Philosophical Speculations

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Nov 24, 2024 2:22 pm In any case, in the post, I did mean to signal the influence of the elastic tensions in the helicopter-view opinionated steering, beyond the technical underdimensionality of our intellect:

"Because of this cognitive leap, we are unable to identify and trace what other elements, beyond the focused analyses developed in controlled sequencing reasoning, may have interfered, and influenced our higher-level judgments and recommendations (such as emotions, facts of our upbringing and life history, religious or metaphysical views, ideologies)."

Yes, I didn't miss that. I only wanted to highlight a point, because different ideas can be evoked when we think about interfering forces. For example, one way to understand what you provided is the following (and I know that you don't imply that way). Let's say we have problems with the weather. Like the social system, this is far beyond our native intellectual capacity to encompass. These are the chaotic factors that we have difficulty dealing with. The sci-fi-oriented mind of today may imagine that higher cognition would provide a better understanding and technology for controlling the weather. This is the Ahri pole - we are islands of stability within an inherently chaotic sea that we can hardly grasp, but we do our best to expand our cognition, for example by using computational accelerators, and as a result reach deeper into the chaotic sea and instill our designed order there. I only wanted to underline that higher cognition doesn't simply give us the insight and means to put an order within the chaos of interfering factors, but is at the same time the experience of conscious perspectives at a higher level from whence perturbations in, say, the astral field proceed. Thus higher cognition leads, for example, to the inner knowledge of what the progressive and backward angels are doing in our astral body, and which can motivate our corresponding activity at these scales. I guess that this is what you meant, but just wanted to emphasize it, because "emotions, facts of our upbringing and life history, religious or metaphysical views, ideologies" can be seen as interfering factors even in a materialistic Universe, there's no hint of the existence of ideal intents at other scales that may cause the tensions. Then higher cognition can be understood as some kind of superintellect that is capable of successfully navigating these inherently chaotic interferences.

Cleric wrote: ↑Sun Nov 24, 2024 7:20 pm

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Nov 24, 2024 2:22 pm In any case, in the post, I did mean to signal the influence of the elastic tensions in the helicopter-view opinionated steering, beyond the technical underdimensionality of our intellect:

"Because of this cognitive leap, we are unable to identify and trace what other elements, beyond the focused analyses developed in controlled sequencing reasoning, may have interfered, and influenced our higher-level judgments and recommendations (such as emotions, facts of our upbringing and life history, religious or metaphysical views, ideologies)."

Yes, I didn't miss that. I only wanted to highlight a point, because different ideas can be evoked when we think about interfering forces. For example, one way to understand what you provided is the following (and I know that you don't imply that way). Let's say we have problems with the weather. Like the social system, this is far beyond our native intellectual capacity to encompass. These are the chaotic factors that we have difficulty dealing with. The sci-fi-oriented mind of today may imagine that higher cognition would provide a better understanding and technology for controlling the weather. This is the Ahri pole - we are islands of stability within an inherently chaotic sea that we can hardly grasp, but we do our best to expand our cognition, for example by using computational accelerators, and as a result reach deeper into the chaotic sea and instill our designed order there. I only wanted to underline that higher cognition doesn't simply give us the insight and means to put an order within the chaos of interfering factors, but is at the same time the experience of conscious perspectives at a higher level from whence perturbations in, say, the astral field proceed. Thus higher cognition leads, for example, to the inner knowledge of what the progressive and backward angels are doing in our astral body, and which can motivate our corresponding activity at these scales. I guess that this is what you meant, but just wanted to emphasize it, because "emotions, facts of our upbringing and life history, religious or metaphysical views, ideologies" can be seen as interfering factors even in a materialistic Universe, there's no hint of the existence of ideal intents at other scales that may cause the tensions. Then higher cognition can be understood as some kind of superintellect that is capable of successfully navigating these inherently chaotic interferences.

Got it, Cleric. In fact, I imagined writing to a materialist, and that informed the choice of concepts and words. I realize this is not evident in the post, since the part to the attention of the materialist is seamlessly blended with an intro and a conclusion to you, the readers of this forum... I thought the usual “likes and dislikes, sympathies and antipathies” would probably puzzle my imagined recipient (they puzzled me, first time I read them) and I also wanted to make it sound very reasonable. It was a light reference to soul forces, meant to simply instill the idea that arbitrary factors may compromise our cognitive flow. But didn't realize the interferences could sound purely material.
I did not mean to suggest that higher cognition may lead to the inner knowledge of angelic activity in our astral body. Firstly because, as said, I was trying to seduce a materialist; and secondly, I wouldn’t suggest in this way something of which I have a fully insufficient understanding, not to mention experience, like it's the case for the angelic activity in the astral body.


Almost unrelated to that, your weather example has reminded me of an essay by Dennis Klocek called Technology and Moral Development : A Cautionary Tale:

"... I built several devices for weather modification based on geometries that I was finding in my planetary research on weather patterns and in the work of Viktor Schauberger. I succeeded in building one device that was a kind of musical cloud cello, that allowed me to control cloud build up over the horizon of the Sierras to a moderate degree. Unfortunately the downside to that device was that the family members who slept in the sweep of the device developed chronic diarrhea. Only I knew what was behind this. When I silenced the device the diarrhea stopped, but eventually things got so bad that I was forced to burn the device and bury the residue to get things back to normal.
My takeaway was that I was technically able to intrude into these forces but not morally able to understand what I was doing. It would be the first of several similar instances I would encounter of the sorcerer’s apprentice syndrome where I had just enough knowledge to get into trouble by starting a reaction.
The requirements of the inner life that I was striving to understand were not developed enough in my soul to be able to command a reaction to cease. That kind of insight about myself gradually led me to an understanding that the devices of John Keely actually drew their force from his own life body. ..."

Stranger wrote: ↑Tue Nov 19, 2024 2:26 pm Still the fact that those materialists philosophies were developed in ancient times when people had such an easy access to spiritual world doesn't make sense.

To add some more flesh, and hopefully perspective, to the question, there is an additional evolutionary arc to be recognized in the unfolding of our Postatlantian times - from Indian epoch, to Persian, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and to our present epoch, begun with the Renaissance. It turns out it’s too simplistic to summarize, as I proposed, the evolution of consciousness in a movement from more clairvoyance into the spiritual worlds, in ancient times, to less today. Another key trend is that, in the life arc of the individual human, the age at which the growth of the soul becomes emancipated from the growth of the physical body has constantly gone down.

In ancient India, the soul growth of the individual was reliant/supported by the physical body up to the age of 56 years. In each subsequent epoch, this threshold has been decreasing by 7 years - reaching age 33 in year 1 of our epoch. Today it's less than 27. This means that the physical body - the most ancient and refined layer - was able for the Indian to tightly support the growth of the soul for the major part of earthly life, hence providing it with solid, de facto access to mature awareness of the higher worlds, up to an old age. Today by contrast, children may be naturally spiritual, thanks to their soul's reliance on the refined physical sheath, in which truth is inscribed, though in a not so intelligible way. This is so until the individual is still physically growing, until the process of bodily decay has not yet taken the upper hand. But as we become adults, we quickly lose that spontaneous spiritual intuition in our epoch, intuition which moreover only has time to resonate in a soul that's still very young. By contrast, the ancient Indians were still growing at age 56, as strange ad it may seem! (The more ones reads spiritual science, the more these kind of things come to life and make sense within the complexity of all other interrelated factors, to say it in an intellectual way). And so the Greeks gave birth to some early adopters of the materialistic impulse that would later explode in the 19th century, because they found themselves sort of in between, along this trend of receding support provided by the physical body to the soul:

Steiner wrote:In the third epoch [Egyptian] simply through his nature it was possible for man to see into the spiritual world, though in decreasing measure. It was possible for him through direct vision to know about the soul's immortality. In the Graeco-Latin epoch man could indeed know that everything growing, flourishing, everything coming into being is permeated with soul and spirit. But the soul's independent life after death, or before it had entered physical life through birth, was no longer obvious to the Greek simply through human evolution as such. That is the reason for the well-known saying expressed by the Greek heroes: “It is better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the shades.”

The Greeks knew through direct vision that the “upper world” and man within it was permeated by soul and spirit. It was just because of this vision that the spiritual world as such eluded them. It is interesting that the eminent Greek sage Aristotle developed his ideas precisely on this fundamental view of the Greeks. The great Aristotle scholar Franz Brentano was right when he said that Aristotle's view of immortality was that after death man was no longer a complete human being. As a Greek, Aristotle had the view I have described, and he therefore presupposed that for a human being to be complete, body and soul must be together. Those like Aristotle who were not initiated in the mysteries said: If a man's arm is cut off, he is no longer a complete human being; if both arms are cut off, he is even less complete; if the whole body is taken from him as happens in death, then he is truly no longer a complete man. This view is certainly not true in the light of higher knowledge; it originated with the Greeks, even with those whose thinking, as in the case of Aristotle, had reached the highest eminence. After the soul has gone through death, man, according to Aristotle, is incomplete because he lacks organs that could bring him into communication with any kind of environment.


Aspects of Human Evolution - Lecture I

I’m thinking to posting this response to jw but I’m very unsure if I’m clear enough, so I would like to get some helpful feedback.

My response:

“I want to apologize for my late response first! Please don’t think that it is because I find this conversation uninteresting.

Let’s revisit our dream analogy. We should find a starting point where we can begin our journey without any assumptions about the world. All we perceive are colors and shapes in their various manifestations. These manifestations transform according to certain regular rhythms. What we call the world is actually our state of consciousness. That is the given. Everything else we know, we form (in our present epoch) by creating mental models based on the impressions provided by our senses (or through the technological extension of our senses). Eventually, a point is reached where, through the mental model of the dynamics of perception, one can say that certain things in the model point to something that explains the emergence of the dream, but which is not factually perceivable. Everything you think is still thinking about the dream, in an attempt to understand it. At a certain point, you claim that the fundamental reality is not perceivable through our thinking, but its existence is recognized through our thinking about the dream phenomena—even when you say that these only point to something else, it is still your model doing the pointing.

But we are still in the dream; your answer exists within this dream, and the idea that there is a fundamental reality arises from a model you’ve created by thinking about the dream. Here, your second cognitive function comes into play, which cannot tell you about the fundamental reality, but allows you to participate in it. However, in order to recognize this, you must think through the experience, that is, understand its meaning. This happens again by thinking about the experience in order to integrate it into your knowledge orientation, which explains how the world changes and how you can act to live in harmony with it.

If we stay with the givenness of our perception, we can say that there are two poles: the perceptions that are given, which appear without our own activity, and our thinking, which we bring about ourselves to understand our perception. Through our activity of thinking, we discover the appropriate concepts (intuitions) that make our sensory experience understandable. Even for you, all your trust lies in your thinking, which explains what the world is and what your role in it is. If we’re honest, the two poles of our experience are the given and our thought activity. From this arise all the models about the so-called world. As long as we create intellectual models of the world, as you do—even if it’s quantum physics in your case—we will never find the primal ground of being, but only intellectual models and speculative theories about it. Only when we recognize ourselves can we begin to recognize the world. And perhaps our other cognitive abilities (in your case, aesthetic knowledge) can allow us to participate in the dynamic structures of what the world brings forth, and our participation can be expressed in the form of clear and understandable thoughts.

What is your view on this?”

Güney27 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 26, 2024 10:33 pm I’m thinking to posting this response to jw but I’m very unsure if I’m clear enough, so I would like to get some helpful feedback.

I think it's a good overall summary of the situation, Guney. It highlights the fact that we cannot get 'outside thinking' as a means of navigating the intuitive meaning of existence and artistically describing that meaning, as JW does with QM analogies.

I wonder if it may be helpful to also work in a reference to GA 1, Steiner's work on Goethe's epistemology. I am sure JW is familiar with the latter and his philosophical/phenomenological lines of thinking. It is usually good to continue the dialogue through our own independently crafted thought-forms for as long as possible (even if that doesn't spark deeper intuition in the other person, it will surely help us). Yet after we have exhausted our own ability to present the ideas, especially to someone with an academic philosophical background, it can be helpful to draw on Steiner's resources that are already there.

Chapters IX and X are especially helpful for approaching the core Kantian trap that assumes 'limits to cognition', based on a faulty understanding of what 'knowing' means, and then inevitably leads to conceiving a 'noumenal reality' on the 'other side' of our thoughts/representations, which we can only speak about negatively. JW needs to see through this common mental trap in one way or another if any progress toward the experience of real-time inner activity and inner space stretching is to be made. For example this passage strikes at the core:

So the place, therefore, where the perceptual pictures appear in their ideal relationship, where this relationship is held out to the perceptual pictures as their conceptual counter-image, this place is human consciousness. Now even though this conceptual (lawful) relationship, in its substantial makeup, is produced within human consciousness, it by no means follows from this that it is also only subjective in its significance. It springs, rather, in its content just as much from the objective world as, in its conceptual form, it springs from human consciousness. It is the necessary objective complement to the perceptual picture. Precisely because the perceptual picture is something incomplete, something unfinished in itself, we are compelled to add to this picture, in its manifestation as sense experience, its necessary complement. If the directly given itself were far enough along that at every point of it a problem did not arise for us, then we would never have to go beyond it. But the perceptual pictures absolutely do not follow each other and from each other in such a way that we can regard them, themselves, as reciprocally resulting from each other; they result, rather, from something else that is closed to apprehension by the senses. Conceptual apprehension approaches them and grasps also that part of reality that remains closed to the senses. Knowing would be an absolutely useless process if something complete were conveyed to us in sense experience. All drawing together, ordering, and grouping of sense-perceptible facts would have no objective value. Knowing has meaning only if we do not regard the configuration given to the senses as a finished one, if this configuration is for us a half of something that bears within itself something still higher that, however, is no longer sense-perceptible. There the human spirit steps in. It perceives that higher element. Therefore thinking must also not be regarded as bringing something to the content of reality. It is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas. Idealism is therefore quite compatible with the principle of empirical research. The idea is not the content of subjective thinking, but rather the result of research. Reality, insofar as we meet it with open senses, confronts us. It confronts us in a form that we cannot regard as its true one; we first attain its true form when we bring our thinking into flux. Knowing means: to add the perception of thinking to the half reality of sense experience so that this picture of half reality becomes complete.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Nov 27, 2024 2:31 pm

Güney27 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 26, 2024 10:33 pm I’m thinking to posting this response to jw but I’m very unsure if I’m clear enough, so I would like to get some helpful feedback.

I think it's a good overall summary of the situation, Guney. It highlights the fact that we cannot get 'outside thinking' as a means of navigating the intuitive meaning of existence and artistically describing that meaning, as JW does with QM analogies.

I wonder if it may be helpful to also work in a reference to GA 1, Steiner's work on Goethe's epistemology. I am sure JW is familiar with the latter and his philosophical/phenomenological lines of thinking. It is usually good to continue the dialogue through our own independently crafted thought-forms for as long as possible (even if that doesn't spark deeper intuition in the other person, it will surely help us). Yet after we have exhausted our own ability to present the ideas, especially to someone with an academic philosophical background, it can be helpful to draw on Steiner's resources that are already there.

Chapters IX and X are especially helpful for approaching the core Kantian trap that assumes 'limits to cognition', based on a faulty understanding of what 'knowing' means, and then inevitably leads to conceiving a 'noumenal reality' on the 'other side' of our thoughts/representations, which we can only speak about negatively. JW needs to see through this common mental trap in one way or another if any progress toward the experience of real-time inner activity and inner space stretching is to be made. For example this passage strikes at the core:

So the place, therefore, where the perceptual pictures appear in their ideal relationship, where this relationship is held out to the perceptual pictures as their conceptual counter-image, this place is human consciousness. Now even though this conceptual (lawful) relationship, in its substantial makeup, is produced within human consciousness, it by no means follows from this that it is also only subjective in its significance. It springs, rather, in its content just as much from the objective world as, in its conceptual form, it springs from human consciousness. It is the necessary objective complement to the perceptual picture. Precisely because the perceptual picture is something incomplete, something unfinished in itself, we are compelled to add to this picture, in its manifestation as sense experience, its necessary complement. If the directly given itself were far enough along that at every point of it a problem did not arise for us, then we would never have to go beyond it. But the perceptual pictures absolutely do not follow each other and from each other in such a way that we can regard them, themselves, as reciprocally resulting from each other; they result, rather, from something else that is closed to apprehension by the senses. Conceptual apprehension approaches them and grasps also that part of reality that remains closed to the senses. Knowing would be an absolutely useless process if something complete were conveyed to us in sense experience. All drawing together, ordering, and grouping of sense-perceptible facts would have no objective value. Knowing has meaning only if we do not regard the configuration given to the senses as a finished one, if this configuration is for us a half of something that bears within itself something still higher that, however, is no longer sense-perceptible. There the human spirit steps in. It perceives that higher element. Therefore thinking must also not be regarded as bringing something to the content of reality. It is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas. Idealism is therefore quite compatible with the principle of empirical research. The idea is not the content of subjective thinking, but rather the result of research. Reality, insofar as we meet it with open senses, confronts us. It confronts us in a form that we cannot regard as its true one; we first attain its true form when we bring our thinking into flux. Knowing means: to add the perception of thinking to the half reality of sense experience so that this picture of half reality becomes complete.

It seems to me that he don’t see that he is creating mental models. Even if he says that he has esthetic experiences of the ontological primitive, he still only has some experience, which he then make sense of trough an intellectual Modell of the world. If esthetic knowledge could give us the means to intuit something of the deeper strata of existence, then we could build clear thoughts that describe the experiences. But if we have an experience and then build intellectual theories in order to make a case for them, that’s a whole other story. Thanks for sharing the quote i shared it with Jw

Güney27 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 27, 2024 5:25 pm It seems to me that he don’t see that he is creating mental models. Even if he says that he has esthetic experiences of the ontological primitive, he still only has some experience, which he then make sense of trough an intellectual Modell of the world. If esthetic knowledge could give us the means to intuit something of the deeper strata of existence, then we could build clear thoughts that describe the experiences. But if we have an experience and then build intellectual theories in order to make a case for them, that’s a whole other story. Thanks for sharing the quote i shared it with Jw

Very good observation. That is why we always stress the continuity of ordinary thinking experience and higher-order experience, trying to establish a clear gradient between them. In a certain sense, we know it is higher experience precisely because it can be lucidly related to the flow of our ordinary thoughts and can naturally be expressed through those thoughts, where the latter symbolically express what the meaning of the former feels like. This is the 'isomorphism' that JP intuits - everything 'below' can serve as a metaphor for what is 'above' because self-similar patterns of meaning are preserved across the entire gradient. It is the very fractal lawfulness of spiritual activity across all scales that ensures this outcome.

On the other hand, when our thoughts merely become the vehicle to rationalize our experience after the fact, then we know that experience is not "higher" in the genuine sense. It may be unfamiliar, abnormal, atavistic, blissful, profound, etc., but it's not higher and is actually lower than the waking intellect, insofar as the latter can make more sense (to a limited degree) of the dreamy abnormal experiences than vice versa. In that case, we are doing the exact same thing we do in ordinary life - we instinctively stumble through certain curvatures of beliefs, opinions, preferences, passions, etc. which condition our experience and the intellect comes along later to rationalize the meaning of what we experienced, solidifying our opinion and preference as the 'right' and 'true' one.

It's not that our thoughts have fundamentally changed in essence - they are always naturally condensing from the intuitive context of meaning we are steering through - but as discussed on other thread, it simply that our conscious perspective on and orientation to the thoughts has shifted/inverted. In the higher cognitive case, we intend that our thoughts should be understood in their relation to the intuitive context from which they condense (such as our intimate soul geometry), while in the lower sub-cognitive case, we only intend they fit together between themselves and work to support our theory of nature, cognition, reality, God, etc.

The last response to my comment:

„What you wrote is extremely interesting. By the way, if you find it easier to respond in German that would be fine. Most of the philosophy I’ve read has been in German and sometimes it helps to write in the language in which it was originally thought.

I’ll start with a few technical points and then move to the more important big picture. I find it problematic to split reality and experience of reality into subject and object. If we speak of “the objective world” and subjective consciousness we lose the all important aspect of entanglement. Our consciousness is not something separate from an objective world, but a special form of a non-objective reality - interconnected and inseparable. The splitting of non-material consciousness and objective nature is the Greek metaphysical error of the 5th century BCE that has undermined thinking in the West ever since. We are that part of physical existence that “Experiences”. That experience can run along different paths, but all paths are forms of that initial awareness of an experience. All experience is an event of entanglement with what we encounter along that path.

The path starts with reduction from the incomprehensible to what is possible to experience within our radically limited “world”. This path, once initiated, can further reduce through objectification, or transcend back toward the incomprehensible through esthetic thinking. That is, we can think of any initial revelation mathematically/logically as wave collapse to quantum Eigenstate, and from that construct an abstract model of the universe from which we produce Ideas. Or we can esthetically think an initial revelation poetically poetically/musically without abstraction. The former is an ossified and lifeless retreat from the incomprehensible; the latter is the dancing with the revelation. Both science and poetry resort to metaphor, but it always helps to keep in mind the difference between them. Scientific metaphor acts to reduce the incomprehensible to a simple image that can be understood for practical purposes, such as the “code” of DNA, or “information” stored in cosmic events. The danger in this is that it can lead to taking the metaphor literally and arise in Ideas. Poetic metaphor goes in the opposite direction. It takes a simple and familiar image of experience, and by inhering in the physical experience itself, carries us into a profound experience of the incomprehensible that can never be reduced to Idea.

That is why Idealism was a dead end. By the way, my interest in physics is not for its theories, which will always be wrong and tainted with metaphysics, but rather the mysteries it introduces where physics necessarily fails.„

Güney27 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 05, 2024 7:52 pm The last response to my comment:

„What you wrote is extremely interesting. By the way, if you find it easier to respond in German that would be fine. Most of the philosophy I’ve read has been in German and sometimes it helps to write in the language in which it was originally thought.

I’ll start with a few technical points and then move to the more important big picture. I find it problematic to split reality and experience of reality into subject and object. If we speak of “the objective world” and subjective consciousness we lose the all important aspect of entanglement. Our consciousness is not something separate from an objective world, but a special form of a non-objective reality - interconnected and inseparable. The splitting of non-material consciousness and objective nature is the Greek metaphysical error of the 5th century BCE that has undermined thinking in the West ever since. We are that part of physical existence that “Experiences”. That experience can run along different paths, but all paths are forms of that initial awareness of an experience. All experience is an event of entanglement with what we encounter along that path.

The path starts with reduction from the incomprehensible to what is possible to experience within our radically limited “world”. This path, once initiated, can further reduce through objectification, or transcend back toward the incomprehensible through esthetic thinking. That is, we can think of any initial revelation mathematically/logically as wave collapse to quantum Eigenstate, and from that construct an abstract model of the universe from which we produce Ideas. Or we can esthetically think an initial revelation poetically poetically/musically without abstraction. The former is an ossified and lifeless retreat from the incomprehensible; the latter is the dancing with the revelation. Both science and poetry resort to metaphor, but it always helps to keep in mind the difference between them. Scientific metaphor acts to reduce the incomprehensible to a simple image that can be understood for practical purposes, such as the “code” of DNA, or “information” stored in cosmic events. The danger in this is that it can lead to taking the metaphor literally and arise in Ideas. Poetic metaphor goes in the opposite direction. It takes a simple and familiar image of experience, and by inhering in the physical experience itself, carries us into a profound experience of the incomprehensible that can never be reduced to Idea.

That is why Idealism was a dead end. By the way, my interest in physics is not for its theories, which will always be wrong and tainted with metaphysics, but rather the mysteries it introduces where physics necessarily fails.„

What's confusing to me is why he chooses to categorize the "ineffable initial revelation" as a physical existence rather than an ideal one. Does he have any stance on whether this Fount also has a first-person experiential perspective?

Güney27 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 05, 2024 7:52 pm The last response to my comment:

„What you wrote is extremely interesting. By the way, if you find it easier to respond in German that would be fine. Most of the philosophy I’ve read has been in German and sometimes it helps to write in the language in which it was originally thought.

I’ll start with a few technical points and then move to the more important big picture. I find it problematic to split reality and experience of reality into subject and object. If we speak of “the objective world” and subjective consciousness we lose the all important aspect of entanglement. Our consciousness is not something separate from an objective world, but a special form of a non-objective reality - interconnected and inseparable. The splitting of non-material consciousness and objective nature is the Greek metaphysical error of the 5th century BCE that has undermined thinking in the West ever since. We are that part of physical existence that “Experiences”. That experience can run along different paths, but all paths are forms of that initial awareness of an experience. All experience is an event of entanglement with what we encounter along that path.

The path starts with reduction from the incomprehensible to what is possible to experience within our radically limited “world”. This path, once initiated, can further reduce through objectification, or transcend back toward the incomprehensible through esthetic thinking. That is, we can think of any initial revelation mathematically/logically as wave collapse to quantum Eigenstate, and from that construct an abstract model of the universe from which we produce Ideas. Or we can esthetically think an initial revelation poetically poetically/musically without abstraction. The former is an ossified and lifeless retreat from the incomprehensible; the latter is the dancing with the revelation. Both science and poetry resort to metaphor, but it always helps to keep in mind the difference between them. Scientific metaphor acts to reduce the incomprehensible to a simple image that can be understood for practical purposes, such as the “code” of DNA, or “information” stored in cosmic events. The danger in this is that it can lead to taking the metaphor literally and arise in Ideas. Poetic metaphor goes in the opposite direction. It takes a simple and familiar image of experience, and by inhering in the physical experience itself, carries us into a profound experience of the incomprehensible that can never be reduced to Idea.

That is why Idealism was a dead end. By the way, my interest in physics is not for its theories, which will always be wrong and tainted with metaphysics, but rather the mysteries it introduces where physics necessarily fails.„

What is also interesting is what he means by "transcend back toward the incomprehensible through esthetic thinking". Does this esthetic thinking actually make the incomprehensible comprehensible (probably on a higher level), or one simply ascends through it into the incomprehensible and flows there dreamily ever after?