Dr. Michael Levin
Quotes to think about #4:
6 responses to “Quotes to think about #4:”
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“I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat, and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?” – YB
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A couple I’d add that could be paired with these beautiful images:
“The world is as I perceive it.” -Schopenhauer
“Adam was Adam’s world.” – Goethe
“Who we are is how we are in relation to others. How we see them is a revelation of ourselves.” – C. Terry Warner, /Bonds That Make Us Free/
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Love that Richard Watson quote…you two have the best chemistry of anyone I have heard you talk to, in my opinion..I think there is something to be said about the amount of humility that leads to playfulness..not only should we not take the engrams of the past too seriously but also the present and future…
My favourite quote is an Einstein quote about any intelligent fool being able to make things more complicated but it takes courage to move in the opposite direction… to paraphrase :p
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Hi Mike,
Sorry if this comment is not appropriate on this thread (or too long), but I figure the quotes you shared here are aligned very well with what I would like to convey (particularly the quotes from McLuhan and Godel!). That said, I am happy to repost it somewhere else if more appropriate.
You seem to intuit that there may be some connection between lower elemental cognitive perspectives (for ex. cellular processes) and potential human+ cognitive perspectives (those responsible for planetary orbits, for ex.) with much more temporally extended ‘light cones’, of which the elemental perspectives are decohered reflections (the Hermetic principle, “as above, so below”). It’s amazing how close your empirical research and way of thinking through the results get you to the phenomenological foundations of esoteric science, most notably expressed through Rudolf Steiner.
You also seem to discern that there is no reason to start with the dualistic assumption, as Kant et al. did, that our reasoned ideas belong to a “subjective perspective in here” that simply tries to model an “objective world out there”, where the latter is imagined as pre-existing and waiting for observers to come along and discover it. Instead, through our reasoned ideas, we participate in fashioning the one and only World there is. We bring the conceptual-ideal element to bear on the perceptual element and restore the Unity of meaning. It is very interesting that you are exploring the archetypal ‘Platonic’ realm by investigating the very manner in which we think and connect thoughts to one another. That is also the foundation of Steiner’s work in his Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
“The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence, is the very one which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process takes place. What in all other spheres of observation can be found only indirectly, namely, the relevant context and the relationship between the individual objects, is, in the case of thinking, known to us in an absolutely direct way. I do not on the face of it know why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning; but I know directly, from the very content of the two concepts, why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with the concept of lightning. It does not matter in the least whether I have the right concepts of lightning and thunder. The connection between those concepts that I do have is clear to me, and this through the very concepts themselves. (GA 4, III)”
If we understand our real-time cognitive activity as a lawful continuation of the elemental-archetypal processes that metamorphose the World state, we can say our decomposed sensory perspective is an aperture of the holistic Mind-at-Large perspective. There is no ‘noumenal boundary’ separating them. The meaning we perceive through the sensory perspective is the exact same meaning that exists at the MAL-scale perspective, only reflected and aliased, like a broadcast signal becomes aliased when reconstructed at a lower sampling rate. Through philosophy and science, among other domains of human thinking, we are gradually increasing the ‘sampling rate’ and restoring the original signal. When we reach ideas that reveal intentional agency in the lawful transformations of the phenomenal spectrum, as you have, we are one tiny but significant step closer to resonating with the inner perspective of MAL. And there is no need to postulate any limit to how far our resonance with the inner perspective of MAL can expand.
Finally, I will conclude by offering a few of Steiner’s quotes for consideration that align very nicely with your own research and intuitions on embodied cognitive perspectives.
Memory as engrams etched into the living body:
“What matters is this. Having sharpened the soul’s power to see things in the spirit, you see—you can observe this in the spirit just as you observe things in the world outside—that something else is going on at the same time as we form an idea based on something we have perceived. It is not the process of forming the idea but this other, unconscious process running parallel to it which produces something that does not come directly to conscious awareness but lives on in me. So if I have an idea, a subconscious process develops that is wholly bound up with the physical body. When occasion arises to call this process up again, the idea forms again because the soul now looks to this process, which is a purely bodily one. A remembered idea is a new idea created from the depths of the living body. It is like the earlier idea because it has been called up in the unconscious process that had been produced in the living body. The soul reads the engram engraved in the body, as it were, when it recalls an idea. (GA 73, I)”
Biological organs as perceptive agents:
“When we pay attention nowadays to ordinary science, we receive the conception, for example, that the human heart is a kind of pump, which drives the blood through the organs like a pumping machine. Spirit-science, such as we have in mind, which introduces us to a view of what constitutes not only the physical body of the human being, but his spirit-soul nature, shows us how this spirit-soul nature permeates the corporeal nature, how the blood is driven through the human being, not as if by the action of the “heart pumping machine,” but through the direct action of the spirit-soul nature itself; how this spirit-soul nature so lays hold upon the circulation of the blood that it is this spirit-soul element which constitutes the force that causes the blood to pulse through our organism. But the heart is then looked upon as something like a sense organ. As I consciously perceive the external world with my eyes, and through my concepts make this something of my own, thus do I likewise perceive through this inner sense organ of the heart — again, in an unconscious way — that which I develop unconsciously through my spirit-soul forces as the pulsation in my blood. The heart is no pump; the heart is the inner sense organ through which we perceive what the spirit-soul nature develops inwardly in connection with our blood, just as we perceive through the external senses the external world. The moment that we pass over from an intellectual analysis of the human organism to a vision of the whole human being, the heart reveals itself in its true essence, in its true significance — as an inner sense organ. (GA 84)”
Expanding cognitive light cone through moral development (Boddhisatva vow):
“Only through such an experience is the student able fully to comprehend—for it now becomes a serious matter to him, as it were—that personal interests must pass into world-interests if he really wishes to see accurately in the Spiritual world. It is actually the case that before attaining this stage he cannot thoroughly believe this, for the personal interests are against it; but now having reached this point he sees it… Only by progressing, and making this penetration into another more and more spiritual, and the renunciation by the astral body which has expanded to world-interests, of this penetration into another’s being, only by leaving his constitution quite untouched and placing his interests higher than our own, can we make ourselves ready for higher knowledge. Moreover, we cannot recognise a being of the hierarchy of the angels, for instance, if we have not reached the stage when the inner being of the angels interests us more than does our own. As long as we have more interest in our own being than in the being of the angels, we cannot recognise them. Thus we must first educate ourselves up to world-interests, and then to interests that go even further, so that another can be more important and of more consequence than oneself. (GA 145)”
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I’d like to know the source of this one
People don’t possess ideas, ideas possess people.
attributed to Jung, but without a citation, on the internet it could just as well be Einstein. 🙂
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I’m looking for the original quote. It’s attributed to Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self, 2nd Ed. In Sir H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9 (333 pp.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. <https://dn790006.ca.archive.org/0/items/collectedworksof92cgju/collectedworksof92cgju.pdf>
but I haven’t found the direct quote yet. I’ll update when I do. Meanwhile, our research librarian did find him saying: “Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts–which incidentally possessed him more than he it.” in Jung, C. G. (1965). Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.; Rev. ed.). New York: Vintage Books. The quote is from the end of chapter 6.
There’s also the following from Dostoevsky: “It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you.”
Dostoyevsky, F. (1994). Demons : a novel in three parts (1st ed.) Trans Pevear, R., & Volokhonsky, L. A.A. Knopf. p.558
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