Content
1.
The First Scientific Revolution
2. The Second Scientific Revolution
3. Tertiary Qualities
4. Qualia Science and Semiotics
5. Qualia Science and ‘Synaesthesia’
6. The Failed Phenomenological Revolution in Science
Today our whole understanding
of the universe is blinded by the dogma of modern brain science.
According to this dogma we do not perceive reality directly. Instead
our entire perception of the world consists of subjective
representations or ‘pictures’ of objects generated by the brain. Yet
if all perceptual objects are but mental representations
generated by the brain, then that includes the brain itself —
which is also a perceptual object. The idea that our perception of
objects is a representation of reality generated by the brain
collapses so soon as we recognise that the object we perceive of as
‘a brain’ must itself, paradoxically, be regarded as a mere
representation of reality and nothing real in itself.
Modern brain science is but the latest form of ‘representational
realism’, a revolutionary scientific worldview, which was first
fully articulated by the English philosopher John Locke. Jeff
Strayer summarises this worldview as follows:
John
Locke thought that the ideas or perceptions which we have of objects
in the external world partially represent the objects as they
are in themselves, and so whether they are being perceived or not.
This view of Locke’s is called representative realism. The
term ‘realism’ here refers to the view that objects are
real or exist apart from perception. And ‘representative’ means
that some of our perceptions accurately represent an object
as the thing which it is in itself apart from perception.
(Think of how a well-painted portrait of someone is said to
accurately represent that person.) But Locke thought that only
some of our ideas or perceptions are accurate representations of
the object itself, and that others are partially due to properties
of the object and partially due to us as perceivers. The perceptions
which accurately represent the object as the thing which it is in
itself apart from awareness Locke called ‘primary qualities,’
and those qualities of an object which appear when we perceive it,
such as its color, which are not taken to be intrinsic or
mind-independent properties of the object are called 'secondary'.
The distinction between primary and secondary qualities is old, and
has been acknowledged by both philosophy and science. It goes back
to Democritus, and was recognized by Galileo, Descartes and Newton.
Primary
qualities.
Those
qualities of an object in the external world which are thought to be
characteristic of the object as it is in itself, and thus
whether anyone is aware of the object or not. Locke lists extension
[an object’s occupying space or three-dimensionality, hence its
size], shape, motion or rest, solidity or impenetrability, and
number as primary qualities of an object. Primary qualities of an
object are said to be those which are measurable. Thus, we can
measure the length, width, and height, of a desk, and can also
measure how much it weighs.
Secondary qualities.
All sensible qualities which are not primary, such as colors,
sounds, tastes, odors, and felt textures. Secondary qualities are
thought to be mind-dependent in that physics does not tell us that
the object has a color, but says that it consists of atoms which
lack color. Color is due to matter interacting with minds.
As Bo Dahlin reminds us, the historical
emergence of this scientific world view was already anticipated by
the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Democritus:
According to common speech, there are colours, sweets, bitters; in
reality however only atoms and emptiness. – The senses speak to the
understanding: “Poor understanding, from us you took the pieces of
evidence and with them you want to throw us down? This down throwing
will be your fall.
Fragment #125; quoted from Diels, 1992, p. 168; Dahlin’s translation
For here, as Dahlin points out:
…Democritus was anticipating one of the fundamental difficulties
involved in teaching natural science to children and young people
today. This difficulty has to do with the “idealising” tendency of
modern science, i.e. its reduction of our experience of the world to
abstract representations and mathematical formulas in which the
concreteness and contingencies of everyday life are annihilated, as
it were – or at least set aside as belonging to the “not real”. This
has lately come to be regarded as a major stumbling block for
students’ learning in science
The standpoint still mythically attributed to Democritus himself —
that everything is composed of atoms — is here treated sceptically.
Democritus points instead to the paradox of using an abstract model
of what lies ‘behind’ immediate sensory experience as ‘evidence’ to
deny the primary reality of such experience. In this way he
foresaw what was to become known as ‘the scientific revolution’ –
literally a mythical turning upside-down of reality. This revolution
first found its terminology in John Locke’s distinction of “primary”
and “secondary” qualities – specifically in his relegation of
sensory qualities such as colour, taste and texture to the status of
mere “secondary” qualities — mere subjective ‘effects’ of “primary
qualities”. Those “qualities” of objects that science had already
began to take as “primary”, were increasingly reduced to measurable,
mechanical and mathematisable quantities having to do with
the relation of material bodies in space, or, more recently, the
dynamics of energetic quanta (sic).
Modern brain science for example,
effectively treats purely quantitative measurements of blood flow
and electrical activity in different regions of the brain as more
real than the actually experienced thoughts, feelings, movements
or mental images that ‘accompany’ them – indeed are offered as
‘scientific’ explanations or ‘causes’ of the latter. Thus it is that
‘science’ as it is understood today, has become what Martin
Heidegger called “the new religion”. For in essence it is a gigantic
socially-constructed myth. The myth provided the basis for
what I call ‘the first scientific revolution’. The myth was a
revolution in the most literal sense, for it turned our whole
understanding of reality upside down or on its head. It does so by
taking scientific representations of reality – mathematical
symbols and scientific ‘models’ — as more real than the
consciously experienced phenomena they are used to explain. This new
and extreme form of representational ‘realism’ is in fact a form of
‘idealism’ – taking ideas about reality as something more
real than our living experience of reality.
When it
is claimed that brain research is a scientific foundation for our
understanding of human beings, the claim implies that the true and
real relationship of one human being to another is an interaction of
brain processes, and that in brain research itself, nothing else is
happening but that one brain is in some way ‘informing’ another.
Then, for example, the statue of a god in the Akropolis museum,
viewed during the term break, that is to say outside the research
work, is in reality and truth nothing but the meeting of a brain
process in the observer with the product of a brain process, the
statue exhibited. Reassuring us, during the holidays, that this is
not what is really implied, means living with a certain double or
triple accounting that clearly doesn’t rest easily with the much
vaunted rigour of science.
Martin
Heidegger The Principal of Reason
Thus it is that Heidegger could also
declare with confidence that “Phenomenology is more of a science
than natural science is.” For it was Edmund Husserl who first
suggested a reversal of what was and still is taken as the
‘scientific revolution’, using the term ‘Phenomenology’ to denote a
philosophical refoundation of science on the basis of our lived,
subjective experience of phenomena. It was also Husserl who first
pointed to the “…surreptitious substitution of the mathematically
substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one
that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced
and experienceable – our everyday lifeworld.”
What is misleadingly called ‘empirical science’ therefore, is the
very opposite of a truly experiential science – a science
based on our direct experience of phenomena and not one that seeks
to explain away those phenomena using mathematical models abstracted
from it.
As Dahlin puts it
succinctly:
“There is no
experiential ground for the distinction between primary and
secondary properties.”
This was recognised by Locke’s major
critic, Bishop George Berkeley, who argued that so-called ‘primary’
qualities such as shape or figure, size and extension, motion or
rest were ultimately pure abstractions – for they are never actually
separable in our immediate experience from so-called
‘secondary qualities’ such as colour, sound, light and darkness,
heat and cold etc. We never actually experience a primary quality
such as a shape or figure that does not also have secondary
qualities such as colour or texture for example.
For my own
part, I see evidently that it is not in my power to frame an idea of
a body extended and moved, but I must in addition give it some
quality which is acknowledged to exist only in the mind. In short,
extension, figure, and motion, abstracted from all other qualities,
are inconceivable. Where, therefore, the other sensible qualities
are, those must be also, namely, in the mind and nowhere else.
Berkeley A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
Berkeley also argued,
against Locke, that our perception of primary qualities was just as
much relative to the standpoint of the perceiver as our perception
of secondary qualities. In this way he introduced the first
scientific theory of ‘general relativity’.
…great and
small, swift and slow, are allowed to
exist nowhere without the mind, being entirely relative, and
changing as the frame or position of the organs of sense varies. The
extension, therefore, which exists without the mind is neither great
nor small, the motion neither swift nor slow –– that is, they are
nothing at all.
That number is
entirely the creature of the mind, even though the other qualities
are allowed to exist without, will be evident to whoever considers
that the same thing bears a different denomination of number as the
mind views it with different respects. Thus, the same extension is
one, or three, or thirty-six, according as the mind considers it
with reference to a yard, a foot or an inch... We say one book, one
page, one line; all these are equally units, though some contain
several of the others.
…it is said that heat
and cold are affections only of the mind and not at all patterns of
real beings...Now, why may we not as well argue that figure and
extension are not patterns or resemblances of qualities existing in
matter, because to the same eye at different stations, or eyes of a
different texture at the same station, they appear various and
cannot, therefore, be the images of anything settled and determinate
without the mind?
That what we take as scientific ‘realism’
is in essence a form of idealism was reflected in the very
language, not only of Locke but of Berkeley too, both of whom
referred even to secondary qualities as ‘ideas’. Locke defined
secondary qualities as ‘idea’ and primary qualities as powers of
bodies to produce such ‘ideas’ in the mind. Berkely rejected this
distinction, arguing that both primary and secondary qualities were
essentially ideas in the mind, and that therefore neither of
them could be seen as having their source in unthinking matter.
Those who
assert that figure, motion, and the rest of the primary or original
qualities do exist without the mind in unthinking substances do at
the same time acknowledge that colours, sounds, heat, cold, and
secondary qualities of a similar kind do not -- which they tell us
are sensations existing in the mind alone that depend on and are
occasioned by the different size, texture, and motion of the minute
particles of matter... Now if it is certain that those original
sensible qualities are inseparably united with the other sensible
qualities and not, even in thought, capable of being abstracted from
them, it plainly follows that they exist only in the mind.
Ibid.
Common to the
thinking of both Locke and Berkeley are four basic
assumptions:
-
Perceived qualities are the product
of a perceiving subject (“mind”) and/or the property of a
perceived object (“matter”).
-
Perceived qualities are essentially
sensory impressions or “ideas” in the mind — whether resembling
innate qualities of material bodies or not.
-
Subjectivity or consciousness itself
has no innate sensual or bodily qualities of its own but
takes the form of a disembodied “mind” that is merely
conscious of such qualities as perceptual ‘contents’ of
consciousness.
-
Bodies are composed of “unthinking
matter”, lacking in innate subjectivity or consciousness.
The modern scientific world-view has
taken these assumptions further and at the same time amended them to
generate a new set of assumptions.
-
That the capacity for subjective or
conscious perception is the product of perceived bodily
objects such as the brain and the body’s sense organs i.e.,
that “mind” is mysteriously generated by “unthinking matter” in
the form of the brain’s “grey matter”.
-
That behind the world of perceived
sensory qualities lies a world of abstract quantities and
quantitative relationships.
-
That the mentally constructed models
of quantitative science represent the true nature of the
reality behind sensory experiencing, and are in this sense more
‘real’ than the qualitative dimensions of experience they
are used to explain.
-
That ideas in the mind
of the scientist therefore represent the true nature of material
reality more accurately than their own direct bodily
experiencing – even whilst being nothing more than an emergent
property of their body’s own biological matter.
These assumptions – the entire world-view
resulting from First Scientific Revolution — left open a huge hiatus
in our understanding of the universe. This hiatus found expression
in the unanswered question of qualia. For notwithstanding all
the advances of quantitative science and quantum physics, it remains
inherently incapable of ‘explaining’ even the most elementary
qualitative dimensions of experience – our experience of
colour for example. For no conceptual leap can ever lead us from
a purely quantitative understanding of colour in terms of measurable
wavelengths of light to our subjective experience of colour as a
distinct quality or quale. Not even brain science can make
that leap, since all the ‘explanations’ of qualia it offers us are
based on measurable quantities such as electrical activity in
sensory nerves and regions of the brain.
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What I call The Qualia Revolution
is a fundamentally new phenomenological account of the distinction
between “primary” and “secondary” qualities, and with a
revolutionary reversal of the ‘first scientific revolution’ that it
supported. In this new account “secondary” qualities are understood
as embracing all sensory qualities of a phenomenon in its
outer physical form — its bounded and localised
manifestation as a body in extensional space (physical space-time).
“Primary” qualities on the other hand, are understood as the felt
psychical inwardness of such sensory qualities — experienced as
innately sensual but non-local qualities of awareness as such in
intensional space (psychical time-space).
The nature of psychical space as a non-extensional or ‘intensional’
space is exemplified in the process of listening to the sounds of
music or speech. For the space of our inwardly felt
understanding or ‘resonance’ with the spoken word or a piece of
music is not itself anything that we can localise ‘in’ outer,
extensional space – it has nothing whatsoever do to with the
physical space in which the sound waves of speech or music travel as
mechanical vibrations of air molecules from one extensional body to
another. And though the written word is composed of outwardly
visible sensory shapes and colours that have extension and
are localisable in physical space – on the page or on a computer
screen — the felt meaning or sense of the word is nothing
localisable in this way. Experienced purely as sound vibration, a
musical or vocal tone is something whose source we are aware
of and can localise in physical space-time. The essential feeling
it expresses is not, for this is essentially not a sound tone but a
soundless feeling tone – a mood or tonality of feeling as
such. Feeling tones are neither just emotion we feel in our bodies
nor sound tones emanating from other bodies. They are non-local
tonalities or ‘mood colours’ of feeling as such – completing
permeating, toning and colouring our feeling awareness of
ourselves and the world. Similarly, the felt warmth or coldness,
brightness or darkness, lightness or heaviness of a musical or voice
tone is not simply a secondary, sensory quality or ‘quale’ that we
are aware of. Instead it is a ‘quale’ in a far more
primordial sense — an innately sensual quality of awareness.
Such innately sensual qualities of awareness can be considered as
‘primary’ because they are what find expression in all sensory
qualities that we are aware of. Thus a localised feeling of
warmth in a part of our body is fundamentally distinct from a
generalised or non-local warmth of feeling towards another
person, and yet both warmth and coldness of feeling can find
expression as sensations of physical warmth or coldness. Similarly,
a feeling of inner psychical closeness or distance to another person
can find expression in bodily movements towards or away from that
person. Understood as psychical qualities of awareness, qualia are
quite distinct from sensory qualities, and yet they are the stuff of
which we are made, constantly toning and texturing our awareness of
ourselves and the world in a way we take so for granted that science
and philosophy have hitherto ignored them completely. If, as
Shakespeare wrote “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” then
qualia are this very ‘stuff’ – the innate substantiality of
awareness itself. Quite simply, the Second Scientific Revolution
is one which understands secondary qualities as sensory
qualities and primary qualities as psychical qualia – as soul
qualities. At the same time it understands the ‘soul’ itself in
a new way – not as a localised subject of perception but as the
non-local or field dimension of awareness. Not as something
lacking substantiality or sensual qualities but as a patterned
composite or gestalt of field-qualities of awareness – of
qualia. Just as physical phenomena are patterned composites or
gestalts of sensory or ‘secondary’ qualities, so are they also the
expression of patterned composites or gestalts of primary soul
qualities – innately sensual field-qualities of awareness as
such. Such sensual qualities of awareness are what imbue all
sensory experiencing with intrinsic meaning or sense.
They are what allow us to feel that intrinsic meaning or sense in
both words and things, objects and people — in a poem,
painting or piece or music, in a sky, sea or landscape, in a
person’s physical facial expression and tone of voice and in their
own physical posture and comportment.
Instead of a world of invisible mathematical and
quantum-mechanical relationships, the Second Scientific Revolution –
The QUALIA Revolution – reawakens us to an invisible but
nevertheless immediate sensible and richly sensual world of directly
sensed meaning, understanding sensory experiencing not as an
abstract philosophical relation or as a physiological mechanism but
as a richly meaningful language. The First Scientific
Revolution has brought about a state of spiritual illiteracy – an
inability to recognise that behind the visible world of our sensory
experience lies an invisible world of meaning or sense. It has
turned ‘scientists’ into spiritual illiterates, for not having
learned to read the qualitative language of the senses the only
invisible world they believe in is a world of quantitative relations
devoid of all intrinsic meaning. Modern science has become ‘occult
science’ in the most literal sense, positing a hidden or ‘occult’
world totally inaccessible through immediate qualitative
experiencing and accessible only through instrumentation and
quantitative measurements. The modern scientist is like someone,
who, not having learnt to read, seeks meaning in a book by chemical
analysis of its ink and paper. Except in this case the book is the
book of nature — and the book of the body. But instead of taking the
body as a living biological language of the soul, rich in expressive
meaning, it crassly reduces that language to its molecular alphabet,
the human genome.
For the soul, physical objects are just as much symbols as words
are. The modern scientist however, takes the symbol as the reality.
Indeed it goes so far as to imagine that inner meaning or sense is a
product or property of its own material symbols, rather than finding
expression in them. The Second Scientific Revolution replaces the
philosophy of representational realism with symbolic or metaphorical
realism – understanding that just as ink marks on a page do not
produce their own meanings, nor does matter. Instead matter is
metaphor – its qualities, like those of a poem, painting or
piece of music, being the sensory materialisation of intrinsically
meaningful qualities of soul. The QUALIA Revolution is no mere
return to a sentimental and aesthetic ‘romanticism’ of nature and
its beautiful ‘soul’. It is the transformation of aesthetic
romanticism into a revolutionary science of soul, a science
that can be pursued through direct experiential experimentation with
our own sensory awareness of the world. For the most fundamental
scientific fact is not the existence of a world of extensional
bodies in space and time but our own subjective and feeling
awareness of that world. The methods of Qualia-Scientific
Research are meditational methods – methods that allow us to pass
from awareness of the sensory qualities of objects to a direct sense
of the primary and primordial soul qualities that find symbolic
expression in them — qualities that constitute the very ‘stuff’ of
which the soul is made, and the imminent meaning in all
matter.
This Second Scientific Revolution is not the invention of
‘old-fashioned’ romantics or mystics. Indeed it was anticipated in
the words of one of the founding fathers of modern astrophysics, Sir
Arthur Eddington:
Briefly the
position is this. We have learnt that the exploration of the
external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a
concrete reality, but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which
those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must
be more behind, we return to our starting point in human
consciousness — the one centre where more might become known.
There we find other stirrings, other revelations, than those
conditioned by the world of symbols. . . Physics most strongly
insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism.
Surely then, that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in
our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of
physics, supplies just that. . . which science is admittedly unable
to give.
Science
and the Unseen World
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In
The New Science of psychical qualia inaugurated by The
Second Scientific Revolution, general words for qualities such as
‘redness’ and ‘roundness’ are understood as referring neither as
really-existing Platonic ‘ideas’ or universals — nor merely as
purely nominal concepts or ‘universals’ abstracted from our
sensory experience of particular reds or particular
round objects. Instead they are understood as tertiary qualities.
Tertiary qualities are neither qualities of sense-perception
nor abstract concepts or ‘universals’. They are sense-conceptions.
Conceptions such as ‘redness’ or ‘blueness’, ‘softness’ or
‘hardness’, ‘roundness’ or ‘angularity’ however, can only arise
because there is indeed something uniting one particular example of
a sensory quality (for example one particular tone of red) with
another. A sense-conception that unites such particulars however, is
not a ‘universal’ (whether taken as a purely nominal
abstraction or as a reality), but instead the expression of “family
resemblance” (Wittgenstein) or “simference” (Wilberg). Simference is
the similarity-in-difference and difference-in-similarity between
one particular and another. The notion of simference expresses the
understanding that, like family resemblances among people, sensory
phenomena in general are not similar in some respects ‘and’
different in others. Instead they are different in the very respects
in which they are similar and vice versa. Thus when we speak of John
having his father’s nose, we imply it has features similar to it. At
the same time we might also acknowledge features that are different.
Understanding the relation between John’s nose and his father’s as
one of “family resemblance” or “simference” however, means
recognising that the very features of their noses that are similar
will at the same time bear the mark of difference.
Sense-conceptions and with them the whole idea of ‘universals’ are
only made possible by simference. At the same time, they
serve to break up simferences into sets of similarities ‘and’
differences. And by ignoring difference in similarity they
tend to focus our perception on similarity rather than difference –
tending to make us see something as ‘red’ per se rather than ‘this
red’ in particular. In doing so they serve a pragmatic function. For
in patterning our perception in such a way that we perceive a
sensory phenomenon as ‘a table’, for example, we can use it
as a table — entirely irrespective of its particular sensory
qualities and its differences from those of other tables. Similarly,
in allowing us to perceive an object as a ‘traffic light’, we know
we must apply the brakes – irrespective of the particular sensory
qualities of ‘redness’ that that light has, and its difference from
that of other lights. Instead of simply perceiving a particular
quality of luminosity and redness we perceive a ‘traffic light’
turned red. Instead of perceiving particular sensory qualities of
roundness and woodenness, we perceive a round wooden table.
Instead of perceiving patterns or gestalts of sensory qualities –
for example particular qualities of ‘rectangularity’ or
‘silver-greyness’ we perceive a rectangular, silver-grey laptop.
Instead of perceiving a face with a particular physiognomy,
look and expression we perceive ‘John’s face’. Only as
tertiary qualities are particular sensory or ‘secondary’
qualities perceived both as ‘universals’ and as qualities
‘belonging’ to pre-given objects or persons.
Tertiary qualities or sense-conceptions, whilst not merely verbal
abstractions from sensory particulars, are inseparable from
language. That is because language itself patterns sensory
perception according to the given senses of words and its pragmatic
syntax. We perceive a particular pattern of sensory qualities only
as a ‘kettle’ because its significance lies only in the potential
pattern of action by which we might pick it up and fill it in order
to make a cup of tea. Seeing something as a kettle, its particular
sensory qualities (being a particular green for example) become
entirely secondary to its pragmatic significance as an object. This
is not so in a work of art, which may aim precisely to release our
perception from the grip of pragmatic significance and reveal
innate meaning or sense (‘aesthetic’ meaning) in sensory
patterns and qualities. Sense-conceptions overlay the language of
the senses (the felt qualities of a particular red) with the
simplified given senses of language (being ‘red’). Similarly, they
overlay the directly sensed significance of particular patterns of
sensory qualities with their verbally signified sense – being ‘a
kettle’ etc. It is commonly thought that the sign function of words
is at least in part objective, referential or literal. We think we
speak of ‘kettles’ because kettles exist as perceptual ‘objects’. In
fact however, we only perceive something as a kettle because of its
place in an already established pattern of signification to do with
the potential action of making cups of tea or coffee. That is why
someone who had never seen or used a kettle before would be able to
neither make sense of the word ‘kettle’ as the name of an object nor
even perceive the ‘object’ we call a kettle as a kettle.
Perception
patterned by language has an intrinsically metaphorical character.
For just as we may metaphorically describe certain people as
‘giants’, so do we also metaphorically perceive certain
things as ‘traffic lights’, ‘kettles’ or ‘tables’. Metaphorical
perception is perception of sensory phenomena as this or
as that — the ‘this’ or ‘that’ being a sense-conception shaped
by the senses of words. The fact that we have such sense-conceptions
as ‘giants’ however — conceptions which do not seem to fit any
actual sense perceptions, belies the fact that the very
nature of human sense-perception has altered along with language
itself. Such sense-conceptions as ‘giant’ may exist only as
words or verbal metaphors today. But that they exist as words at all
is only possible because there were once sense-conceptions that
actually shaped sense-perception – allowing certain beings to
be actually perceived as giants in the same everyday way that
certain things were perceived as tables.
In The New Science ‘primary
qualities’ are understood as soul qualities — as psychical
qualia or innately sensual qualities of awareness. These form
part of an entire alphabet and language of the soul which
finds expression in ‘secondary qualities’ – in the alphabets and
languages of the senses. Thus the true meaning or ‘sense’ of the
look in a person’s eyes (in itself a secondary sensory phenomenon)
has to do with the particular quality of awareness that can be
sensed through it – the way of looking out on the world it
reveals. This quality of awareness is the primary quality or soul
quality manifest in the secondary or sensory quality of their look.
Similarly, the audible tones and chords of music are secondary,
sensory qualities giving expression to – and emerging from – tones
and chords of feeling. The latter are primary qualities because they
are essentially qualities of awareness – moods or tonalities of
awareness. What I term ‘tertiary qualities’ on the other hand, have
less to do with the language and syntax of the senses than
with the senses and syntax of language — less to do with the
directly felt or sensed significance of phenomena than with
their signified sense – their place in a
consensually-established pattern of referential and pragmatic
significance. Yet words too, have an inwardly sensed significance
that transcends their function as referential signifiers. Like the
very objects they refer to, they are just as much ‘symbols’ as
‘signs’. Like objects, what they essentially symbolise are those
sensual qualities of awareness that constitute their deepest inner
sense – ‘the meaning of meaning’.
Sensory objects, as patterned or ‘syntactic’ gestalts of sensory
qualities are materialised symbols of the very same ‘inner’ senses
as those of the words used to name them. The poet does not simply
use words to speak their own personal experience of things (whether
physical or psychical objects) but rather expresses the different
ways in which they find themselves addressed by the world – the ways
in which things themselves speak to them. The inner senses of
both words and things have to do with soul qualities that
they both give expression to. Indeed, the same soul qualities
manifest in things are sounded into material expression in
the same way that words themselves are. Things address or ‘speak’ to
us in the same way that words do. For the very sounds of language
express a language of sound. Words of a different
language, even if they denote the ‘same’ object, not only have a
given sense but a distinct and indefinable inner sense having to do
with their inner resonance as sounds. It is the sounds of words –
their sensed inner resonance — that link their given or ‘denotative’
meaning with their suggestive inner sense or ‘connotative’ meaning.
That is because, like dream images, the very sounds of language
wordlessly attract, condense and unite senses that words
themselves divide – splitting them into sets of
consensually-established verbal senses or definitions.
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In
a classic experiment on ‘synaesthesia’, participants were asked to
decide which of two ‘sound words’ (KAKA and BUBU) best
fitted each of the shapes below. Before reading on you can try this
experiment for yourself.
The overwhelming majority of people
associate BUBU with the more rounded, cloud-like shape and KAKA with
the pointed and angular star-like shape. In explaining these
‘results’ reference is made to the relative softness and roundedness
of the sound BUBU in contrast to the angularity and hardness of
KAKA. The common denominator or ‘synaesthetic’ link between shape
and sound therefore, appears simply to consist of common sensory
qualities such as angularity and hardness on the one hand, and
softness or roundedness on the other. The question arises however,
as to how and where we perceive qualities of angularity and
hardness, roundedness and softness as such – rather than in
the specific sensory form of shapes or sounds. Put in other terms,
what sort of quality or quale is it that constitutes the
‘idea’ or ‘feeling’ of something like angularity or roundedness,
independently of its expression as either a shape or sound?
In the philosophy of The New Science, such qualia are
understood in a quite new sense. For it is recognised that the
‘idea’ of angularity cannot itself be identified with any particular
object that is perceived as angular – such as a shape or sound. Nor
can the essential ‘feeling’ of angularity as such be identified with
any particular object that is felt as angular, such as a shape or
sound. Instead the ‘feeling’ of angularity is in essence an angular
quality of feeling as such. Similarly, the ‘idea’ of
angularity is not a sensory quality belonging to some shape we are
aware of. Instead it is itself a sensed shape or figuration of
our awareness. The ‘synaesthetic’ link that unites and finds
expression in different sensory qualities such as shape and sound
therefore, is not in itself a sensory quality or quale,
and yet it is something intrinsically sensual – a shape and
quality of feeling itself such as angularity or roundedness,
hardness or softness. This is how The New Science offers us a
new, more primordial understanding of qualia as ‘primary
qualities’– not sensory shapes or qualities we are aware of
but sensual shapes and qualities of awareness as such.
A quality of awareness such as the felt ‘colour’ of a mood is
essentially the expression of a feeling tone or felt tonality of
awareness – it is essentially a tone colour. Similarly a
shape of awareness not only finds expression in sounds but is a
sound, a shaping of feeling tone. Like the qualities of musical and
voice tones, all sensual qualities of awareness or soul qualities
are essentially tonal qualities – but qualities of feeling
tone rather than audible tones. Similarly, all shapings of awareness
are essentially tonal shapes and in this sense sounds – but
inner sounds rather than audible sounds.
One might object that in the experiment described the link between
shape and sound does not require deeper explanation, for it finds a
degree of expression in the very shapes of the letters used to
signify those sounds. Thus the letters K and A in KAKA are already
more pointed and angular as shapes than the rounded B and U
letters in BUBU. Thus the common denominator appearing to
synaesthetically link sounds and shapes could be explained on the
basis of a simple non-synaesthetic link between two shapes sharing a
common quality. This in itself however, does not explain the
nature of that common quality – for example the quality of ‘pointed
angularity’ linking the star-shape with the letters K and A. The
same things can be said of colour qualities. No two red or hard
objects are identical in the quality of their redness or hardness
and yet we call them both ‘red’ or ‘hard’. What exactly constitutes
‘redness’ or ‘hardness’ as such, therefore? Is it a pure ‘Idea’ in
the Platonic sense? If so, we are hard put to explain how such an
abstract idea can manifest as a visible or tangible sensory quality,
just as modern science is hard put to explain how our awareness of
tangible sensory qualities such as colour or tone can arise
from mere quantitative wavelengths of light and sound.
The Second Scientific Revolution and its outcome – The New
Science – is a science of qualia understood as sensual
qualities of awareness, one which also understands these soul
qualities as inner sounds or shaped tonal qualities. For the
essence of sound is a shaping of tone, one which lends it
specific qualities such as tone ‘colour’ and ‘texture’. Inner
sounds, as shapings of feeling tone, are what first give rise to
psychical qualia or soul qualities — finding expression both in
soul qualities of softness and hardness, warmth or coolness,
closeness and distance etc., and in the sensory qualities of
shape, texture and colour that are their expression. Thus we come
full circle, for Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary
qualities can now be seen in an entirely new light — as a distorted
intuition of a fundamental distinction between the essence of sound,
as a shaping or patterning of tone(s), and sensory
qualities of tone (whether audible tones or feeling tones) such
as ‘warmth’ and ‘colour’. Not only is sound essentially a shaping of
tone. Conversely, shape, pattern, density and texture are also
innate qualities of tone. For as Hans Jenny’s well-documented
research into the science he called ‘cymatics’ shows, not only do
phonic shapes such as sounded vowels have the capacity to create
two-dimensional patterns in a material medium, but even pure
sound tones have the capacity to create both two-dimensional
patterns and three-dimensional shapes in such a medium — as
well as altering their qualities of movement and flow,
texture and material density.
Pattern
produced by the vowel ‘Ah’ in sand
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The nature of language can only
be understood scientifically by recognising nature itself as a
language, and understanding that sensory qualities and natural
phenomena are expressions of the very same qualities of awareness
that constitute the source and soul of language — and its deepest
‘sense’. That natural phenomena, like words and music, can affect
the soul or psyche is not due to them inducing some emotion or
‘affect’ in us through a cause-effect chain or neuro-psychological
mechanism. Such ‘explanations’ only become necessary if we deny that
secondary sensory qualities such as colour tone are already the
expression of primary soul qualities – felt colourations and
tonalities of awareness. This was what led Goethe on the false path
of a ‘colour psychology’, which reduced the soul
dimension of different sensory colours to their differing emotional
‘effect’ (mechanically mediated by the sense organs and brain) on
the human soul. The new qualia science, by contrast, understands
emotional ‘affects’ that not as the subjective effect of external
sensory colours, but rather as the expression of innate mood-colours
or colour-tones of awareness or subjectivity as such – soul colours.
Through his experimental work on colour prismatics, Goethe rejected
Newton’s conclusion that the prism splits light up into its
component colours. Adopting a more rigorously phenomenological
and therefore ‘scientific’ approach to his experiments than
Newton himself, Goethe observed that in reality the phenomenon of
colour spectra only appear at the edges of a objects or of
darker object or surface i.e. at an interface of light and
darkness. Anyone who actually looks through a prism with
their own eyes will see a spectrum of violet-blue to cyan on one
edge or side of a object and another spectrum of red-orange to
yellow on the other. In the case of light projected through a prism,
only if the aperture of the beam of light projected in a darkened
room is small enough will the cyan and yellow merge to create the
full Newtonian ‘spectrum’ with green in the middle. Rather than
positing ‘invisible’ colour components ‘behind’ the appearance or
‘colourless’ light therefore, Goethe saw no need to create a
scientific model depending on anything other that the primary
experiential phenomena of light and darkness - arguing that any
refractive medium such as a prism, since it serves also to dim
the light passed through it, creates two distinct colour spectra –
one the result of a lightening of darkness (red-orange-yellow) and
the other a result of a darkening of light (violent-indigo-cyan). By
rejecting Newton’s idealising projection of a spectrum of colours
invisibly present in colourless light however, Goethe was led on
what was to become the false path of a future Husserlian
‘phenomenology’ – a supposedly ‘pure’ phenomenological science that
refused to posit anything in the nature of ‘primary qualities’
laying ‘behind’ natural experienced sensory phenomena. This was an
understandable reaction to the First Scientific Revolution, but one
which failed to offer a new understanding of the nature of
such ‘primary qualities’ – not as scientific abstractions from
sensory experience but as innately sensual qualities
of awareness - not least the very light of our awareness as such
– which, if intensified or dimmed, actually makes an ‘objectively’
sunny day or given colour seem brighter or duller.
Neither Newton nor Goethe ever considered the most primary
scientific and ‘phenomenological’ given – namely that phenomena such
as light and colour only become visible in the light of our
own subjective awareness of them. In contrast, Indian philosophy and
science had - millennia before Locke and Berkeley, Newton, and
Goethe, Husserl and Heidegger - recognised the primordial reality of
akasha and prakasha - primordial space and light of
awareness which is the field-condition for our awareness of
any phenomena whatsoever. It was this that Heidegger, unaware of its
ancient antecedent in Indian science and philosophy, was to name the
‘fielding’ (Feldung) or ‘clearing’ (Lichtung).
One fundamental question surrounding the concept of ‘qualia’ has
always been whether bodies actually possess sensory qualities such
as colour or warmth at all, or whether the latter are merely
‘secondary’ subjective ‘effects’ of these objects produced by our
sense organs and brain, as is subjective awareness as such. Arguing
for the latter position requires that we ignore its inherent
circularity — the fact that our very knowledge of the brain and
sense organs comes from our perception of their (supposedly
subjective) sensory qualities. More fundamentally, it ignores the
most basic scientific fact of all – which is not the objective
existence of a universe of objects or bodies in space and time, but
awareness of that universe. Awareness is the
field-condition not only for our perception of phenomena
but for their quantitative measurement. Therefore such quantities
cannot possibly ‘explain’ subjective awareness of phenomena and
their qualities. Arguing that any particular object or
objects that we are aware of can causally ‘explain’ our very
awareness of them – or indeed explain our very capacity for
subjective awareness as such - is like arguing that some object or
objects we dream of could somehow ‘cause’ us to dream them, or
indeed explain our very capacity for dreaming. The First Scientific
Revolution has blinded us to such simple logic and to a fundamental
truth recognised for millennia – the truth that the awareness as
such is the most fundamental reality of all and the source and
foundation of all realities. It is the task of The New Science
initiated by The Second Scientific Revolution – The QUALIA
Revolution – to once again open our eyes to this truth.
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