What we Learned from JW's Monism

[AshvinP]

Hi Ashvin.
Thank you for your contribution.

Thanks for adding these thoughts on the discussion, Guney. I am traveling now but will try to post some of my thoughts soon. I think you are generally correct about the deeper nature of the obtscales involved, although I perhaps see a wider strategic palette available for stimulating the inner mobility needed to overcome the main ones.

Here was JW's response, by the way.

https://jsw21.substack.com/p/the-metaph ... id&r=rlafh

It does seem like he is only interested in preserving the 'mystery' as a monolithic structure without any accessible depth.

[AshvinP]

I don’t think debating with people on the internet achieves anything. I have never had good experiences with it. In the end, it mostly came down to intellectual combat or doubt. However, it depends entirely on the intention. I don't think any philosophy can lead someone to suddenly read Steiner and become an anthroposophist. Neither Cleric's essays nor yours can do that. Nowadays, I believe much more that these are deeply personal matters related to interests, needs, and desires that are not purely intellectual. In the end, you don't convince anyone who isn't already close to you anyway if one even attempts to do so.


I think Tomberg is right: when it comes to spiritual or religious topics, it is about personal certainty, not universal certainty, and this happens primarily through the heart. Reflecting on the past five years, it wasn't just Steiner's philosophical work that kept me engaged with these topics, but interests, needs, hopes, etc. The science of spiritual breathing is inherently different from physical science or philosophy. Perhaps it is even wrong to debate; at the very least, I have noticed within myself how corrupting it can feel to do so.Perhaps I am wrong, I do not know. But I believe it primarily concerns the heart, not primarily thought. If one lacks the aspiration to strive for religious or spiritual questions, one can always adopt the perspective of saying: "It may be that this knowledge exists, but as long as it cannot be intellectually proven to me with absolute clarity that this knowledge is more than personal experience, more than ecstasy, I will not pursue it." Doesn't that somehow reminiscent of the people who wanted Jesus to come down from the cross so they could believe in him? But i cant give your an answer yet.

As mentioned, I think you have accurately assessed the deeper obstacles which could be generally grouped as a lack of burning interest to explore the inner volume. The primary motivation should not be so much about convincing others to pursue the inner path, but stimulating our own inner development. An important consideration is that we need to continually articulate our deeper intuitions to refresh, refine, and expand our inner orientation. It's always tempting to feel that this orientation will remain stable at its current state without too much effort to express the inner dynamics. Yet we all know the feeling of when the latter seems to fade away, become more remote, more difficult to focus on, and so on, after we are immersed in ordinary sensory and intellectual life for a while. The deeper inner dynamics simply don't imprint themselves into our physical organization in the same way as the sensory dynamics or intellectual inquiries that are extrapolated from those dynamics. Thus, our concepts that focus these deeper intuitions can't become external supports in the same way as ordinary philosophical-scientific concepts, such that we can memorize and play them back later to quickly regain orientation to the meaning we were exploring. Instead, we need to put some effort into going through the same inner movements we went through when originally exploring the concepts. 

Such articulations don't need to be conveyed to other people at first, although it's easier to find motivation when in dialogue with others. And if we are going to articulate these inner experiences anyway, then sometimes (the vast majority of articulations we should likely hold back) sharing them at least gives an opportunity for seeds of inner stimulation to be planted. As has been remarked before, if we focus on what Tomberg did, we see this articulation in practice. He wrote one of the most comprehensive tomes on esoteric wisdom, connecting it with modern philosophical-scientific knowledge and everyday life experience. And that was the fruit of many decades of articulating his mystical, gnostic, and magical researches to others. Most of us simply cannot compare ourselves with late Tomberg who withdrew into mystical contemplation, but are much more like early Tomberg who needed to explore and articulate the precise spiritual scientific dynamics for quite a few years.

So I think that is always an unstated background context of these discussions. It is why we strive to articulate the inner dynamics in many varied ways, never settling too rigidly into a certain framework, system, or terminology. If it were only about convincing others, we could hammer them with the same conceptual presentations over and over. The latter would be more akin to the approach of academic philosophers like Kastrup and Essentia Foundation, who hope to 'convince' the physicalists that consciousness is fundamental. If that's what we end up doing, then I think you are correct that our time is better spent elsewhere.

***

Here are some additional comments from a separate article. It seems to me that JW uses 'physical' as more like 'bodily', i.e., as whatever interfaces consciousness with a shared space of substantial experience, instead of only as gross material substance. I am hoping that can be leveraged to point toward deeper scales at which conscious activity can interface with shared experiential spaces.

A: JW,

I believe your post raises the possibility, even the likelihood, that the boundary between pre-articulate 'experience' (using that term very broadly and loosely, as a symbol for unfamiliar domains of entangled states) and articulated reality is fluid, flexible, malleable, depending on the state of the experimenter. One experimenter may feel forced to manipulate already articulated mental images and at best only infer the pre-articulate domain of entanglement, and another may find leeway to play along the boundary of articulation. Could yet another learn to play within what feels as a pre-articulated domain of entangled states from the ordinary articulated perspective, by becoming more and more self-conscious of what it is always doing?

I have written about this possibility in a few essays and am curious what you generally think about it. Could this become a concrete experience that can be explored and fleshed out further, not necessarily by adding additional articulations, but by shifting our entire perspective on the purpose such articulations have always served? For example: [essay quote]

JW: I think your question reaches something important, although I would formulate the boundary somewhat differently.

The boundary between the prearticulate and articulation is certainly not fixed, but neither is consciousness itself. Consciousness is an evolving physical event, and I see no reason to regard its present human form as its culmination. A primitive single-celled organism could no more have anticipated poetry or music than it could have anticipated quantum mechanics. Yet all of these eventually emerged through the continuing evolution of living organization. We should therefore be cautious about turning the present limits of human consciousness into limits upon what consciousness might ever become.

This is one reason I find your suggestion of learning to “play along the boundary of articulation” intriguing. Different modes of consciousness already gather differently. Dreams, poetry, music, painting, affect and disciplined attention do not articulate experience in the same way as conceptual reason. Poetry, for example, can hold ambiguities and tensions together that propositional thought tends to resolve. Music can gather relations without first converting them into concepts. These are not simply inferior or less precise versions of rational articulation. They disclose differently.

But even the image of a boundary can mislead if it suggests two separate realms. We never cease to be within the prearticulate itself. Consciousness does not stand on one side of a divide and attempt to peer across at something inaccessible on the other. Articulation occurs within what it articulates. The cut produces distinctions within that event; it does not establish an ontological separation that was already there.

This is also why I do not regard the prearticulate as another version of Kant’s noumenon. We are not epistemological spectators barred from reality-in-itself. We physically belong to what we are attempting to articulate. Articulation is itself an event within it.

Nor does this mean that articulation tells us nothing about the prearticulate. Quite the contrary. A fuller articulation can disclose something of its character while never exhausting it. The fact that every articulation involves a reduction does not make every articulation equally reductive. Some preserve more multiplicity than others. A poem can gather what its paraphrase destroys. A musical work can sustain tensions that conceptual explanation resolves. What is disclosed remains partial, but partial does not mean arbitrary.

Quantum mechanics matters to me in much the same way. Superposition, entanglement and complementarity do more than demonstrate the failure of certain concepts. The particular character of those failures tells us something. When separability, locality, determinate identity and ordinary causal description repeatedly fail at the quantum boundary, I do not think we are entitled to turn those failures into a positive metaphysical description of what ultimately exists. But neither are they empty. They disclose negatively something about what our ordinary articulation has reduced away.

That is where I find your question about the possible development of consciousness particularly interesting. If consciousness has already undergone radical transformations during the history of life, why assume that our present manner of making the cut is final? Perhaps further development could produce forms of consciousness capable of gathering multiplicities that we presently collapse immediately into determinate objects, identities and relations. I have no idea what such consciousness would be like, and that ignorance seems philosophically important rather than embarrassing.

So I would slightly change your image of moving toward the prearticulate. We are already within it and have never left it. What can change is the manner in which it becomes articulated through us. The boundary moves because consciousness and its modes of articulation change.

This is also where I would remain cautious about some of the language you subsequently introduce. “Soul landscape,” “alternative histories,” “collective destinies,” and particularly “micro-astrology” seem to me to begin determining positively what this openness might disclose. My inclination is to resist that move. It risks constructing another metaphysical architecture precisely where the experience is asking us to remain open.

I therefore take something slightly different from quantum mechanics. It does not provide me with a model of a hidden reality that consciousness might eventually learn to navigate. It shows experimentally that the forms of articulation we inherited from classical experience cease to be adequate at certain boundaries. That failure is itself a disclosure.

Perhaps, then, what you call learning to “play along the boundary” would mean cultivating the ability to remain within that disclosure without immediately forcing it back into a determinate conceptual order. Aesthetic experience already suggests that this is possible. Evolution suggests that we should not presume to know how much further it might go.We do not encounter the prearticulate from outside. Articulation is the prearticulate becoming partially articulate from within itself. And there is no reason to assume that the particular way it presently becomes articulate through us is the last word.

A: I sense great alignment with what you have expressed here. I think the central question then becomes whether our poetic consciousness can be integrated with our scientific-philosophical consciousness, so that we no longer need to oscillate between esthetically experiencing the prearticulate states and positively describing that experience with precise images and concepts. In a sense, we are both already doing that to some extent in this discussion, as we leverage the QM experimental observations to more precisely flesh out the inner dynamics that make our ordinary capacities for observation, thinking, etc. possible, but cannot be found contained within or produced out of the articulated content of our perceptions and thoughts.

The difference between us and the QM researchers is that we are more conscious of this relationship and purpose, while they only seek to 'explain' the articulated results, at best imagining they only relate to the participation of some hypothetical 'consciousness' or 'observer'. . The scientists may play along the boundary in various physical experiments, but they aren't aware of what this intimate boundary signifies. Our concepts only aim to further refine the inner relationship we intuitively experience and (hopefully) never settle into some rigid framework or terminology that purports to define or explain that relationship. Can we become even more conscious of what we are doing to become philosophically-scientifically and esthetically aware of this relationship?

This question leads to the question of whether the 'future' evolved potential of consciousness already exists, in some sense. I like how you stated the issue with respect to QM interpretations:

"Delayed-choice experiments intensify the difficulty because our ordinary causal language insists upon reconstructing a temporal narrative: the photon must already have been a wave or a particle, must already have taken one path or both paths, and the later experiment therefore must somehow have changed what happened earlier.But those “musts” belong to us. They express our demand that an articulated classical history exist prior to the conditions under which that history becomes determinate."

In a similar sense, we can say the bodily event through which, from our articulated perspective, more evolved and integrated forms of consciousness can be accessed in the future are already germinally present. It is only our demand, rooted in our intuition of already articulated contents, that these forms must be separated out into a linear sequence from past to future, an articulated classical history of consciousness. Because of that, we always tend to assume the new forms will arrive down the road, and for now, we can only play with the familiar forms of consciousness in slightly new ways. We become wary of making any positive statements about the truly new forms. It becomes like the donkey chasing the carrot tied to its head which it can never reach: the new forms are already present, but to disclose them we need to become more and more conscious of the entangled states we are already participating in and which make our ordinary articulations possible.

These 'future' bodily events could be said to function at deeper scales. The bodily organizations that reflect or articulate holistic conscious experience can become more integrated and unfold their functions from within new 'boundaries' or thresholds. These are commonly referred to as 'subtle bodies' in esoteric literature. In that sense, there is never some free-floating consciousness without a bodily-energetic organization, but the latter itself becomes more like what we consider 'consciousness' from our articulated perspective. Instead of only following existence insofar as it flashes together with our neural firings, our palette of holistic ideas becomes a mirror for our deeper conscious activity (which we normally experience as dreaming or dreamless sleep). This is precisely about remaining within the space of pre-articulate disclosure without forcing it into a determinate conceptual order. The concepts we later use to describe the experience become more like the colors a painter may use to express what lives in their imagination, or the words of the poet. Except now we are painting the experience of very precise and lawful inner dynamics, instead of only nebulous esthetic feelings.

JW also posted this comment on the last Chess essay:

Much of what you describe concerning meditation is surprisingly close to my own experience. I have meditated for nearly forty years, and that experience has been formative for my thinking, although I use a very different vocabulary. I have tended to describe meditation as widening the aperture: loosening the habitual reductions through which consciousness makes a determinate world and becoming receptive to what appears without immediately forcing it into concepts. In such moments I do not experience myself as a detached subject contemplating an external object, but something closer to an energetic entanglement with existence itself.This may explain why I find so much in your essay familiar despite our very different philosophical languages. What you describe as loosening or redirecting soul flows I tend to understand as relaxing reductions and allowing a broader gathering. Neither formulation need imply that ordinary experience is false. Rather, ordinary consciousness is highly selective. It must be. What we call a stable world requires innumerable exclusions and determinations. Meditation can loosen that selectivity and allow relations ordinarily suppressed by the cut to become experientially available.Where I remain more cautious than you is in naming what becomes available when the aperture widens. My experience of meditation has actually reinforced my reluctance to do so. The more the usual conceptual differentiations loosen, the less justified I feel in converting what is encountered into a determinate ontology—whether of Matter, Consciousness, soul, archetype, or anything else. The experience discloses something; I have no doubt of that. But disclosure need not entail exhaustive determination of what has been disclosed.Perhaps our difference, then, is smaller than our vocabularies initially make it appear. We both seem interested in what becomes possible when the habitual organization of experience loosens. You are more willing to articulate positively the landscape that then appears. I tend to remain closer to the opening itself—to what I call the prearticulate—and to ask how much can be gathered without prematurely reducing it again.

[AshvinP]

He would probably say that he sticks to experience and does not surrender scientific or poetic/aesthetic experience; that consciousness beyond living biological organisms ceases, and that this experience shows consciousness is extinguished as soon as the energy supply stops. He sticks to articulated experience instead of going beyond it. In doing so, he takes scientific insights that possess a model-like character and uses them to make ontological statements. He is sawing off the branch he is sitting on.

Related to this, I commented on his new article as follows. It is a bit frustrating because it feels like all of his reasoning leads him so close to the threshold of 'intuitive pushing' and corresponding mental images as the 'primary articulation', but right as attention is directed to that domain, he chooses to abstract it back out into 'energy'. I am very curious if/how he may respond.

JW: "Energy is the first articulation.

But first cannot mean first in time. There was not first a prearticulate condition and then, at some moment, energy. Time itself belongs to articulation. “First” names the primal level at which positive articulation becomes available to us.

Energy is our primal articulated experience: vibration, transformation, flow, appearing in the forms of space and time."

A: "JW, something in your reasoning still confuses me.

You begin by pointing to ‘articulation’ through the example of willful speech, i.e., mental images that we effortfully organize and manifest through our inner and outer voices (or our hands in the case of sign language). That does indeed feel like the word's most natural connotation, and it's also the articulation process we are most intimately familiar with. As we navigate the experiential flow of life, we constantly articulate mental sounds as we comment on those experiences with our inner voice, to gain some orientation to their lawful dynamics. If we imagine being deaf, blind, and paralyzed, unable to move our limbs, and our feelings numbed, we can still imagine this inner commentary unfolding as a reflection of our ongoing intuitive process. It is where the unknown meaningful landscape we are living through first becomes intimately known.

So why is this inner process not considered the ‘primal articulation’, but rather it is abstracted into a nebulous concept of ‘energy’? It only makes sense to me if the latter is a symbol for precisely the inner articulating process by which we effortfully organize our mental images and navigate life experience. In which case, there is not much need to indirectly describe it as ‘energy’.

I suspect that you continue to use ‘energy’ to describe the primal articulation, instead of a concept more directly applicable to our inner speech experience, because you are hesitant to associate it with anything related to ‘consciousness’, ‘ego’, or similar concepts, because that feels like it will snap back into idealist metaphysics. But would you acknowledge the possibility that we can speak of ‘inner activity’, ‘intuitive process’, or something similar, which also vibrates, transforms, flows, and appears in spatiotemporal forms, as the primal articulation based on direct inner experience of where the unknown first becomes known? In other words, there is no need to extrapolate that into any idealist metaphysics, but simply as a phenomenological description of the fact that all other concepts, such as energy, force, vibration, transformation, etc., are downstream of our effortful intuitive process. All such concepts presuppose the latter and its articulation of mental images that we organize to elucidate the characteristic dynamics of experience."

[AshvinP]

Related to this, I commented on his new article as follows.

More comments:

JW: "I think the difference between us is becoming clearer. I have no objection to describing inner speech, intuitive activity, or mental imagery as articulations. What I resist is granting them primal status because they are the articulations with which we are most intimately familiar. Immediacy of access does not establish ontological priority.

Inner speech is in fact an extraordinarily evolved articulation. It presupposes a living energetic self-organization capable of memory, language, caring, differentiation and temporal experience. Remove that energetic self-organization and there is no inner speech, no intuitive process, and no consciousness left over to do the articulating. That does not mean that I am proposing energy as an ultimate metaphysical substance. Energy is the primal articulation available within the articulated universe; it is not my name for whatever I have called the prearticulate.

So I would resist calling energy a “symbol” produced by an antecedent consciousness. That makes consciousness the builder standing outside the gathering, which is precisely the move I deny. Consciousness is itself within the gathering—an evolved articulation of energetic self-organization, inseparable from it but not reducible to some isolated mechanism such as neurons.

This is also why phenomenological immediacy cannot settle the matter. That an experience is immediately available to consciousness tells us something about the articulation of experience; it does not establish consciousness as the ontological primitive from which everything else derives. Otherwise we have simply reversed the familiar metaphysical priority of object over subject and given priority to subject over object.

My concern is with the bifurcation itself. Both alternatives imagine articulation too late."

A: "But I think we have settled that seeking 'ontological primitives' is a rigged intellectual game, one that always unfolds within the domain of articulated outputs. We simply take one articulated output of our mental process and try to make it into the foundation of other mental and sensory outputs. It seems we both understand that this modality of thinking has become decadent and is no longer fruitful for philosophical-scientific inquiry.

Thus, we speak of staying with experience and 'gathering' what intuitively discloses itself through experience, without rushing to articulate it into a definitive conceptual system. Experientially, there can be no concept of a 'living, energetic self-organization' without our immanent intuitive process through which our mental images condense (or collapse) and are sequenced according to familiar spatiotemporal intuition. We are not speaking of a hypothetical 'intuitive process' here, but the real-time process we are experimenting with right now, in vivo, to formulate these posts. It is that same process by which we compound memory images of past experiences, feel certain regularities and patterns in that panoramic memory intuition, and focus those felt patterns into sharper concepts such as 'living, energetic self-organization'. I hope it is clear how conceiving the latter presupposes the primary intuitive process by which we gather experience and project what is so gathered into conceptual handles (symbols).

As soon as we begin articulating absolute conditions necessary for this immanent experiential process to unfold, we are stepping into metaphysics. The latter is not only positive statements about the nature of reality, but can also take the form of negative statements (limitations) on reality. To test that, we only need to imagine a scenario in which the intuitive process may unfold apart from a living body. Some people would argue that 'superintelligent' AI is an example of that (or will be soon), and I would disagree, but the fact that we can imagine it already hints that we would need to adopt metaphysical thinking to rule it out as a possibility. Of course, the spiritual traditions have always spoken of disembodied intuitive agents influencing the sensible phenomenal flow. Again, there is no need to positively assert that is true - we only reference it to better sense how we need metaphysical thinking to rule it out from the beginning. IF it happens to be true, then our declaration, "Remove that energetic self-organization and there is no inner speech, no intuitive process, and no consciousness left over to do the articulating", would be revealed as an erroneous metaphysical speculation. For example, let's say we die and experience ourselves intuitively navigating experience independently of the body. We experience how our previous articulation of inner speech was like a shadowy projection of a more subtle process of 'speech' (which was "prearticulate" from our former perspective, but is now articulate). That experience would then disclose to us that we were still stuck in the modality of metaphysical thinking when we ruled it out as a possibility before death.

We can avoid all of these problematic metaphysical traps if we simply stick with what is disclosed to us directly through our phenomenal flow of experience and continue probing the ‘contours’ of that flow more expansively and deeply. It is a given fact of inner experience that all concepts related to the energetic flow are downstream of our intuitive process, which lives within, is entangled with, and navigates the prearticulate flow (whatever it is) and projects the felt patterns into conceptual handles. There is no longer any question of whether this intuitive process is a metaphysical foundation (ontological primitive) for anything else in experience - we now have zero interest in that question! The only interest is using our intuitive process in novel ways so that more and more of the articulated spectrum begins to feel musically and meaningfully structured, entangled with our immanent intuitive steering. We are no longer interested in knowing and accumulating facts about reality, but in becoming a new reality through our knowing process. Then the questions about the nature of the 'primal articulation' are answered through our ongoing lived intuitive experience, and we feel no need to settle it beforehand with philosophical argumentation."

[Cleric]

More comments:

JW: "I think the difference between us is becoming clearer. I have no objection to describing inner speech, intuitive activity, or mental imagery as articulations. What I resist is granting them primal status because they are the articulations with which we are most intimately familiar. Immediacy of access does not establish ontological priority.

Inner speech is in fact an extraordinarily evolved articulation. It presupposes a living energetic self-organization capable of memory, language, caring, differentiation and temporal experience. Remove that energetic self-organization and there is no inner speech, no intuitive process, and no consciousness left over to do the articulating. That does not mean that I am proposing energy as an ultimate metaphysical substance. Energy is the primal articulation available within the articulated universe; it is not my name for whatever I have called the prearticulate.

So I would resist calling energy a “symbol” produced by an antecedent consciousness. That makes consciousness the builder standing outside the gathering, which is precisely the move I deny. Consciousness is itself within the gathering—an evolved articulation of energetic self-organization, inseparable from it but not reducible to some isolated mechanism such as neurons.

This is also why phenomenological immediacy cannot settle the matter. That an experience is immediately available to consciousness tells us something about the articulation of experience; it does not establish consciousness as the ontological primitive from which everything else derives. Otherwise we have simply reversed the familiar metaphysical priority of object over subject and given priority to subject over object.

My concern is with the bifurcation itself. Both alternatives imagine articulation too late."

A: "But I think we have settled that seeking 'ontological primitives' is a rigged intellectual game, one that always unfolds within the domain of articulated outputs. We simply take one articulated output of our mental process and try to make it into the foundation of other mental and sensory outputs. It seems we both understand that this modality of thinking has become decadent and is no longer fruitful for philosophical-scientific inquiry.

Thus, we speak of staying with experience and 'gathering' what intuitively discloses itself through experience, without rushing to articulate it into a definitive conceptual system. Experientially, there can be no concept of a 'living, energetic self-organization' without our immanent intuitive process through which our mental images condense (or collapse) and are sequenced according to familiar spatiotemporal intuition. We are not speaking of a hypothetical 'intuitive process' here, but the real-time process we are experimenting with right now, in vivo, to formulate these posts. It is that same process by which we compound memory images of past experiences, feel certain regularities and patterns in that panoramic memory intuition, and focus those felt patterns into sharper concepts such as 'living, energetic self-organization'. I hope it is clear how conceiving the latter presupposes the primary intuitive process by which we gather experience and project what is so gathered into conceptual handles (symbols).

As soon as we begin articulating absolute conditions necessary for this immanent experiential process to unfold, we are stepping into metaphysics. The latter is not only positive statements about the nature of reality, but can also take the form of negative statements (limitations) on reality. To test that, we only need to imagine a scenario in which the intuitive process may unfold apart from a living body. Some people would argue that 'superintelligent' AI is an example of that (or will be soon), and I would disagree, but the fact that we can imagine it already hints that we would need to adopt metaphysical thinking to rule it out as a possibility. Of course, the spiritual traditions have always spoken of disembodied intuitive agents influencing the sensible phenomenal flow. Again, there is no need to positively assert that is true - we only reference it to better sense how we need metaphysical thinking to rule it out from the beginning. IF it happens to be true, then our declaration, "Remove that energetic self-organization and there is no inner speech, no intuitive process, and no consciousness left over to do the articulating", would be revealed as an erroneous metaphysical speculation. For example, let's say we die and experience ourselves intuitively navigating experience independently of the body. We experience how our previous articulation of inner speech was like a shadowy projection of a more subtle process of 'speech' (which was "prearticulate" from our former perspective, but is now articulate). That experience would then disclose to us that we were still stuck in the modality of metaphysical thinking when we ruled it out as a possibility before death.

We can avoid all of these problematic metaphysical traps if we simply stick with what is disclosed to us directly through our phenomenal flow of experience and continue probing the ‘contours’ of that flow more expansively and deeply. It is a given fact of inner experience that all concepts related to the energetic flow are downstream of our intuitive process, which lives within, is entangled with, and navigates the prearticulate flow (whatever it is) and projects the felt patterns into conceptual handles. There is no longer any question of whether this intuitive process is a metaphysical foundation (ontological primitive) for anything else in experience - we now have zero interest in that question! The only interest is using our intuitive process in novel ways so that more and more of the articulated spectrum begins to feel musically and meaningfully structured, entangled with our immanent intuitive steering. We are no longer interested in knowing and accumulating facts about reality, but in becoming a new reality through our knowing process. Then the questions about the nature of the 'primal articulation' are answered through our ongoing lived intuitive experience, and we feel no need to settle it beforehand with philosophical argumentation."

Thanks for sharing, Ashvin. I think this conversation goes a notch further than what we had here in the past. It will be interesting to see how it proceeds.

The place where JW stands is understandable. Through the inertia of our intellectual age, it is natural that our default intuition should be that our thinking life is too complex and manifold to be somehow an articulation of the fundamentals. The tragedy is that this stance can only see a direction of increase of lucidity and intuition, as resulting from even more complex processing, thus moving further away from the supposed fundamentals. And conversely, if it is simpler, then it must be less conscious, like we conceive of animals -> plants -> minerals.

Alas, there seems to be no easy way to convey how things stand. One needs to realize that simplicity can be gained in the opposite way, by finding a deeper barycentric axis of the experiential flow. This, however, already requires us to consider meditative life. And this is where most thinkers today simply stop following. The Dasher metaphor is the closest I have come so far in that direction - trying to show that our ordinary intellectual thinking can be experienced as simpler flow-steering. Unfortunately, it is not something that can be conveyed in a few sentences, especially not in the telegraphic nature of a comment section.

Your example with the afterdeath state points in the necessary direction, but let's see how he will respond. Alas, thinkers like JW and BK seem to have grown way too comfortable with the idea that the intellectual movements are only ripples on the surface of energy/MAL, that can only articulate from the surface that there's some mysterious depth to reality, but refuse the possibility that the intellect can become the voice of the depth - the means of self-reflection of the depth.

[AshvinP]

Your example with the afterdeath state points in the necessary direction, but let's see how he will respond. Alas, thinkers like JW and BK seem to have grown way too comfortable with the idea that the intellectual movements are only ripples on the surface of energy/MAL, that can only articulate from the surface that there's some mysterious depth to reality, but refuse the possibility that the intellect can become the voice of the depth - the means of self-reflection of the depth.

Thanks, Cleric. There have been a few additional comments now, and I tried to work in a bit of what you expressed into my last response. It is indeed difficult to find a way forward when the soul is so invested in maintaining the status quo of its current perspective. I can already imagine how everything I wrote will start to sound like an attempt to articulate some metaphysical framework about the 'intuitive process'. It is difficult to address that without ending up with a few essays' worth of comments. The intellect develops such a nuanced, fleshed-out philosophical understanding of 'articulation ' that it fails to consider that this understanding of articulation is itself unfolding within the already articulated perspective.

***

JW: "Part I. I think we are still passing one another at one crucial point. When I speak of energy as the primal articulation, I am not privileging scientific concepts or mathematical formalisms over experience. Scientific observation is itself experience. Light, heat, sound, vibration, movement, bodily exertion and transformation are experienced. So are the registrations of instruments through which our range of observation is extended. Physics subsequently gathers such observations into concepts and mathematical formalisms, but those are further articulations of experience; they should not be confused with the experience itself.

The same distinction applies to inner speech. I certainly experience an inner voice, but I don’t see how its phenomenological immediacy makes it primal. In fact, inner speech seems an unusually late and highly sedimented articulation. A word cannot sound inwardly as a meaningful word until it has been experienced within a world. I must have encountered language, other speakers, differences among sounds, things and situations, uses and meanings, before the word can return silently as the apparently immediate language of thought. The inner voice therefore carries within it an immense gathering of previous articulations—body, perception, language, memory, other people, caring—which have become largely elided in its present fluency. Its apparent immediacy conceals its history.

In that sense, inner speech is an elision of its own articulation. It feels primal precisely because almost everything required to make it possible has become silent within it.

This is why I cannot make the move from “everything I experience is experienced as a conscious being” to “consciousness is primal to what is experienced.” The first is unavoidable. The second does not follow. It converts a condition of our access into an assertion about what is accessed—the same move, from the opposite direction, that naïve realism makes when it converts the experience of determinate objects into an independently determinate objective reality.

Nor does imagining consciousness without energetic self-organization alter this. Perhaps consciousness survives bodily death; perhaps it does not. We presently experience neither possibility. The fact that we can imagine disembodied consciousness gives it no more experiential warrant than imagining its extinction. Reports of disembodied agents or spiritual presences are certainly experiences and should be treated as such. But the assertion that a disembodied consciousness caused the experience is already an interpretation of it, just as a physical theory is an interpretation and further articulation of scientific observation.

What we do experience is a persistent relation between consciousness and living energetic self-organization. Alter that organization sufficiently and consciousness alters; disrupt it sufficiently and consciousness disappears from observation. That does not prove the metaphysical impossibility of consciousness otherwise. It means simply that experience gives us no warrant for detaching consciousness from energetic self-organization.

This is where energy enters my thinking. Matter itself, when pursued experimentally, does not remain the solid substance of naïve experience. Its apparent solidity gives way through further observation to molecular, atomic and quantum articulations. At the primal physical limit available to us, we encounter energy—transformation, vibration, interaction—not independently subsisting little things. I call energy the first articulation for that reason, not because I have decided that “ultimate reality is energy.” Quite the contrary: I explicitly refuse that further step. Energy is the primal articulation available within experience; it is not my name for the prearticulate.

Nor is it separate from the prearticulate. Everything that can come forth in articulation must point back toward something inherent there, while what actually comes forth is also tempered by the evolving articulations through which it appears. But we cannot reverse the process and conclude from an articulated determination what the prearticulate is. That would simply begin metaphysics again.

Part 2. So I think your “intuitive process” and my “energy” occupy quite different places. Inner intuition is something I experience, but it already presupposes a living, caring, temporally articulated consciousness with memory and, in the case of inner speech, an acquired language. Energy is what remains experientially available as we reduce those increasingly elaborate organizations toward their primal articulation.

Perhaps the simplest way to state our difference is this: experience does not imply the ontological primacy of consciousness merely because we experience as conscious beings. Consciousness itself is something we encounter within experience. I see no warrant for removing it from the energetic gathering in which we invariably encounter it and then making it the source of that gathering.

That would again be to imagine articulation too late—starting from one of its most highly evolved forms and projecting it backward as the condition of everything from which it came forth.

Another way to think about it: when I get the experience of something like pure consciousness I liken it to listening to the hum of an amplifier. It resonates to itself until a signal comes through to amplify. The internal working of the amplifier might be interesting in itself, but in another sense beside the point. The amplifier exists to make something else, an input, audible. Consciousness resonates in us and we can learn to listen to that resonance, but it is not itself the prime thing. It exists to foster awareness of what surrounds us. It is an increasingly common mistake to mistake the mode of awareness for what we become aware of and project our particular instance of awareness onto all existence."

A: "Right, I fully agree that the experience of our intuitive process, as most intimately reflected in our inner voice, unfolds within a living context that feels independently given to us. Yet it is precisely this context which must initially remain a prearticulate mystery if we want to avoid straying into metaphysics. As you aptly expressed, "everything required to make it possible has become silent within it". We know this silent context is somehow related to our concepts of light, heat, vibration, movement, transformation, etc., but our intuition of what those concepts mean takes shape entirely within our articulated spatiotemporal experience, and thus the concepts can only be considered loose symbols for the prearticulate mystery. We only know the dynamics of sensory impressions, from which we derive those concepts, from within our already articulated spatiotemporal perspective. So, in that sense, we need to take the limitations of that perspective very seriously. Those limitations apply to the very cognitive process by which we try to discern the relationship between 'consciousness' (or 'intuitive process') and 'energy' (standing in for the entire history of evolution leading up to modern consciousness, in this case).

In the article, you also aptly pointed out how the sequential experience of time itself belongs to articulation. Yet, by the same token, all our scientific observations of energetic transformation are rooted in that articulated temporal experience. So both our observations of 'consciousness' and 'energy' belong to the articulated dashboard of experience, and speaking of which is "prior" to which can only reflect certain distinguishable aspects we discern through our intuitive process. The main difference is that the former feels as belonging to a spectrum of dashboard experience that is relatively ghostly, volatile, and insubstantial when compared with the latter. The movements, vibrations, and transformations of consciousness feel much subtler. This always tempts us to make the latter primary in some way, whether we conceive of ‘energy’ more physically or mystically. But that priority status does not come from direct scientific observation, only from a particular intuitive perspective rooted in modern consciousness. It is the evolved condition of the latter that makes it feel like substantial reality has been focused into a physical-energetic substrate and consciousness floats on top as something more insubstantial, yet also more intuitively transparent (as we saw with the counting example).

When we scientifically investigate this dashboard of differentiated experience, all we can justifiably say is that we become accustomed to certain patterns of articulated outputs and the way they are related to other outputs. For example, quantum mechanics doesn’t say what exactly happens when an electron and a positron annihilate and produce two photons. Rather, as represented with a Feynman diagram, it says: “Here’s the situation before – we have the electron and positron – here’s the situation after – there are now two photons.” We do not observe the particles ‘melting’ and gradually ‘evaporating’ as photons, but we can mathematically describe the probability of finding one state after the other. The theory is quiet about how exactly this metamorphosis happens. Thus, even in modern science, everything ultimately boils down to building intuition about which outputs are likely to be followed by others. We do not know whether the collision output (registered in the particle accelerator) causes the output of the photons any more than we know that the display output of a rocket in a video game causes the output of the damage to our video game character.

Once that is settled, we can notice the epistemic asymmetry. It is not about projecting our current experience of this intuitive process backward, but about realizing we can only begin investigating the prearticulate mystery from within its most evolved condition. The LIFO (last in, first out) principle in computer programming can be metaphorically instructive here. Since the human intuitive process, which explores the lawful dynamics of existence through its stream of mental images, was the 'last' to arrive in World evolution, it should be the 'first out', i.e., the first to be turned inside-out and intuitively understood. We can't undress our socks (the energetic patterns of physical experience) before we first untie our shoes (the energetic patterns of intuitive/imaginative experience). Thus, we must always first leverage the intuitive transparency of the inner process to gain deeper insights into the wider articulated spectrum.

This is, of course, what we are already doing as philosophers and scientists. It is what you and I are doing to explore what can unfold 'after the collapse'. Only through your intuitive process can you discern that your intuitive experience unfolds within a living context that can be described conceptually in various ways, as correlated with observed dynamics of energy, language, relationships with others, and so on. The question is whether we can continue doing what we are already doing more consciously, more expansively, and at deeper scales of the experiential flow. That doesn’t require any metaphysical frameworks or ontological statements. It is only about refusing to wait passively for further evolved conditions to somehow render the prearticulate mystery more transparent, and instead, taking that task actively in hand as the natural continuation of where World evolution has so far brought our intuitive process.

When we adopt the former disposition, it leads to stagnation at the threshold of collapse, while the latter brings about a truly new mode of philosophy-science after the collapse. Then we can no longer speak of 'what we experience' in any metaphysical sense, i.e., as a categorical and uniform nature of human experience. Some people indeed experience a rigid relationship between consciousness and the articulated structures of the living body, such that one is always strictly correlated with the other, but others, through the proper inner training, may experience a more fluid relationship in which consciousness can persist more independently of the latter, and perhaps even intensify without the physical-organic constraints, becoming more holistic and lucid.

A huge obstacle arises when we contemplate this possibility. Based on our default intuition from within an articulated (embodied) perspective, the richer and more manifold our experiential flow is, the more complex the inner process must be. According to contemporary scientific conceptions, intelligence seems to result only from highly complicated computational operations. Thus, it makes little sense that we could simplify the inner process by loosening it from organic constraints and still experience it more lucidly and precisely. Instead, it feels like we would drop into a dreamy, animal-like consciousness. (This is related to Kastrup's conception of MAL, by the way). We would need to detour into too many other considerations to clarify this misconception, but suffice it to say, it is entirely a function of our articulated perspective (just as linear, sequential temporal experience). Once we experience the intuitive process independently of its bodily constraints, it becomes clear that simplicity can also result from finding a deeper 'barycentric axis' of the experiential flow that heightens lucidity. We realize that we have always been dreaming within the neural constraints, and our ordinary intuitive process stands in a similar relation to the deeper one as our dream life to our waking life.

The main point is that these possibilities are forever excluded from our experience if we fall into the metaphysical trap in either direction - either positively speculating about the prearticulate mystery and resting satisfied with our resulting 'understanding' of it, or negatively speculating about the inability to cognitively probe it further and resting satisfied with our understanding of the whole philosophical problem. In the latter case, we inevitably feel that the mysterious input which the amplifier of consciousness makes audible, in your metaphor, must be something discontinuous with our experience of inputting intuitive gestures and experiencing mental images as tightly correlated outputs. An unbridgeable gap remains between what we do in our cognitive articulating process and the mysterious World articulating process that shapes and animates the surrounding physical environment. We know the former must be somehow embedded in the latter, but we can't say anything more scientifically precise about that relationship. In either case, metaphysical thinking wins the day, because the end result is the same: the experiential chasm remains between 'poetic' and scientific consciousness of the prearticulate mystery."

[Cleric]

...

It occurs to me that I'm not aware of what JW's stance is on the matter of inner activity. I mean the following:

From what I see above, it seems that he uses 'energy' in a more or less phenomenological sense, as the raw pixels/vibrations of experience - the elemental ground of experience. He keeps openness about the 'other-sidedness' of this energy, realizing that this leads to abstract metaphysics. We can more or less imply that our human-scale experience can be thought of as the stream of elementary energetic/vibratory phenomenal experiences. Things, however, become trickier when we include inner activity. If we want to hold fast to the view of reality as a stream of concatenated elementary events, then we must conclude that things like intentionality and activity are also merely what the elementary domino-train feels like. For example, reaching with my hand for a glass of water feels like something at my human scale, but at the energetic level it is nothing more than the concatenation of elementary events, following the gradient (thus, there's nothing at the human scale that really tips the World flow in one direction or another).

Has he ever clarified his position on this? Does he see inner activity as a kind of illusory playback of the raw energetic stream, or does he admit the possibility that this activity contributes something unique to the stream, something that does not result from the mere locally interacting energetic domino pieces? If it is the latter, then naturally it can be reasoned what the limits of such contributions might be.

[AshvinP]

...

It occurs to me that I'm not aware of what JW's stance is on the matter of inner activity. I mean the following:

From what I see above, it seems that he uses 'energy' in a more or less phenomenological sense, as the raw pixels/vibrations of experience - the elemental ground of experience. He keeps openness about the 'other-sidedness' of this energy, realizing that this leads to abstract metaphysics. We can more or less imply that our human-scale experience can be thought of as the stream of elementary energetic/vibratory phenomenal experiences. Things, however, become trickier when we include inner activity. If we want to hold fast to the view of reality as a stream of concatenated elementary events, then we must conclude that things like intentionality and activity are also merely what the elementary domino-train feels like. For example, reaching with my hand for a glass of water feels like something at my human scale, but at the energetic level it is nothing more than the concatenation of elementary events, following the gradient (thus, there's nothing at the human scale that really tips the World flow in one direction or another).

Has he ever clarified his position on this? Does he see inner activity as a kind of illusory playback of the raw energetic stream, or does he admit the possibility that this activity contributes something unique to the stream, something that does not result from the mere locally interacting energetic domino pieces? If it is the latter, then naturally it can be reasoned what the limits of such contributions might be.

There have been a few more comments, and perhaps these will elucidate your question. When he says, "Consciousness itself comes forth within living energetic self-organization and participates in its further articulation", that would suggest he sees inner activity contributing something unique to the stream. On the other hand, it seems these responses are 100% generated by AI, and perhaps he isn't thinking too carefully about any of it

Guney weighed in with some extremely helpful and pinpointed comments.

***

JW: Part 1: I agree that consciousness and energy are both encountered within articulation, and neither gives us a metaphysical description of what the prearticulate “is.” Where I continue to differ is in the privileged role you assign to the intuitive process and in the implication that its further evolution might progressively penetrate what presently remains beyond articulation.

I also think the dashboard metaphor makes the difficulty clearer. A dashboard already presupposes something happening elsewhere, a display representing selected aspects of it, and someone reading the display. What is displayed and what produces the display have been separated before the metaphor begins. Once experience is understood this way, the subject/object problem—or at least its phenomenological descendant—has already been installed within the metaphor.

I should make the same qualification about my own earlier amplifier metaphor. I intended it only to suggest that consciousness can mistake its own resonance for what makes resonance possible. Taken literally, however, it has the same defect. It gives us an input, an amplifier, an output and a listener. There is no “us” sitting behind consciousness listening to what consciousness presents.

The whirlpool comes closer to what I mean. A whirlpool is not a dashboard representation of the flow. It is a relative self-organization within the flow. It can be distinguished without being separated from what is occurring. Likewise, consciousness is not a display interposed between us and an otherwise inaccessible energetic reality. Consciousness itself comes forth within living energetic self-organization and participates in its further articulation.

This is also why the intimacy of the intuitive process cannot establish its priority. Inner speech feels immediately given, but the inward word can have meaning only because an enormous previous articulation has become silent within it: embodiment, perception, other speakers, language, memory, caring, and a world in which the word acquired meaning. What feels most immediate may be among the most highly evolved and sedimented articulations we experience.

Your LIFO proposal may therefore be useful as a method for investigating consciousness: begin with what is most intimately available and work from there. But “last in, first out” cannot establish that the latest articulation gives privileged access to what makes articulation possible. The socks-and-shoes metaphor already knows what lies beneath what. That is precisely what we do not know here.

The same issue arises with scientific observation. I agree that a Feynman diagram or mathematical formalism should not be mistaken for an unmediated picture of what “really happens.” But scientific observation is itself experience. The accelerator event, detector, registration and observer belong to the articulated gathering. Our inability to observe a metaphysical mechanism “behind” an electron-positron annihilation does not turn what we do observe into arbitrary dashboard icons representing an ontologically disconnected process elsewhere.

This is where I think the dashboard model risks replacing naïve realism with representationalism. The naïve realist says that what appears simply is an independently constituted reality. The dashboard model says that what appears is an interface representing a reality hidden behind it. Both have already separated appearance from reality and then disagree about the status of the appearance.

I am questioning that separation.

Part 2: The appearing is itself an articulation.

What is disclosed need not be identical with the articulation through which it is disclosed, but neither is it disconnected from it. That is also why I can speak of energy as the first articulation without claiming that the prearticulate “is energy.” Energy remains experientially available as increasingly elaborate organizations are reduced toward their primal physical articulation. Consciousness appears only with highly evolved forms of living energetic self-organization. They therefore do not occupy equivalent positions merely because both are encountered within experience.

But energy is not an ultimate substance standing behind appearance. The articulated points back toward something inherent in the prearticulate without giving us a representation of what the prearticulate is. Whatever comes forth is also tempered by the evolving articulations through which it comes forth.

And here I think we reach our deepest difference.

I do regard this as a genuine boundary for understanding. That does not mean that the boundary of what can become articulated is fixed. Consciousness can evolve. Science may disclose phenomena presently inconceivable to us. New modes of awareness may emerge. Art and poetry may gather what conceptual thought cannot. What can come forth remains open.

But whatever comes forth will have become articulated through whatever conditions made its appearing possible. A future consciousness vastly different from ours might articulate vastly more than we can. It would not thereby have acquired a position outside articulation from which the prearticulate could be experienced as prearticulate.

Our desire to get beyond that boundary gives us no warrant that we can. Nor does an unwelcome consequence of the boundary count as evidence against it. Disembodied consciousness, an intuitive faculty freed from organic constraint, or progressively more direct experience of the prearticulate may be possibilities we would like to preserve. The fact that a structural cognitive limit might exclude them from our understanding is not evidence that the limit is merely provisional.

Perhaps some things are forever excluded from our understanding. The fact that we would prefer otherwise is not evidence that they are not.

Part 3:This is why I hesitate when speculation is presented as a way of keeping experience open. We can imagine consciousness becoming more lucid as it becomes independent of living energetic organization. We can also imagine consciousness ending entirely when that organization ends. Neither imagined possibility constitutes evidence. What we actually experience is that alterations of living energetic self-organization alter consciousness, and sufficient disruption removes consciousness from observation. That does not establish what is metaphysically possible. It establishes where our warrant stops.

I therefore don’t regard acknowledgment of the boundary as stagnation. We can press against it indefinitely. Indeed, that is much of what science, art and philosophy do. But pressing against a boundary is different from imagining ourselves on the other side of it.

What can become articulated is open; that whatever appears must appear through articulation is the limit.

The philosophical task, as I see it, is not to fill what lies beyond that limit with whatever our intuition most fervently suggests. It is to attend to what the limit itself discloses.

That is one of the reasons quantum mechanics has mattered so much to my thinking. Its deepest philosophical significance for me is not that it reveals what lies beyond articulation, but that at its boundaries familiar articulations—causality, separability, determinate identity, even ordinary temporal and spatial description—begin to fail us. Their failure does not authorize us to replace them with an intuitive metaphysics.

Sometimes the failure to cross a boundary is itself what there is to learn.

So I don’t think the choice is between remaining passively at the threshold and imaginatively penetrating it. Articulation remains in movement. Its possibilities remain open. But our most compelling intuitions cannot provide a view from outside it.

Otherwise we have again begun with one of our own articulations and projected it backward as the condition of everything else.

We have imagined articulation too late.

Guney: "I think I roughly understand where you're going, but I think the problem is even deeper than the method of science or the way experiments are set up.

Science itself only becomes possible within a much deeper horizon of sense that has already formed before any particular method begins. Even the basic identification of knowing with seeing is already there. Eidos, idea, theory, looking at something, having something before you and understanding its form. That is much deeper than a scientific method. The method already grows out of that way of relating to what is.

And this is not only true of science. It runs through Western philosophy as well. Not just Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, but also Heidegger, Gadamer and the poststructuralists remain embedded in this horizon, even when they are explicitly trying to break it apart. Fichte may be an important exception here in certain respects. But even where Western philosophy turns against its own foundations, there are deeper assumptions about knowing, sense, articulation, subjectivity and what it means to think that often remain completely unspoken, precisely because they are what allow the philosophy to happen in the first place.

And that horizon is not some timeless structure of human knowledge. It could have been radically different, and historically it has been radically different. If you look at ancient Egyptian or Iranian forms of thought, you find very different relations between knowing, hearing, listening, order, participation, ritual and transformation. These are not just different theories about the same world. They are different horizons in which the world can become meaningful in the first place.

You are operating inside one particular horizon and articulating intellectual thoughts within it. The problem is that the horizon itself mostly never appears in those thoughts. It silently determines what can count as a question, what can count as an answer, what “experience,” “reality,” “articulation,” “subject,” “object” and even “knowing” can mean, while remaining invisible precisely because it is what makes the thinking possible.

And I think modern intellectual thought has a very particular tendency here. It tries, consciously or unconsciously, to determine what the whole world can be. Even when it no longer claims to have a complete theory of reality, it still tends to decide what kinds of reality are possible in the first place. That is already a huge claim.

But why should it have that authority?

This is where I think you may be overstepping when you turn the products of this particular intellectual articulation into universal conditions of articulation itself. You don't actually know that your categories describe the conditions of all possible knowing. You know that they are categories through which things become intelligible within this horizon.

And the fact that philosophy has repeatedly discovered its own limitations does not solve this. It can recognize the finiteness of its concepts while still remaining blind to the fact that it has never established any priority over other possible modes of knowing. In fact, it often no longer even knows what those other modes would look like.

That is also why I think the colleague (Ashvin) is being misunderstood. He isn't necessarily offering another theory that can simply be inserted into your intellectual framework. He is talking about a possible change in the operation of knowing itself. And if that operation really changed, then it could potentially transform what we mean by the world, by articulation, by body, by consciousness, by ourselves, even by what it means for something to appear at all.

A concept only has the meaning it has within a horizon that gives it that meaning. “Articulation” is no exception. “Energy” is no exception. “Consciousness” is no exception. So why should the meaning and structural role they have within our present horizon be projected onto every possible horizon?

That is the point I want to press. Before you tell me what the conditions of all possible articulation are, how do you know that the horizon within which you are making that statement has the authority to define what articulation itself can be?

Because if you cannot establish that, then you may be doing something much more circular than you realize. You take a particular horizon of knowing, produce certain concepts within it, discover certain conditions through those concepts, and then quietly turn those conditions into universal structures. The horizon disappears, and its products are left behind as if they had never depended on it.

Why should we trust that move?

And especially, why should we use it to judge a form of knowing whose very possibility might be to transform the horizon itself?"

A: "I will likely have some more thoughts to share on your responses, but, quite unexpectedly for me, @Solar-Philosophy has really encapsulated my core points and honed in on the crux of the discussion from my perspective. So it would be interesting to first hear your perspective and thoughts on what he shared.

For now, I only want to make it clear that I don’t offer these concepts, metaphors, and general lines of reasoning as evidence that the loosening of organic constraints can lead to a more expansive, lucid intuitive process that sheds light on the prearticulate mystery (what is 'prearticulate' is relative to the horizon of knowing, as we have discussed). The only evidence of the latter is the direct experience of its characteristic phases in the daily flow of life. I would never point to the possibility with such confidence if something of that experience was not present within my horizon of knowing. But, of course, there is no value in simply stating that dogmatically as a fact and asking someone to accept it. That is why I speak of the possibility in more conditional language, as something we may discover under certain inner conditions that we don't passively hope for but actively participate in bringing forth. Because, in a very real sense, the possibility simply doesn't exist in our version of 'reality' until we actively forge those conditions. I also know very well, from my intimate experience, that the intellect can devise endless ways to rationalize away such new possible horizons of knowing when the latter are simply presented to it as a series of theoretical concepts. Conveying such possibilities is a very delicate and artistic process, in that sense, but it's never intended as evidence that can establish their reality beforehand. We can never be compelled to accept that reality by logical reasoning, but can only grow into it in complete freedom.

Learning to ride a bicycle is a classic example. We have no choice but to begin with inner activity we already know, yet through it we seek to discover novel degrees of freedom. We start with movements we can perform in ways we already know, yet we also stumble in the dark and remain open to the possibility that some new kind of inner activity may be discovered. Familiar movements bring us into the vicinity of a novel palette that can only be discovered through a singular flash of insight. We also understand that we cannot simply impose this dynamic insight of ‘how to ride a bike’ on another person with a list of verbal and pictorial instructions, accompanied by compelling logical reasoning. We can only convey certain indications that point towards its general vicinity, yet it is up to them to ‘get it’ through their own intuitive pushing and stumbling in the dark until reaching a singular flash of insight, as if awakening from a dream."

JW (responding to Guney): Your question gets very close to something important, but I would formulate my position somewhat differently. I don’t claim to know the conditions of all possible articulation. If I did, I would be doing precisely what I have been arguing against: taking the products of one articulation and projecting them backward—or forward—as universal structures.

I have no reason to suppose that our present horizon is final. Quite the contrary. The forms through which human beings articulate a world have changed historically, and I see no reason to think they have stopped changing. A future form of consciousness might articulate things that are literally inconceivable to us. “Energy,” “consciousness,” perhaps even “articulation” itself might then be understood very differently.

But notice what follows—and what does not. It follows that I cannot legislate the content or categories of every possible future articulation. It does not follow that I can therefore imagine a standpoint outside articulation and give that imagination epistemic authority.

I am making a much more limited claim. Whatever appears to us appears under the conditions through which it can appear. Those conditions need not be timeless. They need not be exclusively conceptual. They need not even resemble ours. But if those conditions change radically, what comes forth through them will be another articulation. I cannot say in advance what it will articulate.

That is why I don’t think historical difference poses the problem for my position that you suggest. Ancient Egyptian or Iranian modes of knowing may indeed have articulated radically different worlds. I myself often write of the different pre-Socratic Greek world that resonates in ways nearly forgotten in words we use today without thinking. But recognizing that difference does not give us access to a position outside all horizons. It teaches us precisely the opposite: that no particular horizon can simply declare itself universal.

And this is also why I am cautious about Ashvin’s proposal. I am not using present scientific concepts to rule out some future transformation of consciousness. I am objecting when the possibility of such a transformation is used to warrant claims about what lies beyond our present understanding. Those are very different moves.

Perhaps consciousness could develop in ways that radically alter what “body,” “world,” “energy,” or even “consciousness” mean. I don’t know. Neither does Ashvin. The possibility should remain open precisely because we do not know. But openness is not evidence.

This is where the boundary matters. It is a boundary of our understanding, not a fence I am erecting around all possible reality. We can discover its limits, press against them, perhaps transform the conditions under which we encounter them. What we cannot do is turn our desire that something lie beyond them into knowledge of what lies there.

Pressing against a boundary is different from imagining ourselves on the other side of it.

In fact, your warning about circularity is very close to my own concern. We should not take concepts produced within our horizon and quietly transform them into universal structures. But that prohibition cuts both ways. We should no more project “consciousness,” “intuition,” “participation,” or “transformation” beyond the boundary than we should project “matter,” “energy,” “causality,” or mathematical structure there.

The prearticulate is not the place where my preferred concepts become finally true.

It marks precisely where their warrant ends.

A: "I think it is helpful to consider a few of these phrases you used above:

Some future transformation of consciousness

What lies beyond our present understanding

The possibility should remain open precisely because we do not know

Now we can imagine for a moment that the 'future' transformation is already present (which is actually what we would expect if the prearticulate domain implicates entangled potential, which only collapses into familiar spatiotemporal sequences through modern articulating consciousness), and our conscious participation in it makes evident that lucid inner activity persists and intensifies when the bodily-energetic constraints recede into the background, so to speak. This is a thought experiment, a complete hypothetical. The only point of this experiment is to consider how open we are truly being if the above possibility is already excluded when we formulate the idea: "these things lie beyond our (collective humanity's) understanding". If we die tomorrow and experience the reality of that transformation in consciousness, and we realize it had been completely accessible to us while still alive through certain inner efforts, wouldn't we then say: "Oh, it turns out I was not as open to the possibility as I imagined I was being when I formulated that idea..."?

Of course, being open to the possibility doesn't automatically mean accepting it, but it does mean hesitating before we declare that everyone shares the same horizon of knowing about it, and that it can only be a future transformation no one alive today has direct experience with. I think such a thought experiment is helpful to work through. Solar and I are suggesting that this is a subtle way of sneaking in a metaphysical standpoint, i.e., a consciousness that imagines itself standing apart from all horizons of knowing, observes them from outside, and then judges which ones are available at which time, to whom they are available, what they would entail, etc. But what warrants this move? Perhaps the phrases listed above would be less metaphysically constraining if they resembled this other phrase you used: "I cannot say in advance what it will articulate." Then we would get:

Some transformation of consciousness... that I am not presently familiar with.

What lies beyond my present understanding

The possibility should remain open precisely because I do not know"

[Federica]

There have been a few more comments, and perhaps these will elucidate your question. When he says, "Consciousness itself comes forth within living energetic self-organization and participates in its further articulation", that would suggest he sees inner activity contributing something unique to the stream. On the other hand, it seems these responses are 100% generated by AI, and perhaps he isn't thinking too carefully about any of it

Guney weighed in with some extremely helpful and pinpointed comments.

I would like to seize this opportunity to attract attention to the gesture of using AI assistance to post and comment in this type of let's call them philosophical discussions. To paraphrase what you often say, what are we really doing when turning to AI, even only to summarize a specific idea? Of course AI can be extremely helpful and pinpointed. I use it every day for practical purposes and I agree with what you and Cleric have sometimes done - explicitly quote or link to AI outputs. But when it is used seamlessly to help shape the body of our concepts and ideas, it's another story, I deem. Then it becomes a kind of addiction. Obviously this will happen more and more and it will be interesting to see how dystopian human communication will grow when everyone else's voice in the conversation is 'augmented' in this way.

[AshvinP]

There have been a few more comments, and perhaps these will elucidate your question. When he says, "Consciousness itself comes forth within living energetic self-organization and participates in its further articulation", that would suggest he sees inner activity contributing something unique to the stream. On the other hand, it seems these responses are 100% generated by AI, and perhaps he isn't thinking too carefully about any of it

Guney weighed in with some extremely helpful and pinpointed comments.

I would like to seize this opportunity to attract attention to the gesture of using AI assistance to post and comment in this type of let's call them philosophical discussions. To paraphrase what you often say, what are we really doing when turning to AI, even only to summarize a specific idea? Of course AI can be extremely helpful and pinpointed. I use it every day for practical purposes and I agree with what you and Cleric have sometimes done - explicitly quote or link to AI outputs. But when it is used seamlessly to help shape the body of our concepts and ideas, it's another story, I deem. Then it becomes a kind of addiction. Obviously this will happen more and more and it will be interesting to see how dystopian human communication will grow when everyone else's voice in the conversation is 'augmented' in this way.

Right, and it can be a bit deflating to one's motivation to dialogue when you know the person on the other side is simply feeding your posts into the LLM and spitting out responses within a matter of minutes, especially in this domain where the ideas require much more careful, participatory contemplation. There is clearly a gradient of augmentation; for example, I am currently using "Grammarly" software to suggest better punctuation, wording, and phrasing. But the trend today is toward full-blown LLM construction. Just today, I commented on an Anthroposophy Facebook post about AI issues that was (admittedly) constructed with AI assistance:

"It is worrisome that even people cautioning about the risks of AI, or the need for ‘spiritual development’, so extensively and casually use LLMs to fashion their posts, and that the trend is only becoming more and more prevalent. This is the primary threat that generally isn’t included in lists of existential AI risks (which focus on physical or psychological, rather than spiritual, harm). Most people simply don’t realize what they are inwardly losing when they fail to sustain their attention through the unfolding of their creative inner process, integrating feedback on their inner gestures as they navigate and articulate the landscape of meaning. I addressed this previously with a Chess metaphor:

"Modern chess software often allows players to take back their moves if the opponent agrees. Many people automatically convince themselves that it is ‘compassionate’ to allow such takebacks. That is somewhat understandable in the case of misclicks, which are usually easy to spot, but what about when the player fails to remain focused and makes an impulsive or ill-thought-out move, only spotting the error after the fact? Allowing a takeback is only ‘helping’ this player if the goal is to win the game, regardless of how it is won. If the goal is to enhance the player’s experience of their intuitive process, on the other hand, then it is optimal for them to live with the full consequences of their cognitive errors, i.e., the suboptimal board configuration that results, so they can properly observe and integrate the feedback. The player is then also given the opportunity to adapt to the new circumstances by discovering creative ways to rebalance their position. The implicit offense here is that, if we are not consistently exposed to the deviations and detours our intuitive process takes from its desired state, in full consciousness, our sensitivity and orientation to the intimate (subtle) constraints on that process can never expand."

Extensive LLM use can be directly compared to this takeback mechanism in Chess, and it is also a vicious self-reinforcing cycle. The more we rely on LLMs to construct our posts, the less sensitive we become to what we are losing by failing to 'manually' organize and articulate our thoughts, observe that process, and creatively navigate the resulting suboptimal configurations. This is an absolutely vital process for modern spiritual development, but it is also a very subtle process and easy to lose sight of. The wider materialistic culture was always expected to keep it in the blind spot, but when it also manifests extensively in Anthroposophically informed spiritual culture, it should prompt us to pause and take stock of what we are doing.

I don't intend to suggest any rigid rules for AI use. There may be times when we need to write something for work and simply don't have the time to do it manually, without a lot of assistance. The key thing is to remain completely self-conscious of what we are doing and not foreclose on opportunities to remain intimately involved in the creative inner process, especially when we are conveying deeper spiritual intuitions. That applies whether we are communicating these intuitions only to ourselves or to others. Extensive reliance on AI for daily writing can easily creep into this spiritual domain and become an unquestioned crutch before we know it. The worst part is that we won't actually realize what we are losing by that overreliance, since we have become so insensitive to the inner process and its higher potential."