Gobierno de la ciudad de Buenos Aires
Hospital Neuropsiquiátrico
"Dr. José Tiburcio Borda"
Laboratorio de Investigaciones Electroneurobiológicas
y
Revista
Electroneurobiología
ISSN: ONLINE 1850-1826 - PRINT 0328-0446
A Palindrome:
Conscious Living Creatures as Instruments of Nature;
Nature as an Instrument of Conscious Living Creatures
by
Mario Crocco
Correspondence / Contacto: Postmaster
[-yat--]
neurobiol.cyt.edu.ar
Electroneurobiología
vol. 7 (2), pp. 81-116, 2000:
URL http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/a_palindrome.htm
Also chapter 12 in
Helmut Wautischer, ed., Ontology of Consciousness:
Percipient Action
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass (A Bradford Book, 2007)
(References in this file have been brought up to the
preparation date of the The MIT Press edition)
____
Copyright © 2000, 2005
Acceso de red
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imprimir esta investigación, desde aquí o de / You can download a .PDF (recommended: 456 kB) or .DOC (231 kB) file
for printing, either from here or
<http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/index2.html
ABSTRACT: Conventional wisdom states that science cannot discover or
describe any intrinsic, non-instrumental value. Research in a broader
perspective indicates that this may be doubted. What goes on in the universe
manifests itself to natural scientists as an axiological palindrome, readable
from more than a single vantage point. If, through observation of reality, one
comes to recognize that mind-possessing living creatures – whether human or of
some other species – were used as a means, that is to say functionalized, by
physical processes, namely by biospheric evolution and its larger context, then
one must also recognize that the astrophysical-biospheric evolution was in turn
functionalized or used as a means to afford responsibility to some
mind-possessing living creatures. Natural science thus observes a mirror or
reciprocal functionalization, in which each of both realities uses for its own
ends the reality that uses it as a means. Current science, however, does not
stop at this result. Also in natural science's grandest picture of reality, the
being of all entities cannot ultimately come from other entities' being and
should, thus, come from value: regardless of what it is that the being of
entities originate from, it is to be regarded as taking action in view of
value.
Natural science describes
originated realities of two kinds: observers, also called minds, which do not
generate time inside them (but may emulate any outer course, an aptitude that
may be called xenochronism), and the set of extramentalities, which does it
(and interactively assists minds to emulate outer evolutions). While in minds
memories persist because they do not exist within a coursing of time that could
alter or erase them, extramentalities evolve because the transfers of causal
efficiency make a microphysical time course that the inertial mass of some but
not all elementary particles extends into sizeable scales. As long as xenochronic
minds and time-evolving extramentalities interact, they keep the mentioned
palindromic relationship. Sooner or later, however, bodily circumstances break
down, rendering their minds unobservable for natural science (death). So
science can track minds only until they pass away. Yet observations previous to
death, especially that of memories' being unable to succumb to time processes,
enable science to say that in this state of affairs – that is, beyond such a
realm of causal-efficiency transfers observed by natural science – the
mentioned palindromic relationship is also to break down, and the antecedent
matter of value resurfaces. This cessation reveals which of both courses of the
mentioned palindrome the originating value does in the end invest.
This occurs
because in nature minds and extramentalities enact a unique efficient causality
but, in making time courses, this causality's ability to cause further changes
becomes extinguished when it affects minds, intonating them into knowable differentiations.
Or, minds are not only sources but also sinks of causal efficiency: sensory
knowledge – that is,
minds' sense-based differentiations or knowable mental contents – consists of
efficient causality that has lost its transferability and become no longer able
to cause further changes. On the contrary, the minds' purposively directed
causal efficiency that minds put to work in the causation-transferring realm
cannot be likewise extinguished or exhausted therein. This disparity, in the state
of affairs beyond what in the universe goes on through causal transfers, breaks
down the mentioned palindromic situation kept in nature. Science can say that
at death the mind could not succumb but extramental nature ceases being of
assistance. Science's grand picture of reality thereby recognizes that the
ontological makeup of the mind of every observer-endowed living organism is
where the intrinsic value resides whereby both minds and extramentalities
exist. The ontological makeup of the situations arranged by transferable causal
efficiency – that is, the time course of extramentalities – just serves to
enable genuine freedom in some minds, whose development would be obfuscated
should they come directly to grips with the unoriginated portion of reality
rather than discoverable regularities. In science's grand picture of reality,
therefore, natural scientists' aspiration of "naturalizing the minds'
depiction" does not clash with the humanities' recognition of intrinsic
value in persons.
_________________________
1. Putting Minds to Work in Nature, Or, Life's Natural Sense
Bodies. Any flow of energy may arrange
things. In certain cases it may give shape to biological bodies. For example,
the hot interior of many planets creates a heat flow toward the surface. This
outgoing flow might sustain organic arrangements reproducing underground – that
is, microbial life – and the flow of solar radiation across thick clouds, such
as those of Venus, might develop communities of floating microorganisms. Over
the Earth's surface, that is to say neither on high clouds nor very far
underground, the energy flow that sustains biospheric differentiations – life – is
primarily made by the Sun's radiation that reaches our planet and then gets
reflected from the outermost level of the land or sea. The best-known living organisms
flourish as a means to dull in the most efficient way the shine reflected by
their land or aquatic environment.
This
shine-dulling means of making organisms operates constrained by chemical
kinetics and uses of cell space (compartmentalization). These two
nonthermodynamic constraints play a major part in shaping the evolutionary
drive, though fortunately it is unnecessary to consider them in the present
discussion. In more opaque technical words, we can start it by saying that biospheric differentiation optimizes the
disordering of planetary albedo on the shortest path. The evolutionary
diversification, of the balanced system of living beings and surroundings – or
biosphere – into nested organizations, apportions the planet's exiting energy
(albedo, the glare that the planet sheds into space) as fast as it can into photons (the light waves, or "grains of
light" forming that glare) in their greatest physically feasible numbers
with the longest (dubbed "reddest") physically feasible wavelength.
Life dims the planet's glare. This is why the diversity of living beings has
grown continuously through evolutionary times – bringing about the natural
selection of brains and of their opportune production of different sensations
and sentiments in the subjective existences, or finite psyches, that find
themselves in those brains.
The shine
reflected from our planet when seen from afar, as a tiny point of light in the
sky, is what we see on the planet itself as daylight. Biological evolution is a
relaxation or balance-seeking elastic process that, in the Earth's biosphere at
least, mainly uses and affects daylight. It is similar to the self-shaping of a
bow that relaxes as it shoots its arrow, exhausting as fast as it can its own
capacity of doing further physical work. By modifying the effulgence, or
shining, of the planet where this relaxation process takes place, biological
evolution moves like a shooting bow, toward exhausting by the shortest path its
own capacity to do further physical work. Just
as the bow supports the arrow's shot but by itself does not direct it, so also
the evolutionary trajectory is set by the nonthermodynamic factors over whose discussion I am skipping, such as replicative kinetics and its space and
time compartmentalization. In these terms, this glare-dwindling disordering is
the motor – not a directing but a supporting one – that drives biological
evolution. It is instrumental not in directing but rather in supporting the
evolution of certain replicating organizations of chemical reactions. The
averaging-out of the work-doing highs and lows, or differences in photons'
energies, comes to pass along the trophic or alimentary chains of organisms
catching living prey one after another – like bigger fish eating smaller ones.
It happens in
the series of food hunts whose paths commonly converge onto photosynthetic
plants, which currently are the initial link and ultimate prey in most of the
Earth's biospheric system. All along these chains, the more energetic photons
in a certain range become absorbed in chemical reactions that later engender
new photons, most of them fainter. So, how is this optimal disordering of the
photons' capacity to perform work, or tarnishing the planet's shine, achieved?
By using predecessors of the exiting photons to produce heat and excrement as
they pass through the alimentary chains.
Minds. This introduces variety into
biospheric history: heat (for the most part, directly ending as unseen infrared
radiation fed into and dimming the planetary glare, by its replacing some of
the shine that otherwise should have been reflected immediately) and
digestion's excrement (a transient state of biomatter that eases its further
decomposition) are the crucial upshot of this evolution, the arrow shot by this
tensed arch – and the sense of all life in nature. Minds are means to attain
more of it faster. To diminish (a little), in this way, the working aptitude of
the planetary albedo or effulgence, this process functionalizes (or uses as a
means) the regular appearings (eclosions, or "pops-outs") of finite
existentialities (or subjective existences, or psyches) for overcoming the limitations of Turing machines, unable to convert
accidents into opportunities. Minds, however, can do this – that is, progress
toward biological goals through appropriate steps for which the instructions
are nonetheless undefinable – and this is why during the course of evolution
minds become selected as instruments for some organisms to thrive in complex
environments and situations demanding this capability.
Put in the
service of this relaxing tension or elastic natural process, these instruments,
finite existentialities also termed minds or psyches, are causal agencies:
sinks and sources of causal action, as we will see. Thus, like any other source
of change in nature, finite existentialities or minds act locally, and exist
only "intransformatively" or within the actuality of the physical
instant. This leaves outside of minds' reality (or minds' ontic consistency)
the situations, unfolding in a stream of nows, whose tension-degrading
evolution I have been recounting thus far. These situations transform themselves
independently of their being known, that is, in extramentality, outside and
apart of what finite minds are cognizant of; and thus such tension-degrading
situational evolution is counted as elapsing time. All this concerns the
carrying out of causal transformations and will be explained below. What counts here (and
biologically, too) are two features that only minds make available for time
processes.
These minds,
put in this way to work as instruments in the service of this natural process, know: minds avail themselves of a
gnoseological or cognoscitive grasp, only
of the variations in their own ontic consistency – where time does not elapse,
so that those variations's sequence does not fade and may be made to refer to
otherwise gone extramental time courses ("past"). This means that
their knowledge of their own ontic consistency is only partial. This
incompleteness comes from their being limited or finite entities, so that they
do not enact by themselves their own existence and consequently cannot know
their own enactment to be rather than not to be, a prime ontological topic.
Nonetheless, the knowledge of their variations suffices to build a model of the
surroundings and of themselves within, provided such variations somehow come to
reflect those realities. Furthermore, minds are endowed with semovience – or
capacity to launch nonregular modifications in reality by taking unprompted
initiatives – to efficiently cause changes only
in the said variations in the texture of their own ontic consistency.
Both this
gnoseological apprehension or knowing grasp and this semovience, which very
remarkably coincide in their limited
sphere of action, are in turn causally chained into respectively sensing
and semoviently controlling the transformations that only a certain portion of extramental nature undergoes in time.
Such parcel or portion is denominated the immediate circumstance of a
circumstanced mind: the immediate localization of this mind's interactions or
operative presence. This causally chained parcel or portion of nature is small,
being a part (some brain components) of an organic body transiently
conglomerated and persisting over a noticeable interval in a certain site and
epoch – along a cradle-to-coffin itinerary or "worldline." The
relationship, of this parcel of extramental nature with the grasp and
semovience that are concurrent in, respectively, sensing and controlling only
it, is called the "brain-mind connection." Its central feature is
that, although efficient causation is unique throughout brain and mind, neither
the parcel of extramentality nor the mind can in each case determine their
mutual allocation ("circumstancing"): such and such a brain for such
and such a mind, and vice versa.
Whence it is
said that the mind "ecloses" (or "pops out") at the
causally chained parcel or portion of nature; not that it "emerges
in" or "is produced by" the parcel's conglomeration. This
bursting-out of eclosional realities, psyches or individual finite existentialities, is implemented or used to
fulfill an operative function in the albedo-dimming, shortest-path relaxation
process of extramental biospheric evolution. Which function is this one? It is
the foremost among the so-called "functions of relation with the
environment," or functions of relation for short. All biological organizations
must cope with basic issues such as how to nourish, defend, and reproduce, so
as to live on and thus fulfill their astrophysical-biological role of boosting
entropy. For nourishing, defending and reproducing themselves most biological
organizations function as Turing machines, which are the contrivances that cast
step by step their outcomes' string. For example, corals, oysters, and tropical
plants – all of which are not mind-regulated living creatures – function in
this way. These biological organizations solve their problems upon species-specific preadaptations. All
their functions of relation are preset. So, oysters solve these
problems of how to nourish, defend, and reproduce by basing their particular
solutions on species-specific preadaptations, instead of minding of the
situations they should cope with. Refining, in contrast, the adaptation or
adequacy of the provided solutions, in the biological organisms called
"mind-regulated animals" – which use a mind as its uppermost
regulatory level – the individual finite
existentiality that confronts a concrete problem does this, and grasps at
most of the opportunities that a Turing machine would have lost.
Thus the
weirdest things in cosmology, these circumstanced existentialities, subjective
existences, minds or psyches unbarterably allocated to constitute strange units
with flowing parcels of extramentality – brains – and at whose emplacement the
efficiency of some causal series exhausts itself (ending as sensory knowledges
of the therein-interacting mind, not of any other one), are put in this
evolutionary role because of the said two features that only minds make
available for biological evolution. As sources of efficient causality, they can
efficaciously inaugurate new causal series in their extramental surroundings,
triggering diverse consequences. As sinks of efficient causality, they also
know or gnoseologically grasp states of their own ontic consistency and their
variations, produced by the exhaustion of efficient causal series into known
reactions. These reactions' intonative variants or possible variations that
inescapably must be known, when causally affected by the action packets of
other causal agencies, are known as sensations; the demarcations' sequence of
these reactions does not elapse (because of lack of causal-efficiency's
transferability that could set up a time course for the mind's inner
differentiations) and so the contents of experience remain rememberable.
Bodies Selected so as to Allow
Intellectual Development of the Minds That Will Command Them. Minds are, thus, sinks of
causally efficient actions. The evolutionary selection set up the diversity of
the sensation-stirring organic processes congruously with the diversity of possible
intonations; not reversely, as assumed in J. Müller's "law of specific
energies." Thus, while conforming the selected organic processes to these
possibilities of the minds' ontic consistency, the evolutionary employment or
functionalization of these circumstanced existentialities only required
adjusting the organic presentation of sensations to prompt existentialities'
semovience into adaptive behavior – rather than into indulgent pursuances
unavailing to the relaxation of their biosphere. For this adaptive function,
step by step, the architectures of the cerebral gray became naturally selected
as a necessary instrument, or requisite condition, for the developmental
acquisition of suitable intellectual proficiency in the circumstanced
existentialities.
Besides
reacting self-intonatively when causally affected by action packets coming
through the sensed parcel of nature (which is the immediate or causally
interacting portion of their bodily circumstance), these finite
existentialities continually initiate semovient actions. Minds are therefore
sources of causally efficient actions. Some of these actions initiate evident
bodily behavior, such as changing a limb's position. Others just change brain
states. Others do not even stir such cerebral changes (as when making one's
mind for selecting a particular memory in order to reimagine it, putting it in
the general view also called "tip of the tongue"; or when giving up
the attempts to reimagine it). But all these actions generate an attentional
refocusing in the agent. Through those actions that are carried out bodily, finite
existentialities probe their environment, by moving, cracking, or in any way
changing the surrounding things. These initiatives allow their intellectual
development, which could not be achieved through Platonic contemplation but
needs to distinguish between their own causality and the resistances and
performances of the surrounding things that thereby become typified and
recognized as instancing a type ("concept"). The finite existentialities'
gnoseological grasp (or cognizance), of the reactions stirred in them by these
probed portions of the environment through any consistent causal chain
impinging from outside on these existentialities' immediate circumstances,
allows such circumstanced existentialities to build, in their own ontic
consistency – which is known in its variations – a xenochronic or
time-emulating model that tracks accurately enough some variations of the
surrounding relevancies.
In this way,
all that every existentiality does by herself in nature, whether initiating or
not evident bodily behavior, is reclustering her focus of attention. Aboutness,
the attentionally optional reference to certain responsively varying entities
rather than to others, is thus intrinsic to the functioning, development, and
use of that relevancies-anchored model. Their cognizance of themselves,
although incomplete, allows these existentialities to know this model and then,
as they grow up, to refine it. So they distinguish a diversity of encompassing
things in terms of which specific combination, of semovient actions, in similar
circumstances maps again those outer things (or "conserves" them, as
in Piagetian object permanence) in the mind's unelapsing ontic consistency.
This
feature-ascertaining "classification" yields "classes" of encounters,
relating each new individual encounter with the already objectified and
categorized surrounding things. This turns new sensations into perceptions,
turning sentient intelligences into percipient agencies. Let me give some
illustrations. The largest thing in the solar system, Jupiter's magnetosphere
(ten times the width of the sun), was only recognized in quite recent times and
by means of actions performed by instruments journeying to the thing, unseen
when one simply gazes at Jupiter. It instances a class (or "concept")
whose previously encountered samples were smaller. Nut kernels, instead, are
more straightforwardly recognized, as what appears whenever cracking
open an instance of the appropriate class of woody shells. Yet in both cases
the notion is established by the appropriate courses of semovient causal actions
("nut cracking" and "Jupiter probe-sending") and the
sensual intonations that these actions generate in return; Platonic contemplation
does not infuse knowledge. Along these lines, to achieve the mentioned transference
of the problem-solving function from one agency to another (that is, from
species-specific preadaptations, such as those of oysters, to individual finite
existentialities circumstanced in individual organisms), these finite
existentialities or minds are either sensually allured or sensually discouraged
for keeping or varying their courses of semovient action on recognized things.
In this way these existentialities are instigated to turn accidental encounters
into opportunities for their general programmings set up in terms of seducing
or deterring sensational states – for
example, to optimally profit from occasions to nourish, reproduce, and protect
themselves as well as kith and kin. Thus their semovience and their ontic
intonability, the two gnoseologically apprehended, are used as an instrument to
bring extra entropic gain to the biospheric process – an extra
"reddening" to further dim the otherwise-silvery planetary shine.
So evolution
selects the formation of animal bodies that allow minds to attain adaptive
intellectual development, that is,
to become clever as the individual grows up; not unrestrictedly clever, but
just as much as is required for proficiently leading such bodies, in their specific
circumstances, into their functions of relation. That is to say, evolution
selects the formation of such animal bodies that make these minds know and
semoviently address those differentiations of their own reality that may be
developmentally made to include references to those outer things biologically
relevant in their specific situation. (In contrast, recognizing objects such as
Jupiter's magnetosphere was biologically unimportant for our ancestors, or for
the ancestors of whales and dolphins, which acquired their own important
increment in brain mass, in proportion to body weight, before our ancestors
did: cetaceans acquired it some 35 million years ago.) This correspondence thus
represents outer things by way of individual segments intonatively broken off
from the main reality knowing itself – that is, mind's ontology.
Such diversely
and distinctly intonated segments, which are phenomenal as in a successively
transforming field of adjoining phosphenes and non-intonated or nonphenomenal
as in the operations one may carry out on them, "uncompact" each mind's
knowledge of its own reality into differentiable contents. Through them,
therefore, minds intend or image macroscopic or molar (extensive)
realities. Contrastingly, extramental causation is enacted only through very
minute, microphysical or subatomical packets of physical action (force carriers
or quanta): an action that physics describes as belonging to physical fields
and originating in them.
Insertion of Minds' Actions and
Reactions into Time Courses. For that reason, the insertion of the actions and reactions of
circumstanced minds into extramental causal chains (principally, into the
biosphere's trophic chains) demands that these molarities-intending minds be circumstanced
to immediately control field actions. The immediate extramentality of minds is
thus a physical field, not the field's action-carrying microphysical packets.
In other words, the specific locus for the causal efficacy of molar volition is
thus the states of a certain physical field that makes eclose (as all fields
do) microphysical carriers of its causal action. These carriers' density builds
up this field's potential – coupled with the brain's electromagnetic one. As
the gateway element for mind-brain efficiently causal interactions,
modifications in the states of the first field that generate its potential
(flow densities of its eclosing field-action carriers) generate sensory
reactions in the circumstanced mind and are also under this mind's direct
control. This preserves the molar mode of mind's efficient causation in the
face of the neurobiophysical non-molar (microphysical) one, handled by such a
field's force-carrier's eclosions. It permits extramentalities to be causally
mapped and acted on from minds, and vice versa, not withstanding the scale jump
of their vastly different modes (one in large units, the other in microphysical
ones) of applying efficient causality.
Thus, by
employing a dependable regularity in the eclosions of such minds as the
resource to transfer concrete problem-solving from species-specific
preadaptations to individual organisms, this shortest-path relaxation process
for maximizing entropy becomes, through evolution, capable of raising its own
efficiency even more. By implanting at the tip of the trophic chains more
replacements of force carriers (more hunters in the chain), readily posited to
dissipate the energy-richest preceding organic assemblages (feeding on them,
turning them to heat and excrement), this shortest-path relaxation strategically
elongates the trophic chains that the force carriers will traverse. Such a life
of minds is thus not a vain struggle, a treadmill of useless toil. Minds are
put to work as instruments for increasing entropy faster. Ordering the disordering
process (like the act of controlling with barriers the flow of people going out
of a crowded stadium, or intelligently obstructing with traffic lights the
vehicle circulation in big cities), the biospheric implant of those lives
further orders and so speeds up the biosphere's disordering net action. Its
shortest path is thereby approached further. Natural selection of biological organisms
operates as a lever to multiply energy dissipation under the mentioned
nonthermodynamic constraints: technically said, elongating trophic chains
shortens the space-time path of their dissipative work. The evolutionary
development consists in adapting each mind's intrinsic capacity of handling her
intramental contents, so as to use the effects on her causally immediate
circumstance for setting off a causal chain that inserts mind's action into some
extramental processes. This extramental insertion of the actions of minds –
percipient agencies, such sinks and sources of causal efficiency – is made to
work in two kinds of improgrammable-in-detail crucial acts of becoming
"one flesh," in which acts minds intelligently pursue two sensoemotional
rewards:
·
Eating up, appropriating, as
bodily resources, the irregularly evasive bodies (preys that are hard to get
hold of) and the results of former organized efforts (those prey's energy
investments in their own buildup) of other circumstanced existentialities. This
additional level of predation was attained by stirring private sensations (e.g.,
hungers) that allure, into chasing after such a mind-regulated food, all the
individuals recently deprived of nutrients (and thus "hungry" or
"famished"), so as to self-sustain the evolutionary efficiency
booster by correcting their nutritional depletion.
·
Making most individuals seek
the behavior in which complementary sex congeners masturbate inside vaginas
and, on estrus, enwrapping the ejaculator ducts, or – if their species have not
evolved fully interpenetrating anatomies – simply rub cloacæ, interlocking on
diverse degrees. All of these matching sensoemotional responses, behaviors, and
far-from-uniform organs were gradually selected, over a few hundred million
years, starting with the coordination of both sexes' reflex expulsion of germ
cells in great numbers, to become mixed and fecundated in water. By procuring
upon its alluring sensations the execution, in the convenient bodily posture,
of a sneeze-related, unconditioned expulsion reflex, this behavior leads to
recombine halves of genetic material separately split in different individuals
– a genome-reshuffling recombination attained, again, by way of stirring private
sensations (incalescence) that in the two genders alike allure the individuals
which of late have not participated at inseminations (thus erotized – that is,
turned "incalescent" or "lustful"), so as to self-sustain
the evolutionary efficiency-booster by amending their genome-recombinative
("copulative") lack of participation.
1.1. Origin and Evolution
of Nervous Systems
At this point,
the evolutionary origin of the nervous systems should be briefly reviewed, with
special focus on the physical means put at play at each stage. The evolution of
living systems, outlined hitherto, is one of the most notable dynamical
phenomena in nature. Numerous observations, often scarcely discussed outside of
the neurobiological and psychophysiological concerns, consistently point out
that speed variations in the action carriers of a force field, obtained by coupling
with intensity variations of another, overlapping force field, found a
neurobiophysical application. In it also intervened relativistic dilations of
the instant or minimal interval-like course of causal transformation, despite
such dilations being unexpected in the Pythagorean-Parmenidean mindsets where,
in order to deny genuine reality to elapsing time, the physical instant is
supposed infinitesimal – that is, "not integrable into actual time
courses" – and therefore unfit to undergo relativistic dilations.
Brains combine the two physical phenomena (fields' coupling, and instant's
dilations from the relativistic speed variations so attained) in connecting
minds with their environment and varying their sensations' force of imposition.
This application, not specifically discussed in this subsection aimed instead
at its antecedent stages (see rather Szirko's article, "Effects of
relativistic motions in the brain and their physiological relevance"), was
achieved through the electric field's neurophysiological patterning which,
before and after the incorporation of those phenomena into biological
functions, some living organisms employed for getting into resourceful relationship
with outer events. Whence summarily depicting the long evolutionary roots of
this special use clarifies such incorporation.
To obtain
nourishment, defense, and genome recombination biological organisms enact their
distinctive menus of relationships with the external world by performing what
is called their "functions of relation." Distinguishing any
particular external thing or sector to be acted or reacted on (object) from the
rest of the environment, while allowing for its relevant relations with this
environment (mapping), is termed a "reference to object." It was once
thought that, for the functions of relation to make reference to objects and
map them, a nervous system was requisite.
Nervous
systems, for that reason, were conceived as having started with cellular
specialization – that is, with the evolutionary selection of surface cells
specialized in detecting and cooperatively communicating the presence of
relevant objects to other bodily cells specialized in fittingly dealing with
them. Though functional, this criterion underscored the primacy of anatomical
distinctions: the nervous systems were assumed to have started with the
functional diversity that made neurosensory cells different from other cells –
especially from motor cells.
The rest of
the evolution of the nervous systems was thought to have consisted in the
natural selection, differentiation, and combination of the paths or circuits
(hodologies, also called neural nets) composed of those specialized cells of
the first class (neurosensory cells). The account tells that, early on, some of
these communicating outer cells moved into the tissue (subepithelization) for
covering. Then, for mustering into synergy more numerous and distant motor
cells (muscles), they also became elongated into fibers (fibrillarization).
Then the fibers became drawn together into suitable anatomical corners, forming
local networks called nerve plexuses (plexusification). Concentration continued:
because it enables shortening in strategic sites the fibers' length and, so,
faster coordinating the nerve communications that must be forwarded in some
mutually referred-to sequence for bringing diverse muscles into common action,
the natural selection of more complex instinctive behavior selected the genetic
formation of nervous ganglia (ganglionarization). Their development came upon a
treasure of new resources derived from variations in their inner connectivity.
As ganglia became more complex, they formed an inner fiber mesh called neuropil
(neuropilarization), which was organized into the brain cortex (corticalization)
and – since the appearance of reptilomorphs - into neocortex
(neocorticalization) so as to sustain, inside it, the natural selection of
physical processes that minds can react to with subjective intonations.
Otherwise
stated, it was thought that the natural selection of paths for nerve activity
supplied the physical processes to which minds can react by intonating
themselves subjectively. But such story is incorrect.
Already in the
acellular microorganisms from which all animals derive, far before any cell
differentiation, the functions of relation (which in Christfried Jakob’s terms
are in such beasts no more than plasmopsiquismos,
plasmopsychisms, regarding “psychism” in the sense of Aristotle’s concept of soul, i.e. not essentially including existentiality) made reference to objects.
These acellulars distinguished from the rest of a mapped environment the
particular thing or sector to be acted or reacted on (a field that, with the
occasion of the fortieth anniversary of some key concepts, the present author
reviewed: Crocco 2004 a). Almost two thousand million years ago,
"swimming" was achieved by some Paleoproterozoic protozoans through
the beating of cilia in their surface. It propelled the protozoan. Immediately
below its surface spread oscillations in electrical (ionic) potential that
reflected the viscous coordination of the cilia's beating. But coordination is
not control and control was needed to catch the prey – often to chase it. So
the very outer objects, whether edible or to be avoided, were allowed to intervene
in the control that steered the so attained "swimming," specifying –
by their also viscous contact with the beating ciliary system – an interference
structure of potential (i.e. a sort of correlogram or outside-originated
wave pattern encroaching on inner wave patterns so as to form briefly
stationary transiences serving to refer to the interfering outer object). This
interference generated inner objects of allusion ("stationary waves"
in Jakob's 1906 terms: Jakob 1900, 1907-1909, 1911a, 1911b, 1913, 1918; Jakob
and Onelli 1913, especially 25-40 and 75-102) that directed the
"swimming" toward or away from the encountered object outside – with
which the organism had thus established a relation.
Ciliophora, in this way, for over more than a thousand million years have fed because the mechanism that controls cilia reorients them or
their water currents toward prey, some fast swimming such as paramecia, and
edible floating crumbs. As the means for attaining reference to objects, in the last phase of
capture they utilized electric field patterns probably composed at the
deformation of the distribution of submembrane potential fluctuations –
resulting from the automatically coordinated ciliary beating – by the viscous
contact of the ciliary rows with a floating piece or with the hydrostatic waves
coming from also ciliated prey "swimming" fast in the neighborhoods. This electropotential system for
ciliary control was retained in the descendents (some of whose body plans might
for a time have been mounted on a hydroskeleton, as in today's earthworms) that
in their larval stages ("dipleurula": cf. Garstang 1894, 1928; Nielsen 1999, 2005) had the cilia around
the "mouth" (the ciliary band and the apical organ). From the cells
supporting those cilia, our whole nervous system originates. A refinement of
their control is exposed in adult ctenophores, gelatinous marine invertebrates
that are voracious predators in zooplankton food chains and the largest
organisms to swim by means of cilia. The refinement, captured in such a primitive
level of organization, consists in that some of their cilia are controlled
through axons; beautiful photographs have been published in Tamm and Tamm 2002.
But ctenophores are derived from a separate evolutionary branch, other than
that of humans and all vertebrates. In our nervous system we still retain not
only the cilia but also gene sequences such as the one called onecut
(Poustka et al. 2004; cf. Nakajima et al. 2004), which
anatomically initiate the nervous system "above" what is to become
the buccal cavity in our early embryos.
The electric
field patterns (correlograms) that those acellulars utilized as the means for
attaining reference to objects was lost in many animal lineages, which rather
formed nervous ganglia to serve as their uppermost level of organic regulation.
It was not the finest option but it evolved quickly, and precluding other
possible alternatives it enabled many organisms to cope with certain
life-sustaining exigencies; namely, with exigencies so undemanding that they
would have been surmountable as well by a Turing machine, in spite of its
limitations – that is, surmountable with a behavior generated by a set of
instructions handicapped by two main drawbacks: their need of being definable
by the antecedent situation, and their being able to evolve only over generations,
not improving after individual maturity. This ganglionary uppermost level of organic
regulation yielded the behavioral marvels we admire in, for example, bees, spiders, termites, and ants. The electric
field means, lost in them, were instead preserved as the uppermost level of
organic regulation during the process of path concentration that formed brains.
As a result,
the brain organs that now carry out the chordate's uppermost level of organic
regulation include neural ganglia that subserve a specific, connectivity-based
function, which is not the uppermost regulatory function of the organism: the
neural ganglia embedded in each chordate brain do hodologically enact unmindful
behavior through refined sensomotor archs that lack any memory of particular
objects. This is why so much of the brain's neuroactivity, being unassociated
with sensable processes, is not sensed at all: we are not aware of most of what
our brain does. As another result of the same course of events brains also
include the said electric field means. They perform another specific function.
These electric means furnish the therein circumstanced mind with exchanges to
intonatively react to, as well as with a way of bringing about ecphoria – that
is, causally chaining some extramental
processes to mental operations. Further, these same electric field means, by
way of making relativistic effects assume specific values at the locations of
the mind-extramentality causal exchanges, enact variations in time resolution
that modulate the mind's intonative reactions, while the mind's retentiveness
(or, rather, lack of a causal transfer-implemented, inner time course) supplies
a memory of particular objects in terms of their operative characterization.
Therewith individual intellectual developments become allowed in the biosphere
– whereupon the regular eclosions of never regular minds are placed into the
causal organization of behaving organisms, as their uppermost regulatory level.
In this way, and not through the hodologies or circuitry of the neural ganglia
embedded in the brain, these organisms become able to surmount the Turing
machine limits and so colonize such biological niches where transforming
accidents into opportunities is requisite for survival. Amniote organization,
by its affording neocorticalization, provided the most recent major step in
this evolutionary journey. We enjoy its benefits: our minds' intellectual
development is based on the differentiation of mental contents attained in this
way. Yet the architecture of these mental contents is by no means minds' most
remarkable feature.
2. Minds' Cadacualtic Features
The most
outstanding feature of these minds is rather one that culture often eclipsed,
namely every mind's cadacualtez. Cadacualtez – that is, the intrinsic
singularity, unbarterability, unrepeatability, and incommunicability of every
existential being (independent of its being finite or not) – has remained
unperceived in many cultures, as if hidden from view. Social stratification and
its reflection in the resources of the language often privileged the allusions
in block, the "mass nouns" in some East Asian languages and the
"De individuum scientia non datur" ("about individuals no
science is given") in the presuppositions of Western science. These
structural constraints also have functional roots. In humans, as well as in
every animal regulated by a circumstanced existentiality, typification or
conceptual generalization is the foundation and necessary condition of
utilitarian praxis – be it nutcracking or sending probes to the outer planets.
Because of this, in every culture such a conceptual generalization grounded
intelligibility on the references to those realities whose "individual
instances" might be freely swapped, one in the place of another and any
one by any one else, so that their total set would make a kind of fungible
mass, from which it is equivalent to take a portion or rather any other portion
in order to "instantiate" such a mass. With this "samples"
way of making allusion, individuality became an intersection of fungible attributes
and the references to cadacualtez become eclipsed. Conceptual elements of this
variety are characteristic of the line of thought that finds its continuity
along intellectual stances such as those of Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, and
British Puritanism and Platonism. Some of these conceptual elements have
prevailed in the scientific way of making reference to the realities found in nature,
preventing an emphasis on, or at times a perception of, the mentioned intrinsic
unbarterability of existentialities. In other cases the notional developments
of monotheistic faiths obscured it and, as outlined below, made its conceptual
elaboration superfluous, contributing to the same result.
Minds' intrinsic unbarterability is thus a feature
whose conceptualization is culturally eclipsed, as may be seen even in the
communicative metaphor chosen by the unknown writer of the Book of Job's conclusion,
whose author assumed natural in his readers's mindset the substitutability of
some persons for others fulfilling their same role. In ancient times, in fact,
no word was available to denote cadacualtez – even the term that originated our
word person appeared relatively late
– and the recognition of cadacualtez was often reduced to a preconceptual
understanding of "lo que se cifra en el nombre" ("what is
ciphered, or encoded, in the name"). It was manifested as an inexpressible
intuition indicated by every forename, helped by place-names or family names
wherever forenames seemed insufficiently clear – for example, to distinguish
absent Gilles of Rome from absent Gilles of Lessines. Yet the eclipsing also
affected the conceptual fathoming of somatopsychical or body-mind
relationships.
Such a line of culturally dominant thinking abstracted
and subtracted from the concept of every psyche the element of its unbarterable
existentiality, representing every mind as consisting only of its mental
contents: a hypothetical mind that happened to differentiate the same mental contents as another,
would be deemed to be the latter. This
confusion of the mind's presence within reality and her mental contents'
structure, viewing the being or enaction of a cadacualtez – which makes an
existentiality to exist – as exhausted in the arrangement of features later
acquired by the already existing existentiality (rather than by another), made
Locke's view, of body-mind relationships as exclusively consisting of efficient
causality, appear "logical" and natural. Just as a domestic appliance
that might remain connected or disconnected with the mains, and if plugged in
might remain so in a certain wall plug or, indifferently, in any other
whatsoever, such a brain-mind or body-mind relationship was also considered to
exist only as long as it was working (e.g. while originating mental contents
or bodily motions) and the connection was assumed to be Platonically accidental
– that is, an extrinsic harnessing together, as if empsycheable
bodies and embody-able minds lacked any intrinsic bond referring them one to
another individually: as if existentialities might be causally chained or "plugged in" to whatever parcel of nature,
in the style of Mark Twain's "The Prince and the Beggar." So
conceived, existentialities are no longer recognized as cadacualtic, brains are
believed to be capable of producing them (because what is called
"psyche" has been reduced to its acquired mental contents, some of
which – namely, the new sensations – indeed are interactively generated by the
brain organ) and minds, in good logic, are believed to be clonable.
Such a description is certainly improper to describe
what is found as existentialities, but it may be proper to philosophically
describe their common ontic constitution. In the Peripatetic line of thought,
for example, Scholastic analyses came to depict a hylemorphic constitution that
abstracted the unbarterability of existentialities by using a notion that has
been called a "standard cadacualtez" – that is, a nomical or typical cadacualtez which, of course, is
uncadacualtic. This process attracted some confusion regarding the Aristotelian
series of souls (only vegetative soul, vegetative-sensitive soul, and vegetative-sensitive-rational
soul, collectively composing a segment of the Great Chain of Being that once
did represent, crudely yet to the best of human knowledge, nervous systems'
evolution and the evolutionary sequence of the functions of relation) and the
insertion of cadacualtic existentialities in such a series.
Aristotle conceived knowing, gnoeín, as a
variety of metabolic assimilation only for the purpose, and with the precise
objective, of being able to compose a unique descriptive series with which to
delineate the full variety of living beings – by comparing species among
themselves and comparing the developmental sequences of individuals. With this
conceptual tool, Aristotle was able to achieve his purpose, of attaining
conceptual means suitable for unifiedly and uniformly describing the living
beings found in nature in all their possible forms. His informational view of
knowledge, presenting it as a variety of metabolic assimilation, is thus why
Aristotle managed to institute biology as a unified science. In this way
Peripatetism and the whole of European culture found a coherent exposition of a
sector of reality, the living beings. Scholasticism then procured the goal of
extending this exposition to the whole of reality, establishing a description
of every type of reality in ontological terms. When Christian Peripatetism paid
descriptive attention to psyches or individual existentialities, its purpose
was to depict their ontical constitution, which it accordingly did not do in
cadacualtic but in fungible terms, as Matter, Form, and their instances are.
Its pre-Renaissance ideas permeated most scientific descriptions during
Modernity, even those of its ideological opponents.
Therefore, Christian Peripatetism, in order to account
for the constitution of every individual, sensibly considered as its formal
cause the matter signed by quantity. This name denotes the piece or particular
portion of fungible prime matter that, while accidentally composing the
individual of the case, after successive information by the Forms of the
system's components finally assumes the Form proper of its species or Type.
For Aristotle, in view of his mentioned purpose, it
was uninteresting to detect if within the series of organisms animated by a
vegetative-sensitive soul the individuals of some species included an
existentiality circumstanced to sense and move its body. This is the case of a
dog, for instance. Other organisms lack such an existentiality in charge of
biological functions, for example a starfish – or its common ancestors with the
dog, if Aristotle could have paid attention to them. These other organisms are
constituted purely in the hylozoic hiatus and operate in a purely reactive way:
they are unable to inaugurate innovative causal series semoviently, that is to
say with decisions. In addition, they cannot bring to an end an outer causal
series and know its last effect as a sensory intonation of existential being.
As mentioned, the ontic consistency of gnoseological apprehension or knowledge
requires a break in the efficient causal series, and these unempsyched animals
are entirely constituted in the hylozoic hiatus where all efficient causality
is unbrokenly transeunt. These animals lack any intrinsically unbarterable element,
and thus any knowledge inasmuch as experience: in these animal species having
an Aristotelian soul but not circumstancing an existentiality, their
"knowledge" is mere information, gnoseologically uncharacterized –
and only metaphorically called "knowledge" by external observers
interested in keeping Aristotelian homogeneity for the biological series.
The influential philosophy of Christian Peripatetism,
with its affiliation to monotheistic hopes, found it pointless to refine the
ontological principle of individuation in order to describe what is ciphered in
the name, or cadacualtez. It was a feature eclipsed by culture's generalizations
but assured by the "Good News" – that is, by the dogmatic perception of the ultimate ground of
reality as Lover (cf. A. Courban’s chapter 5, "Why One is not
Another? The brain-mind problem in the Byzantine culture", in the book
where this article is also to appear). Christian anthropology is monist – in no
way dualist, as it is often erroneously believed to be on the basis of Platonic
notions imparted by its Cartesian misrepresentation – inasmuch as the
reciprocal unbarterability of the two "elements" compounding the
somatopsychical personal unity grounds the dogma of the Creator's individual
reference to every soul when creating it for a certain body and circumstance.
It thus was superfluous for Christian Peripatetism to
require from materia signata quantitate the impossibility of justifying
nomically the anomical reason why one is not forming one's psychophysical unity
with another body, that
is, why one is not circumstanced to
interact with time processes from a different corporality – the body being the
outer signal that, because of the unbarterability of circumstantiation,
indicates a different cadacualtez. This found fact is not a nomical fact nor
can it be conceptualized as such, either in our current description of reality
or in the doctrinary beliefs taken for granted by Christian Peripatetism. For
sure some Scholastics might have confused the two elements of hylemorphic
constitution, from whose concept is absent any intrinsic need requiring an
unbarterable relationship with a single and particular instance of the other
species, with body and existentiality, which are found to comprise it. Yet
other authors found it futile and redundant to analyze and explain, in regular
or nomical terms, what their faith manifested to them as a most singular loving
act of the ultimate ground. All the more so because, on reason of their faith,
they chose to focus on the communicable and mystagogic aspects of the existential
finding, thereby contributing to the cultural eclipse of cadacualtez. This is
why it was only rarely and recently noticed that the
cerebral organ only determines some sensory contents of her or his experience,
but does not determine – nor could it do this – who will appear circumstanced
to use it; namely, the not nomical (i.e., not standard) but cadacualtic
and unbarterable constitution of a certain psychophysical unity.
This neglect was further bolstered by the time
asymmetry of cadacualtic descriptions. Cadacualtez is postdictable but never
predictable. If one's survey goes back from the existence of a
particular existentiality, say that of Jane Doe, to her previous nonexistence,
the former is already established as a part of the query. In contrast, when the
survey is conceptualized in the opposite sense, one comes from the nonexistence
therein – say, in a not yet fecundated ovule – of circumstancing relationships
with any cadacualtic existentiality (namely, not from the nonexistence of
circumstancing relationships with Jane Doe but the nonexistence of
circumstancing relationships with any existentiality by then future) to the
existence of Jane Doe's particular reality, not another. In this fashion, in
one avenue of the survey (the latter, or causal sequence) this nonalterity
differs from identity, but merges with it in the other, sequence-reversing
avenue. The epistemological time asymmetry that in this way comes to affect the
issue cloaks, habitually, the important distinction between one's being one
because of one's history, namely the fact that the sequence of constitutive
events makes one's instanceable features, and one's being not another because
of a different source. In this regard cadacualtez is a converse of ipseity, the
latter determining one to be oneself and the former making one's being not
another.
Cadacualtez, the intrinsic unbarterability,
unrepeatability, incommunicability, and singularity of every existential being,
thus manifests as the ontic determination, in nature, of every event of a
finite observer's finding herself experiencing in a circumstance rather than, instead,
in another. Natural science finds psychisms that neither self-posit to exist
nor self-circumstance to eclose. As their circumstancing is a constitutive
contingency for finite observers, its unbarterability makes such event one and
the same, even if iterated observationally over the years – one never being
shifted or teleported to other bodily circumstances. As a
matter of observation, each real observer in nature cannot derive its own place
from the physical regularities forming its other empirical findings; less, to
account for why the availabilities compounding his or her mental world do not
become available to another person. Certainly, this other in lieu of, say, the
reader, could not detect any swapping, since as mentioned cadacualtez, although
never predictable, is always postdictable; but before it happens (i.e.,
now), "other in one's lieu" is fully understandable to everyone, and
serves here to illustrate what the pronoun who signifies: namely, what
is ciphered in the name. The variable indicated in "other in one's
lieu" is what the personal identity means, alluded to in the function word
who; cadacualtez is the ontic
determination of each instance of its being brought to bear. And before a
particular existentiality ecloses to nonpredicative actuality, as a subset of
finitude among a plurality of separated psychisms, the physical constitution
does not suffice to determine "who" shall avail of the availabilities
of a psychism. For example, at the time of the physical constitution of the
reader's body, the components in the maternal makeup and paternal spermatozoid
that originally composed such a body did not suffice to determine (or even
refer to) "who" was to avail of the reader's apprehension,
semovience, and historical-biophysical circumstances including the
species-specific palette of structureless characterizations stirred by her
brain's states – rather than the states of, say, a reptile brain – and the
remaining of the reader's body providing its own time acuity for her
existentiality to directly apprehend some bodily constituents. The particular
set of all these availabilities, which an existential finitude – say, the
present reader's – does not posit but encounters, is not available to another
finite semovient existentiality. Cadacualtez, a converse of ipseity manifested
as the eclosional circumstancing of finite noeseis, which in each case makes 'their' some respective noema causing
each finite psychism's circumstancing to not an other brain, is thus
intrinsically asymmetrical over time[1].
Although this asymmetry is conspicuous, its
appreciation is not helped by the cultural occultation of cadacualtez. The
conceptual situation is even worsened by the quite widespread misunderstanding
of actuality as if it were predicative – presenting 'to be' as it were a result of combining features, or predicates. As
an example one might think of the "proof of the existence of God" by
Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109 ("God exists because
one of his attributes is being perfect and he could not be perfect if he would
not exist"), or the conception of mind as a software that by arranging
nonexperienced contraptions generates experience (not seldom inconsistently
conceived as a "nonpersonal personhood" consisting only of
"unowned mental contents," so as to apply Locke's account of
brain-mind relationships as a mind-generative efficiency harnessing together
the organic source and its product); or the so-called bootstrapping
cosmogonies. This confusion, commonplace today and probably also among the
Sophists in classical
Deconstructing this composite cloaking, or eclipsing
series of circumstances, demands heeding both that 'to be' is really different from a combination of predicates and
also the mentioned time asymmetry. In macroscopic affairs time is just an
accidental occurrence, which comes from the differential acquisition of
inertial mass by elementary "particles." It is convenient now to cast
a glance on this topic. Macroscopic time process, as well as spatiality or
dispersivity for forces, are secondary, derivative cosmological occurrences.
3. Building Circumstances that Evolve: Barygenesis and Time's Spatial
Spread
Extramental
things, the components of the hylozoic hiatus, compose a single realm that
homogeneously features transeunt causation. It lacks any sink or source of
causal action except in the microphysical scale (i.e. in the
"bubbling", by all of the overlapping physical fields, of the
particles that constitute these fields' potentials). Minds, in contrast, are
cadacualtic and plural, as well as not point-like but innerly extensive and
differentiable sinks and sources of causal action. Thus each intramentality modifies unidirectionally the
frontiers with extramentality by means of nomical and non-nomical causation,
while extramentality can reciprocate the transformative action only nomically.
It breaks any purported identity of intramentality with extramentality: their
difference is not one of aspects, but an ontical difference. The element
of this difference that is central at this point is that every realm harbors
contents or components that aggregate and evolve differently.
In the
hylozoic hiatus, space is generated; namely, a dispersivity for forces comes to
be, whose features it is unnecessary to detail here – although one might think
of how mechanical levers do work (i.e.,
what supports the arms' remarkable relationships), to get a taste of the sense
in which space is a dispersivity for forces. Extramental space is a secondary
offshoot of more basic physical determinations. At this time, every ten minutes
more than three million kilometers of new space opens up between us and the Pisces-Perseus
supercluster of galaxies, while in the same number of minutes more than 800,000
kilometers of fresh dispersivity also opens up between us and the nearer Virgo
metagalaxy, so that also inside the small volume of our bodies new space must
continuously force elementary components ever more apart, though on so small a
scale the effect is unnoticeable. Through this space, the force carriers do
transport or propagate the action of force fields. Such spatial hauling or
conveyance of packets of efficient physical action is a key feature.
Photons (light) carry the action of the
electromagnetic field and gluons carry the action of the strong nuclear-force
field; since both such species of carrier particles are massless, they move and
propagate the respective field's action with causal celerity, c. This is
a speed that, light being an efficient causal action, is also the velocity of
light. Photons frequently interact with the matter interposed in their path and
become absorbed into some change of this absorbing matter. In making this
change, the causal action carrier (photon) sacrifies its own being, that is, it is thus annihilated: this
is why observers have no impression of the outer causation but only of the
produced changes.
This scientific point deserves philosophical
underscoring: nobody could reproach David Hume (1711-1776) for not having
foreseen that, more than a century and a half later, Max Planck (1858-1947) was
to discover that physical causation comes in packets, so that in producing
effects action packets annihilate and one could only see the effects – never
acquiring any impression from the (exhausted) causative action by observing the
extramental changes it had already produced. Hume was expecting such an
impression for action and, on its nonoccurrence, rather than declaring that
causation yields impressions only when the observer is the very causal agent,
Hume declared causation to be an ungrounded idea both for extramental and for
intramental realms. Hume's mistake is important in the modern history of ideas.
Hume's error induced Inmanuel Kant (1724-1804) into the slumbering in which his
subjectivist-transcendentalist dream occurred (Kant himself, of course, viewed
it inversely, stating that Hume awoke him from his "dogmatic
slumbering") and, bolstered by political and ideological confrontations,
persuaded many moderns to view minds as ineffectual (epiphenomenal) and being
as predicative (analytic). But let me return to natural science.
The change that the annihilated photon caused in
matter may later somehow subside. In doing this the absorber emits another
photon, or several of them, with some of the energeía or capability of
generating change (i.e., the field's action) contributed by the
previously absorbed photon. Inside condensed or gaseous matter, those photon
substitutions are especially frequent. There the space traveled by each photon
is very short: the energy (field's action) of a photon created by the Sun's
nuclear furnace delays about a hundred thousand years in exiting the Sun. By
then its carried action has been absorbed a very great number of
times, each time to be later emitted as a new photon that travels much less
than a millimeter before restarting the absorption-emission cycle. The many
repetitions of this cycle's characteristic time, rather than the sum of travel
times, is what adds up to the largest share in the mentioned hundred thousand
years. In interstellar space travels are longer – once having exited the Sun, a
good proportion of solar photons arrive at the Earth unscattered, after an
eight-minute trip – and some photons from remote galaxies actually travel for
several thousand million years. Long or short, nevertheless, the duration is
always the same if measured by a clock placed in the photon itself: no time.
Or, to be exact, just the time-like thickness of all nature, namely the
"interval" in which no physical force could ever cause a change.
Change Is Forbidden between
Physical Cause and Effect – Or, Why It Is Impossible to Plant an Interruption
between the Observer and Her Observed Diversity. No matter the
length of the photon's journey, for massless carriers of causal action the
action is not spatially conveyed if measured in the carrier's own frame of
reference: action always acts in the same spot, in its "local"
immediacy. So time does not elapse between emission and absorption, even if
outer observers should construe the causal carrier as taking millions of years
"in flight." This is a crucial link that articulates space, time, and
causality. It thus plays a pivotal role in relativity theory, where it makes
another scientific point that deserves philosophical underscoring. Because of
the influence acquired by Hume's error and the persistence of societal factors
that originally induced it, Poincaré, Einstein, Lorentz, Hilbert, and the other
founders of relativity physics saw in this special celerity, c, a
feature of light – "light's speed invariance"; light and visual
features ('videas', as 'Ideas' was originally written, with an
initial letter digamma already lost by the Greek alphabet in Plato's time) have
been always a special predilection of Platonisms – rather than a feature of
every efficient physical cause.
This narrow attribution was bolstered by the fact that
by then only two varieties of physical causes were distinguished – gravity and
electromagnetism, light being known to belong with the latter – and that among
physicists preponderated the Pythagorean-Platonic views that, finding time's
irreversible elapsing deplorable and unbearable, voiced and justified the societal
struggle against time, wishing and presenting real causation as illusory. Such
antichronic views made it seem credible that all the segments of an interval
exist simultaneously. This in turn suggested that the formalisms employing a
concept of four-dimensional space-time, proposed by Hermann Minkowski
(1864-1909), do indeed match physical processes because past and future are in
some way actual, and is why studies in relativity physics used to be infested
with time machines: the theory both allows for and demands time travel in order
to preserve self-consistency of dynamic spacetime solutions. However, both time
and space just display features from enactive causation.
The link joining efficient causation, space, and
time is the fact that what is usually named time consists of situational
change; namely, change of situations, or shifting arrangements of positions in
dispersivity. For example, deer ramble and clouds shift, causing effects anywhere
they pass. Like deer and clouds, the microphysical causal carriers also move.
But causal carriers only cause effects at arrival, because they are discrete
packets that generate only one effect. Every discrete or indivisible quanta of field action
communicates its own being to the effect, which is a change that thus comes to
exist. Causal carriers cannot carry and sustain another effect for, say, communicating their position and so use up
this single effect while moving, for example, in support of exchanges that, by
delivering an impression to the observer, would result in their observability
in intermediate stations. If causal carriers did so, as matter does, they would
lose their sole effect, and nature's transformations would "hang," an
outcome that Hume did not imagine. In this context, genuine or translocational
propagation always takes time, or, while any propagation is on its course,
nature grows older: its situations metamorphose. But causal action cannot be delayed
by its propagative travel. From their own
reference frame, the quanta of field action have always been intrinsic to their
effect and thus no change comes to exist. (Thus what every packet of the
efficient cause communicates is not numerically distinct from its own entity,
and exhausts it in a wholly local transformation.) How, then, one might wonder, is it that light
only causes effects at its arrival? Meanwhile, is not its causation in
abeyance?
Such a basis of relativity physics instances in
fact the more general case, that no cause – and circumstanced minds are also
efficient causes – can "become," or delay its efficacy. To be
transformative, causation is exerted in intransformativity, within the
interval-like "thin" actuality of nature. One might say that
causation is abeyant or suspended for a while, but since any while of
situational change comes from causation, where causation is abeyant there is no
gaugable while. Therefore, for calculations, one would do better to word it as relativity physics does,
pointing out that time does not elapse for the light ray or for any other
massless quantum of causal action, no matter how long its propagation takes or
which line of march it is steered through. In turn, those force carriers that
possess inertial mass keep a certain proportion, mathematically determinable,
of this same effect.
In sum, from the photon's frame of reference, no time passes. As far as it is concerned, the point of propagation
and absorption are touching. A combination
merging all the "own" referential frames, if perceived, would present
Nature as a nonspatial interplay of determinations self-conditioning its
parceled causal influences. Transformatively efficient causes
in nature, counting of course minds' causal efficiency exerted in it, may
remain "not-yet-done" or "in propagation" only if depicted
from reference frames other than their own. Efficient
causal action – not to be mistaken as its effects, which e.g. for light's specific modality of interaction is
observed to take, after the photon no longer exists, the next 1027 minimally possible
physical instants (5 x 10–17
second in total) or longer to occur, so many interruptions could be planted in
this process; it makes a good part of the protracted time taken by photons to
leave the Sun – is delivered within a single physical instant, if described
from its own frame. This also
maintains its effected action local – that is, ignores spatial extension; or, more accurately
said, keeps the effected action within a minute spatial locality.
This locality varies in size for each interaction modality, yet is always defined above the Planck-scale graininess, which in current nature makes no possible causal demarcation of a spatial locality smaller than 1.616 x 10‑33 cm. One might say that it is for causal carriers to act locally (also to set the locality's graininess, but this is another topic) that time does not elapse at their propagation, and vice versa. These two bound realities, namely that massless causal carriers cause effects locally and that their propagation takes no local time, constitute the brute fact of nature that the entirety of relativity physics rests on. And, because we are finite semoviences, our efficient causal action in nature should also comply with such a restraint (in a certain proportion to the inertial mass of the action carriers we directly use to influence the next-to-immediate outer circumstance – that is, to modify our brain electroneurobiological state), thereby giving rise to many psychophysiological effects that biospheric evolution profited from. A bit more technically said, the fact that time does not elapse at the causal carrier makes its action maximally local with Planck-scale graininess, or its special ratio of distance traveled to time taken yields the causal action minimally dispersive ("the closest possible to zero") at the path length. This applies to every causal action, so the causal status of knowledge