metamorphosis

The next thing that one notices is that motion can start and stop, and that changes outside and inside seem not to be independent of each other. In other words, the elements change, maybe even metamorphose into each other.

What causes or allows these changes ? Whatever it is, it must be something fundamental, like the four elements. So let me simply call it the fifth element, e5.

Free will seems to be a part of e5. It is possible to lift a spoon and then to throw it away, i.e. to get something outside that rests into motion (ero→emo). However, free will cannot be identical to e5, as some things are much harder to control (try lifting a tree) and things transform all the time without conscious influence.

Freedom inside the mind seems larger than outside. It is much easier to lift a tree in the mind than a real tree outside. But let me tackle things from a different angle: Outside on average more things rest than move, while inside the mind, things are almost always more flowing.

For example, a tree is at rest in most situations, except for a little movement of leaves and maybe branches. But if you close your eyes and try to imagine a tree at rest, it will get very hard after a few seconds not to deviate to other thoughts and to keep the tree at rest.

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In conclusion, on average outside activity is needed to get things moving, while inside activity is needed to keep things at rest. More abstractly, emo and eri are thus active, ero and emi are passive. Also, what is outside resists motion on average more than what is inside. So emo and ero are hard (out), emi and eri are soft (in). What moves usually does so in various directions. Hence what rests appears to bind, what moves appears to release.

A camera can only register ero and emo, and thus only transitions ero↔emo, while transitions that would cross between in and out seem impossible. Personal experience might be a bit different, albeit a bit paradox, as follows.

If you leisurely observe a scene outside, like at the beach, usually most things will be resting, but there will be some movement. If you then close your eyes, in my experience, what will be immediately visible after closing your eyes will be the few things that moved, but frozen in movement, hence apparently a transition emo→eri, a transition in which activity is preserved.

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Accordingly, passivity outside would then yield passivity inside, ero→emi. Actively created change outside, which more often means to get something in motion than the other way round, usually needs active focus inside first. Hence transitions in↔out would go both ways, emo↔eri and ero↔emi. Motion outside can also come to be and stop without much activity inside, like when an apple falls from a tree. Similarly, such things can also happen inside without much activity outside. Hence there would apparently also be transitions emo↔ero and emi↔eri. All in all, apparently a circle ero↔emo↔eri↔emi↔ero, while other transitions would at least be less frequent.

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The elements could a priori interface in six ways: emo-ero, emi-eri, emo-emi, ero-eri, emo-eri, emi-ero. Any interface between elements must be unobservable, because otherwise it would be something that is perceived inside or outside, i.e. it would be one of the four elements. The same argument can be made for e5, of course.

Let me imagine an interface in-out as an infinitely thin membrane. And imagine, say, a blob of ero at the interface. If it remained passive, it could start to flow while permeating inside, becoming emi, or the other way round, and similarly for emo and eri.

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Since interfaces between elements would be invisible, just like e5, they might a priori have an arbitrarily complex nature, so that the above picture is a priori maybe just one of the simplest ways of seeing them.

leads

• If free will or the observing self is a part of e5, what is the rest ? Cause and effect, fate, destiny, the free will of others, the own or collective unconscious ? Quantum mechanics has relativized the first assumption somewhat, or maybe not.
• What property of the issue of free will or not leads to millions of variations when thinking about it ? Could it possibly even be literally the effect of many “transformations” in the mind, even in circles, whatever that may mean precisely ?
• Freedom to lift a spoon does not automatically mean freedom of choice whether to want to lift the spoon or not.
• When I say that outside more things rest than move, I mean this in a very specific sense: Relative macroscopic motion at time scales that human beings can register.
  At long time scales, all things move; microscopically everything is in motion, as heat is nothing but random motion of atoms or molecules. When I turn my head, all objects move, but relative motion between them remains small.
• Some things outside keep moving, but often in a way “that rests by changing”, reminding of Heraclitus, like a river that remains the same despite its water flowing, or often waves in the sea that move sort of periodically and only drastically change their average size and shape over longer periods of time than immediately observable. Fast moving clouds, however, can take on quite different shapes. And so on; all in all, categorizing outside as “hard” is not absolute.
• The present approach to nature is consequently centered on the human perspective, on direct experience of nature. Modern science usually differs from that by trying to pick a point of view from which a problem is easy to describe.
  The oldest example for this is astronomy that has been greatly simplified by solar centered calculations instead of using many arbitrary epicycles in geocentric calculations.
• Modern science is a very valuable companion for the present approach, especially for helping to exclude naive mistakes.
• Can my observations about motion, activity and hardness outside and inside be formalized and thus proven ? How would such a mathematical representation look like ? What assumptions would it be based on ?
• In any closed system, entropy, roughly a measure of disorder, can at best remain constant, but usually it increases. With time, macroscopic directed motion and structures decay into microscopic random motion, which is, by definition, heat. Life manages to escape this fate by operating in open systems, by exporting disorder into the environment. That way, living beings can grow from microscopic seeds to complex structures and animals can repeatedly create directed motion.
  Since science considers the outside world to be mainly inanimate and the mind to be located in a piece of organic matter, the brain, it predicts that outside motion tends to disappear, while inside the conscious mind has a hard time focusing on something, because lots of mostly unconscious activity in the brain keeps stirring things up.
  Science is thus essentially compatible with the considerations presented so far, except for science’s qualitative notion that creating motion inside the mind is active, requires energy, like outside. This might, however, simply be due to the viewpoint of science, which only considers facts in the outer, material world and might thus not be able to describe inner processes as experienced from the inside…
• In meditation, calmness of the mind (eri) is often sought by actively focussing the mind on something, thus reducing emi.
  Is motion time ? If you are just sitting outside at a calm place, time does not stop despite no movement outside (emo), but people who meditate and thus also reduce emi, often report that they feel time to slow down or even stop.
• In daily life, the outer world seems often bigger and stronger than the inner one. If you look at a bicycle and then close your eyes, you can quite quickly imagine the bicycle in your mind, but if you then imagine, say, that you add wings, and open your eyes again, you will usually not see a winged bicycle.
  Conversely, you can usually make everything outside disappear by just closing your eyes (“turn black”, ero), or you can turn your head or walk away, so that the influence on what one sees outside is immediately very strong in that sense.
  Adding wings to a bicycle outside is still possible, but harder, because the outer world is harder. It requires several steps involving eri (planning, focussing), which then lead, via emo, to a different arrangement of ero, a winged bicycle.
• In The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer puts will before a distinction between subject and object:
  “[…] as feeling, a knowledge that his will is the real inner nature of his phenomenal being, which manifests itself to him as idea, both in his actions and in their permanent substratum, his body, and that his will is that which is most immediate in his consciousness, though it has not as such completely passed into the form of idea in which object and subject stand over against each other, but makes itself known to him in a direct manner, in which he does not quite clearly distinguish subject and object, yet is not known as a whole to the individual himself, but only in its particular acts,—whoever, I say, has with me gained this conviction will find that of itself it affords him the key to the knowledge of the inmost being of the whole of nature; for he now transfers it to all those phenomena which are not given to him, like his own phenomenal existence, both in direct and indirect knowledge, but only in the latter, thus merely one-sidedly as idea alone.” (§ 21)
• There is usually less emo than ero and less eri than emi, but emo and eri are on average not disappearing. So transitions would have to be balanced and/or to return in loops.
  In today’s science, the source of recurring activity would be the sun. The earth receives about the same amount of energy as light from the sun as it radiates back into the universe, which is why the temperature of earth is roughly constant. But since the earth receives energy from a single point in space and exports energy into all directions, it effectively exports entropy into space, thus preserving life on earth.
• If something rests inside and one remains passive, it starts to flow and change, but being active inside does generally not seem to create calm, often seems to do the opposite.
  I am not sure if that is true, but personally, I tend towards the following perspectives that preserve the view of the main text, and which, together with many things that would fit in from human history across ages and cultures (see later sections), would give a coherent picture of almost everything in life.
  That view would appear to be very universal, something that would apply to any form of self-conscious life anywhere in the universe, and thus public preservation and some form of promotion would seem paramount, or, if not certain, likely still better to preserve, and promote a little, just in case.
  Maybe one day, me or someone else would find an immediately more convicing perspective to my idea, or something partially or entirely different; I am not a god or goddess, just someone thinking about these things.
• The ancient Greek word psychê, which, for example, Plato used for “soul”, literally also meant butterfly. A butterfly flies from flower to flower, sometimes rests longer, sometimes only briefly, and apparently randomly flies on.
  The flowers could be interpreted as individual words or images or other kinds of inner topics, which would emerge (emi), in modern view from the unconscious, then the conscious mind would dwell on them (eri) for a short while, keeping them actively still, and then they would disappear again (emi), sink back to unconsciousness.
• In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus is traveling from island to island back home to Ithaca. This epic poem was arguably the first time a new kind of thinking was described, one that is practically everywhere today, at least in cultures influenced by the ancient Greeks. Hence is Odysseus with his ship like a butterfly and the islands like flowers ?

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  On his journey, Odysseus is helped by Athena (also in dreams) and also subtly by Zeus, while the sea god Poseidon, Zeus’ apparently more archaic brother, is making the return to Ithaca at least harder. In antiquity, Poseidon was also responsible for earthquakes, thus probably also for islands to emerge out of the sea, which are usually of volcanic origin.
• If you want to use a word like “island” in conscious considerations, how can you consciously retrieve it from memory ? You cannot use “island“ itself to retrieve itself, and if you would retrieve “island“ via an image or other kind of “token” for it, how would you retrieve that token in the first place ? Hence it seems that retrieval cannot be a fully conscious process.
  Similarly, a chain of thoughts may not be a fully conscious process. The chain can be perceived consciously, but maybe not created that way, or only indirectly.
• Measurement in quantum mechanics comes to mind, where a well-defined consciously registered result (something static?) comes about by the “wave function collapse”.
• Overall my approach is a self in a contemplating mode, where it observes what happens outside and inside. Outside things tend to rest, getting them to move is often hard; inside things tend to move, getting them to rest is often hard. One could object that this is overlooking that the self would be part of what goes inside, that a lot of what goes on inside is caused by unconscious processes, but that is not a primary observation, that is a theory based already on multiple assumptions, on more than immediate contemplating observation.
• By the way, seems that Latin ‘contemplatio’ was the original translation of ‘theōría’ in ancient Greek philosophy. I used ‘contemplation’ as observing in a calm, relaxed way that does not try to interfere with what is going on outside or inside.
  For how ‘theōría’ evolved in ancient Greek philosophy, see e.g. Andrea Nightingale’s Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2009). It is interesting that theōría first related to literal travels, typically to witness a religious event in a different polis and report about the experience at return, and then it “traveled inside”…
  In antiquity, people would usually not read a text silently, but read it out loud, hence also the hexameters im Homer’s work, for example. In that sense, internalization would likely also mirror further development of a self that learned to contemplate silently and invisibly inside.
  Accordingly, early ‘sophoi’ (wise men) like Thales, Heraclitus and Pythagoras where broadly involved in many practical ways, were active in politics, economics, religion, and more, Plato already less so, even though he tried to realize his views of a perfect state abroad, and Aristotle wrote about all these areas and was a teacher of young Alexander the Great, but was himself not actively involved any more.
  As Andrea Nightingale discovered, Plato’s cave, the probably most famous allegory in philosophy, is in the immediate sense an attempt to introduce and explain a virtual form of ‘theōría’ to his fellow Athenians, a journey to the world of ideas and forms, with likely also the aim to prevent clashes with power, like the ones that had cost his idol Socrates his life.
  Despairing, or maybe rather only almost despairing at one’s contemporaries is, of course, also the fate of any discoverer of something new, as I know all too well. I would certainly follow Odysseus’ choice in Plato’s Republic, choose the fate of a regular man, have a family, kids, and so on.
  Hey, the Odyssey, much more so than the Iliad, seems to me to be the first virtual theōría, the very source of almost all that is in this world today, and the mother of this here…
• The original idea is from 2004, doubts around active/passive inside from 2024, so what would it be in 2044 ? Personally, I just still dream of fully recovering the original idea, since it is so beautiful and would explain so many things from one …