Today my heart became a void again for the third time, in my life. There’s a beauty in suffering. In what that Lacan guy called, ‘Objet petite a’ i.e., “an attainable object of desire”. It’s delusional, it’s a fake promise and a smile.
It’s something that you keep telling yourself, over and over again i.e., that it might just be attainable. But what happens in the end? You pour yourself out until the bottle of the unattainable empties you. And let me tell you, emptiness is a funny thing.
Very funny actually. Not that you just realize you dipped your toes into the mud, but also that the lotus belongs where it does.
Unrequited love is a self-assigned contract. You sign yourself into the uncertainty because you want to give yourself an oblivious certainty. An oblivious certainty that is love. Perhaps one of the most profound intoxicating immersion ever.
They say that you become sort of an artist when you’re heartbroken. I don’t know if that’s completely true, but I know that it is part of that contract.
An artist is the only one that can find solace in uncertainty, as the emptiness weeps tears of craft. A carefully, much detailed piece of possession. Memories.
Dali painted the persistence of memory, and I like that it’s lucidity presents or puts forth the certainty of dreaming. Dreams and fantasy are so immersive that it keeps the lover locked into a well, a well full of wine.
And that Wine I sip while I smile, and say goodbye.
I created the following Mind-Maps to illustrate more of my thinking style in terms of condensing as well as synthesising my chain of reasoning for the concepts I either create or the existing ones I contemplate upon (& play around with)->
I. The Map for Survival
The key is to achieve homeostatic psychosomaticism- i.e., the stability between the body and the brain, and the important tool here is the power of the mind to manipulate the game of survival. If you can convince your mind that you have the power to make it out alive- you’ve won.
[Thoughts I had in the ICU bed- constructing the model for durability induced by survival instincts as the tiles on the roof kept transposing via the (magical, astonishing &.. an aporia) state of delirium. The model seemed to have worked, helped me meditate for the first time in a very long time. Near-death experiences are truly transforming- not endorsing that this model would work for everyone of course- but it seemed to have worked for me- and made me realise that it’s truly the mind that possesses all the power in a sentient- and that perhaps the mind has always been the biggest gem of all times- hence, making the manipulation of mind the biggest virtue & weapon in the history of mankind]
II. Deconstructing Philosophy
Philosophy is not a ‘way of life’- that’s perhaps the biggest myth of all.. it’s the way of rationally contemplating about the very essence of contemplation itself, along-with the inquiry into existence, reality and what possibly lies beyond i.e., the abstraction of the universe.
[Philosophy can roughly be divided into a) Axiology i.e., the scrutiny of value in theology, b) Epistemology i.e., the investigation of the essence of knowledge and, c) Metaphysics i.e., inquiry into abstraction of the universe, existence (ontology), etc.]
III. On the Phenomenology of Perception
It is the imaginative capacity of our perceptual consciousness which constructs the subjective sense of external environment perceived.
[Imagination (within the Imaginative Capacity of Perceptual/Visual Consciousness) renders (or puts together) the ‘images’ of our immediate external environment perceived. Hence, the (Real*/Actual) physical/material reality is imperceptible to the perception of a subjective sentient. What we experience, is merely a subjective constructed sense of reality. One could hence argue that our perceptual & imaginative capacities is what accounts for the ‘qualia’— “the hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers). Philosophically illustrating—the triad between (i.e., theories or perception) Husserl-Sarte-Ponty is the key to understanding this chain of reasoning i.e., Husserlian theory of perception leading to or adopted later by Sartre & Ponty via phenomenological speculative introspection. One could also interpret this via the lens of Embodied Cognition (Varela) i.e., Neurophenemenological scrutiny of the mind-body problem (Descartes)—> Body ~ Mind (~ = influence). Broadly speaking, the ‘constructed sense of reality via perceptual consciousness’ is what contemporary thinkers would define as the ‘dream-like sense of reality’ (Joscha Bach) or as a ‘continuous hallucination/s that mark the subjective sense of reality’ (Anil Seth). Therefore, to loosely conclude, we construct our sense of reality via our imaginative capacities via perception (within consciousness)] —— [Some reflective add on(s) after a twitter dialogue– A) Perceptual Consciousness here would come off as a term under the umbrella of access consciousness (i.e., the functions that can be associated with consciousness)— the very use however would elucidate more about the essence of phenomenal consciousness. B) The key term use of perceptual consciousness * i.e., a mechanism for deciphering the enigma of the hard problem via a theory of perception with this argument in generation. C) Access & Phenomenal Consciousness are Ned Block’s terminologies that has been used within this argument– the term merely is broadly aided or ‘does justice to’—via the in-depth investigation of the perceptual (access) consciousness. Deciphering access consciousness—> Apprehension of the phenomenal consciousness. D) There’s a presumption assumed here that the material/physical reality a) exists and, b) is inaccessible—the ‘proof’ however I suppose would be illuminated via studies/experiments conducted to elaborate more the basal essence of neural interactions & the different brain-states. (I will continue to develop this of course, for now this is all I choose to share here)]
IV. The Construct of Intelligence
Intelligence is an autonomous subject’s capacity to comprehend or synthesise knowledge alongside the capacity for abstraction and furthermore to possess the ability to create unique models.
[Thoughts derived from another twitter dialogue about the C3 model for Intelligence– Intelligence is/comprises of C3- i.e., a somewhat top-down reduction of the complexity which is intelligence. I wouldn’t reduce it even* more than c3. An agent is intelligent by the virtue of being able to create models within its given environment however, the models created require a certain level of comprehensive and connectivistic capacities. I think resolution & causal reconstruction definitely plays a huge role in effectuating the C3 capacities (within one’s intellect) because it puts forth the ingredients upon through which the model is brought into existence… It would be the components/constituents. Like each component is independent however, all the components are required for the agent to be intelligent. Because an agent could have creative capacity only but that would be a waste if it’s not able to grasp the model’s meaning or level of abstraction]
V. The Triad of Psychoanalysis
I would divide Psychoanalysis or let’s say interchangeably also broadly the Psychoanalytical movement into roughly three subsets i.e., as Empirical psychoanalysis, Collective Psychoanalysis & Semantic Psychoanalysis.
[ (A) Empirical Psychoanalysis has its basis in the sciences of brain and body i.e., a biological basis that Freud heavily relied on to carefully construct the genesis of the psychoanalytic movement in 1896. (B) Collective Psychoanalysis has a psychical basis i.e., broadly a metaphysical, anthropological and psychological basis- what I think Jung introduced and conceptualised shortly after the Freudian genesis- specifically with his coinage of the term ‘Collective Unconscious’. (C) Semantic Psychoanalysis has its basis in the inquiry into the use of language or communication- Lacan’s famous quote about the unconscious being structured as a language would do justice to the basis stated here ]
Varela & Maturna’s Notion of Autopoiesis w/ the Kantian Noumenon (i.e., the transcesental immersion)as opposed to the Heideggerian Dasein (i.e., the purest essence of being) is the Autopoietic Noumenon i.e., inherently complex self-regulating living cells/systems function upon the discontinuous awareness of the Metaphysical which allows for the Novelty induced artistic communications.
This will be the core point of the upcoming blog post/essay on & around Autopoietic Noumenon wherein I’ll sketch out its phenomenological structure which is essentially a broader argument for autopoietically induced creativity.
“[Humberto] Maturana and [Francisco] Varela’s revolutionary theory of cognition became the centerpiece of a larger overall explanation of how all organisms gunction and evolve, which they call “Autopoiesis,” from the Greek word “self-making.” “Autopoiesis” refers to the unique ability of living systems to remake themselves by means of their eown internal dynamics. Or put differently, living systems are autopoietic because, through their internal interactions with their component parts and their external interactions with the environment, they continually maintain themselves and generate their own organization. Autopoietic systems are also autonomous and have individuality, meaning that they maintain an identity that is independent of their interactions with an observer.
[. . .]
What does any of this have to do with education? If, as Maturana writes, “learning is not a process of accumulating representations of the environment; it is a continuous process of transformation of behavior through continuous change in the capacity of the nervous system to synthesize it”and if “man[woman/child] changes and lives in a changing frame of reference in a world continuously created and transformed by him[her],” then the fixed body of knowledge we hold up as the goal of education might not even exist.”
—Chris Mercogliano (In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids’ Inner Wildness; pp. 30/32)
“Autopoiesis attempts to define the uniqueness of the emergence that produces life in its fundamental cellular form. It’s specific to the cellular level. There’s a circular or network process that engenders a paradox: a self-organizing network of biochemical reactions produces molecules, which do something specific and unique: they create a boundary, a membrane, which constrains a network that has produces the constituents of the membrane. This is a logical bootstrap, a loop: a network produces entities that create a boundary, which constrains the network that produces the boundary. This bootstrap is precisely what is unique about cells. A self-distinguishing entity exists when the bootstrap is completed. This entity has produced its own boundary. It doesn’t require an external agent to notice it, or to say “I’m here”. It is, by itself, a self-distinction. It bootstraps itself out of a soup of chemistry and physics.”
—Francisco Varela, ‘The Emergent Self’
On ‘Free Will‘
We enter the concept or totalise the concept of free-will when we enter into a social contract (Jacques Rousseau) with the society or our immediate external environment. One could argue that the peak of this free will is realised at its maximum during the sensorimotor stages of childhood development (Jean Piaget)— when the individual is around 0-3yrs old and totally relies on his mother and his/her senses for support and care. During this stage, the individual is incapable of entering a social contract with its environment because it hasn’t developed any sense of shred values and communal ethics- it is after this very stage of development that the individual enters into a social contract wherein he/she fulfils their own moral and ethical duty. One can also argue, that the core of this idea lies within the arguments of facticity (by Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir)— that ‘facticity’ signifies all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is therefore, limited i.e., human freedom or ‘free will’ is essentially contextual- that it only exists in the need for it to contrast well with the social contract.
Human Eyes are psychic in nature as such that they continuously are driven towards satisfying those aesthetic needs- which they procure after scanning their immediate external environment. The drive nature permeates the eye-consciousness, hence allowing the eyes to focus on the aesthetics of the environment as opposed to the environment itself.
II. Morality & Ethics: The Sophists, Shamans & Mystical Prophets
The Sophists, from the pre-socratic traditions, were deemed *un-virtuous* on the basis of delivering the knowledge of art of persuasion and rhetorics for a fee. So, what is even a true shaman? Who is a true Guru or a teacher? The Shamans traditionally deliver the healing and guidance for the very virtue in healing others- those who seek spiritual assistance. However, contemporary shamanism is a return to the sophist tradition- as the Shaman becomes *un-virtuous* in delivering the mystical experience with the rightful and moral intent. Therefore, a false Guru figure, its very archetype, implies delivering the false message (the *impure-unvirtuous* message) to their students and spiritual-patients.
III. Bardo Resemblances in Higher Psychedelic States
To what degree does higher LSD & Psilocybin States resemble the DMT-Hyperspace Realm? The Tibetan Book of Dead, as per Timothy Leary- the Bardo Thodol, explains the common different states of a psychedelic experience. The very stage of the loss of ego-consciousness- the peak- the rise of the emergence of the white light signifying the three Bardos, seems to translate into the highest self-actualised realisation possible. And if often times within subjective accounts these higher-potent or higher-dose LSD, Psilocybin & Mescaline (along with other phenethylamines) are said to induce this white-light transcendental state, then what gives N, N-Dimethyltryptamine & 5-MeO-DMT its own unique hyperspace dimension? My speculations from an outsider-perspective (non-experiential) rests upon the hypothesis that this hyperspace dimension is rather an alternate visual dimension that exists within the compounds of the same reality the body resides in. One way to explain this maybe by imagining the continual replication of the hallucinated OEVs & CEVs (Open-Eye Visuals & Closed-Eye Visuals)- this could possibly induce a sense of existing within an alternate dimension from a perceptual view-point.
IV. Jacques Lacan’s Borromean Knot & the Psychedelic State
Jacques Lacan’s conceptualisation of the Borromean Knot between the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real can be translated into the sketch of the objectives components of the Psychedelic State. The psychonaut existing within the compounds of the Real, witnesses the assimilation of the Imaginary and the Symbolic through the ethnopharmacologic effects of the Psychedelic State- thereby, inducing the hallucinatory states. As these hallucinatory states, alongside several other effects like distortion of time, from a pharmacological viewpoint can be thus concluded as the objective components of a Psychedelic trip- as they are shared, and hence, collective in essence.
V. On Jungian Unconscious & its significance within a Psychedelic Experience
Through the lens of Jungian Analytical Psychology, the significance of the Unconscious can be roughly bifurcated, pertaining to its respective affects within a Common Psychedelic Experience. The Jungian Personal Unconscious can be identified in the emotive aspects of the psychedelic experience, through a close examination of the personal archetypes and their distinction from the psychedelic experience itself. Archetypes, in as much as they are collective, can also have a personal significance to them- i.e., the projection of the personal significance onto the archetypal pattern. In contrast, the Jungian Collective Unconscious can be recognised within the objective components of the psychedelic experience i.e., the common and shared ethnopharmacologic effects (distinct from affects)- in forms of cultural, religious and geometric archetypal patterns.
Consciousness of Shock, Victor Brauner (April, 1951)
I. Cartesian dualism entails that the body is essentially material made of matter, whose essence is extension and the mind as a non-material substance whose essence is thinking. This thinking component is non-spatial while matter occupies space and hence, body is spatial in essence. Human minds are the only substance in the physical natural world which are not mechanical and materialist wherein human beings constitute of a conscious-mind and a non-conscious physical body whose interaction pose a mind-body dualist problem to consciousness. Hence, the human mind constituters of mental parts imagination, sensations and feelings whereas the non-conscious components of the brain as part of the body constitutes of the neural networks that aid the processing of external stimuli in the brain. Therefore, it’s the difference between these characteristics that pose the very mind-body problem within certain dualist theories.
II. Hypnagogic transcendental states of consciousness produces subtle to intense visual, auditory and even synesthetic hallucinations in human consciousness. Dualist theories have always expanded on the split between the body and soul i.e., in this case, the act of sensing vs the act of perceiving or hallucinations and delusions vs truth and reality. The dualist theoreticians have located persona i.e., our personal conscious identity within the ‘continuous mind’ as opposed to the ‘fleeting body’. Descartes’ rationale towards melancholia entails a correlation between the outer sensorial world and inner thought, and although hypnagogic mental imageries doesn’t necessarily favor objects seen with eyes, it dictates a complete disintegration between the mind and the body as the dualism persists (Meditations on First Philosophy).
III. Qualia is the subjective conscious experience that constitutes elements of sensibility and emotivity i.e., sensible and aesthetic conscious presentations. Most reductionist materialists would reject the very existence of qualia, even though it’s merely another name for non-conceptualized experience, at least standardly (CI Lewis). Being a subjective conscious experience, qualia are only a part of consciousness as a whole i.e., qualia reside within the broader compounds of consciousness, and hence, is irreducible to physicality or materialism. Physical or materialist properties cannot be equated with a mentality, and hence it would be an unintelligible categorical mistake on the part of western scientific and analytical traditions to non-functional terms. Reductionist physicalism, however, poses a broader problem wherein the subjective aspect of the mind cannot be categorized within the objective methods of reductionist science. It would pose another hard problem for consciousness if physical theories of mind are framed without speculating the general problems of subjectivity and objectivity (Nagel).
IV. Gilbert Ryle’s argument, famously known as “the myth of the ghost in the machine” poses a behaviorist view of the concept of mind and thus critiques Descartes’ bifurcation of a person’s life into two separate careers i.e., external and internal. His argument against this metaphor rests upon the theoretical struggles between the influence of mind and body which further pose categorical mistakes due to positing both mind and body within the same logical category. Therefore, Ryle argues that the cartesian dogma presents mind and matter’s polar opposition and rejects this dualism by establishing that physical processes may not necessarily be determined by mental acts.
V. Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment concludes that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand the language but doesn’t produce any real understanding, hence, the Turing test is inadequate. Therefore, as the whole argument depends upon strong appeals towards intuition, it only follows that the Chinese room follows a purely Syntactic i.e., symbol manipulation process as opposed to a Semantic i.e, that of an understanding one. Thus, the Chinese room argument is unconvincing to those who don’t share Searle’s intuitions as it counts be solely accepted on Searle’s expertise, due to other philosophers disagreement. However, it is true that humans follow semantic processes.
I. The visual field becomes more concentrated on the objects existing in their realtime position i.e., x existing in its absolute essence– the anxiety unfolds the heightening of the essences of the object existing in real time. The visual field becomes cognizant of the sharpness of the objects existing within the compounds of the immediate external stimuli.
II. The melting dimensions of the immediate external reality brings forth a distorted sense of reality with no realisation of time while ascending towards the ego-loss phenomenon. The geometric cubes around the visual fields unveils an expanded sense of atom-composed reality i.e., to be able to harness reductionism in order to denounce the world being reduced to the tiny materialist particles.
III. With the geometric distortions, comes the revelation of the link-image which is the knot between the emerging imaginary and the symbolic. The dissolution of the dynamic patterns within the geometric visual field encompassed with mild auditorial hallucinations harnesses the united unconscious and the conscious sentience as a projection onto the perceived hallucination.
IV. The potency of the Open-Eye Hallucinatory state along with the Closed-Eye Hallucinatory state is able to reproduce a closely-parallel visual-mental dimension distinct from the sense of the presence within the fundamental dimension. The replication of the OPVs onto CEVs, and vice-versa produces the sense of existing within an alternate visual dimension along with a strong mental psychedelic state.
V. Ego-loss within an out-of-body experience induces the insemination of the conception of the ALL is Mind– the unity- the ultimate individuality. The dimensional perceptual awareness and sentience-sense become unified and the entire sense of sentience reduces to one eso/exoteric body.
VI. Hypnagogic hallucinations can be divided into three rough stages- a) Geometric-pattern Visuals, b) Tetris Effects (Working memory and Symbolism from Long-term memory) and, c) An amalgamation of a) and b).
Eavesdropping on Beauvoir, Sartre and Their Circle of Friends (NYTimes)
SARTREAN COGITATIONS V : REFLECTIONS ON THE SKETCH FOR A THEORY OF EMOTIONS
(Jean-Paul Sartre, 1962)
The classical theories that investigate the theory of emotions more or less lets us understand emotions within the boundaries of our conscious experience, at least according to the early theories devised by William James. Hence, devising a model wherein the states of consciousness can be divided as physiological and psychological phenomenon.
(i) It is within the very physiological phenomenon that holds the capacity to produce psychosomatic conscious states, as the consciousness is struck by the physiological projections. It is the very extension of the relatedness and associative elements of consciousness that combines the psychic world and the external reality. Hence, this peripheric theory of William James exerts that the physiological disturbances are either directly or indirectly discernible.
The individual can therefore can sum up their conscious states, in objective terms as their systems of behaviour.
(ii) One must recognise and analyse their emotions in a functional order of comprehending emotion via its significance. Gestalt psychologists, like Janet & Wallen would emphasise that the synthetic arrangement of behaviour would evoke elements of the unconscious or consciousness within the realms of psychoanalysis and hence offer a psychoanalytic theory of emotional finality.
However, emotional manifestations are an intrinsic combination of the psychic and behavioural aspects of the human condition. And therefore, negative emotional manifestations like that of anger or fear usually arise from the human sub-conscious and unconscious as a powerful urge towards attaining the symbolic satisfaction for the release of the intentional and insufferable tension.
(iii) Consciousness generated via the symbolic realisations only offers what it deems to offer as a desire. Within the psychoanalytic interpretations, there’s an established notion that the conscious phenomenon is presented with the symbolic realisation of a particular desire which is furthermore repressed by the censor within the different realms and depths of human consciousness.
Yet the desire is not intrinsically connected with the symbolic realisations as the very presence of the symbolic realisation further delicately fabricates the rise of emotions through the physilogical imperatives of human desires.
(iv) The symbolic realisations requires the renunciation of the Cartesian Cogito and conducting the consciousness as a passive and secondary phenomenon. It is the very acknowledgement that consciousness comprises itself into a meaning whilst being unaware of its very constitution of the meaning derived.
However, if the Cartesian Cogito is possible, then the consciousness itself becomes the very fact, the signification as well as the signified.
(v) The conscious fact of the consciousness becomes symbolical of the desire it expresses i.e., of the expressed complex, in Sartrean notions. Hence, the symbolic character is constitutive of the expressed complex of the symbolical.
Therefore, the innate desire for an inner signification is the precursor for the consciousness that makes itself known (or conscious).
(vi) In Sartrean terms, emotional consciousness is the introductory consciousness of the world. We can construct a meaning of this emotional consciousness initially through its non-reflective structure, and upon its very plane it should be noted that it cannot be aware of its own consciousness, hence, it requires the non-positional reflective mode in order to act as the precursor to the consciousness of the external reality.
Therefore, it is the very perception that connects the emotion to its representative signal. It becomes easy to view the action as the non-reflective consciousness of the constructed instrumental world and the emotive anger as the non-reflective consciousness directed towards the cruel essence of the world as action transforms into anger in psychosomatic-emotive consciousness.
(vii) The nature and structure of my writing is always and forever a product of my conscious state of consciousness as opposed to my unconscious state because an activity comprises a succession of particular objects in this probable world. The probable world is only considered probable due to futuristic realities, yet is also deemed certain as the Sartrean potentialities of the world.
Therefore, like Sartre, my writing is always and forever exigently remnant due to the decisive manner I procure my thoughts in my creative headspace. These thoughts are indeed realised potentialities that generate its exigence objectively through the subjective creative art forms.
(viii) There is an inherent distinction between unreflective activity and unconscious activity as they are non-thetically conscious of the self and the very process of being conscious of the same allows for the transcendence and apprehension onto the external reality posing as the qualia of objects. Therefore, in Sartrean notions, intellect here would be the very noetic correlate of the activity undertaken or conceived by the individual.
However, fear as an emotion has a consciousness whose target is the very negation of the external reality by means of what Sartre would call a magical behaviour. This would further allow the annihilation of the emotive-consciousness as a preliminary step towards the annihilation of the objects present in external reality. This emotional catastrophe allows for the exile of responsibility as the magical exaggeration and sufferings of the world excruciate the consciousness.
Therefore, negative conscious emotions like that of fear and sadness are irreducible to this Sartrean constitution of a magical world wherein the objects that are bodies act as instruments of enchantment. In every possible situation, the subject matter might differ and so would the human behaviour, however, in order to trust this Sartrean magical behaviour, one must manifest physical perturbation.
itsa2amgrunge 