing with our sense of consciousness, as we play.

And our growing sense that we are spiritual (open, infinite) if not religious (embedded in a tradition, and institutions) mirrors this coded reality.

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Jesus and Kenny in Infinity

There’s the claim in the Book of Revelation, written perhaps seventy years after Jesus’ brief earthly life and early death, that puts his life in the context of the eternal and ongoing creation.  The creation is historical, yet infinite:

I am making the whole of creation new. . . . It will come true. . . . It is already done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. —Revelation 21:5-6

The Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are one and the same.

Sometimes a reference to Jesus Christ annoys me, as if Christ was Jesus’ last name replacing the designation “of Nazareth”.   Naming the town where they beckon was the custom, emphasizing a point of origin that is geographic, political, earthly and earthbound. Replacing “of Nazareth” with “Christ” might undermine our sense of Jesus’ as truly human, coming from a specific small town in a specific historical era.

And yet, that might be the point I miss.  The very same Jesus in history is for all time, and beyond time in the historical sense.  It doesn’t negate Jesus’ historical being, but places it in the very same context that I’m trying to comprehend as infinite.  Jesus’ revelation:  Our physical being is one and the same as our infinite being.

Like Kenny, but more like Jesus, we don’t die because we cannot die.

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After effects – an analysis of ­mediated experience and time

I’m writing this, and indeed even when I’m not writing I’m living just beneath the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.  I see its lights on the hill from where I sit tapping on my keyboard.  There people like Einstein, Keppler and Hawkins are revered and their theories modeled.  I can catch a bus and be up to the observatory in a half hour.  As well as the equipment to observe the moon and galaxies, there are models of these bodies up there.  Every high school student who attends a public school in Los Angeles will visit the Griffith Observatory.  It is part of their science curriculum, a must-visit-in-order-to-graduate sort of event unless, of course, they are sick on the day of this class trip.  Students need to explore what’s out there.  I love this, all of it, the existence of the Observatory, all that it contains, but mostly the hiking trails up and around it, the bird sanctuary that is still in ruins from a fire, the path that takes one to the Hollywood sign.

In his extraordinary work, A Brief History of Time, Steven Hawkins explains to ordinary people how two projects in physics have come to disparate and incompatible conclusions that he tried to resolve:  “The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe, that is, the structure on scales from only a few miles to as large as a million million million million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, deals with phenomena on extremely small scales, such as a millionth of a millionth of an inch. Unfortunately, however, these two theories are known to be inconsistent with each other – they cannot both be correct.” (Hawkins, p.8) He was attempting to bring the two investigations together, because there aren’t two separate universes, that of the very big and very small.

Different methods

How it relates to this study of time consciousness is something else again; not an investigation of what is but how we experience what is, and even what isn’t, because our imaginary experiences are still experiences.  We needn’t go anywhere to explore this; no class trip is required.  I’ve been at it all day and haven’t left my apartment, though now when I look up at the lights on the Griffith Observatory I wish I’d made the trip, taken a hike.  Even monks need to engage in walking meditations.  Our bodies as inseparable from consciousness.  We’ll come back to this when we consider media.

However, now all one has to do is look very closely at one’s own experience, bring it to consciousness. The investigations of the very big and very small, and our consciousness of time should be consistent.  Otherwise, either the science is wrong or our analysis of our experience is twisted.  Given the brilliant minds at work in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics, our analysis being twisted is most likely if they do diverge.  But perhaps they won’t.  We should be anticipating insight, not failure, at the outset.

Mind the gap

When I analyze my own consciousness of time, I recognize that time consciousness is gapped even if there is no consciousness of the gap.  In the case of media and stories, even the story of how we spent the last hour or millennium, and how we’re going to spend the next, there are gaps.  The narrative, one thing following another, is not how we experience the present.  We can’t even be conscious of the present because as soon as we call it to consciousness, it is past.  That’s the gap, the present, in which we of course live but can’t bring to consciousness.  We can only be present to it.

If this is merely a limitation of our human minds, so be it, but there is this apparent contradiction between the flow of events and the gapped quality of consciousness that we can analyze carefully.  It is also true of various media.  Between every note played in music is silence, and between every symbol in computer code is no-code.  The breaks symbolize something other than the code, and while the overall code has a beginning, middle, and end, it is riddled with no-code.  In every sentence there are words and with every word phonemes, and between phonemes… gaps. Silence.

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