Saving the materialists

[AshvinP]

That's fine, Federica, let's pause it. I hope one day you will also review some of these threads and take notice of the patterns and trends revealed, and then you will see it's never just about other people and their struggles. I would hope anyone pursuing the introspective path would intuitively know that their comments also reflect upon the perspective from which they were issued, and that this phenomenological reality doesn't need to be restated on every thread. One of the first things we should learn on this path is how deeply the materialist, reductionist, externalizing, etc., tendencies are embedded in our souls as attractors of our imaginative states.

As I said before, it's also worrisome that you pass off your incremental rational approach onto Steiner, because that means either (a) you are fundamentally misunderstanding Steiner's indications, or (b) the approach you have in mind is practically the introspective approach, but for some reason you can't see that and thus keep speaking of two different approaches. You never addressed the fact that the recent quotes in question (from Steiner and Scaligero), which were supposed to help me see the 'other approach', were directly about the introspective approach, i.e., PoF.

I have to notice that you have a hard time “inhabiting the other person’s perspective”. Instead, you prefer to give my words little twists of deformation. As I point these out, you conveniently let them fall, focusing on giving another twist somewhere else. Have you thought about recursively incorporating this tendency in your process? If you did, you could stop twisting my words to make them support your preconceived ideas. I quoted Scaligero to remind that, for him too, PoF starts from a step by step intellectual approach, to then open the way to ascension to the spiritual. PoF goes east first, and then north. It was the only way possible at that point. Anthroposophy was not born when PoF came to life. And this initial appeal to the intellect had to be a step by step progression, as per Steiners own words (a suspicious sign of reductionism, as you have called it, when I used the same expression in the same sense, before I knew about this lecture which, ironically, you pointed to):

if we start from the directly perceptible existence and from the processing that the human mind undertakes with it, we arrive at the level that can be described as the life and activity of the cognitive subject in the realm of the thought-plan. But then further progress is possible only if, from the other side, from the side opposite to the sense-perceptible existence, there comes the fertilization through those means which are presented in this book, 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. In the literature with which I have tried to point to these things step by step — first as prepared by my previous writings, summarized in my “Philosophy of Freedom”— you will find a path that can be taken from external sense perception, from the external processing of the material of existence, up to the realm of thought.

At this point I can practically remote view your next post. No supersensible faculties required here. Unless you think twice?

Federica, I think we should bookmark this post as an example of how PoF is being fundamentally misunderstood and/or misconstrued. The problem is, there is no easy way for me to illustrate this to you without you feeling insulted, becoming defensive, and eventually acting like you never wrote the words above, or that they meant something completely different from what they seem to mean (and thus I am twisting your words). I will have to think more about a fruitful way forward.

For now, I will just say that PoF is a step-by-step bridge in exactly the same way as the phenomenological essays here, which indeed initially appeal to the intellect and its familiar movements, such that they can be leveraged introspectively. We don't need to speculate on what Steiner meant by "step by step", or what Scaligero meant, because we have plenty of embodied examples right here on the forum. What we find in the phenomenological essays is not at all the 'exact opposite' of the introspective approach, or 'going first east and then north', unless by 'exact opposite' and 'going east' we mean... the introspective approach.

[Federica]

That's fine, Federica, let's pause it. I hope one day you will also review some of these threads and take notice of the patterns and trends revealed, and then you will see it's never just about other people and their struggles. I would hope anyone pursuing the introspective path would intuitively know that their comments also reflect upon the perspective from which they were issued, and that this phenomenological reality doesn't need to be restated on every thread. One of the first things we should learn on this path is how deeply the materialist, reductionist, externalizing, etc., tendencies are embedded in our souls as attractors of our imaginative states.

As I said before, it's also worrisome that you pass off your incremental rational approach onto Steiner, because that means either (a) you are fundamentally misunderstanding Steiner's indications, or (b) the approach you have in mind is practically the introspective approach, but for some reason you can't see that and thus keep speaking of two different approaches. You never addressed the fact that the recent quotes in question (from Steiner and Scaligero), which were supposed to help me see the 'other approach', were directly about the introspective approach, i.e., PoF.

I have to notice that you have a hard time “inhabiting the other person’s perspective”. Instead, you prefer to give my words little twists of deformation. As I point these out, you conveniently let them fall, focusing on giving another twist somewhere else. Have you thought about recursively incorporating this tendency in your process? If you did, you could stop twisting my words to make them support your preconceived ideas. I quoted Scaligero to remind that, for him too, PoF starts from a step by step intellectual approach, to then open the way to ascension to the spiritual. PoF goes east first, and then north. It was the only way possible at that point. Anthroposophy was not born when PoF came to life. And this initial appeal to the intellect had to be a step by step progression, as per Steiners own words (a suspicious sign of reductionism, as you have called it, when I used the same expression in the same sense, before I knew about this lecture which, ironically, you pointed to):

if we start from the directly perceptible existence and from the processing that the human mind undertakes with it, we arrive at the level that can be described as the life and activity of the cognitive subject in the realm of the thought-plan. But then further progress is possible only if, from the other side, from the side opposite to the sense-perceptible existence, there comes the fertilization through those means which are presented in this book, 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. In the literature with which I have tried to point to these things step by step — first as prepared by my previous writings, summarized in my “Philosophy of Freedom”— you will find a path that can be taken from external sense perception, from the external processing of the material of existence, up to the realm of thought.

At this point I can practically remote view your next post. No supersensible faculties required here. Unless you think twice?

Federica, I think we should bookmark this post as an example of how PoF is being fundamentally misunderstood and/or misconstrued. The problem is, there is no easy way for me to illustrate this to you without you feeling insulted, becoming defensive, and eventually acting like you never wrote the words above, or that they meant something completely different from what they seem to mean (and thus I am twisting your words). I will have to think more about a fruitful way forward.

Indeed, you didn't think twice, and so we are left, in this short paragraph, with a clear case of fill in the blanks. I agree, this post should be bookmarked as a remarkable example. I hope one day you will review this thread, take notice of the patterns, and fill in the blanks.

[AshvinP]

Let's have a quick refresher on PoF in Steiner's own words, for anyone interested in strengthening their orientation to the phenomenological path. The first half (or even the first few chapters) of PoF does not by any means go 'east to north' with the "third-person rationalization the human mind is so ambiguated with". It jumps into phenomenology-introspection right from the outset (as does GA 2-3). Indeed, Steiner felt the need to say this explicitly in the 1918 preface because so many souls had approached it with the momentum of their default intellectual habits:

The view to which we here refer is one which, once gained, is capable of becoming part and parcel of the very life of the soul itself. The answer given to the two problems will not be of the purely theoretical sort which, once mastered, may be carried about as a conviction preserved by memory. Such an answer would, for the whole manner of thinking on which this book is based, be no real answer at all. The book will not give a ready-made self-contained answer of this sort, but will point to a field of experience in which man's inner soul activity supplies a living answer to these questions at every moment that he needs one. Whoever has once discovered the region of the soul where these questions unfold, will find that the very contemplation of this region gives him all that he needs for the solution of the two problems. With the knowledge thus acquired, he may then, as desire or destiny impels him, adventure further into the breadths and depths of this enigmatical life of ours. Thus it would appear that a kind of knowledge which proves its justification and validity by its own inner life as well as by the kinship of its own life with the whole life of the human soul, does in fact exist.

Elsewhere, as amply demonstrated on this thread, Steiner reinforced this point in many different ways. Just to quote a few passages:

The essential thing would be to change the habit of reading books like my Philosophy of Freedom with the mental attitude one has toward other philosophical treatises. The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things. If this were done, one would realize that such an approach lifts one's consciousness out of the earth into another world, and that one derives from it the kind of inner assurance that makes it possible to speak with conviction about the results of spiritual research.
...
Now what kind of reader approach did The Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader, as he read, to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really just like waking up out of sleep in the morning.
...
The anthroposophically oriented expositions of the years that followed are actually all just statements of matters to which I called attention at the time of writing my Philosophy of Freedom. I pointed out that there are paths the soul can follow to the development of a thinking that is not summed up in an intellectual piecing together of a picture of the world, but instead goes on to lift itself in inner vision to an experiencing of the spirit. I felt impelled to describe what it is one sees on looking into the spiritual world.
...
I conceived The Philosophy of Freedom in the 'eighties, and wrote it down in the early 'nineties, and I can report that I found no understanding for it at all among those people whose job it really was at the time to give at least some attention to the book's major premise. The reason was namely that people—even so-called thinking people of the present—are really unable to do more than reflect the physical world in their thinking.

We could go on and on with more such quotes. Steiner could not possibly get any clearer on the introspective approach toward PoF that is needed from the outset, from the very first pages.

[AshvinP]

I will have to think more about a fruitful way forward.

Ok, so I was honestly going to let this discussion subside for a while, but then I was doing a periodic review and came across a series of comments from about a year ago that are almost an exact replica of the recent discussion on this thread. Many parts of the discussion from last year had really slipped my mind, and it's quite remarkable how much of it tracks the debate of whether it is ever a fruitful strategy to approach spiritual science with an 'east to north' intellectual approach in preparation for the 'real introspective deal'. Cleric and I were both stressing how 'rational understanding' or 'reasoned thinking' etc., as used by Steiner (and as can be confirmed through our own experience), is practically synonymous with an introspective approach bordering on meditation (or at least requiring an imaginative effort born from a cognitive reorientation of perspective).

I don't want to rehash the specific points of either discussion. Rather, I want to point toward where it left off and see if there is any potential way forward. At one point, you wrote:

But I doubt that Steiner means study-meditation when he refers to the "actual study" of spiritual science that must precede clairvoyance.

As you (Cleric) point out, "true study of spiritual science means to take a communicated experience and try to seek the real inner configuration from which the description should be experienced as reality". But this equally describes how attaining clairvoyance through experiential efforts goes about. Then, what is the difference between “actual study” of spiritual science and “endless efforts” to attain head-clairvoyance, justifying that Steiner says it can't be emphasized enough that the former "must precede" the latter? that the former is a "factor" in the development of the latter? What logical sense would that make if he were meaning that the two are one and the same thing?

There was an additional illustration about how "we can only advance by gradually shifting and rotating the triangles of our depth being", and then you wrote:

So this is the part that confronts me with difficulties. Now, I still understand the effortful attunement in 3/. I remember the pendulum metaphor for attunement you have given somewhere else, which is a more vivid image for me. Because I feel I have an experience of such attunement-in-progress, when for example I contemplate in my thoughts Raphael’s Saint Sebastian. Then, I really sense how I only grasp some all-round meaning captured in the expression, in pendulum-like moments. On the other hand, I admit I have to work more on the “no real disconnect between reasoned thinking and deeper meditation” and maybe I’m translating this lack into the lectures, I don’t know. For me, reasoned thinking and meditation still feel like distincts chapters of the daily conscious flow, distinct sets of gestures to will. I believe I get what “thinking with warmth” means - it means making the ‘rotating’ effort to descend into the experience, for example of Saturn existence - but at the same time I am very unable to do that ‘casually’, to do that at pace, contextually while listening to a lecture description of the planetary conditions, for example. I would be exhausted after a short while.

I tend to consider these rotating efforts of thinking with, say, warmth, as something to attempt under meditative conditions, in calmness, away from sensory stimuli, etcetera. It’s like the cylinders of a car engine. I entirely lack the power to keep this efforts going at the same time as I read/listen to a lecture! And so the question arises: should I stop reading/listening and wait until I can warmth-think that description of the Saturn condition, before moving to the next sentence??

My current answer is: NO! It’s completely unrealistic! I think it’s better to move on through the descriptions, and get a general sense of human evolution through those planetary conditions, even if it means that one has to slide through most of it intellectually. Because the value of gaining that vista will materialize later on, and it will prove itself precious. It reminds me of being taught piano for years, as a very young child, without ever being allowed to play any melody, only to solmizate and play exercises and scales. Until one day I saw myself doing the inconceivable act of throwing the musical score against the wall. I can still see the score lying on the floor, torn apart diagonally from its middle.

And this brings us back to the question of how Steiner meant to communicate the aims and tasks of spiritual science to his audiences. I always put myself ideally in the audience when I read a lecture, and try to hear the spoken words from that place, rather than reading the words and sentences as if they had been written for that purpose by the author. And, to be honest, I have to say I am still not convinced that Steiner was encouraging his audience to study-mediate in real time, when listening to the descriptions of spiritual science. That would have been unrealistic! I can’t convince myself he was telling that diverse audience of old and new members of the Society to somehow make all the effortful rotations click on the go (!) or otherwise to slowly read lecture-transcripts afterwards (for those who might have had the luxury to have access to such material for that purpose) and only move to the next sentence after having diligently thought the ideas through with light, or warmth, or else, and only after having succeeded at clicking the rotations into place along the ideal inner vector, one by one.

Rather, I think he knew that, at that pace, people would have ended up throwing the transcript against the wall, or, more likely, letting it collect dust on a bookshelf, which is why he said that “intellectual” understanding of spiritual science was not at all meaningless, and certainly more useful than easy gut-clairvoyance. And that’s why he also said that, when one gets an intellectual (abstract, as you would say) understanding of spiritual science, at least one has it, in some way - like when one is named in a testament but doesn’t yet know it, to use Steiner’s metaphor. Then he has the wealth, even if he’s not conscious of it. So I may be wrong, but at this point, I still believe he acknowledged that the reasoned thinking you speak of, embedded in the same fluid as deeper meditation, was largely disconnected from the reality of his audience, realistically inaccessible, and therefore he adapted his teachings accordingly, so that everyone would find reflected in the teachings their own present level of thinking power.

As we can see, at least a year ago, all of this remained specific to your perspective and circumstances, and not only how some hypothetical materialists would have to deal with the spiritual path. Is anything expressed above still a difficulty for you? Cleric followed with a response involving the intellectual voice as encoding of full body imagination and how we inevitably lapse into the doll-mode without introspection of this process, and how this positively prevents a deeper orientation to the inner states from which the spiritual scientific facts are communicated. But there wasn't much follow-up from there or specifically related to the issues expressed above.

[Cleric]

Maybe it can help if we distinguish that there are two different bridges that are spoken of here.

One is the bridge that acquaints a person with some of the practical consequences of SS. To make this example more explicit and sharply outlined, we can imagine that someone presents us with alien technology. The 'bridge' here pertains to the fact that when applied, the technology has some points of contact with what a normal person is familiar with from everyday life. Such are things as diseases, food production, energy production, and so on. Then, when the person becomes familiar with the alien tech, they say, "Hm.. that's interesting. It's not something speculative, it really intersects with what constitutes reality for me, even though I don't understand how it works. Maybe in the future it will even be shown that everything can be explained with completely ordinary materialistic concepts, and there's no need to acquire some higher-dimensional alien consciousness." (This last sentence is significant because it shows how even though one may enjoy the fruits of the alien tech, they may secretly doubt that there's anything more than mass/energy in motion. Speaking of families, my brother maintains such a position. He still believes that concepts like etheric body, astral body, etc., are only a working model that, in the long run, will be shown to be completely equivalent to what science describes in another way. IOW, SS is just being too poetic about the hard facts of reality, and unnecessarily clothes the World process in artistic expressions like spirits, while the latter can be equivalently and more neutrally referred to as currents of electricity, for example.)

The second bridge is what indeed leads us to recognize our ordinary intellectual life to be something akin to a picture-in-picture mode in respect to the more encompassing World flow within which our personal is concentrically embedded. The crucial thing is that in our age we are at a stage where the only viable bridge is to address the matters directly. In a sense, we are already in the water. If we try to build bridges by speaking in parables about wetness, we're actually only diverting attention from what is already imminent in the present moment.

What we should comprehend clearly is that even though we continuously speak through metaphors and analogies, this is not because we're trying to describe something in a galaxy far away, that is inaccessible to the intellect. And this is not unique to higher cognition. Even our ordinary speech is metaphorical in a sense. When someone says "I feel sad", we can only comprehend this if we can evoke the inner soul state which expresses itself in the verbal gestures. And this is true even for sensory descriptions. For a blind person, the descriptions of visual perceptions are like parables. It is only because we so effortlessly relate to the words describing everyday experiences that they feel literal. In the same way, I think we can already feel this to an extent in between us - the way we speak about flows, state space, intuitive steering, and so on, also comes to symbolize something experientially literal. In other words, the language becomes literal as the words begin to evoke in us concrete inner experiences (these are the literal part).

So with that said, the only viable bridge available for the intellect to know its deeper reality is to tackle the problem head-on. We simply have to exert ourselves and try to feel our precipitating mental images as having something to do with more intimate intuitive steering of becoming. There's nothing we can do to 'bridge this more'. This doesn't mean that we cannot speak of these things in step-by-step manner, through the various analogies and metaphors, but these no longer serve to make a theoretical mental picture but are actual guidelines for entering the new mode.

To make an even more explicit comparison, it is as if our arm is on the table and we only slightly move our fingers to scribble symbols with a pencil. Then someone helps us scribble: "The hand and even the whole arm can be lifted". Until we have experienced this, it sounds only like a parable. But it speaks about literal reality. And in fact, if we start to scribble bridges that are supposed to make things more accessible to our mental scribble-symbols life, we only start to distance ourselves from the goal. The bridge takes us farther, not closer. The only viable bridges are those that scribble more precise instructions about how to lift our arm.

One may say, "I'm not ready to lift my arm yet. I need more scribbles." And this is fine, but we should at least aim for those scribbles that serve as practical guides. In other words, only those scribbles are useful which help us to at least imaginatively rehearse the lifting of the arm. So, there should be no two different sciences: one that only scribbles about the eventual arm movements and another that describes how to move in practice. These two fuse together. The descriptions of SS are the descriptions of the inner experience of arm movement - what constraints it and what lawfulness it encounters.

The first kind of bridge, undoubtedly may spark an interest in the second. And it is also the case that for some people the second is unlikely to come to focus in this lifetime. Then it may still be better if they could at least utilize some of the alien tech, even though it will be done primarily because of egoistic impulses (in some cases it may even be better to stay away). But we should not delude ourselves that in our age we still need roundabout bridges to living reality. The only viable bridge to the latter is to speak directly and literally (even if in the above metaphorical-literal sense) about what it takes to approach the experience.

[Federica]

Yes, Cleric, thanks. In other words, the first is what I have referred to as a bridge. The second is about learning (or teaching, guiding through,...) the real, direct practice of introspection - its phenomenology. For my part I have just been calling the latter a path, rather than a bridge: as you say, we are already in the water.

[AshvinP]

Maybe it can help if we distinguish that there are two different bridges that are spoken of here.

One is the bridge that acquaints a person with some of the practical consequences of SS. To make this example more explicit and sharply outlined, we can imagine that someone presents us with alien technology. The 'bridge' here pertains to the fact that when applied, the technology has some points of contact with what a normal person is familiar with from everyday life. Such are things as diseases, food production, energy production, and so on. Then, when the person becomes familiar with the alien tech, they say, "Hm.. that's interesting. It's not something speculative, it really intersects with what constitutes reality for me, even though I don't understand how it works. Maybe in the future it will even be shown that everything can be explained with completely ordinary materialistic concepts, and there's no need to acquire some higher-dimensional alien consciousness." (This last sentence is significant because it shows how even though one may enjoy the fruits of the alien tech, they may secretly doubt that there's anything more than mass/energy in motion. Speaking of families, my brother maintains such a position. He still believes that concepts like etheric body, astral body, etc., are only a working model that, in the long run, will be shown to be completely equivalent to what science describes in another way. IOW, SS is just being too poetic about the hard facts of reality, and unnecessarily clothes the World process in artistic expressions like spirits, while the latter can be equivalently and more neutrally referred to as currents of electricity, for example.)

Thanks, it helps to become clearer on the contours of this "bridge". In a certain sense, this is simply what materialistic culture conditions us to expect and pursue. If something can be shown to help make our lives more convenient, pleasurable, outwardly healthy, and so on, it is eagerly devoured up and we don't care too much from what direction it comes. It's all the same if people want to call it alien tech, the grace of spiritual beings, or what have you. This is also why 'spiritual' paths involving psychedelics are so popular (even among some Anthroposophists, like Segall), because it opens consciousness toward subtler aspects of its organization while providing immediately tangible benefits. As we have discussed, even these subtler etheric experiences can be logically understood as mass/energy in motion. It is quite a dangerous game when the spiritual impulse gets mixed up in this default conditioning that expects 'salvation' through new passively consumed technologies and corresponding experiences.

Jeff/FB takes a similar position as your brother (and, by the way, it's interesting that my brother has a very similar outlook on 'spiritual reality', i.e. as mere symbols for physical realities), as we saw when he referenced how the 'spiritual beings' spoken of in spiritual science could be practically synonymous with 'magnetic fields'. That is just one of many examples of how FB has taken decades of spiritual scientific 'study' and, through it, concluded that Steiner was merely representing certain familiar aspects of experience with spiritual terminology, which was explored by many other 19th-20th century thinkers from different perspectives and conditioning. So it seems that, more often than not, this "bridge" is a bridge to nowhere, at least in the current incarnation. It merely reinforces our default materialistic conditioning and may even lead us to refashion the details of spiritual science in its image.

[Federica]

As we can see, at least a year ago, all of this remained specific to your perspective and circumstances, and not only how some hypothetical materialists would have to deal with the spiritual path.

Ashvin, by the way, this is one example - among many others in this thread, but I'll let this suffice - of your small deformations in action, and inability to see things from the perspective of the other person. Speaking of families, I have said not once, but multiple times, that such materialists are not hypothetical, but real persons I deal with. Still you prefer to 'forget' that, because you can't resist trying to make your argument better, even by these means. There are a few other things you typically can't resist, as it shows in your posts. For my part, I don't have energy to invest in dealing with all that, with this type of discussions. I will possibly resume these, if opportunity arises, once you have integrated these tendencies in your inner process some more.

[Federica]

In the spirit of “saving the materialist” and under the impression of various lecture cycles, I have recently thought about the following question: couldn’t (earthly) thinking be initially presented as (in principle quantifiable) energy - in line with the definition of energy in physics? Perhaps the use of a familiar framework could help approach, even from a materialistic perspective, the realization that thinking must be alive in all reality.

I was about to post a few elaborations on that, but then I stumbled upon my limited understanding of both current natural science and Steiners, for example what Steiner says about the law of conservation of energy, which I guess I understand, but not fully as I would need. I have had a few initial thoughts on how to compound all this, but I wonder: is anyone aware whether this idea has been addressed already (which would seem very likely to me) that energy, as modern science has it, can be a starting point to build a sense for the pervasiveness of thinking, on the physical plane to start with?

I think that this attempt [to represent thinking as quantifiable energy] will simply keep us circling in the age-old metaphysics. Actually, for some time now I've been putting together a list of a few things that I presently see as key milestones for the reorientation of modern scientific thinking toward making it compatible with living experience.

We can ask the same question in pretty much the same way about the 'life energy' that guides the growth of the mineral body. And it is not as if this hasn't been attempted (for example with vitalism). The trouble is that in the end, from the perspective of physics, this only adds a suspicious layer on top of the measurable physical world, which practically serves no other role than filling that gaps of knowledge with something imagined. It's the same with thinking (and consciousness). The even greater trouble is that even if the physicist accepts to consider such an additional layer in his model of reality, this would only make the whole theoretical system even more convoluted.

We have spoken about this before, but to this day the most powerful transformation of thinking that I recognize is thinking in terms of a metamorphosing state. This is already what science is doing in a lot of fields anyway. What is missing is the shift in inner perspective - to understand that this state is actually the relative perspective of our inner experience and to include also the flow of our thinking there.

The key here is that we do not try to build a thought model of this state from various conceptual elements (physical energy, mental energy, etc.) Instead, we need to learn to be mindful of the real-time experience of the flow and closely observe how our inner activity feeds back through the experience.

Maybe it could be useful to make an analogy with pseudo forces in physics (like the Coriolis force).



Let's consider biological growth because it feels more pictorially approachable. Imagine that we get to choose the way the World state metamorphoses by steering the direction of the flow. We forget about all laws of nature for a while and imagine that the next World state state could be anything as long as we can find a way to bend the flow of metamorphosis in that way. For example, we can steer the metamorphosis toward states where the phenomenological pixels of our bodily experience crumble and fall apart or cohere and grow in a healthy way. From our perspective there are no 'forces'. There's a whole palette of potential next states, we simply intend certain direction. It's like steering toward what the next movie frame should be. From another perspective, however, it may seem as certain forces are at play, much like the Coriolis force that bend the ball's path. Then we look at the biological system and say "There are certain forces here that pull the biological material in the right way to sustain life." This could be the perspective of vitalism.

Of course, at our present human stage we do not get to steer the biological flow in such a direct way. But we can do that to our thinking flow to a much greater extent. And here the thinking flow is not to be taken as something fundamentally distinct from the World flow as a whole. For example, when we look at the following image (let's pretend it is a faithful scan of brain activity):



we make things difficult for us if we say "OK, so here's the material part with the neurons, then thought energy surges through it and activates the different parts." It's not that there could be no value in this way of speaking and thinking, but we should remember that in a sense this 'thought-energy' is like a Coriolis force. From our first-person flow, there's only the bending of the flow of mematorphosis. It's like saying "I'll steer toward a World state where I experience such mental images, which can only be such if the brain pixels are also such and such." In other words, the World state should always be thought of as something whole. Ultimately, when this holistic state is grasped in differentiated way and it seems that differentiated parts affect each other 'horizontally' through exchanges of forces, this can be considered a 'Coriolis view'. The origin of these forces can only be found in the interference of superimposed first-person perspectives, where each bends the World-flow according to its limited intuitions. And just like the dude in the video said, this doesn't mean that these forces are 'unreal', as if we can realize their illusionary nature and think them away. It's all a matter of finding the right perspective.

Not elaborating for now, but it can be noticed that there actually is something going on, right now, in scientific-philosophical thinking about revisiting and expanding on the concept of energy, so that it can be expanded "to account for mental phenomena" - for thinking. Yes, we are still on the level of thinking unaware of itself, of separating the World state in horizontally differentiated parts. Nonetheless, I believe these concepts and ideas are an improvement, within the realm of separated concepts. They are not the thing that needs to happen, but they facilitate its coming. They shorten the jump ahead. They bridge. They habituate the mind in a way that allows it to remain open, with no instinctive blind rejection, whenever the deeper prompts appear. It's similar to how Levin's work and ideas are habituating the scientific mind to a certain range of concepts, so that now fewer and fewer are upset upon reading about the "Platonic space". Very few would now walk out on the keynote stage. I don't think this is trivial. Because, oftentimes, it's not that people are utterly unable to take in and reflect on a thought-provoking essay. It's rather that they never come to that point, because they are upset, they are not habituated, and they instinctively quit, phisically or mentally, before even getting a chance to get in touch with the real prompts. We have seen this many times. But ideas of the kind linked to here slowly raise the temperature in the frog bath. And so I believe there is a bridging value and usefulness in them. This is not age old.

I also argued in my doctoral dissertation that energy is a vaguely defined concept, and I outlined the history of the concept of energy starting all the way back from Aristotle’s energeia, to show that our modern concept of energy is really just a modern iteration of the ancient bias to derive change from the changeless (e.g., modern energy in the 19th century tells us that energy is constantly transforming, but the quantity of change in the universe is eternally conserved).

In this paper that I wrote applying Bergson’s philosophy to critiquing the concept of energy, I essentially take a process-philosophical approach to analyzing energy and how we might expand this concept to account for mental phenomena as well.

https://substack.com/@pedrobrea/note/c-127218329

This was a comment on Jaimungal's post: "Veritasium pointed out that energy is not conserved, but here I argue something further: energy is not even well-defined!"


Brea's dissertation: Critique of the Concept of Energy in Light of Bergson's Philosophy of Duration

[Federica]

On the theme of bridging anthroposophical understanding for the benefit of the intellect, I'm just pinpointing this Steiner quote for later - from GA 128/3:

"it would nevertheless be extraordinarily interesting, since not everybody is capable of becoming clairvoyant, if such facts could be accepted by external physiology, accepted, let us say, as possible ideas, so that people would say: “I will for once imagine that what is attained by means of the inner clairvoyant eye is, after all, not such complete nonsense as it is often supposed to be. On the contrary, I shall neither believe nor disbelieve this; but I shall let it remain as an idea presented to me, and shall then investigate what external physiology can point out, whether, out of all that is asserted by occultists, anything whatever can be substantiated by showing clearly that it is actually confirmed by external observation.”"