...at the point from which I choose to jump... 2007-12-01T18:59:29Z User 373 http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/ OrgSpace NewsLog

This poem I wrote over the last several years, editing it slowly. I hope you enjoy it and learn something from it! It is about my experience of schizophrenia and what I feel like inside myself: like a beautiful bird who could be flying but whose spirit is trapped in a cage. I don't feel l...

This poem I wrote over the last several years, editing it slowly.

I hope you enjoy it and learn something from it!

It is about my experience of schizophrenia and what I feel like inside myself: like a beautiful bird who could be flying but whose spirit is trapped in a cage.

I don't feel like I'm trapped now, except in the society which I mention in the poem. But I'm an activist and a writer, so I have ways to the means with which to interact with that society, hopefully changing it for the better!!

Without further ado, here is the poem:My mind breaks things apart
and sequences impossible order
to the meaningfully spontaneous.
I perceive a strange message conveying
while break-mind intervenes, inadvertently,
“breaking the spirit’s focus from mind and body,”
one sense I have of schizophrenia.
Blinded by internal events too intense,
I easily wander lost seeking reasons outside
for my beautiful dreaming deep within.

A shared realm entertains transformation,
and I abide by the dynamic of biology,
mind, emotion, and soul.
Those reversed call for freedom,
response, articulation, and creativity.

If I ever forget my spirit, my freedom,
and reduce merely my dimensions to three,
break-mind squeezes my breath closed,
forces a halt.
I needed to accept a cosmic origin,
that I'm not just a meaningless chance.
If this world follows only physical mechanism,
and no soul-space has a you-essence,
where could real love live and who’d wait for true love?

To escape the clutches
of unstopping nihilist reduction
in this real struggle
for sane meaning
and in this yearning for my source,
my mind found a door to open
and I could let in my imaginings,
to find the embrace
of spontaneous expression.
And I could watch on this side of the door,
as this side of the world did turn
into a magic poem I could read.
The door to spirit slid open for me,
and I could disappear out there completely,
until then leaving it open,
letting the cool and warm airs of spirit fill my world,
airs of that open world that help fill physics with life,
with vitality, with my breath ongoing,
for the drawing and passing of air entices life
into our midst.
Pursue the lessons, oh, the joys, of symbiosis!

Schizophrenia for me has been a war against myself
and those devices planted in my brain, but hold on,
because I am not paranoid! I planted them myself;
they’re devices for repression and devices for delusion.
One invents a device when a method of thinking is discovered, a method to organize meaning. Keeping in mind that I’ve never been able to well organize my room, my sentences, or organize my future, one could easily see the potential confusion for my mind released to wild nature. I feel at odds with my environment, extremely feel odd for sure. Do you want to know my biggest delusion? I believed our society was one grand illusion, for I couldn’t believe in extreme impiety, the kind of society itself broken from reality, the kind of society abhorrent to social, emotional, or racial inclusion, a society that stomped Earth’s biodiversity and stomped on fellow global citizens in holy wars of greed and creed.
I became so deluded, because I wouldn’t believe in true evil. I made up a story that some god had weird plans, and now forgetting that, I still won’t agree to see evil thru to its end.

Please: if you dig this poem,
go to dance and sing some music,
and make love, communicate.
In my waiting out storms schizophrenic,
I longed to experience this world’s sunlight again.
Feel the amazing release of your light,
deeply profound in every moment
because, really, you see, I’ve been meaning to explore and surrender to experiential discovery.

Gaia asks for tears, you pheonix,
so heal Earth with love on a never-ending quest.
Seek freedom in the sadness for the beauty that we are;
go emerge,
you can fly free from your cage....
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000016.htm 2007-12-01T18:59:29Z 2007-12-01T19:00:25Z

I wrote this last year for a writing course. It's a good piece.

I wrote this last year for a writing course. It's a good piece.My first doctor, a practicing psychiatrist, tells me I am an excellent case of schizophrenia, high-functioning and well-adjusted. She told me that I’m lucky for my ability to converse in psychiatric discourse at a somewhat intellectually matched level with her. She said she’s never known a patient who was so knowledgeable and en-languaged about his condition; in addition, before I got very sick, I had always done well at school, had been open to volunteering in my school and community, and had also possessed a healthy dose of teenage angst to change my world. Before I saw any doctor for it, I had already self-diagnosed and learned much on my own, feeling that schizophrenia intriguingly and weirdly challenged my mind, at least before I totally lost connection with reality.

Schizophrenia is a chronic form of psychosis, described by psychiatrists as a drastic disconnect from socially shared mental and emotional reality. The presence of delusions and hallucinations characterizes psychosis. Delusions are persistent, often destructive beliefs held onto in spite of any provided rational evidence to the contrary. For example, I had a delusion once that weather like the wind could be directed by my thoughts. Hallucinations on the other hand are perceptions that occur to an individual’s senses, but which are not really based in an external stimulation of the senses. My delusion about the wind was not a hallucination because I really felt the wind moving. A dream, for instance, is technically a hallucination, because what we see in a dream is not really where one physically sleeps. For the schizophrenic, voices and strange objects might be perceived just like when one is dreaming, but these perceptions occur in waking life when there is no outer source for them. The difference between delusions and hallucinations is the same difference between belief and sense perception. The two relate as perceiving events through the senses provides material for a belief about events to form. This idea figures into my overall ideas on the subject of schizophrenia in a significant way.

Before I was severely ill, my mind slowly filled with weirdness. I remember during my teenage angst that I felt a need to express certain views, but I felt none would listen to what I most wanted to say. I felt alone and developed a habit of imagining myself in conversation with the others that I really wanted to speak to. It was a tactic to test out concepts and simply explore by myself what I wanted to say, since I did want to say a lot. It occurred to me eventually that I almost literally heard speech of my friends and argumentative quarries when I imagined their responses. I thought in isolation about what exactly I might say if I were to open up and express issues important to me. I would go for a walk out back behind my house into the forest, find a spot, and pace back and forth while imagining and muttering under my breath both my words and the words of others. The experience gave me an eerily realistic sense of meaning that was exchanged and developed through the imagined dialogue.

This progressed until I could not shut off the perception of imagine-hearing others make statements, even when with them at school. I began to make up responses and follow-through statements in the direct midst of actual conversation. It happened when I would walk by a group that was talking, and the “sound” of these extra statements began to feel a lot like my own thoughts but attached to other personalities than my own. I had been reading ancient to new-age spirituality as well, and at the weirdest times, I imagined with some disbelief that I might actually share thoughts with others. The characters seemed consistent, and the thoughts kept appearing in my mind without any impetus or desire of mine to think about them, but I also didn’t resist when I thought I could learn from it as I initially intended by testing out hypothetical conversations.

My last year of high school in 2002 went like this. Later that summer, however, a real trauma occurred(1), and I became even more disconnected from reality than during school. I gained so such emotional stress that while not going into the story, I can say a situation completely debilitated my already faltering psyche. I could no longer contain my already rampant imagination or maintain rationality. I started hallucinating extremely, totally blinking out with huge memory gaps and not noticing even several days going by—at that point I desperately needed help. And, it was at that crisis point that the struggle with my delusions truly began. How in high school I became prone to psychosis will elucidate the later points I make about schizophrenia. I think it is important to keep in mind that inadvertent ideations tend to confound schizophrenics; right before I got sick and in the midst of it, I felt I could not at all stop the flood of my thoughts.

In a state of recovery since becoming psychotic in the Fall of 2002, I attest to the following point: without many kinds of help, I would not have had the ability when totally convinced of my delusions and hallucinations to overcome them. A nightmare of horrors deeply daunts the individual who becomes severely schizophrenic. I happened to be watching TV the late night that the ambulance took me away, and at that crisis point, I thought that the television images and words were talking metaphorically about me. Around the same time, I experienced hallucinations of people that I talked with, so vivid that I could see colour in their eyes, feel their breath, and feel the touch of their hands and arms. With schizophrenia, an individual experiences profound changes in the function of his or her mind, and these changes have a potential to disrupt mental life by making it unmanageable and unbearable; they no longer share the reality had by everyone else. Luckily, the people I hallucinated were friendly and non-threatening to my emotions, which was a relieving way to emerge from the trauma that occurred within real events(1). Although, talking to people who weren’t there and unaware of what was happening, I was in a sick state. Psychosis intensely affects perception and imagination, leaving one susceptible to startlingly vivid hallucinations and intensely held delusions. Recovery must be guided with sensitive care, because insight toward sanity for a psychotic hardly derives from the distortion of insanity. All I can remember is one room and its two windows, a forest I sought out of the top of a mostly opaque window and a hall with desks around the corner out another. The door was kept locked unless I was given a pill to take. I was there a whole week, and I remember taking the med only once. They said (as I later heard) that I was often seen talking and looking around as though interacting with people. Apparently, I was cooperative with treatment, but I had no idea where I was. A grounded mind supported by good knowledge is the essence of recovery for a schizophrenic. I needed grounding alright. For the times I remember, I felt like I needed electrical grounding.

Recovery began for me as it does for most Canadians that become psychotic: I received the attention of a psychiatrist and then encountered psychiatric methods of treatment, beginning first and foremost with medication. Doctors, informed by science and not personally swayed by the torrents of a psychosis, have useful knowledge, and their help for grounding the afflicted begins in giving them a medicine. Anti-neuroleptics or anti-psychotics, as they are called, most directly aid schizophrenia by controlling what has become the chaotic chemistry of the brain, full of processes that doctors can associate with hallucinations and delusional impulses. Different drugs help various individuals by balancing their brain chemistry, thereby helping to balance their minds by controlling and limiting what manifests to perception. This medical knowledge grows and improves the chance of recovery for schizophrenics who have access to the most effective drugs(2).

Medicine at least allows recovery to begin, but the afflicted individual must, I believe, attain also a coherent mental framework to make chemical treatment effective. No schizophrenic individuals will be okay if given only adequate doses of some pill but are then deposited in the street before working through their onset and lingering psychosis. I responded well to medicine and my hallucinations faded. Medicine indeed helped to settle my teetering mind, but much was yet amiss.

After my initial hospitalization and “settling” closer to sanity as the nurses and doctors described, I was still convinced by some strong beliefs that I only later learned referred to the unreal. I realized at some point that real people had not seen the things I hallucinated, but I still thought the visions were more substantive than waking dreams. Delusions still swayed my judgment to a bad end, for example discontinuing the stabilizing med. Utterly convinced by my experience right before the first ambulance ride to a psych ward, I consciously supported my delusions. After watching TV that time feeling so powerfully that it was about me, I readily convinced myself any image through my senses could carry a metaphorical message like the TV had seemed to. In the hospital, medication ended the strong and active hallucinations that had onset during severe psychosis, but an inclination to form delusions remained. I did not yet doubt the hallucinatory images or feelings that had occurred, so like ghosts in my memory, the response lingered of looking for a message like the one imagined from the TV. Choosing to stop taking my med and spending a whole night watching TV again like that, I required a second hospitalization to “settle” again, but I started to recognize the presence of persistent delusions. They did not dissipate even as my heart and mind grew calmer and as my thoughts composed some measure of reason. Exploring the confused, I entered confusion, unable to understand. I needed more help than a pill, because even on it, I could inappropriately desire the alternative to its settling effect.

Where pills do not and cannot reach, I have found the mind responds to aberrant perception by intentionally creating and maintaining delusions. In recollection, many delusions and strange concepts came to me directly from trying to figure out or think through the weirdness of various hallucinations and feelings that invaded my unadjusted and untreated, schizophrenic mind. In the period during high school, feelings dwelled in me and led to preoccupations, which I think might have advanced the neural pathways needed for hallucination, my mental future at which the spontaneous inner conversations hinted. In the period during my hospitalizations, the perceptual symptoms grew more hallucinatory, and the near-delusions from high school evolved and shifted with my changing perceptions. The conversations and thoughts of others I imagined happening inside me during high school were overridden during psychotic onset by more intense feelings that a worldly separate thinker was communicating straight into my thoughts. The base perceptions underlying my beliefs changed drastically, in the nature of how thoughts appeared to my mind: the thoughts coursing through my mind grew even more intrusive and automatic. My explanations kept changing in a struggle. Instead of fake-talking in my head to my friends, or thinking I maybe heard my friends’ thoughts telepathically, I began to think my mind totally invaded by a foreign communicating entity or spirit.

Consider another case of strange perceptions: most people who ingest psychedelics to create hallucinatory images tend to avoid strange beliefs that persist after the chemicals are flushed from the system. When a person using a drug forgets that the drug causes what they perceive, they may become prone to cognitive disorder. Doctors describe “toxic psychosis” as a result of some drug use where the user “does not come down” as anticipated. People are susceptible in this way because they usually try to explain and understand objectively what is happening to them, which will not likely succeed for an experience not based at all in objective reality. Being literally convinced of a hallucination can prolong it chemically in the brain, I figure. I see an analogy: not knowing oneself is dreaming prolongs the perception of dreams or to say that more familiarly, discovering that oneself is dreaming often immediately rouses one from slumber. The brain works in mysterious ways and can make the mind strange when creating representations to the mind that are not based in sense stimulation.

Hallucinations for the schizophrenic generally occur over a far longer period of time than for a psychedelic user or a dreamer, so one afflicted tends to struggle a long and arduous time trying to reconcile a coherent worldview. Memory and thoughts of a drug user or dreamer can turn into specific albeit loony perceptions that are sometimes incredibly meaningful to the experiencing mind, and the long-term experience of schizophrenia fills a mind like some dreams do with meaning to comprehend or think about. The biggest problem I believe exists for schizophrenics in thinking the ‘waking dreams’ are real and in working on with ‘the faculty of reason’ to reinforce the imagined but inappropriate ideas of some principles or facts that are supposed by the schizophrenic to explain intrinsically bizarre or hallucinatory perceptions. I believe the delusional response requires deep psychological and cognitive treatment to offset perhaps years of intentional but unbalanced thought tendency. This is my best sense of my own case with schizophrenia at the very least, but I know it’ll hold to some others.

Because delusions are a mental response(3), any treatment can have little lasting effect until one is convinced of the truth despite being also swayed by feelings. For schizophrenics, some kind of truth or some insight must develop before they possibly clarify or abandon what is untrue and insane. Coherent thought breaks down when one believes totally in a different reality than the one shared, and reparation in logic and in understanding needs correct and true ideas as well informing the ill mind.

Faulty beliefs seem to me to form in articulate and rational-like streams of thought. They appear more verbalized into language and actively put together compared to odd feelings just bubbling up or absolutely bizarre hallucinations presenting themselves suddenly. For example, some people have intense paranoia and work hard to ideate complicated conspiracies because of a recurrent, unintentional feeling that they are being strangely stared at by complete strangers. After the peak of my own disarray, I continually perceived creepily profound meanings in ordinary statements, or built strange meanings myself into what I witnessed. I cannot yet comfortably watch TV without seeing at least a potential for the meanings that used to flow in with clear meaning to my mind as directly as I hope these words communicate my experience to you.

I thought for a while that every word I received could metaphorically convey a message, and this intense feeling gave me the reason to seriously speculate about an entity or aliens directly communicating with me. I thought some entity could reach through time to coordinate events to enfold me in a rapture of symbolic learning. No kidding! Reading, radio, TV, and conversation with others—these seemed to flow in a continuously meaningful and never-ending message to myself. Sometimes what people said took on such significance in my mind that I felt the extreme meaning I gleaned in some statements could be rationalized through the existence only of powerful, indeed omnipotent beings. I transferred at various points between the angst-ridden desires in high school to speak my mind toward the unavoidable perception of an intangible entity’s speaking of its mind through my consciousness. I would not imagine that the profound meaning could simply be in my mind, so I made up pseudo-theories that aberrant perception seemed to validate easily. I did not accept my own mind’s inner work, disposition, or personality, what have you, as the possible source for these feelings which were so strong.

Mine was a breakdown of interpretation. To understand what happens during the perception of events, people use language, or to say it another way, if asked we can usually give some words that clearly convey the sensed meaning of our experience. Similarly to ordinary speech, delusion formation in schizophrenia involves mentally active expression, but about a strange perceptual world. I’ve hinted consistently at a distinction between communicative expression and passive perception, and I find it is an essential distinction for me to investigate in my ongoing recovery from untruth. I keep clear to myself that there is a big difference between having a spontaneous thought or perception and then deciding which thoughts to nourish with faith in an external to me (like the entity). A schizophrenic must, to overcome, not only question whether what they actually see or actually hear is also actually real, but question as well whether they are thinking as clearly as they could be. Philosophy class makes me laugh when someone asks “what’s this thing people call reality? What if, really, all life is but a dream?” Hah, I’ve questioned that, but it dug way deeper.

In my mind I know that mainly good ideas, some given by friends or my doctor and some gained myself, have helped me sort through the surrealism and hold on to some sound reason. I attribute my recovery to many factors, but I want to emphasize the overcoming of delusions, reiterating it was hard because they stuck around far beyond medical treatment and awakening from hallucination. I’ll speak of one delusion I overcame and of how I overcame it: to avoid believing in higher beings (or whatever) to explain strange encounters of strange meaning with ordinary people, I held instead to the idea that my mind can quickly glean profound meanings. These meanings once seemed to specially arise for me, but genuinely, they arise from my mind. I now imagine a hyperactive subconscious in conversation with itself to be my mind when I get a little schizophrenic. This idea is so much more comfortable than thinking seriously and mysteriously that you (someone, anyone) are not truly yourself at least for a moment that another being, one interested in me, speaks through you. Weird, eh? With a mental choice I offer a weird part of my experience a poetic response instead of a delusional response. Luckily, I still get the old feeling of wonderful and exhilarating meaning sometimes, but a few insights toward sanity help me have these interesting experiences and also keep sane inside them.

Not every schizophrenic is so lucky with their course through the disorder. The Public Health Agency of Canada released(4) A Report on Mental Illness in 2002, the same year I was diagnosed. In the relevant chapter, it says “the chronic course of the disorder contributes to ongoing social problems. As a result, individuals with schizophrenia are greatly over-represented in prison and homeless populations.” Further, the report says between 2 and 3 out of 5 schizophrenics attempt suicide and about 1 succeeds. As a rough average, about 1 in a 100 individuals in the general population faces a life of schizophrenia. If Malaspina (the school I attend) had 8000 students, anywhere in the range from 45 to 140 individuals with the illness might walk by me daily on campus. My doctor asked me once to tell her if I had delusions that would not go away so she could consider raising my dosage of meds. She worries for me, because she knows from trying to help them that many schizophrenics never get over their lingering psychosis. I shared more of my own perception of how I’ve done so well because I consider my own mind more invaluable than my meds for stopping delusions.

I told my doctor this summer more thoroughly that the medicine never surely stopped the delusions, and she seemed sort of aghast for just a moment wondering if I had been lying to her about feeling better. The meds have stopped the most vivid hallucinations as well as allowed me to sleep, but the crux of my recovery conjoining these vital parts of it are recurrent choices of how to respond to strange feelings, and the delusional response weakens gradually. Sanity is with- in -sight, to play a little friendly word salad! Ah, I find so much joy when characteristics of schizophrenia, like a far-reaching imagination and play with language, two abilities which used to hurt my mind as symptoms, can now be used for beneficial expression. I would like more people to have a general knowledge about how delusions form, because I find the process so integral to individual suffering. It would be good for more people to know better how to engender that grounded mental framework that guides the disrupted and distorted individual to inner peace. We schizophrenics need real help out of illusions.



Footnotes: 1) A thorough enough account for understanding the events which took place goes quite beyond the scope of this writing, and exploring them would surely distract the reader from what I seek to emphasize. The events lacking mention do not pertain to what herein I have to say about schizophrenia and the delusional response.
2) Different drugs work with varying degrees of success for different individuals. My doctor says sometimes a mixture of various medications is necessary for some.
3) I allude to in discussion of my “high school conversations” but never explicitly state that sentences and words can appear in a hallucinatory fashion like when hearing voices in the head, but I do hold an important distinction between sentences that might pop into mind as hallucinations and between delusions which I primarily conceive as statements consciously derived by meticulous, reason-guided articulation about what might first pop into the mind unabated as raw perception or feeling.
4) The report can be found for reading online.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000015.htm 2007-02-10T13:05:57Z 2007-02-10T13:06:08Z

This is a paper I wrote for my First Nations Literature class. I haven't been around on NCN for a while and thought I should show my face and contribute something. Hello all! I hope you appreciate the thoughts!

This is a paper I wrote for my First Nations Literature class.

I haven't been around on NCN for a while and thought I should show my face and contribute something. Hello all!

I hope you appreciate the thoughts!To Inspire an Adequate Response…

Joseph Dandurand’s play, Please Do Not Touch The Indians, conveys a dark history in Canada that many do not fully conceive the extent of. Cultures of colonization historically ac-cepted and sought to legally justify the forcing of most indigenous cultures in Canada into condi-tions today deemed deplorable, which writers like Dandurand explore. In his play that inspires respect for those impacted by past and present conditions, Dandurand subverts both colonial as well as contemporary patterns of oppression by exploring Canadian history from the telling per-spectives of characters who received the dark side of that history.

The characters of the play are one white tourist, three animals—a wolf, a raven, and a coyote—and two wooden Indians with an appearance “not quite traditional but more of a Holly-wood taste” (7). The overt plot of the play consists in “Tourist” emerging upon stage to represent the others in a medium like photography, painting, or film while ignorant that when offstage, the others communicate and reminisce upon events in their past. The characters other than the tourist are the tormented ghosts of devastated Native individuals who were deprived of peace by murder-ers of an oppressive culture. Throughout the play, the characters fondly remember bearable parts of their lives and later in the play painfully remember the events that ended their mortal lives. Via characters whose memories are archetypal of real abuses that occurred toward Natives, Dandu-rand teaches to his audience a dark side of Canadian history such as terrifying experiences that happened in residential schools and army-perpetrated massacres.

In his essay “The Hearts of Its Women: Rape, Residential Schools, and Re-membering,” Ric Knowles comments on what he interprets as a primary focus of First Nations Literature, not-ing that many Native playwrights have quoted the traditional Cheyenne saying that “[a] nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground” (Knowles 245). Knowles com-ments that
[the] most pervasive feature of current Native writing … seems to be the impact of “Resi-dential schools—past, present, and future” (18) on Native Children. These are the Chris-tian-run schools to which First Nations children were taken by force, removed from their communities, and denied access to their languages and cultures, by government decree for over a century from the mid 1800s until the 1970s. (Knowles 245).

That means some people currently alive have living memory of this disservice, but Joseph Dandurand is young enough that his knowledge of the greatest material abuses in Canadian his-tory come from the memories and stories of others. Perhaps, the greatest value of Dandurand’s writing comes in the very fact of his continuing to tell stories of abuse in history even when per-sonally beyond it, for unless people continually retell these stories of past colonization, some may lapse and hurt others again. In an essay that talks about the impact on children of colonization called “The Children of Tomorrow’s Great Potlatch,” Ernie Grey writes as a member in the Cheam band of the Sto:lo nation that “[we] dream of the day when First Nations people and whites will sit together to take part in a great potlatch. Before this happens, the whites must learn more of the First Nations history, because understanding is essential to create solutions and har-mony” (Grey 150). Immediately following this statement, Grey includes a quotation from Chief Joe Mathias that “[the] Indian Act of 1876 shattered the lives of the aboriginal people of Canada,” and Grey continues to state “those most profoundly damaged were the children of the First Na-tions people” (Grey 150, 151). Colonizers strove hard to disrupt healthy human growth.

Sister Coyote, a character of Dandurand’s play, represents this history as a child taken from home and put in school. Her heart stomped hard to the ground, Sister Coyote relates her ex-perience in the school, “being beaten and kicked around,” and then she describes a priest viciously raping her while telling her frighteningly gross lies: “he hurt me real bad, all the time telling me I was his gift from the lord and that I should never tell anyone. He raped me and then he smacked me across the face and told me to never tell anyone or else God would punish me” (49). This priest attempts to conquer Sister Coyote’s heart by crushing her to subordination by his desires and reduces her to such a state that she kills herself with a belt discarded by him while exploiting her.

Grey informs his reader with a quote from Dr. Neil MacDonald of the University of Mani-toba that when children were when taken from their parents’ shelter, they were “assigned a num-ber and unceremoniously herded into cattle cars for transport to the residential school” (Grey 151). Values of the kind pervaded in real life that in the play allowed the priest to attack and dis-miss the importance of Sister Coyote. Dr. Neil MacDonald wrote about an incident at one “Fall round-up” of children when they were taken to go to residential school:
The women ran alongside the cattle cars until they found their child or children. They grabbed the hands of their children and refused to let go, thus preventing the train’s depar-ture. The RCMP constables responded by climbing up the sides of the cars and stomped on the hands of the mothers, breaking their grips and some of their hands and fingers. (Grey 151-2).

All sorts of horrors abound in the colonizer’s historical treatment of First Nations people, horrors whose diversity and quantity forces upon one the realization that Canadian history in-volves entrenched systematic oppressions. “Real, material technologies of colonization,” the phrase Ric Knowles uses to describe rape and sexual violence, exist in many forms as shown by the preceding story and the story of Sister Coyote (Knowles 245). Spiritually dismissive atti-tudes—the kind acted upon Natives by the various modes of destructive colonization—run to-gether with assimilation, “ethnic cleansing[,] and cultural genocide” (Knowles 246).

Nothing but spiritually dismissive attitudes could result in a whole society systematically oppressing, injuring, and attempting to assimilate another. Wooden Woman, another tormented ghost of Dandurand’s play, relives her memories of being a Native mother at a time when “battle” went on—when dressed in “blue US cavalry” purposefully hunted Native groups to scalp and massacre any dark-skinned man, woman, or child they could find (42). In a culturally autobio-graphical vein that also imparts visceral emotions, Wooden Woman tells that “[the US cavalry] slit their throats, the youngest of the children, slit their throats and tossed their small harmless bodies into the hole” (48). She relives an attack as she hides with her child waiting for the dark-hearted men to find her. The attackers annihilate her sanity—frighteningly stomping her heart to the ground: “They were coming to kill me and take my hair. My child wouldn’t stop screaming so I took some dead leaves and gently pushed them into her mouth” (51). Eventually the crying child suffocates, which itself most powerfully torments Wooden Woman’s soul while in limbo with the other characters.

Colonial patterns of oppressors must include delusional self-rationales for acting out these torments, rationales which I refer to with the phrase spiritually dismissive attitudes. Colonialists needed to strongly imagine their Native hosts as worth very little in order to have the moral ability to so mercilessly ravage and malign. To feel sane while murdering or raping someone else, peo-ple who deem themselves “good and civilized” or at least “right” must force their minds to contort reality into severe delusions of dichotomy between self and other. Such a colonial dichotomy surely lent philosophical support to both the “legitimized” abuse upon Natives by Canadian law and the preservation of residential schools until the 1970s, within 35 years of today. Dandurand subverts colonial dichotomies of worthy human versus denigrated primitive by relating to us com-pelling first-person perspectives of innocent, intelligent Native people impacted and devastated by savage colonizers.

By informing his audience in a carefully symbolic way about this side of Canadian history, symbols which I’ll explain in the next paragraph, Dandurand also subverts something he per-ceives continuing to happen now. I have noticed a phenomenon that some people do not fully conceive the extent of a dark Canadian history, tending to believe Canada to be a forerunner of international peace with nothing under its belt but innocuous good will. A look within, however, such as the look given by Dandurand and the critics I have mentioned, reveals a great deal of so-cial decay that festers under the surface of everyday contemporary life. The most desperate colo-nial actions thrum in a time just now behind us. Today, our governments renounce such cultural decay, but I suggest contemporary values have not instantaneously and easily changed between generations. No reason other than to merely recite the past exists for Native playwrights to go back, again and again, to the subject of lingering suffering unless hazy, decayed contemporary values provide such a reason to tell stories that instruct societies away from destructive behaviour.

Whereas life memories of the Native characters in Please Do Not Touch The Indians pri-marily express the emotional hell perpetrated upon Natives by colonialism in the past, the charac-ter simply called Tourist most vividly symbolizes the contemporary persistence of sick values be-hind past atrocities. The title of the play is the same statement that reads on a sign initially hang-ing around Wooden Man’s neck, a kind of sign to tell tourists not to touch, because they might damage what they touch. Tourist spends much of his time onstage taking images of the Native characters while not knowing or touching at all upon the horrific lives they lived before becoming spirits in limbo. I think Tourist symbolizes intended efforts of the colonial project and can pro-vide insight into the strange phenomenon I discussed concerning Canadians not fully understand-ing the extent of suffering perpetrated through their history. I feel the presence of an analogy oc-curring somewhere between Tourist’s ignorance of the Natives’ deeper lives while striving to have a beautiful image to keep of them and the way contemporary Canadian society carries forth its history. I think Dandurand subverts contemporary social prerogatives by making a damned fool of Tourist, especially when at the end of the play he stunningly directs the Hollywood-ized enactment of the horrific massacre that Wooden Woman lost her life and child to. If elements of contemporary society genuinely are as negligent as Tourist in their evaluation of history and of cultural identities, then Dandurand subtly presents a strong case for a re-evaluation of contemporary social agendas.

As example of how contemporary Canadian society responds to its history, I have my own experience to offer. I went through elementary school instructed by teachers that Native culture was a) interesting to know about, b) worthy of respect, c) as good as other cultures and d) impor-tant to my Canadian heritage. Beyond seeing examples of art and technology and beyond doing crafts, I do not recall an equivalent amount of sincere discussion about highly problematic values that currently linger from a dark history of systematic cultural attack. Elizabeth Mary Furniss wrote her thesis dissertation for a doctorate of philosophy in the department of anthropology and sociology at UBC, and its name is In the Spirit of the Pioneers: Historical Consciousness, Cul-tural Colonialism and Indian/White Relations in Rural British Columbia (1997). She claimed “the power that reinforces the subordination of aboriginal peoples in Canada is exercised by ‘ordinary’ rural Euro-Canadians whose cultural attitudes and activities are forces in an ongoing, con-temporary system of colonial domination” (ii). On Vancouver Island having grown up in the rural town of Ucluelet (with a population around sixteen-hundred, a couple hundred of which are Na-tives mostly on a reserve) before living in the city of Nanaimo, I attest that I bear witness to more “subordination” in everyday racial attitudes in Ucluelet than Nanaimo, and I also attest that ‘both sides’ often construe their ideas as perfectly “ordinary” and reasonable. Issues of subordination sometimes entered secondary school classrooms, but I mainly remember being told dates of armed conflicts and being told about the activity of trade routes in distant regions. Although the official mandate is that Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian culture should peacefully coexist in Can-ada, I think the current state of moral affairs and the current state of public education lag and do not adequately supply the data and testimonial—such as Native authors like Dandurand convey—that will expose to youth the real problems opposed to a cultural peace.

I think we still linger near the beginning of a transitional period toward peace, considering residential schools ended only within 35 years of the present day. Canada is still discarding the oppressive, destructive values and learning the constructive, compassionate ones, and as long as stories keep spinning, we will learn. Luckily, First Nations Literature grows in popularity, and I see only Native writers that, like Dandurand, well know history and intentionally work with con-structive goals in mind toward a peace for those impacted in various ways throughout history and to this day. The history of our land and people reveals its shades, both light and dark, to us upon our today reaching—striving—beyond the causes of suffering in literature and charitable remem-brance.

...Please do not forget the Indians.



Works Cited
Dandurand, Joseph A. Please Do Not Touch The Indians. Candler, NC: Renegade Planets
Publishing, 2004.
Furniss, Elizabeth. In the Spirit of the Pioneers: Historical Consciousness, Cultural Colonialism
and Indian/White Relations in Rural British Columbia. Ottawa, Ontario: UMI Dissertation Services, 2001.
Grey, Ernie. “The Children of Tomorrow’s Great Potlatch.” In Celebration of Our Survival: The
First Nations of British Columbia. Ed. Doreen Jensen and Cheryl Brooks. Also BC Studies no. 89. 1991.
Knowles, Ric. “The Hearts of Its Women: Rape, Residential Schools, and Re-membering.”
Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre. Ed. Sherrill Grace and Albert-Reiner Glaap. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2003.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000014.htm 2005-12-02T19:49:32Z 2005-12-02T19:50:37Z

Hello there, you with eager free minds that some philosophers would tell you that you don't have. I've been busy busy with my second year of university, but I've written lots and would like to share. Here is my final essay for Phil 361 - philosophy of mind! Enjoy

Hello there, you with eager free minds that some philosophers would tell you that you don't have. I've been busy busy with my second year of university, but I've written lots and would like to share. Here is my final essay for Phil 361 - philosophy of mind!

Enjoy





In this paper I intend to show that certain arguments about the nature of the mind need careful revision in their thinking of the world's substrate – that which we call the 'material.' I think that materialism can help make sense of this world and of minds, but not in the current state it finds itself. In this essay, I challenge the notion that materialism needs to mean that minds cannot exist in an efficacious way, and I challenge, for materialism to adequately make sense of the world and our place in it as made of matter, it will need to accommodate more in the concept of matter than a descriptive account of only physical structure colliding and moving around. I argue in the paper that there is an adequate material account, in the workings, for a world that behaves much as we physically observe and predict it to while at the same time conceiving that this material world can allow the decisions and awareness of an experience that we at least undeniably have linguistic descriptors and a sense of being in for. I think those descriptors are accurate and that the sense of being is beautiful and personal, and this shapes the intent behind the words of my essay to proceed in a such a way as to find that our sense of our life as developed can reflect the natural way we really are in the cosmos, that is indeed made of matter.



What does it mean to propose as contemporary science might that the understanding is sufficient that every human is "nothing but a physico-chemical mechanism" like philosopher David Armstrong does (Morton, 206)? It is bold of materialism to suppose all including mind consists of matter and its energetic and lawful state such that we could give "an account of the nature of the mind which is compatible" with materialism (Morton, 225).



However, it is a little reckless and, to be shown in this paper, unscientifically presumptive of materialism to suppose that 'matter', 'energy', 'material energy', or at any rate 'the effective and integral substance at hand' can only be physically mechanical and classically describable in its natural process – i.e. that statements about conscious selves, who are observed conjoined to a physical bodily structure yet who seemingly choose to act, are meaningless and irrelevant to the real dynamic mechanisms underlying the necessary processes of anything in existence. More than that, whatever the case may be our quite undeniably biological/living existence includes in the stronger use of the word a sense of entanglement of things that feel and think they are, and materialism needs to accommodate our experience of the world. In understanding a universe of matter, I wonder what 'a world inhabited by beings' means – what 'feeling music' might mean...



For lack of better terms, in my being and thoughts I contend that materialism is accurate insofar that it is ontologically compatible with the negative constraint upon any theory of a material world that it must formally contain a potential for (or be conceptually compatible with) the existence of real unities that feel that they're a certain way how one is occupying and aware of a physical existence almost like music being in. Science must not only be able to predict observations, but be consistent with all available observations, so that includes the observation of sentience, active conceptualization of events that occurs when interacting with the world, as occurs in the perspective of what we generally recognize as the sentient living. We need this conceptualization to know how to walk around a place, for instance. Sight of things is used to navigate. And things are matter. It needs to fit somehow.



This is not to say that all observations and concepts are of a physical world represented in forms made apparent to senses: our existence includes observations of an ideal world of events represented in forms apparent to another level than bodily sense, a different level of conscious content than the level of biologically structural sensations (e.g. retina rainbows, nose roses). Our empirical experience includes a sense of existing persons and meaningful, emotional relationship in addition to what are just observably structural (physical=enduring of spatial dimension, apparent beyond yourself) aspects of this world, all this energy. Keep in mind, no physicist can tell you what energy is that is said to underlie or become all things. Is it at least also an ability to change something, like we think of the dispositions of matter underlying the observations of something physical or like we appear to do from within our own bodies? I contend for materialism to be true that consciousness needs to be deemed an inherent and natural form of material energy in a state that is legitimately described as having awareness and self-direction, and I find it implausible to entertain notions that every sense of 'the world as material energy' excludes persons, feelings, desires as eliminative materialists pose.



If this is a problem, making a distinction between energies when either physically observable or conscious, we should observe that meaning and structure are evident in this world and are evidently energetic; both the structure and meaning of others that interact with us have the potential to change our body and mental consideration, as energy was roughly conceptualized above. To be ontologically compatible with persons, the specific task of materialism is then to understand how transforming, enduring physical matter can accommodate and transform because of flexible consciousness that is expressly non-physically observable yet still conceived of as essentially 'material' and that allows our bodies and social lives to endure, a matter of direct experience.



The question may be, for some, how matter the world we have may arise into forms that we can call conscious. How does matter function in a particular sentient way, as we evidently have human bodies interactive with reflection and seeming options for being ways; not just being such as seen: physical – how can matter be more than that, more than observable structure? Undeniably, matter must involve (at least seemingly) sentient choices; the world of matter is observed to be and sentience makes sense of the human world of art and emotion lived materially as we know it; we are materially conscious entities, by all reports and observations. Mental states exist and correlate with behaviour in a sensed meaningful way but the world is material and observations of the brain correlate to observed and reported behaviour as well; therefore mental states seem to be brain states, related to them somehow at least. There seems with the neurological evidence to be a necessary relationship implied between what is observed as structure in space and what we all have to be aware of. But what is the actual state of the brain – i.e. what is the form or nature of the material energy that is associated with our perceptions of the physical brain?



To answer this question we must first adequately understand what we mean by matter, because linking the mind to the brain requires understanding how certain forms of matter simultaneously exist with observable structure while sensing a conscious unity – i.e. forms of matter we call aware creatures. Understanding the nature of matter is to the materialist a way to have insight into the nature of mental states about one being in the material world – that is, knowledge of matter gives insight into our lives, i.e. finding out the nature of observably structural processes that are holistically organized into what's considered an individual that senses interactions of those structural processes as specially and meaningfully united in relationship and function. Thus, understanding matter's correlation to unities is the key to understanding how "matter dreams", as physicist and writer Fred Alan Wolf spoke in an interview about his book The Dreaming Universe, which is the logical implication entailed by a materialist view since the world includes real persons as we are conscious of ourselves as being.



I'm obviously taking to heart the arguments of consciousness and intentionality and proceeding in argument as though these are automatically the case. I seemingly can't help but feel and articulate that I'm purposefully connected to and aware of my experience as a human being, and I think materialism has done a weird thing by considering these feelings of consciousness and intentionality as problems to fit in somehow to the view that all is material energy. I think that functional unity is similarly a problem for these 'weird' materialists, and I also think these problems are rooted in a mistake of the 'weird' materialist. They have exceedingly believed Newton's paradigm, that all is particles bouncing around independently of any holistic, conscious, or intentional organization. His view of matter is simply inadequate as accounted by contemporary physics, and it's only within that old theory that our sense of ourselves having beliefs and intentions is not allowed a causal manner in behaviour. In today's physics unlike Newtonian physics, the ability for holistic organization that is required by consciousness is present, so materialism has another course in dealing with the philosophy of the mind: Instead of the old problem of reconciling a seeming paradox of fitting a particles- that-bounce-around physics with a unity-that-functions-intentionally psychology, we have the task of seeing how the new physics is constituted for the existence of consciousness.



Since matter is seen today as quantum in nature, by all relevant experiments and as explored in neat technologies, and since our (material) bodies rest at night and produce worlds for us to dream, we must conclude that the essence of materialism's substance – what's beneath the 'observable structure': the quantum state – that this essential matter in our reality has properties making consciousness capably achieved. Further, to make a natural sense of such things as human art, emotion, and sensuality, it must be somehow that in living forms the material existence includes a genuine personal interactivity with conscious representations. Complex material organisms must be somehow self-reflectively whole in order to naturally and simply explain why humans might do a thing that can easily be described in terms of, for instance, desires. What I'm saying here is that when considering the collections of physical particles that are seen to make living things up and when considering that these collections have evolved on Earth to feel and work with aspects of themselves and their surrounding environment, then we must allow the notion that some specially evolved ensembles of physical particles just have consciousness and interactivity as naturally emergent material behaviours; I'm saying here that, in addition to the laws of physics, certain ensembles also naturally behave like we humans do.



To use a different meaning of the word matter with an obvious connotation to my ideas, I'm assuming that life matters as much to the underlying dynamics of our bodily actions as do those physical laws holding our bodily actions. It might seem strange to some materialists that I could speak of matter this way, but I insist. It seems undeniable to suppose that our physical systems materially project individuals, persons who are whole. To see how a physics could entertain such wildly contrary terms such as 'sentience as a material process of wholeness' there is a specific task.



For this task, a historical review and its revision: we must discover why the materialist concept has become associated with a universal deficit of efficacious mental processes. The state of the material brain is thought of (even to this day) by some materialist philosophers in exceedingly simple models that are quite formally inadequate for understanding matter's unity in consciousness. The brain can be observed as specialized regions of activity composed of neurons and complex pathways enmeshed into a whole organism's metabolism, which in turn dissected can be observed a composite of molecules composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons that simply move and react with each other. There is a destructive audacity (with concern to scientific inclusion of minds) of some materialist philosophers to suppose we can adequately consider these dynamic building components in this way as "logically independent local entities", as a physicist I am about to talk about describes, that have no holistic relationship like the kind our empirical experience of wholes requires, as I have argued (Stapp 6.1).



Many materialist philosophers speak of the nature of the mind as though we need to conceive it as necessarily a mysterious tag-on to blind matter that just collides and melts together mechanically until weird forms of as-yet-unaccountably organized chemical reactions say they feel it happening to them, but that it happens totally without reference to the desires that they say they have, they who are these organized machinelike mechanisms feeling sentient mechanism, according to this retired view of 'necessarily blind and broken-to-pieces world'. Materialism like this, proceeding from the notion that matter observed of parts and separation cannot be whole between our discrete observations, doesn't know where to go but to deny our sensed place of commanding our lives, but paradoxically anyways, 'minds' watch their bodies behave and successfully mechanically describe those observations, so that we could think we were even ghostlike in the matter that we always see behave with order. This problem with minds is because this kind of mechanical understanding only allows small structural parts to affect their immediate neighbours by means of regular rules, and this understanding has no possible description relevant to the sense of unities, things that work as wholes, like a person.



But wait! This is materialism applied to the mind as per the classical understanding of physics. Henry Stapp, an established physicist of the University of California, stresses several relevant points about the mind/brain relationship in his essay Why Classical Mechanics Cannot Accommodate Consciousness but Quantum Mechanics Can, the central point namely being in the title of the essay. In the first line of the introduction, he writes that "classical mechanics arose from the banishment of consciousness from our conception of the physical universe. Hence it should not be surprising to find that the readmission of consciousness requires going beyond that theory" (Stapp 1.1). Of classical mechanics in the next section, he writes "The fundamental principle in classical mechanics is that any physical system can be decomposed into a collection of simple independent local elements each of which interacts only with its immediate neighbors" (Stapp 2.2).



However, "it has become clear that the revolution in our conception of matter wrought by quantum theory has completely altered the complexion of problem of the relationship between mind and matter" (Stapp 1.3). He stresses that the classical understanding of matter is in conflict with understanding of the mind as capable of holding or beholding unity, and he stresses the inadequacy of the view that "the simple empirical fact of the matter is that brains are made out of neurons and other cells that are well described by classical physics" (Stapp 5.1). Instead, "the processes that make brains work the way they do depend upon the intricate physical and chemical properties of the materials out of which they are made: brain processes depend in an exquisite way on atomic and molecular processes that can be adequately understood only through quantum theory" (Stapp 5.3).



To see how philosophers have confused the classical model into their ideas of the mind, it is necessary to understand the limit, reach, and origin of the classical models. In the space around us containing the objects of the world that are apparent to us, they are observed in such a way as proceeding 'mechanically' – i.e. precise things happen such as apples falling on our heads when we sit under apples trees in harvest season. The sense of the word 'mechanical' is very different when one shifts from classical to quantum understanding, and the quantum understanding indeed gives us better predictions of when and how those apples will fall. At the present moment however, there is no genuinely clear consensus on how to interpret the implications and mechanisms of quantum mechanics, but regardless, accomplished physicists are insisting that the classical view is inadequate for understanding subatomic physics and hence the human brain, and Henry Stapp argues that the contemporary mind/body problems about machine vs. human as we have them have actually arisen because of belief in the fundamentally inadequate classical model of matter. Moreover, Stapp uses math to demonstrate that the quantum description is holistic in nature and argues that in this way it seems that quantum mechanics might be quite conceptually compatible with a sense of whole persons than the classical model. It still needs work, however, to see how it might fit and one may ask of my ideas why the classical model could be wrong, in the sense that there are just blind parts bumping each other around. To show this, I'll talk about the nature of classical description and discuss how it was derived.



In Newtonian/classical physics we symbolize our perceptions of apples (i.e. the weight of one in our hand) as mass, m, and symbolize our perceptions of their motion as acceleration, a. In our perceptions and language, forces move matter. Sitting under the apple tree, and having an apple fall on your head will illustrate that a force on an apple accelerated it. Newton went on to describe a universal law of gravitation, that all free-falling material bodies in the universe are observed to be attracted together in an orderly and precise manner. This is to say, in the most empirical sense, that we have always perceived the same relationships when observing matter. No matter how we subjectively see it, the matter itself is seen changing precisely around us; that's what classical physicists have stressed, correctly mind you.



This means that transformations occurring within our observations of matter are describable in mathematical terms and relationships. Carefully, the observed things of the universe put in mathematical terms refer to employing measurements of observed things, which are only symbolically used delimitations of acts of perception – i.e. a legitimate but unlikely measurement standard could be that the symbol "a metre and a half" is stipulated to represent the perception of the height of some arbitrarily selected human, so that every subsequent act of perception may measure (or compare by empirical resemblance with another perception) to find the length of an object in metres. Nearly everything we can perceive with our bare eyes, ears, and hands and instruments is classically describable in some way, which means mathematical terms can be created of events that are always in themselves consistently continuous and punctuated with changes. This is an important way to articulate what 'scientific knowledge of objects' is, because even though we are considering real objects, the classical description refers only to the fact that, like the apple falling, the world has been sequentially ordered insofar that we can symbolize our perceptions of its motion and change.



Consequently, to say some event within perception proceeds classical mechanically is to say that changes in observable structure happen as though it were a mathematical machine, and in a deep sense this says only that there is a regularity to our perceptions of any event's process that has already begun. Reasoning from just the domain of classical description, scientists cannot reasonably assert that consciousness is entirely excluded from the essential dynamic mechanisms and existential nature of the real substance that all life on Earth is occupying and transforming for life's growth. Empiricist David Hume, for one, would not let the assumed view of classical physics be rationally and universally attributed to the causality of all things. That goes too far, and indeed contemporary physics has shown that classical mechanics only well describes events at the level of objects we immediately perceive, like apples. It also well describes the 'physical machinery' of computers and any discrete state system. However, classical mechanics was shown early in the twentieth century to utterly break down when applied to the atomic scale. It was seen that there is genuinely no regularity of the classical sort in the underlying scales of matter, indeed it was even seen that in quantum activity there is no way any longer to even adequately conceive of the material state as being just physical, as meaning just observably structural following definite courses.



Instead of seeing observable particles just bouncing around, the quantum mechanical aspects of matter are modelled in terms of "objective tendency" and "actual event", which will be talked about later because of required depth to do so adequately, but Stapp says "Bohr resolved this problem of reconciling the quantum and classical aspect of nature by exploiting the fact that the only thing that is known to be classical is our description of our perceptions of physical objects" (Stapp 5.4; his italics). The processes underlying our actions are not classical and we need to expand our views to see how consciousness may be naturally the way we feel it is, while matter is it somehow. Stapp argues that our quantum conception naturally accommodates our notion of consciousness, because unlike in classical models, the description of systems of matter is necessarily holistic, like our thoughts and beliefs, which means:



In this [new quantum] theory [of the brain] there is no abandonment of the normal psychological conception of our mental life. It is rather the classical theory of matter that is abandoned. In the terminology used by Churchland, folk psychology is retained, but folk physics is replaced by contemporary physics (Stapp 4.7).



With this in mind, we may ponder on what answers might be feasible to the many questions historically asked about the nature of human life and the nature of matter that must as I have argued be understood as accommodating us, or that we must understand how the form of material existence in humanity's case is consciousness. There is an obvious old question to ask of this view: in what way would the consciousness of human matter be distinguishable from the non-human-consciousness of ocean, star or rock matter? Do we have a special dignity of choice that other material forms do not have?



Henry Stapp has an insight into this direct question given in an appendix of his essay, but a little more about the nature of quantum mechanical description is necessary. Quantum mechanics is an account of material processes. In classical mechanics, there were just static entities moving with utterly deterministic absolute inevitability, but Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Schrödinger's equation illustrate that the connection between particular states of matter is not linear and direct in the same way as classical models do. Instead, Schrödinger's equation describes matter with probabilities where, between particular states, matter is in a flux of "objective tendencies" each with a similar ability to be the case until Schrödinger's wave function of probabilities collapses and an "actual event" occurs (Stapp 4.6). Stapp says "contemporary quantum theory does not have any definite rule that specifies where the collapses occur" (Stapp B.1). It is assumed that in quantum systems like radioactively decaying matter that these collapses are occurring randomly. So the question for human status in the material cosmos becomes the question of whether this potentially random decision- swerving of a system of subatomic matter can somehow become the choice of a sentient entity inherent in that system, say, a brain.



To realize our dignity, Stapp employs a principle inter-crossing his discipline of physics into evolutionary biology and asks a question of survival advantage; an argument can be constructed like this:

1. The choice of matter's collapse into "actual events" is left physically open, free of determinism in any kind of classically mechanical sense of necessary outcome, of absolute inevitability (Stapp 4.6). 2. There is a great deal of evidence for the evolutionary principle, stated in its most general sense that traits eventually emerge in life forms which confer adaptability and success to them. 3. "The question arises: Is the placement of the collapses at high-level classical branches, as specified in our model, favorable to survival of the organism? If so, then there would be an evolutionary pressure for the collapse location to migrate, in our species, to this high-level placement. . . .It would be advantageous to its survival for the organism to be organized so that whatever fundamental property induces collapses occurs in conjunction with the top- level templates for action" (Stapp B.2).



In other words, for survival of life forms the "fundamental property" or reason that changes occur in each of the physical parts we are reducible to might "migrate" so that the reason our whole life form changes "occurs in conjunction" with possibilities relevant to our whole life form's survival. In Stapp's view of the mind, "top-level templates for action" would be these sets of material possibilities that we perceive with a sense of volition and involvement, and the quantum collapse is the effect of our choice: we see a particular action. We can adequately suppose "the determination of where the collapses occur is fixed not by some a priori principle but by habits that become ingrained into nature" (Stapp B.2, his italics). Thus far, it would seem the state of physical uncertainty between positions of matter might be actually, in higher organisms at least, the state of sentient decision-making. It would help us survive to not be utterly random, to be aware and in command of a little bit of the process of our lives, it would strongly seem, wouldn't it? Most of biology would stand as is, because so much of our living process could be entirely 'habitual' in Stapp's view, like the beating of our hearts and digestion of food. What we breathe for our heart and eat for our gut to move around our body, however, might as argued here be left up to us in the form of a genuinely mental choice.



This view of the philosophy of mind draws together physics and evolutionary biology in a way that speaks of an elevated universe that has it in itself to be alive and feel that: it seems a function of material states to be either unbound by life (being perhaps random) or to be bound as a living whole (being perhaps wild or willing) while this living whole/unique material state becomes conscious as a feature of the evolution of a world with a profound material nature. Stapp argues that a more coherent and encompassing account of the world is arrived at if we expand from the classical view where consciousness is "non-efficacious and hence of no relevance to the survival of the species" (Stapp B.4). Instead, conscious dignity might be a natural outcome of the basic rules that allow all things to occur, just like all the nifty physical effects we've discovered from those rules that some philosophers have heralded as the beginning of liberation from mental concepts; instead, we have a simpler understanding of how minds might operate than the classical model requires. The impression of an 'idea for action A or B' or of a 'choice A or B to make' might be akin, materially, to a quantum state that as described before has similarly arise-able possibilities for physical state A or B; then the collapse occurs where we want it to because the potential for collapse has somehow become a sentient event. This would, at least, seem to possess some kind of naturalistic sensibility; it fits with our view of us and our very successful view of matter, and these views are joined in a way to be yet far more vastly explored by scientists and philosophers.



If all this indeed has relevance to the materialist philosophies of mind, we should look at how three such theories cope with the idea of natural psychology that I evidently assume viable. "Supporters of the identity theory argue that psychology will be reduced to neuroscience. Functionalists claim that psychology will be autonomous of neuroscience. And a third answer… psychology will be eliminated by neuroscience" as said by Peter Morton (Morton 335). Neuroscience is the description of physical observables correlated to experiential contexts; it is the fitting of what we see the brain doing to what we say is going on, in a gist. For instance, two precise spots in the left side of your head (Broca's speech center) will each light up on magnetic scans at different times you are aware of the words 'cup' and 'orange'. The 'you are aware of' part is the language of psychology.



The identity theory's reduction to neuroscience would mean there is some 'spot' or process in the matter of the brain that is identical to our minds so that the brain can have "a purely electro-chemical account" as David Armstrong says in The Nature of Mind" (Morton 225). The concepts I've been developing can clearly criticize the philosophical foundation of such a claim, namely the assumption that neuroscience (as purely electro-chemical) is the proper account, but current neuroscientific description is mainly limited to the classical level description that is bunk. I have been arguing that the 'material' account of the brain is deeper than a "purely electro-chemical" account or the account of physical observables. Armstrong himself says "this [pure account] is not to say that in the future new evidence and new problems may not come to light which will force science to reconsider the physico-chemical view of man" (Morton 225). I have argued, along the lines of Henry Stapp, that the quantum understanding forces this already, and have even in this essay attempted to begin to describe hypothetically what that quantum material process of the brain that we call ourselves might be like. Identity mind-matter theory need not reduce psychology, but rather expand neuroscience to the level of quantum brain-nature; "it would seem imprudent to ignore the holistic aspect of matter that lies at the heart of contemporary physics when trying to grapple with the problem of the connection of matter to consciousness" (Stapp 3.12).



Saul Kripke responds to and also criticizes the suppositions of the mind/brain identity theory in Identity and Necessity. To go about this, he introduces the conception of various expressions as rigid or nonrigid designators, and he does this in order to clarify what kind of identity the mind/brain must be. An example of a rigid designator that Kripke gives is 'the square root of 25', which is rigid because 5 is necessitated by the expression; the square root of 25 could not be other than 5, as long as we are not arbitrarily using language. The rigid designation of an expression forces some other concept to be the case; it's about necessarily linked concepts. In Kripke's example, we are using a concept of a number's 'square root,' a concept which involves finding the dimensions of a square that has the original number's area. One way to schematize finding 'the square root of 25' is thus:

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .



There are 25 dots arranged in a square (the number 25 represented as a square, if you will,) and letting the 'root' of a square be considered its side in mathematics, lo and behold there are 5 dots on each side; therefore 'the square root of 25' rigidly designates '5' because of the necessity of the concepts that have been formed about numbers. Even though this is all made up by a meaning and relationship we give to words like number, square and root, the concepts are necessary beneath the words, rigidly, because of their reasonable meaning. A rigid designator is "a term that designates the same object in all possible worlds" (Morton, 244). No matter what world one is in, 5 x 5 (will always) = 25. Rigid designation is about understanding the only possible way there is to understand given the existence of objects referred to by concepts – i.e. if numbers exist, then Kripke's rigid example is also true.



This is the opposite from nonrigid designators. Before introducing the example Kripke uses, I'll approach the idea from what it entails conceptually in contrast to rigid designation. If a rigid designator means that an item is always necessarily referred to by an expression, then a nonrigid designator means what is referred to by an expression does not need to be the case, or that the identity of the referred object is contingent on something but is not necessary because of the idea of the first expression that does the referring. The rigid designation of mathematical expressions is contingent on nothing because they are necessary given the concepts. Nonrigid designators refer to something actual that could have been other than it was given an alternative way things happened to occur. Nonrigid designation is not to do with concepts fitting with concepts like rigid designation is. Kripke's example is 'the inventor of bifocals.' Even though this statement refers in particular to Benjamin Franklin, someone else could conceivably have invented bifocals instead of him and this stands in contrast to 5 only that must be the square root of 25.



Kripke applies these designations to scientific claims of identity such as "mind is brain" and that 'heat is molecular motion.' Kripke notes that in scientific conventions, identity statements about the nature of the world are viewed as contingent, that heat could have been something else, and this means, by Kripke's terms, that 'heat' is a nonrigid designator of 'molecular motion.' In other words, conventional science might say that the concept of heat does not necessarily entail the concept of molecular motion, as highlighted by the antiquated caloric theory of heat, and this goes for the mind-brain identity too. To say mental states are contingently identical to brain states is to suppose that it could rather have been the case that the mind is a disembodied homunculus that unnaturally forces otherwise blind matter into a marionette-like life-form. The supposition is that concepts such as heat/motion and mind/brain are not rigid like 'the square root of 25'/5 is.



The supposition that Kripke directly criticizes in his essay is that heat can be adequately conceived as a caloric fluid rather than molecular motion, which would extend to other scientific claims about the world. He attempts to realize how the concept of molecular motion is necessitated by the concept of heat instead of contingent upon, which would solidify and ground scientific claims while highlighting that we can interpret things incorrectly by thinking in terms of 'what could or might cause something' instead of 'what needs to fit what we observe as orderly and think of as reasonable'. Kripke says heat's contingency doesn't follow because circumstances cannot be adequately imagined such that heat is not molecular motion. He says that some thinkers only thought that heat could be different, and only because, Kripke claims, the sensation of heat was confused with the concept of heat. Those who would say the caloric theory is conceivable are only thinking about the sensation of heat.



When we rub our hands together quickly (moving), the sensation of heat develops as some of our energy is literally 'moved' between our palms. When we light a fire (by moving sticks and dry grass or flint and rock, for example) and watch the burning matter move more quickly into the air with light that moves into our vision as well, the sensation of heat develops again. What's going on here are empirical experiences of motion that have customarily been associated with heat for the sensation they produce. The sensation of heat we acquire necessitates nothing, but we attribute the concept of molecular motion to all occurrences of heat. The caloric theory of heat was only accounting for another substance that would possibly cause a sensation of heat. The concept we have of molecules with lots of kinetic energy causing slower molecules to speed up is necessarily identical to heat, because that is how our concept of it works. This is just his example, and this argument extends to all claims of scientific discovery; if a thing is actually existent, it is necessarily ordered and the terms of any identity statements concerning things in the world must be conceptually entailing of other in rigid designation, like those square roots.



In the arguments for strict identity of the mind and brain, an identity between what we feel in the inside and what we see from the outside, Kripke then says that because the things in the world are necessary, mental states also are necessarily identical to brain states. With this said, the problem is widened for conventional materialist arguments about the mind and brain, as I have attempted to overcome, for the arguer "has to show that these things which we can imagine are not in fact things we can imagine" (Morton 248). He says this because he concludes the concepts of mind and brain as necessarily identical must necessarily entail each other and conventional materialism "can't imagine" in small independent parts the holistic concepts of personhood. If the mind/brain identity is true in some unconventional way such that it is the case, then mental states rigidly designate brain states in a clear-conceptual way like heat/motion. Kripke is actually saying that the identity theorist's position is that the concept of brain states necessarily lead to mental states and that mental states without brain states would be inconceivable. Therefore "it would have to be a deeper and subtler argument" for materialists to show that our built-up concepts of minds, thoughts etc "are not in fact things we can imagine" because these are what conventional materialism expressly denies ontological existence of. I hope to have proposed such a deeper and subtler argument or at least a start for one.



We "can't imagine" how the square root of 25 would not be 5, given the meaning of the words, but we can imagine minds whose choices create actions and whose reasons form concepts, given the meaning of the words. Thus for Kripke, "the conclusion of this investigation would be that the analytical tools we are using go against the identity thesis and so go against the general thesis that mental states are just physical states" (Morton 248; my italics). The identity between mind and brain must be necessary, Kripke argues, but it doesn't seem to be as direct as an A stands for B when one says mental states are brain states, when as concepts mind entails feeling and brain entails observable structure. These basic concepts must be inseparable as neuroscience does indeed show, but they are also not definitional of each other as is, no matter how one conceives them, at least looking through what "has ever appeared in any materialist literature" except for recent strides by Stapp, Wolf, and many contemporaries I have read (Morton 248). So again, the neuroscience in the identity theory needs to evolve. The quantum theory of the mind comes closest so far as any materialist theory in finding a conceptual linkage between physical and conscious states of matter.



To go on to another materialist theory, the functionalist says the language of psychology is autonomous of neuroscience. Functionalists say that cognition and awareness are functions of living matter processing information in a certain computational way that produces representation. If the function is such that the brain's processing is both observable as behaviour/actions/etc to the outside, thus being the output of the living function, and intentional with selecting choices, thus being the input of the living function, then this theory is somewhat coherent with what I've been proposing in terms of the quantum state of wholeness. That might be the function for any material system and would indeed be autonomous of neuroscience because it merely considers our particular structure; other systems of matter might conceivably be psycho-functional if they can be quantum wholes as we are. Because neuroscience deals in classical descriptions, the psychology of language is autonomous of neuroscience; in this way what I'm saying coheres with some of the claims of functionalism. However, the psychology of language by the presently explored theory would not be autonomous of quantum behaviour. We just don't have that kind of neuroscience yet though, except that the quantum understanding of mind likely involves, as explored, the way our thoughts and quantum descriptions both speak of holistic relationships, and conceptual linkages will hopefully arise that will allow us to discover that our sensed existence is a reasonable one in a universe of abundantly and profoundly behaving material.



This function of abundant material making mind might be like a quantum "probabilistic automaton", to borrow the term of Jerry A. Fodor used in What Psychological States Are Not and apply it in the context I've been working with (Morton 333). The nature of the brain as a quantum "probabilistic automaton" may be such to overcome the problem that "psychological states of an organism cannot be put into correspondence with the computational states of an [non-quantum] automaton" (Morton 333, 334). This problem comes from the notion that our computational states (thinking through 3 plus 11 for instance) are unlike those of an automaton because "the mental states of a person can at best be specified by a finite approximation" (Morton 334). When we choose between alternatives, we don't select from a list of infinite potential computations, like computers essentially have at their disposal save for memory limitations. Moreover, we don't store our knowledge or compute by working in lists such as " 'the belief that 1+1=2,' 'the belief that 2+2=4,' 'the belief that 3+3=6' and so forth" like a mechanical automaton like conventional computers would (Morton 334).



In going with the idea that we're functions of matter, we may be "quantum automatons" (which incidentally is a term also found in Wolf's The Dreaming Universe in the concluding chapter that discusses what he speculates is the consciously material state that we are, it seems.) The brain considered by a quantum-educated functionalism would not quite be a discrete state system although all its states are observed by us as classical events in the world, i.e. actions like coming to be in the state of running are seen by observations to be classically describable, but asked, "they chose to run." Not a discrete state system or an automaton like that, the quantum-computational function of the brain would involve our sentient selection from the "habits ingrained into nature" like Stapp speculates (B.2). An implication of this is that a computer could conceivably be built to function in a quantum manner and perhaps have strong A.I., but the task will become like cellular biologists trying to recreate the conditions for the origin of life; a huge time of evolution came before us to reach to our level of consciousness. Training a quantum system to learn with a sense like us at any communicative level to a human would require immense complexity, presumably as things have turned thus far, with us. I think we might have to build a 'thinking computer' slowly by adding more matter to a system trained a certain way from the start like our cells must have behaved while evolving into multi-cellular organisms that have holistic behaviour and representation.



Then there is the materialism that seeks to eliminate the language of psychology. The language of psychology is a language of unities, of individuals, thoughts, choices, behaviours, and so also is the language of quantum mechanics about selection, unities – thus there may be a theory of matter compatible with ordinary mind, classical mechanics the language needing to be eliminated when dealing with the mind. An adequate language may be in human cases a language of vast symmetry with what is still being discovered of the language of matter that works well for technological pursuits, this deep quantum sense that deems processes as "automatically holistic" (Stapp 3.11). Such a language may be quite familiar, while we might even see that our natural language about ourselves will evolve so in our mind's eye its meaning will reflect our material knowledge that fits with us.



On the other hand, in Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain Patricia Smith Churchland sees the way we naturally talk about the mind as "folk psychology" and claims that we need to "revise and improve upon" it (Morton 356). She also calls this "intuitive psychology" and says that it is what "shapes our conception of ourselves" (Morton 355). It is the language of how we explain the 'inside' of human "behaviour as the outcome of beliefs, desires, perceptions" etc. that consist in the conscious objects inside the holistic entity I have argued for (Morton 355). This psychology is viewed by Churchland in a similar vein as how I've described "folk physics" or classical physics as arrived at in attempts to similarly shape a conception of things we saw 'outside' us; Churchland writes that "insofar as it enables us to make sense of and explain a certain range of phenomena, folk psychology resembles the folk physics" (Morton 356).



We remember what Stapp said about folk physics being replaced by contemporary physics and that the folk psychology was only stipulated to be ruled out and expelled from conception of the material universe in the extension of the classical paradigm to all levels. Churchland speaks of Newtonian physics in her essay as the better system from folk physics, but that's not quite up to date and what is perceived as her newer ideas have been shown to be what's inadequate, that consciousness needn't have been banished in the first place.



Churchland goes on about these folk theories: "what is important is not that they originated in self-conscious construction, but that in their explanatory and predictive role they function as theories" as Churchland writes; in other words, specific ways we talk about ourselves are similar to the level of description of "folk physics" in that the way these theories talk is as a theoretical account, a conceivable explanatory paradigm only (Morton 357). Therefore, she argues, it is possible that our current psychological language arose to a similar inadequate extent as classical mechanics, and that we might have no grasp on the actual dynamic mechanisms of living and worldly events when employing either folk physics or psychology.



However, I would like to add that our music, poetry, and spontaneous intellectual/emotional contributions do originate in self-conscious construction, in a way that these theories are capable of being known only after being alive and feeling alive. I don't think our concepts and psychological language arose as just a theoretical account. I have been arguing for the case that conceptualization is an energetic state in the form of awareness, in the material world and in a material entity. In other simpler words, I think feeling alive or feeling a world, things, others, the barest sense of anything at all is enough for us of reason to realize that what is a material world being eaten and turned into biological life has livid awareness of this fact, indeed we do! While I disagree with some of Churchland, there is value to be had as in nearly every being's perspective and articulation of what they feel.



In particular Churchland speaks about the relation between our folk psychological explanations (such as linking "believes that p" to a behaviour) and between "numerical attitudes", for instance, that can be mathematically related (such as linking "has a masskg of n" to an observation of momentum) (Morton 358). When we have beliefs and desires about behaviour, there is a rational connection instead of a causal connection between them; there is a "rational-in-the-light-of" relation between my knowledge of how light switches operate, my desire to read at night, and the behaviour of turning the light switch on (Morton 359). For Churchland, the causal conditions of these rational actions are neuroscientific, and she also notices how our "mental states referred to in the explanation of behaviour" are alleged as "indispensable for psychology but unfathomable by neuroscience" because "they form a semantically coherent system, as opposed to a causally interconnected system" (Morton 359). She says mental states "are about things, they can be true or false of the world, and they stand to one another in logical relationships such as entailment and contradiction (Morton 359). She writes that if the semantics of mental states conform to logical relations, and since "logical relations cannot be reduced to causal relations", then the psychology of mental states is autonomous of the causal relations that are deemed materially based.



Kripke's critique of the identity thesis meshes here in that 'logical relationships such as entailment' must apply to the mental states in relation to the brain or 'causally interconnected' states because of the rigid designation of scientific concepts about the world, as he argues. It seems then that logical relations indeed cannot be reduced to causal relations but instead be required by them. Therefore, the logical relations between mental states as known might be required by our brain's state. Indeed, Churchland distinguishes that "the generalizations of psychology are emergent with respect to neurobiological theory" and in the theory I present this is blaringly evident, considering the discussion about survival advantage, for instance (Morton 360). There are "biological relations" to consider as the causal interconnections for our mental states and an element of consciousness would do well for living things, and seems to perhaps fit well, as per quantum materialism (Morton 360).



This essay has expounded that the dynamic process of the brain is quantum-mechanical and thus, it would seem that with contemporary physical theory there is allowance for some minds of the sort we are familiar with. Materialism needs to be structured and understood so it allows us to realize that it is the case that we have real mental lives within our metabolic connection and interplay to life and the environment that is beyond. It seems fundamental in our reality that life and consciousness embody a material of vast potential for intricacy and sentient representation. The concept of material life is not so strange; considering our nourishments and sensualities and they way living bodily seems quite good, we need to be aware material, for any sense of reasonability to last. If this is the case – I mean, if it is rigidly the case that we are naturally in active participation with our material being that lives rationally and metabolically – then the whole universe naturally and necessarily instantiates life and emergent consciousness. Instead of to call it 'just observable', Life lives to really feel something.

















Works cited.



Morton, Peter, Ed. A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind – Readings With Commentary. Broadview Press Ltd.; Peterborough, Ontario: 1999.

Stapp, Henry. "Why Classical Mechanics Cannot Accommodate Consciousness but Quantum Mechanics Can." PSYCHE 2(5) May 1995. .

Wolf, Fred Alan. Common Ground Interview – The Dreaming Universe. the link is hosted on under the name "What are dreams made of?" No date posted.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000013.htm 2004-12-16T19:40:51Z 2004-12-16T19:42:03Z

Hey all. I've moved in and am attending classes, 2nd year university! Yay! English and Philosophy are fun! Here are some thoughts I wrote after thinking about a philosophy lecture.

Hey all. I've moved in and am attending classes, 2nd year university! Yay! English and Philosophy are fun! Here are some thoughts I wrote after thinking about a philosophy lecture.Apparent avid communication exposes a light on reality that I think cannot be denied. When I look at the world and reflect on this, I see that human events and contexts are caught in a ‘neat’ way. I see that the keyboard and screen before me are undeniably bound by use in coordination with – here’s the important part - an intent of communication.

Philosophers debate what this intent might be, an intent that arises in a material world of precise ordering and seeming intellectual supplication, but that such an intent exists is really of no question. Any proposition must fail that does not charitably account as ‘intended’ what meaning we glean thru our communication, and must fail because you’re receptive to these words, expressive with your response, and meaningful. I assume this, drudgingly that is, because I feel I rather know others are coming across to me!

Is the ‘intent’ behind every event one kind? For example, in such forms as mechanical or magical (the former implies law-consequent necessities and the latter implies creations from our rules,) do either of these alone govern the outcome of every process and pattern that happens? Whatever the case, that intent must be at least partially cognitive, as to account for apparent meaning. The bodies respond to physical law yet minds are our domain, and a sense of communication easily verifies this. The ontological status should not be in doubt. Can’t you hear me??? I do not think all argument here depends on merely proving the extent of physics in our behaviour. There’s more to our world and us, seemingly.

I say this because to be realistic we must respect notions that our lives are physically embodied and that experience and expression in our psyche are enmeshed within interactions of that embodiment. Yet notions also are to be respected that at one important level of these interactions, sentience must be seen to guide results. I believe meaning and perception CANNOT be inherent or hidden in cause-effect material transitions. Human expression certainly uses those transitions however. I feel that what I believe is that this life is unbearable to live and impossible to understand if we restrain from acknowledging the status of our creative faculties.

I know some of our process must have what are deemed ‘mechanical’ restraints. By the above paragraphs it would be that my position entails that somehow for living systems of a particular sentient tuning, the mechanical restraints allow ‘say’ in the subatomic ‘decisions’ that, I argue as to make sense of our lives, we must infer as quite bound by sentient intent. I can only find sense in ordinary language that “there is what we intend to communicate and what we do communicate.”

I can only find sense in assuming we drive toward creating things like creative technology for personal and widespread discovery, rather than by means of the necessities of an overriding underlying force. I guess I see a pertinence to the notion of identity. I see that a living spiritual force that is you and is me underlies the actions of the bodies we ride in. Your messages make no sense if you don’t mean them is what I’m getting at. Eliminative materialism must fail, because you make sense to me sometimes!!! Does this sound weird or philosophically unsound a bit?

To be honest, I can’t imagine how, logically, someone might assume our thoughts have no momentum besides the physical momentum of particles in our brain. Minds are NOT physical. I believe thoughts are embodied physically and can be observed by scientists as happening in our brains, sure… but physical process is ‘blind.’ We behold beauty, bear witness to others’ messages, and we feel so much we cry now and then. “We” are not physical beings. We are spiritually anchored, physically enmeshed, and I believe this is undeniable if one seeks charity in their assessment of this world and if one seeks to avoid despair and delusion.

I don’t think we’re being used by any merely inalterable deity or physical logic, if there could be such things. I think we use our experience and reason for creation in a world for us to share. I see it in people talking to each other, desiring to share a unique perspective. I can imagine neither someone or something calling or necessitating the shots before all happens as we perceive our willing it.

The undeniable way we experience the world and reason about it entails wonder. All these many observables of the universe, our artifacts, those symbolic and technologic, must be properly regarded as belonging to our intentional use. The faculties of scientific inquiry have fallen to a dire state when only physical mechanism is assumes possible in explaining nature. Our avid communication must be seen as integral to nature, not as a byproduct of a nature that doesn't think.

Even Occam’s razor insists in our personal autonomy. What’s simpler than assuming we mean what we say and that from us do our intentions arise. Considering our actions must teleologically regarded beyond ordinary physical mechanics, then a natural way of describing human events is thru "a mechanics of magic.” Magic is your voice unanticipated nor contained within blind molecular motion. Choice acted upon is magic upon the flesh.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000012.htm 2004-09-22T23:22:48Z 2004-09-22T23:22:48Z

This is fare well and see you later.

This is fare well and see you later.
I will not be able to log in for several days, for I am moving tomorrow! I'm going to Malaspina in Nanaimo again!

Yay!

See you again in a week or three!

peace- Brenden.

Disclaimer: The preceding articles have been a phase of bi'nerb'cation, an example of reaching for what I seek, esoterically hidden in my writing: The only relevant facts are alive...

see you soon. As some genius used the porta potty at burning man to artistry: "Think free" ~_~_~
|! !|
| V | ;)
l-l
dots under slot eyes, or vertical eyebrows????? Gosh!

SHRIEEEEEEEEK!!!! EEEEEWWWWWWWW: that's just icky!

Here you go, a big ol' J and a big ol' K!

NO! I ordered all the way from A thru Z; I'm hungry!!!

hehe
Initiate your september well!]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000011.htm 2004-08-29T21:06:31Z 2004-08-29T21:06:31Z

Enjoy! . /

Enjoy!

.
/
Essential knowledge!

A semblance of our highest hope?

a link thru, our core...

the first most important thing

Something to keep in mind outside]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000010.htm 2004-08-28T17:16:03Z 2004-08-28T17:21:00Z

Sometimes in epistemology class last semester, I had a feeling that if one earnestly and sincerely bears witness thru-out time to the philsopher's arguments, poet's conveyances, artist's renditions, mystic's visions, shaman's discussions, psychologist's advice, scientist's questions, and in abstra...

Sometimes in epistemology class last semester, I had a feeling that if one earnestly and sincerely bears witness thru-out time to the philsopher's arguments, poet's conveyances, artist's renditions, mystic's visions, shaman's discussions, psychologist's advice, scientist's questions, and in abstract, the being's expressions, and if that one who witnesses these does so intelligently, articulately, and charitably, then that one will invariably develop a strong assumption that 'reality itself' was housed in form of diversely avid communicators posing that one a proposition most deeply interesting and pertinent, to describe moderately.... (won cleck shone of poe ms: circa 2000-1; reef 'leck shone of today)

SIX: DANGLING
OF LEAKYFORM



(1) 'in our face, see I'

clouds lingerdrip secrets willing
to bequeathed unto those willing
to glance upwards into luminous
ungatherings of sirius column roses above
in grey shades amongst
a greenredyellow
leaf clutter to burst)a light of blue pervading;

beauty billows here just to lick at
and bloom sunshine watery
into a rainbow
Spectrum blinding uncessation causation
wrenching madness from my fingertips
of subtle grandeur dripping fore this altar


(1) reflections - the morning divinity

The first form of this poem came and leapt out of me when I was on a busride going to school one morning. I was looking at the clouds and it was that time of year, Fall beginning of school, when we could see the beautiful colours the clouds big puffy and leaves gone flutter do shade. I felt the clouds were 'gods of expression' and that there was just artistry in all of it, like paintings not brushed in the sky by a hand, but pang *tings* of artistic spirit in me reaching "from my fingertips." The painting was done in a hypermedia of my perceptual connection to a beautiful sky nestled into linguistic enrapture, for a moment. And suddenly I was at school after flitting words down in the heavily treed parts of the road knowing subconsciously in the feeling of the road-turning gravities when it was opportune to look into that sky so wondrous that morning, with my favorite kind of clouds. And I think the day before I was feeling close to nature's mind.



(2) 'vanishing through trees'

when walking home in a sea where glistening 'realease'
emerges from abysmal height, a light resolves to captivate
me into stagger step. Pulsate luminosity, drop by drip:
I disappear in you a light dripping tones
white delectably green between
noise the spines of shadow moaning. a broken
fervour on tree leaping in a wind
my vortex coil unshrouding


(2) reflections - susceptible vibrancy

I often am amazed by the intricacy of the flowing nature around me. I've grown up in a niche of wonder. This poem came out of a walk at night after I had written 3 & 4 below, and I was watching the lights of a distant house coming intermittently thru a many several trees. There was a fog visible like a flashlight illuminating a dusty room, flowing all the way to me, moving thru the trees, washing over me with the sound of wind and cool breeze that lifted me. I vanished for a moment as the fingers wrote and light played around my brain. When I get in those moments, I lose where my surroundings are exactly yet they become suffused into a dynamic current of me just experiencing, expressing. I wasn't walking home so much as forgetting that I wasn't a mist aware and flown thru light...



(3) 'listen to the silence'

moonlife by a flutter while a twitterdizzying of
a surge of flavour thru thy heart gliding,
of candlelight glittery
great orb of moonlife! under swirling shadow strings!
hanging around to why it 's before me, invisibly yet
seen or held on my tongue thru wonderlief of vision
oscillate in shimmerbloom O Fragrancy of Death
in thee. you can't evade nor should you want to.
rebear, now, bear: first step. whisht! whisht!


(3) reflections - the wonderful moon

I've always felt a strong connection to the moon and this is one from many of the poems I've written while looking at the moon. I think this poem is about letting the oncoming flow of nature you are perceiving be continually reaffirming of a building sense of beauty and reverence. Indeed, if nature's positively ROARING silence were to fuel our inner calmness into ecstatic creativity, then we'd have learned something neat. There would be no boredom looking around, for we could learn to see everything thru eyes of a realm-compassionate lensing. 'Tis how I was underneath the moon that night.



(4) 'realease asort'

kind rewind O mind of a
release of wavering
sound
waterfall sideways in high
of flowcapturing today's eye
it shimmewrithes;
whisper spirals in a
drop so eloquent
against the
window pane
if listen;
shifting
underfoot are seasons
above chirpings flowery
radiant
in my palms are reasons
beyond entwined dancers
in sunlight;
nowhere ensues a river
oceanic swirling out
the mouth, I penetrate
torrential purity
of wave;
as imagining could be
a skylike reflect;
ground crumbling
winter chilling

just
as
( ……>---..'''''',,,,,,;;"""^^^
as
springing warms


(4) reflections - in the middle of transformations

Whisper spirals are those lights that happen if one lets bigger mist drops land in their eyes held open. The drop rolls down and rolls out, spreading over the eye yet held in a round, hydrogen-bonded. And when I was letting this happen, I was on a dock and "across the bay" were the street lights of "town." The drops and lights went mingling in my eyes and thru my lenses warped, effectively touch-of-water-on-eye whispering light-wrapping-round-corner spiralling into vision.



(5) 'space crushing of point field'

for reason ambiguous
meaning unknown interactively
and all rearrangement
if conceivable,
we draw our glances
perusing forcefully

breathe, please cosmically
thou art thru which
we why, so
effort expensive not
an apple becalled fruitless
or death deemed
sinister, because of darkness? nay;
we're born to bounce infinitesimally
back and forth toward
asway against the flow
reverse,
if we am
this is infinitely
do, please, for one self in we (eternal


(5) reflections - on the consequences of pragmatic empiricism noticed working alone

If one forgets their nature and/or becomes partially unaware, like I did, and comes in contact, like I did, with a great deal of words and concepts, and then goes, like I did, into contact again with that subtle and simply wordless being had in, the ride back down to Earth can seem like staggering genius- found out! To me this peom reads so beautiful yet stifled, from one moving toward the good all wrapped up in unwrapping layers of binds.



(6) 'real images (stuck looking inward)'

Understuckeyelid assembly of seaflower.
Above peninsula an overhead cloudwalker
dancing, in a shower of serene reaching into;
a sea of hand too much for notice, so we
glimpse oneself, momentarily forever,
in a cry of laughter on a shimmereflection
of;ghost trails one one one one
petal delicately tranquil. cannot we teeming?
!and continue now continue. Now:
aware. nothing one but always so no way.
Here: I'm gone I'm gone how otherwise, eh?no end,
that's the beginning, ends all over us, illusion


(6) reflections - i noticed and expressed myself without realizing, perpetually realizing

Hmmm... understuckeyelid assembly. I want to comment on this :)

Think something like 'buried-habitual-realmperceiving-guidance enstructureprocess.'
In this poem I'm talking about a vivid outreach fueled by seaflower. Of 'oceanic biocurrents beautiful.'

I'm also talking about what was immediately before me as I wrote it. I was on top of a hill in a clear-cutted area. I was up on the top of the hill looking out "across the bay" into "town" and from where I was, I could see completely over the peninsula the town rests on, seeing on to the open ocean and a vastly opening sky. On my mind was the dissonance in my appreciation of the view allowed by means of chopping down and haling out the trees of the forest. ]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000009.htm 2004-08-26T03:26:41Z 2004-08-26T03:31:12Z

Can you imagine never giving up differences?

Can you imagine never giving up differences?Can you imagine never accepting responsibility?]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000008.htm 2004-08-24T21:32:28Z 2004-08-24T21:33:43Z

(Herein is a final essay for an introductory ethics class I took this preceding spring semester; my choice for writing topic. I have edited to make the flow of ideas cleaner and clearer. ((It wasn't an A+ paper :))) . . . "All over the earth, faces of all living things are alike. Mother earth...

(Herein is a final essay for an introductory ethics class I took this preceding spring semester; my choice for writing topic. I have edited to make the flow of ideas cleaner and clearer. ((It wasn't an A+ paper :)))
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"All over the earth, faces of all living things are alike. Mother earth has turned these faces out of the earth with tenderness. Oh Great Spirit behold them, all these faces with children in their hands." Standing Bear, Lakota

May we remember and revere the primacy of life,
and lovingly care for and make free the children in our hands
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.Introduction.

In finding a viable ethical system, I’ve devised arguments that use the anthropic principle as its basis, and I will attempt in this paper to express this theory. My thesis is that there is a tendency of living nature to form symbiotic relationships by which members of the ecosystem can evolve and sustain their life, and this natural symbiosis entails the criteria for ethical evaluation.

As Jack D. Forbes said, “That which I exhale, the trees inhale. Together we form a circle.” (from http://deoxy.org/earthman.htm) I think that the circle of life manifests naturally and that life insists by its nature what is symbiotically consistent with it, and I believe a sound ethics emerges in consideration of what indeed is consistent with the ongoing existence of life.

James Gardner’s new evolutionary theory laid out in the book Biocosm has helped me come to these ideas, and also assisting my ideas are various writings that have come from a (“new-age”) social movement that currently lives as part of the internet subculture, the Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension, a group who advocates that awareness be turned to the evolution of symbiotic biology and sentience.



The state of our reality.

I think life has a natural order which causes the enhancement of life forms, that evolution toward better living affairs is possible unlike prevalent current views that claim evolution is a horizontal affair concerning simply the competitive refinements of mutation arising from the randomness of physics.

This assumption that life necessarily exists and does so in order to become better over time, not merely that life occurs and changes with time, works well with the anthropic principle as conveyed by James Gardner in Biocosm. It states in its strong form that the conditions and laws that prevail in the physical universe must be such that life arises naturally. In other words, reality necessarily contains the required conditions for life.

This is a profound statement because it emphasizes life’s direct priority in the essential nature of reality. It means that the universe of things exist for the existence of life. The principle states that there is no possibility of existence without the outcome of life. It means that physical things must contain the potential for life, or that concerning the essential causal and behavioural structures of physical reality, life must be intended to arise.

This view has the potential to revolutionize our nihilistic conception of a thoughtless, unfeeling, and immoral universe of blind immensity and chance. Instead, the natural order of life arises because the reason for the existence of anything physical is “anthropic” which means to say “to house life!” Thru its life-creating energies, we the living are naturally the purpose or goal of physical reality!



How the anthropic principle works and the process of evolution

Because of the anthropic principle, I think that ethical conduct is constrained by universal standards defined by the natural order of life. The anthropic idea is that making life is the natural order of reality and this leads me to consider evolution as having purpose for some ethical reason, ethical because life seems intended to be about the emergence of beings who can feel a world.

The natural order of life can be seen as the creation of symbiotic relationships that can sustain and enhance mutual survival, such as trees and humans exchanging breath giving one another energy to grow more and reproduce, and this enhancing humanity’s linguistic, emotional, and hence moral understanding as we evolve. The conditions for these relationships are defined by the nature of the physical environment. For example, the breath trees and humans share has arisen from the presence of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

The presence of simple oxygen and carbon dioxide has evolved into our physical bodies that are incredibly organized systems of metabolic processes. But without carbon dioxide, oxygen, and their discrete and physically necessary chemical natures, our biology certainly couldn’t have evolved.

The biology of any life form has a necessary structure resulting from the immediate surrounding relationships in the physical nature, and that biology requires symbiotic connections with an ecosystem that has complimentary metabolic processes for that life form to continue indefinitely (our breath in is the compliment of the trees’ breath out). And all this in us and trees requires the laws and mechanisms of nature. If there is a path for the natural function of symbiotic metabolism to follow, do we not have the base for an ethical system?

Also, the natural tendency of life on Earth has been to move toward complexity. Living beings possess many very complex enzymes. Enzymes are catalysts. Catalysts make chemical reactions proceed more quickly. Any life form that reproduces is making more enzymes and in each successive generation of a species, the enzymes change because of the refinement of natural selection. The function of enzymes thru Earthly life’s evolution has been to become more complex and diverse, and hence more effective. The point here is that evolution is not random, but that symbiotic relationships of living beings emerge that are their own mutual sources for growth and metabolic enhancement. I mean to say that life has a way of making itself feel (or survive) better.

Games Gardner said “the evolutionary process is analogous not to a random walk through [just any] variations of species, but rather to the purposeful climbing of a ladder that leads to discrete and discernible plateaus populated with species of growing complexity and competence.” The natural order of life is not random but it is movement toward “growing complexity and competence.” In other words, life becomes connected in symbiotic ways within the environment in a non-random way; instead of a “random walk,” the connections that evolve between life are “discrete and discernible” and are “purposeful.”

Purposeful for what? Increasingly complex biology and greater biodiversity of species have purpose in that a greater symbiotic peace arises because a greater number of options become available for metabolic loops such as humans and trees to fulfill their biological needs. I guess the connection in my mind that I’m making to ethics is that a moral agent is necessarily a living creature so their innate biological tendencies toward symbiosis contain the basis for a natural flow, and I believe allowing this natural flow is the ethical good.



A recap on what I’ve written so far

I want to restate my thesis that there is a tendency of living nature to form metabolic relationships by which members of the ecosystem can evolve and sustain their life, and this natural symbiosis entails the criteria for ethical evaluation. The criteria for ethical evaluation are meant to be considered with respect to what actions are most consistent with the natural symbiosis that I’ve argued must, by the anthropic principle, emerge here.

Thru-out my argument I have carried the assumption that the anthropic principle is true, and I have agreed with James Gardner that evolution is not a horizontal affair, but instead has discernible purpose in and of its symbiosis (complexity and competence.) These two ideas if true make it legitimate to conceive th