Sunday, September 4, 2011

OOO my word!

Some more thoughts on the previous post:

Some of Morton's language reminds me of Kennilingam's interpretation of Habermas in his critique of the philosophy of the subject. For example from Integral Spirituality, Chapter 8:

“So consciousness itself is deficient—whether personal or transpersonal, whether pure or not pure, essential or relative, high or low, big mind or small mind, vipassana, bare attention, centering prayer, contemplative awareness—none of them can see these other truths, and that is why Habermas and the postmodernists extensively criticize 'the philosophy of consciousness.'”

This is part of Morton's point about the withdrawn nature of ontological objects, in that they are inaccessible to a subjective consciousness “with privileged access to phenomena.”


For this is “a world without reference to a subject.” No, it doesn't eliminate the subject, just the philosophy of a subject with such accessibility. Recall the subject is included but “departs from normative Western ideas of the subject as transcendence.” This includes the subjective capacity of 'implication,' which suggests “being enfolded and unfolded from something deeper,” something like matter, energy or consciousness.

He sees QM as denying any fundamental: “Just as there is no top level, there may be no bottom level.” There is not “any kind of substrate, whether it consists of discrete atoms or of a continuum.” Not even a universal continuum. In that regard it is interesting that he criticizes systems thinking, often thought of in 'developmental' circles as a higher cognitive stage. Morton suggests that such thinking is missing the quantum view, i.e, that quanta are the objective reality, not systems. And “positive assertions about [quantum] objects fail” specifically because they are in part (shadowy pun intended) inaccessible. Here we have a legitimation debate as to what is a better interpretation of the quantum view, accepting that it generally might be a higher mode of cognitive functioning (in some partial respects, in some of its parts).


As this Kennilingam satire states: "Resistance is partial!"

1 comment:

  1. From the SEP entry on "the role of decoherence in QM":*

    "If we understand the theory of decoherence as pointing to how classical concepts might in fact emerge from quantum mechanics, this seems to undermine Bohr's basic position. Of course it would be a mistake to say that decoherence (a part of quantum theory) contradicts the Copenhagen approach (an interpretation of quantum theory). However, decoherence does suggest that one might want to adopt alternative interpretations.... In this sense, if the programme of decoherence is successful as sketched in Section 3.3, it will indeed be a blow to Bohr's interpretation coming from quantum physics itself."

    *http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-decoherence/

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