KARL JASPERS FORUM

Short Note 38 (to N36, Nixon, Chouinard, Wood)

ON TIME & TIMELESS OR EPPUR SI MUOVE.
by Adrian van der Meijden
29 May 2002, posted 25 June 2002

<1>
To measure speed needs two reference points between which we measure the time it takes for an object to move between points a and b. Under the aegis that the observer may only name what he directly observes this is falsehood by way of the taboo against action at a distance. Or better perhaps: paradox as the observer cannot be at two points. I ignore here the tricks we can play with electronics. Einstein introduced relativity by another such play on the observer versus a MIR, as science will. That is whether one stands still versus hitches a ride on a particle. Perhaps a useful image here is a roundabout we stand on and look in and out versus standing on the ground and watching it go round. In a word when the world stands still consciousness moves; and vice versa.

<2>
In all these cases we need at least two points and a relation between them as well as the observer. This imposes structure on what is essentially structureless. If we transpose this into consciousness which people write up as a 0-D which does not exist whereas in actual fact we cannot say whether it does or does not. It's just like the background against which we observe an object. If we take that background AS IF an object in itself and against which we compare it then motion or change occurs. I imagine and hope we cannot absolutise that which occurs as relative. We can temporarily *fix* it. I was told off on JCS for writing this up as container and content, but somehow we cannot contrive any relation until, unless and only if we dualise. But this forever forgets or ignores the dualiser's consciousness. In any of the numerous labels for the 0-D there is not even a now, eternal or otherwise. But because there cannot be any *k-now-ing* does not mean it does not exist unless we topologically invent an observer who does not observe. Because IF he observed it would be dualised again. This *dual* amounts to constructing a relation between which we can do for any a and b. And there's the rub.

<3>
IOW precisely what logic and knowledge strenuously exclude as paradox and anomaly occurs when we deal with the conscious. If it cannot observe itself it cannot say whether it is or is not C. Until we develop a gestalt awareness in which we are ?poly-schizoid? like bi-locus aware of back and foreground or alternatively not taking oneself inwardly seriously while outwardly acting out our seriousness, the paradoxality of all this won't show up. IOW again unless there is a beyond the relative awareness we keep on jumping around all over the topological *space* using a same rhetorical trick without being aware of it. IOW we know our topoi but we don't watch where we take our places in our virtual space. If one does that in a computer program, called division by zero, it hangs.

<4>
PUT simply, the given is always more than we can express. That's exactly the same as for math being incomplete and what Godel's proof makes clear. There is no such thing as a singular observer to object relation. The fault arose over how Renaissance architecture was forced to invent the eye's third dimension which shaped art for centuries while ignoring the trompe l'oeil surrealism. Inside the mind experientially we are always in a surrealistic experience state. The monocular observation frame of science is itself a fiction and it is only because we can selectively use fictions that we can have any knowledge. We should not apply fictions to the fictioneer or call the puppeteer a puppet.

<5>
The *trained* mind can adopt the mono-view of the world in an AS IF of the senses. Backstage in the mind consciousness is used as analogous to the senses. But it is NOT, it's just another fiction. We learn to concentrate on one thing at a time, but that's not how our mind works, it is how habit or convention does it. C Tart's ASC and the gestalt intimate we constantly attention shift for which switching between momentary tasks or views goes into this 0-D from out of which a triune relativity pops up that donates us with 9 fixed positions we can adopt. IOW I can hook and unhook the mind from body and senses both. The actual experience when concentrated on a task is that we forget or ignore self awareness to become absorbed in a task. Approach such a person and they go through the same type of physical shock as we also experience in sleep. BUT when we do it ourself there is no such shock because we temporarily go observerless. The observer is the guilty fiction, he does not exist. Consciousness which is non-local cannot be fitted into that style of content framing we do all the time. If it were not there the world would not exist. Thereby consciousness IS not just one *thing*, it can do many "things".

<6>
At a most simple that I can *express* it in the fiction of the simple betrays us because consciousness, by indirect inference, cannot be a simple. My preferred metaphor for it is a chameleon. That means the counting goes from a 0-D into a 3-D within which we can construe 9 dual positions or locations to work with. This is a match to Freud's ID, ego & superego, or the mythical body, mind and spirit, when pickled in Parmenidean words. To give as "objective" an image of all this as I can, imagine a sea of energy, lumpy perhaps, anisotropic, chaotic - who really knows?. Fit that into astrology. In that case the description becomes that planetary positions, content of the solar system, filter and distort the energy around. It SEEMS that energy comes from the sun but it does not. The energy cannot be measured but its effects are everywhere around. Is not that the case with consciousness too? IF we keep on insisting on a single TOE we cannot but step on the other one. Kant named all this as "the given". We're now looking at the given where knowledge begins, which we tend to do by teasing out one strand at a time. Beyond order looms chaos and there's no way we can impose order on chaos except one way at a time. Now does that make chaos - or the infinite - poly-ordered or non-ordered? There's no way we can absolute decide once and for all but we can play it in many ways. IOW philosophical absolutism is where the hard problem buck stops. Relativistically there is no hard problem to find.

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Adrian vdMeijden