From where I'm sitting, exploration of human consciousness hasn't much advanced over two or three thousand years. Consider a few of my landmarks, given in both sandalwood's and Nagarjuna's essays concerning, indirectly, "bounded rationality" (a condition noted here by parallel vertical bars and modestly popularized by Herbert Simon's theory of the artificial).

- ∞ <------ |  f(t) ≥0 | ------> ∞

alternatively, the tau function to please Jake who would understand a "mathematical labrynth of complexity" whose beauty I cannot fully appreciate.

- ∞ <------ |  τ(n)=0(n ^{11/2 + ∈}) |  ------> ∞

"Because it lies on a cool, ethereal plane beyond the everyday passions of human life, and because it can be fully grasped only through a language in which most people are unschooled, Ramanujan's work grants direct pleasure to only a few --a few hundred mathematicians and physicists around the world, perhaps a few thousand. The rest of us must either sit on the sidelines and, on the authority of the cognoscenti, cheer, or else rely on vague, metaphoric, and necessarily imprecise glimpses of his work." (The Man Who Knew Infinity)

Infinitessimally small units of the bigger picture with which I am engaged.

I think instead, consciousness is, in other words, not a thing but a state of imminence -- symbolized in part by immanence in literary traditions-- that engrosses the physical properties and functioning, voluntary and involuntary, of the human nervous system. The whole of this system of chemical and thermodynamic interactions that propels a person into the world is permeable.

Last night, I caught a few minutes of this program and was impressed by one remark by Andrew Weil. That is a truism, paraphrasing, from birth people seek experience which alters consciousness.

This morning, I happened across this interview with Derrick Jensen. I find myself agreeing with this interpretation of consciousness.

FJS: You often write that the dominant culture has robbed the world of its subjectivity; how does this influence our behavior? And if the stories we are told inculcate an objective perception of the world and those around us, then how do we shatter those lenses in order to begin perceiving the world for what it is - a matrix of subjective relations to be in communion with?

DJ: If you do not perceive the fundamental beingness of others (i.e. nonhuman animals, trees, mountains, rivers, rocks, etc), or in some senses do not even perceive their existence, then nothing I say or write can convince you.

complement. Something that together with X makes a complete whole--something that supplies what X lacks.
reciprocal. Two numbers whose product is 1 or two numbers whose sum is zero, the placeholder. According to wiki, following the Babylonian mathematcal system, "the ancient Greeks seemed unsure about the status of zero as a number. They asked themselves, "How can nothing be something?", leading to philosophical and, by the Medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero and the vacuum. The paradoxes of Zeno of Elea depend in large part on the uncertain interpretation of zero."
"the Other". Cultural or political equivalent of an unknown quantity.

Nor will evidence be likely to convince you, since, as already mentioned, you won't perceive it, or more accurately, won't allow yourself to perceive it. No matter how well I write, if you have never made love, I cannot adequately describe to you what it feels like to do so. Even moreso, if you insist that no such thing as making love even exists, then I will certainly never be able to adequately explain to you what it feels like. For that matter, I cannot describe the color green to someone who is blind, and who even moreso insists that green does not exist, could never exist; as well as to someone who knows that philosophers from Aristotle to Descartes to Dawkins have conclusively shown that green does not exist, could not exist, has never existed, and will never exist; or to someone who is under the thrall of economic and legal systems (insofar as there is a meaningful difference, since the primary function of this culture's legal systems is to protect--through laws, police, courts, and prisons--the exploitative activities of the already-wealthy) based so profoundly on green not existing; who cannot acknowledge that this culture would collapse if its members individually and/or collectively perceived this green that cannot be allowed to exist. If I could describe the color green to you, I would do it. I would drive you, as R.D. Laing put it, out of your wretched mind. And you might be able to see the color green.  Or someone else could drive you out of your wretched mind. It certainly needn't be me. I'm not the point. You're not the point. Your perceived experience isn't even the point. The point is your wretched mind, and getting out of it. And beyond that, the point then is your experience.

reciprocity. Archetype of justice.

(magical and moral) realism. Also called egocentricity and adaption to "bounded rationality".


Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.