It's March 1st, so I am a bit late wishing everyone a happy new year, but yesterday was the new year for Tibetans, so for those of you who are Tibetan buddhists, Happy Losar, many Tashi Delegs.
As some of you know, I have been writing a doctoral dissertation, which I finished this morning at 2 am and submitted to my University in New York. Its title is the title of this newsletter: "There is a way of seeing the world different." The dissertation is on what I refer to as biphasic perception, and is specifically focused on the first phase of perception, which I call imperience. I am very proud of it. I will be sending a copy to all paying members next week, as soon as I have a chance to make up a nice pdf. It's 270 pages ( see the table of contents below).
The main goal of my dissertation is to present Responsive Naturing by focusing on how it explains our perceptions. I chose to focus on our perceptions because there is so much evidence of its telltale signs in how our perception occurs, and I didn't have to explain and justify the whole paradigm. Tranquillity's Secret does that.
I have made major strides in my understanding of Responsive Naturing, and I will be publishing some of the most interesting insights for everyone who is signed up here. Of course, if you are a paid member you will get it all at once.
This paradigm has an incredible explanatory power. The biphasic nature of perception, and the intrinsic recognition of the coherent continuity during its first phase, answers so many questions: The Hard Problem of Consciousness. Why our perception is immediate, and our thinking is so slow. Why both our perception and our daily life have duration. The experienced Fluid Motion in films and videos. How Spontaneous Spiritual Awakenings occur. The extreme difficulty of accurately describing spiritual experiences. Our visceral immediate feelings of Place, Truth, Beauty, and Divinity over a spectrum of perceptions. The spontaneous and responsive nature of thoughts and intuitions. The solution to Zeno’s Paradoxes. The Arrow of Time and that of Coherent Histories. Both Quantum decoherence1 and Wave Function collapse. The development of new and modified traits in the evolution of species, as well as intelligent design. How Basal Cognition2 can occur — all life engages in cognition, even those without brains. The solution to the conflict of Free Will versus Determinism.
As well, it: Re-Enchants our lives and fills them with meaning and purpose.3 Explains the necessity for embodiment. It solves the religious issue of good versus evil. It explains why ontogenesis proceeds. It explains the purpose of the brain. It gives science a firm foundation while providing a place for God — as the creator of this responsive naturing.
Thanks for listening.
Chapter 1 - Querencia and the Perceptual Themes of this Work
| A Moment of Querencia, and Not Much Else | Hermann von Helmholtz and His Liminal Recognition of Two Phases of Perception | The Persistence of Vision and The Brain | Ancient Foundations of the Chasm Between ‘How’ and ‘Why’ | The Cognitive Load Imposed on The Brain by Theories of Perception | Language and Two Examples of Biphasic Perception | What Is Experience? | How Do ‘Consciousness’ and ‘Mind’ Relate to Perception? | Form Versus Matter — What is the Quintessential Phenomenological Character of Our Perceptions? | What Do We Perceive, Exactly? |
Chapter 2 - Helmholtz and Bayesian Prediction Theories of Perception
| Hitting the Limitations of Mechanical Materialism | The Troubling Legacy of Helmholtz in Modern Predictive Theories of Perception | The Problem of Myth-making in Science | Is Bayesian Prediction a Type of Inference? How Does it Help Explain Perception? | The Excessive Processing Load Imposed by Bayesian Prediction as Perception | The Fundamental Problem of Recognizing What is Sensed by our Senses | Losing Sight of the Living Whole | The Profound Difference Between Describing How Something Comes to Be and Explaining Why They Came to Be | The Role of Interpretation, Abstraction, and Intuition in Knowledge and Wisdom |
Chapter 3 - Time versus Duration - Einstein versus Bergson
| The Significance of Cognitive Frames With a Dash of Hollywood Thrown-in | Reconsidering Time and Duration | Consciousness and Duration |
Chapter 4 - The Blind Spot
| And just the Blind Spot |
Chapter 5 - Understanding Experience
| What Is A Meditative Experience? | Experience in an Indefinite World | What is Experience (again!) | How do Memories Fit into This? |
Chapter 6 - Consciousness? Or Clairvoyance?
| Consciousness? | Clairvoyance? | Are ‘Consciousness’ and ‘Mind’ Two Things? |
Chapter 7 - Immediate Perception
| Imperience |
Chapter 8 - Facts of Imperience
| The Imperience of Fluid Motion | The Imperience of Place | Spontaneous Spiritual Awakenings | Trance is the Absence of Imperience | The Prehistory of Cinema |
Chapter 9 - Time and Again
| The Specious Present | Disentangling Succession and Time |
Chapter 10 - Thoughts and Language
| The Paradox of Thinking Our Own Thoughts | The Violence Of Words | The Verbosity of Language, the Silence of Immanence and the True Nature of Intellect | Apophasis: Speaking About What Can Not be Spoken In Order to Communicate | Language Communicates, But it Limits What Can Be Said and Understood |
Chapter 11 - The Different
| Going Beyond the Limitations of Strict Causality — Responsive Naturing | The Responsive Nature of Mind | What Does Responsive Naturing Nature? | The Coherent Order of the World Is Not Optional | An Overview of the Paradigm’s Explanatory Power | A Concise Description of Responsive Naturing |
There Is A Way Of Seeing The World Different
| A Closing Poem |
Footnotes:
1 This is the so-called “measurement problem” of Quantum Theory: how quantum particles, which theoretically exist as an unknowable cloud of possible states, can give rise to the solid, well-defined world of earth, fields of grain, sky, forests, rivers, friends and loved ones, and everything else — including us.
2 Basal cognition, as an emerging field with a label, is very young. It was born 5 years ago under this name, in this form, at a workshop entitled “The Ground-floor of cognition: from microbes to plants and animals, and everything in between” (June 2018) at the Konrad Lorenz Institute (Klosterneuburg, Austria).Footnote 1 The idea was to put a diverse collection of scientists and philosophers from a range of disciplines and research areas in one room to see if there was common ground for a plausible research enterprise. The workshop participants included leading experts in their fields. The result was a special double issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, printed in March 2021.Footnote 2 The project was organized around a phrase that appeared in a short slide presentation at the workshop’s end by one of the organizers (PL) about possible steps forward.
3 The paradigm of Responsive Naturing reintegrates us as the beneficiaries of concerned Naturing — not intentional design, and not meaningless happenstance. This re-enchanting of our world also reintegrates us as an aspect of the wholeness of the world. It undoes the decimation of the human spirit that has been a byproduct of the mechanical philosophy of science.
