Paradoxes

I, like many other people, can experiences moments where reality tortures me. The issue lies in a loopiness; in a difficulty to neatly establish a way of thinking about thinking. Categorizing is tempting, yet reality throws in our faces exceptions to our ruling.

1) I know that my body shapes my mind. I know that, phlyeticly speaking, my brain and nervous system is based on myriad forms before me. Biological life on planet earth is all related: my nervous system is scaffolded upon that of lower creatures before me. Some lower taxa - the mammals share my limbic structures and reptiles are the originators of brainstem homeostatic functions.

Belief - humans believe. We believe, without our realizing it, as a way to hold off dysregulating affects: lower structures guide and structure higher functions: this is an undeniable lesson of evolutionary history: our higher functions are organized by lower functions: we tell ourselves stories about the world to hold off the conflicts of not knowing and not understanding how it is we understand at all: the greatest mystery was defined by Einstein long ago: that we can understand at all.

2) Do not let reality hold your thought! Realism is an illusion! Phenomenology is not all there is! We lie somewhere in the middle, in the spaces, between the spaces! Some people studied in one way of thinking - biology - cannot shift into another mode. The fears have crystallized in them one mode of thinking: shifting is dusregulating! Thinking, and acknowledging what is there - what is made available to us by reality - do not block it out! And yet, this is our impulse, the paradox of paradoxes: we are self aware beings, experiencing reality, as it were, from an alien perspective: yet all of this arises and relies upon the physical processes of biological organization. How do cells create consciousness? Why do some people insist on seeing consciousness as nothing more than cells? Why do other people insist on abstracting consciousness from its biological context?

To escape the conflict: to escape the tension. To move into a space - into body and matter, or into mind and its abstractiveness. We lie in the middle - between the spaces, between.

3) The environment builds biological bodies, and yet bodies develop centers of volitional activity, and return back to the environment what the environment has put inside of it. The laws of thermodynamics insure certain ways of relating: biological bodies are dependent upon the energy it receives from without, but cells, over time, become less and less able to replicate themselves with high fidelity. Reality, expanding reality, spreading outwards from the big bang, yet building life in the process, instates something called time upon us: we have only a little bit of it. And then.......?

What of our consciousness? Such a question doesn't occur to non-reflective creatures: that is, all other creatures. We speak of genes as if genes were the mystery, but they are not. The mystery is matter and how it constitutes itself. Two creatures can share many of the same genes yet end up looking, behaving and experiencing reality very differently from one another. The issue, then, is the organization and constitution of things. So what of our constitution?

4) The organization of our selfhood emerges, like the subjectivity of our minds from the matter of our brain, from the interpersonal spaces of our relations. Self is emergent, and exists upon, our relations with others.

Yet when we develop this selfhood, the stubborn hold of belief - of self belief - of being our own body and having our own mind - our own self - we abstract, we take our place, and forget, yet again, that we exist between the spaces!

Happiness, play. The imaginal play of writing and reading stories. The movies we watch and the books we read. Imaginal play - we play with one another: we are children who pretend we our adults! Again, ontogeny repeats itself - adult reflective capacities scaffolded upon childhood play: the institutions we develop, the way we orient and relate with one another. Some of it is determined by logical necessity, yet more is determined by our want for play.

5) The outside world, the objective world: the world of matter, the terrain of the realist. Objective things structure me, yet, a remainder exists: some things lie beyond explanation. My subjectivity - emerging from biological history: how paradoxical that the most biological of thinkers can overlook the thoroughly emotional nature of human subjectivity! and how sad - that instead of addressing and containing the conflict, people move into one side or another, into "only matter is real!" or "only mind is real!".

Embrace the conflict! And live the paradox!