The Responsive Naturing of Cognizant Gravitation

Philosopher James Michael Corrigan (PhD, Stony Brook) weaves cognizance and intellect with gravitation, situating the three[1] as aspects of the production of our embodied activities and perceptions. Why gravitation? Start with Corrigan’s description of physical reality as encompassing materiality and nonmateriality as one indivisible reality. He explains that while gravitation is nonmaterial, it is said to affect ‘matter.’ But ‘matter’ is how we perceive complex geometries of gravitation, he says, following the later work of Einstein, and that of John Wheeler’s “purer” gravitation-only GEONS.[2]

These complex geometries are ‘beings,’ and atemporal reconfigurations that immediately replace the prior[3] actual geometry account for the ontogenetic development of each being, while considering their ontogenetic potential,[4] contextual possibilities, including their affective intents (attention, intention, desire) if any.[5] Corrigan categorizes this as ‘responsive naturing,’ which subsumes causality, which is only applicable to collections of the least complex beings.

Each gravitational geometry is dimensionally complex, and, because gravitation is non-exclusive, can comprise deeply nested, recursive, complex organic structures. Intellect, cognizance, and gravitation are aspects of all things, not ‘under’ all things, and together they complete the productive principle. So, our conscious ‘moment’ and our feeling of being are none other than this nonmaterial principle.

Cognizance is necessary for the maintenance of the coherent continuity of all life, and what cognizant gravitation produces is the actual percepts that we perceive. That is, cognizance is not conceptual, not mental, nor something other than what this productive principle is doing. Cognizance is inseparable from the actual. Conceptual ‘consciousness’ is abstracted from the cognizance of what is done by each reconfiguration.

The brain is obviously involved in perception but is not capable of producing either percepts or thoughts, as it is only an analog signal processor. Intellect is nonmaterial and recognizes patterns of encoded sense stimuli in the brain, stimuli that change the configuration of the brain. Thoughts are similarly produced, changing the configuration of the brain, and are correlates of intellect. Brain activity is a correlate of conscious perception and thinking. Ontogenetic forms, their momentary topology, and all their motions are correlates of the local complex geometry of gravitation as atemporal reconfigurations.

Duration is the produced continuity of the being from the actual configuration to the successive reconfiguration. Perception has two phases: the first is the immediate recognition by cognizance and is called ‘imperience’; the second decorates the imperience with qualities, names, meanings, identities, classifications, relations, and history, etc., which gives us experience. Every natural being, from the largest cosmological formal structure, down to the smallest particle, is alive, is Life in action. Chairs and tables are not, although the molecules, atoms, and quanta that make up their material are. There isn't a different gravitation for bacteria, for example. All natural things have the same intellect, cognizance, and gravitation, as there is only one productive principle. The differences are in how these are deployed as each kind of ontogenetic form.

See Corrigan’s website (paywall, see site for details) at https://stilljustjames.com/

The Landscape of Consciousness is on the Closer to Truth website at https://loc.closertotruth.com

ཨེ་མ་ཧོ། ཕན་ནོ་ཕན་ནོ་སྭཱཧཱ།

Endnotes:

[1] Cognizance, Intellect, and Gravitation are three aspects of the productive principle. They are 'aspects' because none of them are complete in themselves. I argue that gravitation without cognizance and intellect cannot work, for example, because gravitation waves cannot move faster than light, according to relativity theory, but all orbits must follow the moving center of mass (barycenter) of the solar system (including the Sun) and the light of the Sun takes 8 minutes to reach the Earth. If gravitational waves similarly take eight minutes to reach the Earth, so that the Earth, and all other planetary bodies, are always straying away from the barycenter, then their orbits quickly decay. It is asserted (see wikipedia, for example) that the Earth "anticipates" where the Sun is, but this is ridiculous, given the N-body problem. So gravitation cannot work unless this productive principle comprises all three. And this applies to all natural things.

[2] While the idea, and name, "complex geometries" are my own, I discovered that Einstein and Wheeler worked independently on related ideas, and discussed them in detail a few weeks before Einstein's death: Einstein spent decades trying to show that 'matter' is just how we perceive 'curved space' which he theorized creates mass, and thus gravitation; and Wheeler whose insight was that gravitation and electromagnetism waves can attract themselves, creating 'standing waves' that he characterized as 'entities' (both cosmological and quantum) which had limited lifespans. (He also asserted that black holes are the result of cosmological  GEONS collapsing, rather than the reverse.)

[3] There is no actual time. We live each moment of our lives now. The succession of moments, like the frames of a movie film, succeed one another, and these successions of gravitational reconfigurations are known by the cognizance and intellect aspects. Each of these 'quanta of change' (i.e. reconfigurations) do not happen as a period of change over time because there is only now. Instead, the reconfigurations are atemporal and immediate, with each reconfiguration replacing what was actual. Intellect maintains the storehouse of processed patterns that are produced from the separate reconfigurations, and I characterize this as 'the understanding.' Cognizance is that which recognizes what changed, using intellect, and produces our hyperphantasia world of experience, which includes a produced feeling of duration based on the pattern of the difference from reconfiguration to reconfiguration. Together the known successions and their felt duration gives rise to our erroneous idea of time.

[4] The ontogenetic potential of each being changes over the course of the ontogenesis of the being, due to many factors: wear and tear, nutrition, environment, etc.

[5] Not every kind of being has the same ability to have affective intents.