Cell Intelligence in Physiological & Morphological Spaces

[Federica]

I guess one can rejoice that today biologists such as Levin are going beyond the old paradigm of biology, well described by Adams and Whicher in the 1950s in the book Ashvin shared, Plant Between Earth and Sun. But the most thought-provoking idea in this quote comes last.

Much that the biologist, who is imbued with the ideal of Goethe's theory of knowledge, strives for, can be realized through the clarity and precision of studies in morphology based on modern projective geometry.

Unhappily, the one-sided insistence on the use of analytical mathematics as a tool for biologists has had a profoundly formative effect on the biological sciences and on the minds even of younger scientists, some of whom, however, know instinctively that a purely materialistic approach to the secrets of life yields no real progress, and are at their wits' end to find a way out of the impasse. The prevailing idea is that the inmost structure of matter must somehow contain the key to the phenomena - or else, if it does not, the key is not to be found. The biologist, beholding the wonderful regularities of pattern in the forms of life, tends to assume that if a rational explanation is to be found it must be via the atomic, ultra-microscopic realm with which the physicist and chemist are dealing. He is thus driven into a realm which in the quality of its forms is only indirectly and remotely akin to the phenomena of life directly visible to his senses. A striving to perceive the phenomena of life through the whole, rather than through the part, receives no help from the ancient, Euclidean, finite geometry inherited from the past. This is why there is a tendency in biology to borrow basic ideas from physics, for though in general the old conception of space is adequate for the understanding of inorganic nature, it is so only to at certain limit today. It may be said that the atomic physicist allows himself greater ideal freedom than the biologist. This dependence upon physics has undoubtedly been a hindrance to the proper development of biology. It has even been said that while biology in its effort to be an exact science has taken the basis of its ideas from physics, in future the laws of physics would reveal themselves to be special cases of the more universal biological laws awaiting discovery in the future."

[Federica]

Hey, I have a simple question

As I am reflecting on Ashvin's idea here about the trinity of Perception-Thinking-Intuition having value of general principle in human transformation, I have stumbled upon this, in Steiner

If, however, the memory and the remembrances were bound up with the physical body, they would not be able to survive for very long — at most for as long as the various substances of the physical body remain. This means that if the memory were bound up with the physical body, we should be able, at most, to remember back for six or seven years.

I wonder: how would a materialist neuroscientist address this today?
"We don't know now, but we will know within the next 25 years"? Do they have anything more clever?

[ScottRoberts]

Hey, I have a simple question

As I am reflecting on Ashvin's idea here about the trinity of Perception-Thinking-Intuition having value of general principle in human transformation, I have stumbled upon this, in Steiner

If, however, the memory and the remembrances were bound up with the physical body, they would not be able to survive for very long — at most for as long as the various substances of the physical body remain. This means that if the memory were bound up with the physical body, we should be able, at most, to remember back for six or seven years.

I wonder: how would a materialist neuroscientist address this today?
"We don't know now, but we will know within the next 25 years"? Do they have anything more clever?

I think they would claim that memories are data encoded on the physical hardware, and can be preserved as the hardware wears out by copying, as data on old disks can be preserved by copying onto new disks.

[Federica]

Hey, I have a simple question

As I am reflecting on Ashvin's idea here about the trinity of Perception-Thinking-Intuition having value of general principle in human transformation, I have stumbled upon this, in Steiner

If, however, the memory and the remembrances were bound up with the physical body, they would not be able to survive for very long — at most for as long as the various substances of the physical body remain. This means that if the memory were bound up with the physical body, we should be able, at most, to remember back for six or seven years.

I wonder: how would a materialist neuroscientist address this today?
"We don't know now, but we will know within the next 25 years"? Do they have anything more clever?

I think they would claim that memories are data encoded on the physical hardware, and can be preserved as the hardware wears out by copying, as data on old disks can be preserved by copying onto new disks.

Thanks Scott - yes, now that you say it, it sounds so obvious that would be the claim.

[Federica]

On the question of understanding what life is, I would like to signal the work of physicist Marco Masi - curiosuly, he is registered as member of this forum - that seems to have much in common with the vision Cleric has delineated in this thread, commenting on the work of Michael Levin.

I see that Masi has developed and set out an "integral cosmology" posted in multiple instalments on a Substack newsletter called: Letters for a Post-Material Future.

From the latest part of this work called The Unexpected Comeback of the Conscious Universe - Pt. IX (currently freely readable in full, later going behind a paywall, I believe):

So far, a multidimensional vision has been outlined, that envisages a panentheistic ontology where reality is not only material, subconscious, and mental but is also superconscious, with each individuality a soul in evolution. Can this view of reality answer the following question: What is life?

Might life be something unphysical such as consciousness or mind?
...
I will work with a different working hypothesis. Let us begin by asking the question: What do we feel is missing in a naturalistic account of life?

We know that life must be connected with consciousness, sentience, feelings, desires, emotions, passions, instincts, mind, thoughts, a sense of motivation, intentionality, and volition, that impel agency, purposefulness, and goal-oriented behavior, etc. How do we know that? Because of scientific and empirical observations? Not at all. If we talk about these things we do so only and exclusively because we can relate to these through our first-person subjective experience. Otherwise, from a scientific standpoint, they simply don’t exist.

Pointing to the "discrepancy between science’s third-person description and our first-person perception of life" he asks:

Why does every living being act as if it has agency, aim, and purpose?
…
How is it that cognition precedes brain functions…?

A few more excerpts from Part 9 of the cosmology:

A form of ‘basal cognition’ in cells and plants exists that previously was thought to be possible only in organisms with a brain, or at least with a nervous system.

instead of positing a blind bottom-up material process, supposedly leading to the emergence of these intrinsic psychological life properties, could we look at life coming from the opposite direction

What if we posit the existence of an intentional principle, a ‘desire-force’, and a ‘will-force’ as already inherent to life from the start?

universal Consciousness is not merely a silent immovable and inert self-awareness

Speaking of those inert M@L, blind nature types od conception, he says: “Ironically, they end up in the same reductionist corner of the material sciences that they were supposed to bypass. While the integral cosmology looks upon the same phenomena with a top-down perspective.”

Evolution is not only a purely physical, environmental, or genetic process determined from the outside onto a purely physical organism, but evolution goes also the other way around: from the inside out. The organism is not simply a passive container...

[AshvinP]

On the question of understanding what life is, I would like to signal the work of physicist Marco Masi - curiosuly, he is registered as member of this forum - that seems to have much in common with the vision Cleric has delineated in this thread, commenting on the work of Michael Levin.

Thanks for bringing attention to Masi's work, Federica. The essays in this series are indeed interesting and show a keen interest in the possibilities of exploring 'higher planes of consciousness'. I will share the comment I posted on the final essay. It is especially interesting for me to see where the particular resistance to modern initiation, if any, may reside in such thinkers and seekers who are right on the threshold.

Thank you, Marco, for this illuminating series of essays! I think it makes the 'integral' philosophy of thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo very accessible and relevant to our modern ways of thinking. You may be familiar with another such thinker, Jean Gebser, and what you have written reminds me of this quote:

"In addition, life has a tendency to find its equilibrium. Since we live in a consciousness structure pervaded, as ours is, by conceptions of perspectivity, we must bring this structure into balance with the others if we are to act against life itself. The fact that we achieve such an equilibrium by living an integral and not merely a fragmented life is the basic condition that makes possible the mutation which could possibly surmount the dualistic dead-end into which we have maneuvered ourselves.

Let us note the decisive fact that man is the integrality of his mutations. Only to the extent that he succeeds in living the whole is his life truly integral. But we should go one step further: only if life is integral in this sense of equally living-to-the-full the structures which constitute us does it encompass the emerging structure not only potentially, but in an actual and acute sense. By this time it should be evident that we are not merely toying here with thoughts, but are turning our mind to the prime difficulties that face the realization of an integral life."

-Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin

Of course, if this is not to remain an abstract floating conception of "realizing an integral life", we would need to also explore what concrete practices can support the new 'mutation' of consciousness that brings more of the Whole into our first-person experiential perspective, not in some indefinite future, but in the here and now. I see that you started to address that in Part VIII. I haven't had a chance to go through all the videos with Mr. Shirazi, but in the embedded video, you begin to speak about first-person intuitive experience of the subconscious and supra-conscious.

What do you envision are the limits to penetrating those 'higher planes' with lucid cognition, if any? Can we awaken from within our normal waking consciousness just as we may awaken from within a dream and become lucid? Our dream character usually has no consciousness that its entire sense of 'me' and the dreamscape through which it transforms, unfolds along the 'curvatures' of the waking self - the latter's ideas, fears, anxieties, physical pains, etc. Yet just as our dreaming self can become lucid to these curvatures, could our waking self awaken from within the sensory-intellectual dream to these higher-level ideations that structure the etched 'channels' and 'pathways' of its experiential flow, i.e. what we generally experience as the flow of our personal biographies - our patterned life phases of development - and those of collective human and natural history?

I am very interested to hear your thoughts on these questions, if you don't mind sharing, and thank you again for the stimulating essays!

[Federica]

On the question of understanding what life is, I would like to signal the work of physicist Marco Masi - curiosuly, he is registered as member of this forum - that seems to have much in common with the vision Cleric has delineated in this thread, commenting on the work of Michael Levin.

Thanks for bringing attention to Masi's work, Federica. The essays in this series are indeed interesting and show a keen interest in the possibilities of exploring 'higher planes of consciousness'. I will share the comment I posted on the final essay. It is especially interesting for me to see where the particular resistance to modern initiation, if any, may reside in such thinkers and seekers who are right on the threshold.

Thank you, Marco, for this illuminating series of essays! I think it makes the 'integral' philosophy of thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo very accessible and relevant to our modern ways of thinking. You may be familiar with another such thinker, Jean Gebser, and what you have written reminds me of this quote:

"In addition, life has a tendency to find its equilibrium. Since we live in a consciousness structure pervaded, as ours is, by conceptions of perspectivity, we must bring this structure into balance with the others if we are to act against life itself. The fact that we achieve such an equilibrium by living an integral and not merely a fragmented life is the basic condition that makes possible the mutation which could possibly surmount the dualistic dead-end into which we have maneuvered ourselves.

Let us note the decisive fact that man is the integrality of his mutations. Only to the extent that he succeeds in living the whole is his life truly integral. But we should go one step further: only if life is integral in this sense of equally living-to-the-full the structures which constitute us does it encompass the emerging structure not only potentially, but in an actual and acute sense. By this time it should be evident that we are not merely toying here with thoughts, but are turning our mind to the prime difficulties that face the realization of an integral life."

-Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin

Of course, if this is not to remain an abstract floating conception of "realizing an integral life", we would need to also explore what concrete practices can support the new 'mutation' of consciousness that brings more of the Whole into our first-person experiential perspective, not in some indefinite future, but in the here and now. I see that you started to address that in Part VIII. I haven't had a chance to go through all the videos with Mr. Shirazi, but in the embedded video, you begin to speak about first-person intuitive experience of the subconscious and supra-conscious.

What do you envision are the limits to penetrating those 'higher planes' with lucid cognition, if any? Can we awaken from within our normal waking consciousness just as we may awaken from within a dream and become lucid? Our dream character usually has no consciousness that its entire sense of 'me' and the dreamscape through which it transforms, unfolds along the 'curvatures' of the waking self - the latter's ideas, fears, anxieties, physical pains, etc. Yet just as our dreaming self can become lucid to these curvatures, could our waking self awaken from within the sensory-intellectual dream to these higher-level ideations that structure the etched 'channels' and 'pathways' of its experiential flow, i.e. what we generally experience as the flow of our personal biographies - our patterned life phases of development - and those of collective human and natural history?

I am very interested to hear your thoughts on these questions, if you don't mind sharing, and thank you again for the stimulating essays!

Oh Glad there is something of interest to you in this and thanks for taking it to the comment section.
Large question, difficult to answer in short, and perhaps the "multi-perspectival vision" in the reply, "a completely new way of seeing comprehensively/integrally that does not necessarily need information and technical knowledge" remains an enigmatic idea? At least it does for me who doesn't know Sri Aurobindo and has not watched the videos. Do you see what may lie behind these words?

[AshvinP]

Oh Glad there is something of interest to you in this and thanks for taking it to the comment section.
Large question, difficult to answer in short, and perhaps the "multi-perspectival vision" in the reply, "a completely new way of seeing comprehensively/integrally that does not necessarily need information and technical knowledge" remains an enigmatic idea? At least it does for me who doesn't know Sri Aurobindo and has not watched the videos. Do you see what may lie behind these words?

I don't think I see much more than you do behind the words at this point. They are just broad and vague enough to point toward some inner path but with no clear resolution of what that might involve and, most importantly, what role is played by the experience of real-time cognitive activity. To be fair, I didn't ask about that specifically, but I was hoping a little more indication would be given in the response.

I was just reminded of a post that Cleric wrote to Don Salmon, loosely on the topic of Aurobindo. It seems that typically in these discussions, 'higher states of consciousness' simply involves the expansion of attention to encompass all experiential content as a unified 'pure awareness'. In this process, spiritual activity decides to dissociate from the perceptual feedback and therefore, unsurprisingly, no longer feels it can be active within this higher strata of consciousness. It can't find its own reflection and individual contribution within the higher-order ideal structure. Therefore the highest goal is to simply live in the majestic flux of consciousness and speculate as much as possible on its higher-order structure, according to accumulated wisdom of the ages. I don't know if that is Masi's approach, but that would be my best guess for now.

Things really need to be made more concrete to help steer the discussion toward a higher resolution of the spiritual structure and beings at stake in this evolutionary process, i.e. some spiritual scientific results of higher cognition should be introduced, but at the same time this can easily raise the defense mechanisms. People are generally fine talking about theosophical ideas, but as soon as Steiner or spiritual science is mentioned, or heaven forbid the Christ impulse (as it relates to our living thinking faculty), even the integral spiritual thinkers start to tune out. So I'm not quite sure where to go from here yet.

[Federica]

Oh Glad there is something of interest to you in this and thanks for taking it to the comment section.
Large question, difficult to answer in short, and perhaps the "multi-perspectival vision" in the reply, "a completely new way of seeing comprehensively/integrally that does not necessarily need information and technical knowledge" remains an enigmatic idea? At least it does for me who doesn't know Sri Aurobindo and has not watched the videos. Do you see what may lie behind these words?

I don't think I see much more than you do behind the words at this point. They are just broad and vague enough to point toward some inner path but with no clear resolution of what that might involve and, most importantly, what role is played by the experience of real-time cognitive activity. To be fair, I didn't ask about that specifically, but I was hoping a little more indication would be given in the response.

I was just reminded of a post that Cleric wrote to Don Salmon, loosely on the topic of Aurobindo. It seems that typically in these discussions, 'higher states of consciousness' simply involves the expansion of attention to encompass all experiential content as a unified 'pure awareness'. In this process, spiritual activity decides to dissociate from the perceptual feedback and therefore, unsurprisingly, no longer feels it can be active within this higher strata of consciousness. It can't find its own reflection and individual contribution within the higher-order ideal structure. Therefore the highest goal is to simply live in the majestic flux of consciousness and speculate as much as possible on its higher-order structure, according to accumulated wisdom of the ages. I don't know if that is Masi's approach, but that would be my best guess for now.

Things really need to be made more concrete to help steer the discussion toward a higher resolution of the spiritual structure and beings at stake in this evolutionary process, i.e. some spiritual scientific results of higher cognition should be introduced, but at the same time this can easily raise the defense mechanisms. People are generally fine talking about theosophical ideas, but as soon as Steiner or spiritual science is mentioned, or heaven forbid the Christ impulse (as it relates to our living thinking faculty), even the integral spiritual thinkers start to tune out. So I'm not quite sure where to go from here yet.

I still have to consider the attached links - there are new comments that are more explicit.

[AshvinP]

Oh Glad there is something of interest to you in this and thanks for taking it to the comment section.
Large question, difficult to answer in short, and perhaps the "multi-perspectival vision" in the reply, "a completely new way of seeing comprehensively/integrally that does not necessarily need information and technical knowledge" remains an enigmatic idea? At least it does for me who doesn't know Sri Aurobindo and has not watched the videos. Do you see what may lie behind these words?

I don't think I see much more than you do behind the words at this point. They are just broad and vague enough to point toward some inner path but with no clear resolution of what that might involve and, most importantly, what role is played by the experience of real-time cognitive activity. To be fair, I didn't ask about that specifically, but I was hoping a little more indication would be given in the response.

I was just reminded of a post that Cleric wrote to Don Salmon, loosely on the topic of Aurobindo. It seems that typically in these discussions, 'higher states of consciousness' simply involves the expansion of attention to encompass all experiential content as a unified 'pure awareness'. In this process, spiritual activity decides to dissociate from the perceptual feedback and therefore, unsurprisingly, no longer feels it can be active within this higher strata of consciousness. It can't find its own reflection and individual contribution within the higher-order ideal structure. Therefore the highest goal is to simply live in the majestic flux of consciousness and speculate as much as possible on its higher-order structure, according to accumulated wisdom of the ages. I don't know if that is Masi's approach, but that would be my best guess for now.

Things really need to be made more concrete to help steer the discussion toward a higher resolution of the spiritual structure and beings at stake in this evolutionary process, i.e. some spiritual scientific results of higher cognition should be introduced, but at the same time this can easily raise the defense mechanisms. People are generally fine talking about theosophical ideas, but as soon as Steiner or spiritual science is mentioned, or heaven forbid the Christ impulse (as it relates to our living thinking faculty), even the integral spiritual thinkers start to tune out. So I'm not quite sure where to go from here yet.

I still have to consider the attached links - there are new comments that are more explicit.

Thanks, Federica, I think your comment and his response opened up a fruitful way to introduce the phenomenological essays. It's always good when the other person is the first to mention "phenomenology"! But we will see if he follows up on them. I linked the essays on Google docs since you had already linked the forum and I'm not sure if he wants to get entangled with a forum environment just yet.

Thanks Marco. This combined with your response to Federica above gives me a great sense of what you are speaking of. I think you are correct that seeking out earth-shattering spiritual experiences should never be the starting point or even the goal, but at best only a second-order effect of learning more intimately about the structure of our everyday thinking and perceptual experience. Not by building abstract intellectual models of that experience, but through first-person phenomenological investigation in the spirit of Goethe.

I think it is largely unsuspected how greatly such an approach can orient our intuition of the spiritual 'topology' that structures the normal flow of experience. Our normal cognitive life is so limited in its 'range of movement' that it hardly has any first-person experience to work with, its dataset is limited to immediate sensory phenomena and the abstract configuration of philosophical, scientific, religious, etc. concepts.

Asa metaphor, we could imagine that we spent our entire life using our hands to pick up things, move objects, press buttons, turn keys, scratch itches, and so forth. Then one day, through a flash of insight, we look at the hand and realize we can make it the object of contemplation - we can investigate the hand itself and learn to know its constraints and possibilities from within, by moving and bending it in the most varied ways. This is a limited analogy because there is only so much we can accomplish by investigating our hands, but there is no such limit on exploring the dynamics and degrees of freedom of our cognitive activity.

When it comes to the movements of our cognitive activity, we are not bounded by any spatial considerations. Our hand can only bump into objects within its zone of reach and its zone of spatial extension, yet our thinking can awaken deeper within its flow by 'bumping into' more holistic thought-perceptions, more holistic constellations of meaning. It can find its reflection not only in fragmented sensory impressions or dim concepts that provide feedback on personal and myopic tasks, but in fluid imaginations that provide feedback on its whole life destiny within the broader context of Earthly evolution.

On that note, I invite you to check out the following phenomenological essays written by a friend whenever you have the time. It would be great to hear what you think!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QVo ... sp=sharing