KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA1 (Muller)

Commentary 34

ON EXPERIENCE In ART, installment 2 of four
by Adrian van der Meijden
22 April 2005, posted 7 May 2005

Folks might like to read my Wikipedia article on Originality & creativity, if it's still there.

<1> Proema.

While many people claim to accept scientific evidence, the soft, social sciences nevertheless silently deny the reality of the paranormal. For one example, visit the website of Victor Zammit, where a well qualified Lawyer disccuses this. The paranormal suffers from a surfeit of established evidence as is, fi, provided by: M. Murphy, The Future of the Body, J.P. Tarcher Inc, Los Angeles, 1992 F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and its Survival, University Books, N.Y. '61 J. C. Gowan, Trance, Art & Creativity, C.E.F., State U Coll, Buffalo, 1975 -----------, The Psychedelic Individual, C.E.F., State U Coll., Buffalo, 1974 The first with hundreds of confirming scientific studies, the second further pursued by the Study of psychic phenomena in their own right. This implies mind is neither limited to the body, nor is intellect a limit for the mind or the cognitive mind a limiting circumstance of mind as a whole. One stark example is of Victorian Holmes levitating many times on demand and St Francis of Assisi doing the same. The third also lists many scientific papers. In this post I will highlight the mystical notions included by M in his table 1 by a score of six out of ten. Yes, I know, there's conmen in every speciality, that does not gainsay its reality, nor does stereotyping.

<2>
summary of Ta1 is: "IS THE MIND REAL ? by H. F. J. Muller".

[1]
ABSTRACT: The mind as a whole escapes objective studies because belief in mind-independent reality is self-contradictory and by definition excludes subjective experience (awareness, 'consciousness') from reality. The mind's center therefore vanishes in studies which imply exclusive objectivism or empiricism. This conceptual difficulty can be counteracted by acknowledging that all mental and world structures arise within an unstructured origin-and-matrix for knowledge-structures and beliefs. The mind's experience is thus at the center of reality. Use of such a zero-structure reference can also help to clarify some related conceptual difficulties and to bridge the Cartesian gap between the 'two cultures'. [3] appears to state mind is not acceptable as an epiphenomenon. [4] Declares it is M's opinion [6] "If object formations are demanded as a pre-requisite for scientific investigation, the mind as a whole cannot qualify".

<3>
This of itself appears to deny that scientific study, in so far as it denies or excludes non-local consciousness, can be used. M does not state this outright but in the context of the ongoing debate it is the alternative on offer, which -unstated by M- implies it accepts mind as non-local. Einstein said as much when he wrote that the level at which a problem occurs cannot be used to solve the problem, which thereby makes it become a philosophical problem. [1] "The mind's experience is thus at the center of reality." Experience is a rather broad, vague term. It is rather what we make of our experience and how we interpret it and select from it that one's indviduality emerges, negatively shown by schizophrenics who cannot integrate their experience and exhibit up to 27 different persona. This more commonly occurs in orphans handed on from orphanages and foster parents in a series.

<3>
The issue then becomes one of what mental functions we will use in order to integrate our self. Since this is naturally done by children moving into their teenage we can hardly speak of intellect doing so, as that is trained by universities. We must therefore assume some kind of natural ability to achieve such a feat. We must further allow that this occurs as different kinds in different cultures. In effect this can result in the typical teenage problems as to whether one will adopt a conventional or unconvential self as societal versus the individual. Arthur Koestler, as in the Mystic and the Commissar, spent his life in comment on this issue of the artist in our society, and he is not the only one. A nice example is how William James used nitrous oxide to explore Alternative states of Consiousness right now being outlawed in New Zealand.

<4>
I shall take it for granted that most people are well enough familiar with how Intellect works so need not discuss that, except to note that its method is anything but consistent across a spectrum of specialities. This leaves the way mind functions in the artist, inventors and in general for creatives. An amusing instance is how Gertrude Stein mentions that 'anybody who calls themselves a novelist or poet is a literary shoemaker'; cobbler would have been even better. Picasso was well enough off to be under no such restraint and Wordsworth lost it when he turned Poet Laureate though Robert Graves never did. I rely here on a brilliant introduction by Brewster Ghiselin. "On Creative Process" although I won't ignore my own experience thereby. To understand the process one has to completely ignore the content or focus of application of social category labels since it occurs equally regularly inside and outside of having a University degree. To what percentage of a population no statistics are available, funny that.

<5>
In a word the creative process is a natural one which relies on the unconscious, instinct, intuition, Platonic daimons, inspiration or whatever the labels. One has to sort of woo the lady and put up with her quirks. Aristotle's theory of drama is as good a schema as any other, it referring back to sacred drama which is about the quest, chase or hunt for an elusive goal or target, culminating in a catharsis. although it does not come in neat parcels. In my own case, just having finished a book on "Learn Maori First" to restore its syllabary hindsight tells me it took about forty years to gestate and near two months to write not long ago. The making it apparent to the conscious mind took me about a year or so. In the case of paradox it originated about 50 years ago and took me near twenty to get it near articulate. It is also attended by much revision, as did Keats with one poem taking 173 rewrites, Byron, Shakespeare and myself writing their work without much revision, almost off the cuff by a sensation that tells one it is ready and hatched. Mostly such things arrive by way of a nub, seed or vague idea one minds anything between seconds to decades until a full insight dawns.

<6>
I've already mentioned the study of John Curtiss Gowan several times. What may need emphasis is that the gestation phase Gowan calls trance requires devoted attention near to an obsessive pre-occupation, although it ranges into merely *minding* this as a persistent interest where one picks up this or that bit of a given puzzle into completion almost incidentally and recognised by a certain pricking of the ears or shiver along the spine as a heightening of one's focus of interest in a given topic in any kind of art and craft. In what Gowan calls the psychedelic and creative one acquires the knack of tossing an idea off almost offhand. Curiouser still is the fact that for Plato it was done by slaves and thus beneath contempt which I take to be the occasion and cause for a total lack of interest in it in the intellectual domain.

<7>
I further ascribe this to what Julian Jaynes calls the bicaneral mind. The word duck one can neither eat nor extend into the fullness of duckhood or duckness, merely name one of its aspects that stand out like pig's tails and rabbit's ears by a pars pro toto, synechdoche or metonymy, while a picture of a duck might make one say "yummy" at a memory of duck a l'orange Peking, and an actual duck may evoke a wide range of feeling experiences from a hunter's delight to a poet's hymn to duckhood or plums the wife left in the fridge for supper and you ate, as did e.e.cummings. All creatives use their senses to imagine with and translate this into words. Einstein used his body sensations rendered into math, so it is not confined to the standard five. This needs qualification over a common confusion of the use of the senses as matching how it is in external observation whereas one merely uses a given sensory process abstractly which may be imageless to full featured in colour visualisation. It amounts to the manipulation of a given form and idea by by the mental processing of any of our senses. This depends more on the nature of the focus or content of this. Moore, the sculptor, had to train himself to visualise pebbles in full 3D, seen hyperdimensionally or fully in the round. Tesla did that with our a.c current system and then drew up the engineers drawings when he finished, even unto making the objects imagined run to test for wear and faults.

<8>
The problem here is that we decide on the uses of our mind in childhood. I know of two youngsters who could stop their hearts beating and both told me they did this as babies in the cot, probably to while the time away, for something to do as we may well also do while still in the wombthree months and after. Another one could flap his ears which took him several years. By all this we cannot study the bewildering variety of ways one can be creative by their content or focus of application, ranging between the quite humble and often unnoticed to a worldwide acclaim. If done to gain acclaim it usually dries up. There is also a wide variety of acquisition of full creativity ranging from child prodigy to well into one fifties or worse. One also gets creative freaks like Picasso who, like Shakespeare, explored the fullness of their art to drive it beyond a given current state of development into what we now call the psychedelic or suurealistic. My fancy is that this, by and large, depends on one's financial independency but it need not always be so. Coleridge was so beset by a flush, storm or flux of ideas and insights so that he hardly ever finished anything, althought the man from Prufock interrupting his "kublah Khan" is a fib because he knew his own quirks quite well, as does every creative. One has to self learn the quirks and triggers of one's own mind in action. My grand daughter aged all of nine months old is already drumming rhythms on her toys ) Daddy's guitar, when he lets her and very good at making Mum comply with her wishes. She does it all by tone of voice, not even talking. Yes, it does seem to run in families, posibly by a dominant gene or something like it. Toys don't intrigue her any but people do. She goes very big eyed when interested and closed well up when things are to her satisfaction.

<9>
All this, to move into waffle ABOUT, called philosophy, fails both in the typical analytic mode of intellect to categorise in words that isolate the wholeness of one's feelings into puzzle bits. By this we are disabled from teaching it by way of Locke's tabula rasa as Plato demonstrated for the slave who could think very well, but not necessarily as Plato dictates, solely in or with words few creatives need to operate their minds. I don't see this as any kind of reason for intellectual dogmatics to thereby pejoratise or otherwise ignore our all too human creativity. Short of being very vague about the process in action, each of whose aspects range into full parametric extremes, there's nothing much precise and detailed we can say about it. Although it might be nice to say intuition and intellect have to be mutually balanced, creatives can succeed in spite of the benefits of intellect and method, although emotionally that makes them somewhat wild and woolly which some people object to. The current fadword is "being cool" in the younger generation. "cool, man" means it's Ok too. They have a different attitude.

<10>
While I am quite sure "mind" has nothing much to do with any kind of *objective studies" the promotion of it by intellectual means quite escapes my sense of logical consistency for unless and until and only if we can adopt Husserl's intentionality or Boehme, the shoemaker's intrinsicality, or Buddha's suchness, we cannot come to grips with consciousness. I have so far here taken it to the level of art which interacts with a medium to explore it and our selves oth, It will need another post to explore it to its full range of the solely creative integration. I hereby confess, state, claim, whatever the verb you like most, that I am creatively a bit of a freak because it never occurred to me to apply it to any kind of specific focus or content while I was still a child. I never thought it was something one can **DO** specific things with. I now know it can be applied to anything we choose. I have not yet figured out what I will write but when I decide to write it will come to me, as it always does. My mind is already working on it. "IS the mind real?, well, may I suggest you try pithing it and see what gives. Cutting it off at the brain stem will do nicely.

I'me still waiting for a Muller explanation or rationalisation, funny that

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ADDITION

ON OBFUSCATION.

I DID NOT ****ADOPT**** TOHU WA BOHU AS ****MY MOTTO**** [YOU'RE ABUSING THE MEANING OF THE WORD MOTTO] IT'S A HEADER BECAUSE EMAIL AND YOU INSISTS ON ONE TO COMPLY WITH YOUR MeTHOD OF DISCFILING, AND TO PREVENT YOU FROM PROVIDING A WRONG ONE, YOU ADOPTED IT AS YOURS, THANK YOU. yOU MISPORTEND THE WORD *ADOPT** FOR SIMPLY **USE**, WHICH MISLEADS BY A WORD CHOSEN TO MAKE OUT AS IF I "BELIEVE" IT. yOU'RE ABUSING THE WORD *CHAOS* BECAUSE THAT WORD IS POLITICALLY ABUSED BY gOVERNMENTS TO MEAN ***NOT THEIR*** KIND OF MONO-ORDER, WHEN CHAOS MEANS ANY KIND OF UNDECYPHERABLE AUTOPOIETIC POLY-ORDER, UNDECYPHERABLE THAT IS, WITH LOGIC, NOT OTHERWISE. DON'T TRY AND RE-FRAME my BEING IN YOUR CAMP. i'M NOT. i'M NOT CAMP NOR A CAMP FOLLOWER EITHER -IF YOU HAPPEN TO KNOW WHAT THAT PHRASE ACTUALLY AND ORIGINALLY MEANS - AND I USE THAT WORD TO AVOID USING "SCHOOL". YOU PUT YOUR NOTE AT THE END BECAUSE YOU SUSPECT i WON'T READ IT AND THEN YOU'D GET AWAY WITH IT UNCHALLENGED BECAUSE YOU *BELIEVE* or imagine PEOPLE BELIEVE AND TRUST YOU, INSTEAD OF COMPLYING WITH CONVENTIONS THAT PUT IT UP FRONT at the top. DON'T PUT WORDS IN MY MOUTH. That's why you don't comment on my posts because you cannot.

I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHER EITHER, THAT'S HIS OPINION AND HE LACKS ANY AUTHORITY, AS YOU STATED YOURSELF ONCE, AND USING OUTRE OUT OF THE WAY BOOKS & QUOTES YOU KNOW OTHER PEOPLE ARE UNLIKELY TO HAVE READOR CAN TRANSLATE. AND IF YOU REFER TO HIM KINDLY CITE WHICH BIT YOU'RE USING; JUST AS YOU DID WITH BIBLE AND GENESIS 1.1,2,3. i BET THE MAN IS NOT EVEN TRANSLATED SO MOST MEMBERS OF THIs FORUM HAVE TO TAKE YOUR WORD FOR IT, WHICH IS A MEDIEVAL VERBAL PLOY. yOU SHOULD APOLOGISE FOR THE MISLEADING PUBLIC NOTICE ABOUT YOUR FORUM. yOU SHOULD APOLOGISE FOR THE SLOPPY REFERENCE TO "THE bIBLE". yOU SHOULD APOLOGISE FOR CALLING ME AN "oBELYX' FOR WHICH YOU HAD NO AUTHORITY AND WHICH IS AGAINST All NETIQUTTE AND SCHOLARLY COURTESY IN AND OUTSIDE OF A FORUM, ALTHOUGH IT IS IN ACADEMIC PEJORATIVE CODE. yOU SHOULD APOLOGISE FOR RE-FRAMING TEN PEOPLE INTO TEN PEERS AND THEN MAKING IT INTO AN A UNARGUABLE DOGMA, BECAUSE to YOU - AND WHICH i DOUBT - "IT MAKES NO SENSE" WHICH IN EFFECT IS WHAT YOU DO YOURSELF, MAKING NO SENSE AT ALL. yOU SHOULD APOLOGISE FOR HAMMERING AN UNTENABLE PLATFORM FOR EIGHT YEARS WITHOUT ACCOUNTING FOR YOURSELF. yOU SHOULD APOLOGISE FOR SLAMMING PEOPLE AROUND THE EARS WITH BOOKS YOU'VE READ BECAUSE YOU WORK IN AN uNIVERSITY CUM HOSPITAL WITH A BIG LIBRARY. yOU SHOULD APOLOGISE FOR YOUR ARROGANCE IN BLIND SIDING what you imagine to be naive PEOPLE AND INVENTING STRAW MEN ARGUMENTS TO CONFUSE THEM. yOU SHOULD APOLOLOGISE TO ALL MEMBERS OF THIS FORUM FOR MISLEADING THEM BY USING A FORUM AS A PULPIT. 6 OUT OF TEN ITEMS OF YOUR tABLE 1 IN TA1 ARE IRRATIONAL. iF YOU HANDED IN TA1 AS AN ESSAY IN MY PHILOSOPHY CLASS YOU'D GET 2/20 OR A D- AND TOLD TO DO IT AGAIN. If I were a priest I'd condemnn you to a month's worth of Ave Marias. IF WORDS COULD SPEAK THEY'D REAR UP AGAINST YOUR ABUSE OF THEM. yOU'D HAVE DONE WELL IN ADVERTISING OR AS A POLITICAL CONSULTANT: paradiorthotic confabulation.

i'M HAVING A BET WITH A FRIEND YOU WON'T DO ANY OF THAT, SO i'LL WIN. i'M JUST TESTING WHETHER YOU'LL CRAWL OUT OF YOUR PROFESSORIAL PERSONA AND THE BET IS YOU WON'T. IN CASE YOU WON'T RECOGNISE THAT, you might be happy to know: IT'S IN THE SYNTACTIC FORM OF A DOUBLE BIND. EITHER WAY YOU HANG, WHICH IS WHAT BOOKIES DO AT RACE COURSES TO COVER THEIR OWN TAKING OF BETS. If I lose I win and if I win I win.

APART FROM THAT YOU HAVE BEEN, TO ME, A DELIGHFTUL EXERRCISE IN UNSPINDOCTORING A BUNCH OF OBFUSCATION YOU MISCALL A METHOD. DON'T TRY AND RECOUP BY MORE VERBAL TOURS DE FORCE MAJEURE. yOU'RE NOT FOOLING ME NOR OTHERS, YOU'RE FOOLING YOURSELF. i'M NOT A PSYCHOLOGIST WHO SLAPS LABELS ON THINGS 'ABOUT', i'M A PSYCHOSCIENTIST WHO WORKS OUT HOW OUR MIND WORKS AND RELY ON SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE NOT A BIBLE; WHICH IS NOT WHAT INTELLECT IS MADE TO DO. oNE CANNOT TELL BY EXTERNAL BEHAVIOURS WHAT MIND IS LIKE, NOR FROM WORDS THAT PEOPLE CAN LIE AND CHEAT. iF THIS WAS A SCHOLARLY DEBATE JUDGED BY SCHOLARS YOU'D LOSE. I CAN LIKE vON gLASERFELD BECAUSE AT LEAST HE CAN ADMIT HE IS HUMAN, EVEN IF IT IS ONLY ON OCCASION AND MISCALLS IT PRIVATE. wOULD YOU LIKE A COPY OF MY PAPER CALLED "HOW TO BE AN UNBIASED CHAIRMAN AND STILL HAVE YOUR OWN WAY? I WROTE IT ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO. You're not the ninth wonder of the world you're a squander of the world. Now tell me I'm not a master of the insult indirect, without uttering a foul word. All done with words. Ik denk en jij vernielt. Moi, je pense et tu ourekkekek; Aristophanes, the Frogs. Ik ben gelukkig genoeg te kunnen denken en weet best welk soort mens onze wereld ruineered. Bedankt me de kans to geven dit te zeggen.

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Adrian van der Meijden

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Congratulations, you won.

Un maat nit esu vill Jedööns.

HM