I suddenly feel far more informed about the US election. I was dimly aware of most of the layers you mentioned but only in a rather crude way. Now I consider myself a lot more aware, so thank you for that.
I guess it partly comes from living on the other side of the Atlantic and somewhat of the opinion that it doesn't ultimately matter which gilded puppet sits on the throne, and also from eschewing the television or MSM news. Regardless of any of that though, or any of my own opinions, clearly it's the opinions of the American people themselves which are important (not mine) - and those, as you elucidate, are the layers.
On a philosophical note, I like your bit about not really noticing that we don't notice. I would agree with that - most people, as a result of the brain's evolved tendency towards 'efficiency', simply synthesise all these layers inside their subconscious, then the brain simply presents their conscious awareness (pre-frontal cortex, shall we say) with the finished product, so to speak. Which is why it is always helpful, and pleasingly revealing, to do these little deconstructions and present the layers consciously.
If only the MSM did that. Or at least the education system...
Thank you for your comment! I have no idea how good my commentary on the election was, BTW, having grown up in Blighty decades ago. I was both expressing my own opinion and also echoing other views I have picked up on which I don't necessarily share. The point being that there is a lot going on when those two people and two moderators are in a room together. (Not to mention what each of them ate before entering that room, where they bought their clothes, what their spouses were doing etc. etc. !)
Part of the reason I'm exploring this layers and levels business is to poke holes in the ways we tend to settle on monistic, or overly-simplistic interpretations of pretty much everything. Our mind synthesizes a huge amount of different aspects and flashes them into a single snapshot 'thing' or 'thought' or 'me' or 'you' but in fact everything is multi-layered and ever-changing.
Our thoughts and feelings, all of them, are bubbles drifting momentarily for a little while and then vanishing. Our cognitive-mental processes try to make sense of all this by breaking everything into recognizable parts and bits (words, concepts etc.) but just because we think it so, don't make it so!
As to the election, like I said, I could have gone on forever. There's an old Buddhist exercise of examining where something comes from, the traditional story being a monk picking up an old cow bone and contemplating all the factors that went it. All such factors can also be regarded as layers or levels (the words don't matter). You can have a lot of fun looking at anything and considering everything that went into it. It's sort of endless, and in a way all those contributing factors are still present even though temporally one might say that they were there at the making and are not there now, but their being part of the causation stream makes them both past and present at once since the effects of such causes is now manifesting as a chair, a table, a person, a song etc.
Indeed - and I do think it’s a very good exercise to carry out regularly - examining layers, I mean. One should remind oneself to do it, and try and make it a habit. It’s a bit like me trying to remind myself to get into the habit again of doing a regular tarot reading, say once a week or something.
As with all things, though, I think one could overdo it. And that’s the kind of thing that drives a person mad!
It will certainly be interesting to see how all those layers play out come election day.
Your remark on "to notice what we notice often without noticing that we are noticing it!" somewhat resembles what Immanuel Kant has to say as he introduces his term 'synthesis'. To rephrase it again, it's our faculty of synthesis that allows for the processing of details within our field of awareness, and it also 'puts' [dt. stellen] the objects in there for us to recognize. It's a great word, with the original greek meaning both to assemble something from parts, and something present that is assembled.
Edmund Husserl, however, adds a radical twist to it that is enormously consequential. For him, all perception is essentially synthetic. That means that 'whole' things are not assembled from parts by the faculty of synthesis, but rather it's the other way round! He goes to great lengths to show how that occurs in our awareness and recognition of 'things', which through this view show themselves not as the constitutive elements - the building blocks, if you will - of an independent, 'outside' reality, but as strictly (irreducably) connected to our perceiving them. Hence his term synthetische Apperzeption.
I will remark that this position is not merely another form of philosophical idealism, in the classic sense as opposed to realism. Rather, the whole problem gets undermined by this thorough analysis of object constitution, and is exposed as tied to a problematic premise, though Husserl himself doesn't go so far as to call it out on that. I, however, will do so, and declare the metaphysics of substance a paradigm which is now obsolete and about to be replaced!
Of course the old way to see things (aka the world) permeates our thoughts and language deeply. As an example of a notion that might be seen in a different light, your essay provides the term of 'layers' to something. Of course that is a valid and important observation, but also our experience is not constructively multi-layered (made up from layers), but rather it's the other way round.
One thought in response is that perhaps we can say that within the Oneness of Experience there is multiplicity of particulars (One and Many stuff). And the One, if we are talking about phenomena or self, is something both perceived, experienced and created by Mind. It has no inherent material existence as a One. Materially speaking, things are made of building blocks or parts.
Another thing I'm working on generally with my writing of late is trying to point out the difference between the modernist mind's conception of a solid 'objective' external reality out there somehow and the reality that even the dimension of three dimensional space within which all inanimate and animate objects and creatures find themselves, is itself the product of consciousness-awareness, that on the purely material level, such as that seen by a quantum microscope, such space does not exist, a clear boundary between a table and the hand touching it cannot be determined, it's all one indeterminable soup. Put another way, three dimensional space, which we assume as one of the elements of objective reality out there depends upon consciousness to be perceived as such, just as the wholeness of an apple or flower or whatever is a function of consciousness creating that perception of a whole thing.
To objectivists this is all gobbledygook and since conventional grammar tends to favour that subject-vs-object view (unlike Chinese more image-based language) it is hard to express in language.
I find my Layers and Levels notion intriguing, though not exactly sure why. Part of it is the fun of exploring, noticing. Because nothing is unidimensional, nothing even though our minds like to boil things down to discrete elements like 'that is a tree, a book, my wife' etc.
Anyway, glad you enjoyed it and thanks again for the comment.
PS I have not managed to make it through western philosophers very well but my impression about Husserl based some of your commentary is that he too was exploring how to incorporate experience as elemental to defining reality/truth/ phenomena.
My term for all this is 'experiential continuum'. This is what reality is. Akin to a collective dream world. It's real, but is making itself up from moment to moment, sometimes called 'self-mothering' in old texts. Creation is happening now every moment. From where does this Creation come, who or what is directing it? It is self-directing moment by moment, much like in a dream. And we are all doing it together being part of the One but also aspects of each and every particular Manies.
I suddenly feel far more informed about the US election. I was dimly aware of most of the layers you mentioned but only in a rather crude way. Now I consider myself a lot more aware, so thank you for that.
I guess it partly comes from living on the other side of the Atlantic and somewhat of the opinion that it doesn't ultimately matter which gilded puppet sits on the throne, and also from eschewing the television or MSM news. Regardless of any of that though, or any of my own opinions, clearly it's the opinions of the American people themselves which are important (not mine) - and those, as you elucidate, are the layers.
On a philosophical note, I like your bit about not really noticing that we don't notice. I would agree with that - most people, as a result of the brain's evolved tendency towards 'efficiency', simply synthesise all these layers inside their subconscious, then the brain simply presents their conscious awareness (pre-frontal cortex, shall we say) with the finished product, so to speak. Which is why it is always helpful, and pleasingly revealing, to do these little deconstructions and present the layers consciously.
If only the MSM did that. Or at least the education system...
Thank you for your comment! I have no idea how good my commentary on the election was, BTW, having grown up in Blighty decades ago. I was both expressing my own opinion and also echoing other views I have picked up on which I don't necessarily share. The point being that there is a lot going on when those two people and two moderators are in a room together. (Not to mention what each of them ate before entering that room, where they bought their clothes, what their spouses were doing etc. etc. !)
Part of the reason I'm exploring this layers and levels business is to poke holes in the ways we tend to settle on monistic, or overly-simplistic interpretations of pretty much everything. Our mind synthesizes a huge amount of different aspects and flashes them into a single snapshot 'thing' or 'thought' or 'me' or 'you' but in fact everything is multi-layered and ever-changing.
Our thoughts and feelings, all of them, are bubbles drifting momentarily for a little while and then vanishing. Our cognitive-mental processes try to make sense of all this by breaking everything into recognizable parts and bits (words, concepts etc.) but just because we think it so, don't make it so!
As to the election, like I said, I could have gone on forever. There's an old Buddhist exercise of examining where something comes from, the traditional story being a monk picking up an old cow bone and contemplating all the factors that went it. All such factors can also be regarded as layers or levels (the words don't matter). You can have a lot of fun looking at anything and considering everything that went into it. It's sort of endless, and in a way all those contributing factors are still present even though temporally one might say that they were there at the making and are not there now, but their being part of the causation stream makes them both past and present at once since the effects of such causes is now manifesting as a chair, a table, a person, a song etc.
Indeed - and I do think it’s a very good exercise to carry out regularly - examining layers, I mean. One should remind oneself to do it, and try and make it a habit. It’s a bit like me trying to remind myself to get into the habit again of doing a regular tarot reading, say once a week or something.
As with all things, though, I think one could overdo it. And that’s the kind of thing that drives a person mad!
It will certainly be interesting to see how all those layers play out come election day.
Your remark on "to notice what we notice often without noticing that we are noticing it!" somewhat resembles what Immanuel Kant has to say as he introduces his term 'synthesis'. To rephrase it again, it's our faculty of synthesis that allows for the processing of details within our field of awareness, and it also 'puts' [dt. stellen] the objects in there for us to recognize. It's a great word, with the original greek meaning both to assemble something from parts, and something present that is assembled.
Edmund Husserl, however, adds a radical twist to it that is enormously consequential. For him, all perception is essentially synthetic. That means that 'whole' things are not assembled from parts by the faculty of synthesis, but rather it's the other way round! He goes to great lengths to show how that occurs in our awareness and recognition of 'things', which through this view show themselves not as the constitutive elements - the building blocks, if you will - of an independent, 'outside' reality, but as strictly (irreducably) connected to our perceiving them. Hence his term synthetische Apperzeption.
I will remark that this position is not merely another form of philosophical idealism, in the classic sense as opposed to realism. Rather, the whole problem gets undermined by this thorough analysis of object constitution, and is exposed as tied to a problematic premise, though Husserl himself doesn't go so far as to call it out on that. I, however, will do so, and declare the metaphysics of substance a paradigm which is now obsolete and about to be replaced!
Of course the old way to see things (aka the world) permeates our thoughts and language deeply. As an example of a notion that might be seen in a different light, your essay provides the term of 'layers' to something. Of course that is a valid and important observation, but also our experience is not constructively multi-layered (made up from layers), but rather it's the other way round.
Thank you for the nicely layered comment!
One thought in response is that perhaps we can say that within the Oneness of Experience there is multiplicity of particulars (One and Many stuff). And the One, if we are talking about phenomena or self, is something both perceived, experienced and created by Mind. It has no inherent material existence as a One. Materially speaking, things are made of building blocks or parts.
Another thing I'm working on generally with my writing of late is trying to point out the difference between the modernist mind's conception of a solid 'objective' external reality out there somehow and the reality that even the dimension of three dimensional space within which all inanimate and animate objects and creatures find themselves, is itself the product of consciousness-awareness, that on the purely material level, such as that seen by a quantum microscope, such space does not exist, a clear boundary between a table and the hand touching it cannot be determined, it's all one indeterminable soup. Put another way, three dimensional space, which we assume as one of the elements of objective reality out there depends upon consciousness to be perceived as such, just as the wholeness of an apple or flower or whatever is a function of consciousness creating that perception of a whole thing.
To objectivists this is all gobbledygook and since conventional grammar tends to favour that subject-vs-object view (unlike Chinese more image-based language) it is hard to express in language.
I find my Layers and Levels notion intriguing, though not exactly sure why. Part of it is the fun of exploring, noticing. Because nothing is unidimensional, nothing even though our minds like to boil things down to discrete elements like 'that is a tree, a book, my wife' etc.
Anyway, glad you enjoyed it and thanks again for the comment.
PS I have not managed to make it through western philosophers very well but my impression about Husserl based some of your commentary is that he too was exploring how to incorporate experience as elemental to defining reality/truth/ phenomena.
My term for all this is 'experiential continuum'. This is what reality is. Akin to a collective dream world. It's real, but is making itself up from moment to moment, sometimes called 'self-mothering' in old texts. Creation is happening now every moment. From where does this Creation come, who or what is directing it? It is self-directing moment by moment, much like in a dream. And we are all doing it together being part of the One but also aspects of each and every particular Manies.