Minds and Experience

Dualist psychology necessarily maintains an uncomfortable position with respect to the centrality of subjective experience in our account of what is.  Where behaviorism categorically outlawed any explanatory recourse to spooky, unverifiable and immeasurable mental states, latter-day cognitive psychology has constructed an elaborate hypothetical system, the Cognitive System, that plays many of the roles of Mind, without ever meaningfully addressing or even recognizing the absolutely fundamental place of subjective experience.  It is a baroque construction, whose parts, proponents trust, will ultimately be vindicated by being found in some recognizable form in the workings of the nervous system.  But the fullest account that can arise out of cognitive psychology is a mechanistic account, describing the workings of a machine.

Wei Wu Wei represents a different tradition, which starts with the reality of subjective experience, without committing to an account of what that is, where it comes from, or what it might be.  It distinguishes, clearly and emphatically, between that which we can observe, and that which is the source or prime mover of observation, but these are not two distinct things.  Rather, things are that which can be observed, and it is not possible, and never will be, to observe that which gives rise to observation.  Things that can be observed include bodies, nervous systems, grass, stars, hot, cold, and all the rest.  They do not follow causally from the action of any subject.  Let’s see this using a short text, Paragraph 6 of All Else is Bondage.

6.- This Phenomenal Absence

Nowhere, where I am an object, am I; nor where any part of ‘me’ is an object is it part of me or is mine. Only here where I can see nothing (but the objective universe) am I – and I am only an absence objectively.
When I realise that, I cease also to be an individual ‘I’, for anything individual is thereby an object.

Much of WWW’s verbal wrangling revolves around usage of the personal pronoun, especially “I”.  The first sentence uses “I” in two different senses.  “Nowhere where I (conventional usage, referring to a body/organism, extended through time, retaining a sense of personal identity) am an object, am I (the origin or locus of subjective experience)”.  We might refer to these two usages as I (Conventional) and I (Buddha-nature), though of course a lot needs to be done in working towards a meaningful and consistent description of both usages.  The former usage is plagued with the richness and anarchic referential exuberance of everyday language.  The latter may appear mysterian, though WWW and others insist that “There is no mystery whatsoever – only the inability to perceive the obvious” (ibid, par 7).

What then follows is an insistence on the latter usage of “I”: the objective universe, which is all that I can see, is distinguished from the seeing-a point WWW repeatedly tries to illustrate with the impossibility of an eye seeing itself.  I have been trying to re-express these ideas through my P-world theory, within which I might attempt to draw a distinction between a phenomenal world and that which gives rise to a phenomenal world, and insist, as I do, that the P-world is not to be identified with a person.

My objective absence is the presence of pure non-objectivity, which is just that.
My only existence is non objective, as non-objectivity itself.

Again, WWW is keeping an unrelenting focus on the centrality of the reality of subjective experience (in which there is no distinction between subject and object).  That which can be pinned down, named, categorized, highlighted, or otherwise distinguished, is “objective” in much the sense that this term is used in science.  These are facets of the human experience about which we will ultimately potentially reach consensus.  Yet a yawning gap remains, as all such distinctions arise within P-worlds and are thus derivative of the “non-objective” that brings forth the phenomenal realm.

I cannot be portrayed in any way, drawn, photographed or described. That which impersonally I am has no qualities or resemblance to an individual subject-object, which is purely conceptual.

Again, it is worth noting that WWW is not providing a discursive argument, but is repeatedly pointing to the same fact about language use: that which is expressed conceptually, the objects and facets of our everyday discourse, is derivative of the central undifferentiated experiential center that is not, itself, any object or thing, but gives rise to all objects and things.  This is emphatically not pantheism, and it makes no reference to any realm of existence, or any thing, beyond the reality of subjective experience.

The eyeball that cannot see itself is used repeatedly to point to this distinction.  Another frequent vehicle is the observation by St Francis of Assisi that “That which you are looking for, is that which is looking”.  Biologists encounter this self-same problem when they attempt to arrive at at theory of what an organism is, and are forced to acknowledge that the identity of an organism does not lie in its physical components, but rather in the protracted maintenance of an organizational unity that can only be understood by seeing it against a background of its environment, and realizing that the world encountered by the organism is a direct function of its own constitution and organization (cf. Humberto Maturana, perhaps Francisco Varela). Spinoza’s notion of conatus comes close to pointing out the same distinction: distinguishing between the phenomenal world and its origin.

 

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Tags: dualism, objectivity, subject and object, subjectivity