This is the current version of Chapter 5· of Turning Words, a work in progress. Reading it out of sequence is not recommended: see Contents page. © gnusystems – send comments or questions to gnox -at- gnusystems -dot- ca.
Current 5 November 2011

5·     Inside Out

1. Which dreamed it?
2. The split and image
3. The astonishing hypothesis
4. Umwelt and Innenwelt
5. The lightning glass
6. Wholes in our logic

Which dreamed it?

On her journey Through the Looking Glass, Alice encounters the Red King, lying asleep and snoring on the grass.

‘He's dreaming now,‘ said Tweedledee: ‘and what do you think he's dreaming about?’

Alice said ‘Nobody can guess that.’

‘Why, about YOU!’ Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. ‘And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?’

‘Where I am now, of course,’ said Alice.

‘Not you!’ Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. ‘You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!’

‘If that there King was to wake,’ added Tweedledum, ‘you'd go out – bang! – just like a candle!’

‘I shouldn't!’ Alice exclaimed indignantly. ‘Besides, if I'm only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?’

‘Ditto,’ said Tweedledum.

‘Ditto, ditto!’ cried Tweedledee.

He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn't help saying, ‘Hush! You'll be waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise.’

‘Well, it no use your talking about waking him,’ said Tweedledum, ‘when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real.’

‘I am real!’ said Alice and began to cry.

‘You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying,’ Tweedledee remarked: ‘there's nothing to cry about.’

‘If I wasn't real,’ Alice said – half-laughing though her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous – ‘I shouldn't be able to cry.’

‘I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?’ Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

— Through the Looking Glass, Chapter IV

As it turns out, Alice with her Lacrimo, ergo sum and Tweedledum with his metaphysical interruption are both wrong: it's Alice who's dreaming the whole show – not Alice the character in this dialogue, but Alice who wakes up at the end of the story. But that Alice is herself a figment of Lewis Carroll's imagination. But then who is this ‘Lewis Carroll’? And when Alice Liddell (the original model for ‘Alice’) read this story, did she see herself through the looking glass, or a figment of Carroll's imagination, or of her own? When you read it yourself at this end of time, who does the King represent?

Who's the real dreamer now? Certainly not Alice or any character in dream or story – including ‘that there King’ – and certainly not you as the person you imagine yourself to be. No, it's you as the current embodiment of Mind, the Creator of all these characters. The one who speaks for that Creator is the primal person.

For the primal person there can be no difference between self and other, or between appearance and reality. The universe of experience is the universe, period. Primal person has a whole world, and this having is not separate from being, nor this being from becoming. (Could you also call it be-having?)

The trouble with talking about the primal is that it eludes language, because it is presupposed by language, even by all semiosis. It is the First in Peirce's triad of ‘categories’, which are the basic elements of the Presence now and always. Here is how he introduced the triad in his ‘Guess at the Riddle’ (c. 1888):

The First is that whose being is simply in itself, not referring to anything nor lying behind anything. The Second is that which is what it is by force of something to which it is second. The Third is that which is what it is owing to things between which it mediates and which it brings into relation to each other.

The idea of the absolutely First must be entirely separated from all conception of or reference to anything else; for what involves a second is itself a second to that second. The First must therefore be present and immediate, so as not to be second to a representation. It must be fresh and new, for if old it is second to its former state. It must be initiative, original, spontaneous, and free; otherwise it is second to a determining cause. It is also something vivid and conscious; so only it avoids being the object of some sensation. It precedes all synthesis and all differentiation: it has no unity and no parts. It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence; for assertion always implies a denial of something else. Stop to think of it, and it has flown! What the world was to Adam on the day he opened his eyes to it, before he had drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own existence, – that is first, present, immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent. Only, remember that every description of it must be false to it.

— Peirce (EP1:248)

Jesus said, ‘When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will bear!’

— Gospel of Thomas 84 (Meyer; 5G marks the last part as a question.)

The split and image

If the primal is Peirce's Firstness, separate existence – setting self against other – is Secondness. What brings them together again is Thirdness, the element of generality and continuity, which you have to draw upon in order to lend a tongue to the primal. To grasp it, though, is to lose it. You can't expect the primal to speak consistently: language won't allow that, being tied to common sense.

If the primal person could take a philosophical stance, it would be the one called solipsism, which turns Tweedledum's opinion inside out: as a solipsist, rather than taking us all to be figments of somebody else's dream, I take everybody else to be figments of mine. But since any philosophical stance presupposes a dialogue with other selves, as we saw in Chapter 2, a solipsistic stance would contradict itself in practice. The only practical common-sense belief, then, is some kind of realism: you have to believe that the other is really out there, and you're not making it all up. (Here the gulf opens up between you and the primal person.)

Reflect: if you were making it all up, there would be no difference between appearance and reality – between the world and your perception of it. But you know there's a difference because the world is full of surprises: your expectations often turn out to be wrong. Your knowledge is fallible: there's a difference between the reality out there and your experience of it: therefore, you (and the other) exist. As Peirce put it, your ‘separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error’ (EP1:55). Besides, you have every scientific reason for believing that your whole experience of the external world is a performance of your brain. Yet it's a performance that you can't watch as such; only an observer beyond the performer could do that.

As Maturana (1978a) pointed out, only an observer can distinguish between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of an organism. It is only when you recognize ‘yourself’ as one subject among many, and thus become a self-observer, that you have an ‘inner’ life. Whether we should speak of this inner life as ‘observed’ or ‘inferred’ by others is not a simple question, but clearly they can observe (if suitably equipped) a sequence of brain states, a network of neural dynamics, which correlates so closely with your experience that it appears to constitute your inner life. Talking about this from the ‘inside’ complicates the language even further, though, because the experience generated by the activity of your nervous system appears to you primarily as the phenomenal world, and only in a secondary sense as your ‘inner’ world of private thoughts and feelings. But the nervous system itself appears in the phenomenal world, the world which offers resistance to your will. Careful observation of that world leaves little room for doubt that the nervous system itself does all the thinking and feeling, including observation. Realistically, then, you have to agree that the world is inside out. It appears ‘out there’ because of your own inner workings, which in turn appear to be ‘inner’ only from the outside.

It's as if you have twin ‘selves’, one to experience the world – the subject (who is also the king) of experience – and one to play a part in the world (and thus be subject to it). Let's call the former Dum and the latter Dee. Language being a social phenomenon, it's Dee who does all the talking. In trying to trace the other self, the subject who is king, Dee conjures up a ghostly twin of itself in the form of a disembodied person (selfhood, mind, soul). No matter what the scientific observer says, getting rid of this ghostly Dum self (even if we wanted to) would be a task akin to eliminating the first person from our grammar. What you can do, though, is realize that the first person is only one limited point of view – even though it contains all the glories of heaven and earth – because there are others, ‘who are every one sole heirs as well as you’. To achieve this exalted humility requires us to experience the unimaginable and to see the familiar as utterly strange; it requires a resurrection of the body.

The body of man is a microcosm, the whole world in miniature, and the world in turn is a reflex of man.

— Haggadah (Barnstone 1984, 25)

In ourselves the universe is revealed to itself as we are revealed in the universe.

— Thomas Berry (1999, 32)

Yet all this which seems, in a way, so paradoxical and so difficult to grasp, is the simplest and most obvious thing in the world. It is neither more nor less than discovering, rediscovering, where one actually stands, the actual ground of one's experience.

— Oliver Sacks (1984, 182)

Be strong, and enter into your own body: for there your foothold is firm. Consider it well, O my heart! go not elsewhere.
Kabir says: ‘Put all imaginations away, and stand fast in that which you are.’

— Kabir II.22 (Tagore 1915)

Jesus said, ‘I took my stand in the midst of the world, and in flesh I appeared to them.’

— Gospel of Thomas 28.1 (Meyer)

Why abandon the seat in your own home to wander in vain through the dusty regions of another land? If you make one false step, you miss what is right before you. Since you have already attained the functioning essence of a human body, do not pass your days in vain; when one takes care of the essential function of the way of the Buddha, who can carelessly enjoy the spark from a flint? Verily form and substance are like the dew on the grass, and the fortunes of life like the lightning flash: in an instant they are emptied, in a moment they are lost.

— Dogen, Fukan zazen gi (Bielefeldt 1988, 186)

The astonishing hypothesis

Once the primal One has fallen apart, splitting into self and other, the view from within the system thus self-defined is oriented outward (toward the other) by default. You simply can't navigate the world without seeing it as something really out there to be navigated. Questioning that default assumption would interrupt your navigation. This is not necessarily a bad move, since a temporary interruption might improve navigation in the long run; but you'd be sunk if you did it all the time.

Science, being the formal and public face of common sense, has to make that same default assumption in the course of its inquiry. Therefore when it looks into subjects like you and the way you see your world, it can only confirm the words of Blake, that ‘in your own Bosom you bear your Heaven and Earth & all you behold; tho' it appears Without, it is Within’ (Jerusalem 71:17). Current science may prefer ‘brain’ to the poet's ‘Bosom’, but that's a minor detail.

The discovery that the world is inside out is not new. Indeed it was clearly stated close to 3000 years ago in the Upanishads:

Within the city of Brahman, which is the body, there is the heart, and within the heart there is a little house. This house has the shape of a lotus, and within it dwells that which is to be sought after, inquired about, and realized. …

As large as the universe outside, even so large is the universe within the lotus of the heart. Within it are heaven and earth, the sun, the moon, the lightning, and all the stars. What is in the macrocosm is in this microcosm.

— Chandogya Upanishad (Prabhavananda and Manchester 1947, 119)

However, some discoveries continue to be surprising long after their truth is generally accepted, because they still appear to conflict with other long-held conceptual habits. We might call them macro-surprises, or revelations. They are startling at first, shaking up the cognitive scene just as revolutions shake up the political scene (or the scientific scene, according to Thomas Kuhn). But they also continue to seem paradoxical because they collide with our habitual way of seeing the world – which we habitually confuse with the world itself. We may therefore see revelations as coming from beyond the world or anyone in it. Many religious traditions would trace them to a supernatural source, since ‘nature’ is identified with the world as we habitually know it. Yet our explorations of the natural world itself bring even bigger surprises. In the human dialog with nature which we call science, nature talks back to us in unexpected ways. The current renewal of the revelation that the world is inside out follows upon a string of scientific revelations, many of which have only confirmed things we could have guessed but weren't prepared to believe.

We had known for centuries, even some of the ancient Greeks knew, that the earth was a sphere floating in space; but the knowledge never really came home to us earthlings until the first pictures of our planet were taken from far enough away to see it all at once. (It still amazes me that this took place within my own lifetime; and it amazes me still more that people can lose sight of that big picture so completely as to carry on the petty squabbles and power struggles that still afflict the planet.)

This was a revelation from science which turned our point of view around. Earlier we had imagined that the earth was the center of the universe, that the starry heavens and those ‘wanderers’, the planets, revolved around the earth. Then we discovered that the universe looks this way to us simply because this planet is the point we are looking from. We were limited to a first-planet point of view, as it were, but we had no way to realize this until we could shift our point of view elsewhere – first in imagination, by building a new model of the universe (more on this below), and later by launching ourselves (or our prosthetic viewing devices) far enough into outer space to become observers of the earth.

Other revelations from science have revolutionized our vision of the world since Thoreau walked the shores of Walden Pond. The idea of natural selection was already dawning on Darwin back then, but he didn't publish it until 1859 (worried perhaps about the dismay it would cause). Later on, when the molecular basis of genetic inheritance was discovered, the ‘missing link’ in modern evolutionary theory was filled in, thus completing its broad outline. Many of the details are still under construction, and there are competing interpretations of some facts in evolutionary biology; these are signs that the theory is healthy and flourishing. Opponents of the theory, or of science generally, prefer to consider these signs of health as weaknesses, thus following in the footsteps of those who have opposed every revelation. Like the Pharisees who rejected Christ, they simply don't want their habitual view of the world turned upside down, or inside out. So they demand proof before they will ‘believe’; but the kind of ‘proof’ they have in mind is contrary to the spirit and method of science. As Gregory Bateson put it (1979, 32), ‘science probes; it does not prove.’

Then there was Einstein's theory of relativity, which (much to his dismay) spawned The Bomb – meanwhile upsetting our understanding of space, time, energy and matter. All of these mindquakes have been disturbing, and continue to be so for many people. But in our time, perhaps the most astonishing of all – for those who manage to get past their dismay – is the realization that the world is inside out. This revelation is both mysterious and mundane, perfectly obvious and totally unimaginable. The explanation in this chapter may be inadequate for some readers and superfluous for others. If you are bored or bewildered by it, the author can only beg your patience, as the main thread of our story must pass through the eye of this needle.

Francis Crick, who played a role in the genetic revolution by co-discovering the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule, also wrote a popular book about the neuroscience of consciousness, The Astonishing Hypothesis. Here is his version of the inside-outness of the world:

In perception, what the brain learns is usually about the outside world or about other parts of the body. This is why what we see appears to be located outside us, although the neurons that do the seeing are inside the head. To many people this is a very strange idea. The ‘world’ is outside their body yet, in another sense (what they know of it), it is entirely within their head. This is also true of your body. What you know of it is not attached to your head. It is inside your head.

— Crick (1994, 104)

The reason this hypothesis remains so ‘astonishing’ is that you can't see or experience the world as being inside your head, nor can you normally talk about it as if it were. The brain is in the body, the body in the world, and the part cannot contain the whole. The world is inside out because all of your experience, everything from your most intimate thoughts to the furthest reaches of ‘outer space’, the whole universe of your awareness, can only appear to empirical science as something going on in your head – and that includes how empirical science itself appears to you. The world that exists for you is called the phenomenal world, after the Greek word phainomenon, which comes from the verb for appearing. As it often seems that you are looking out at that world ‘through a glass darkly’, you may well decide that some appearances are more ‘real’ than others; but nothing can be real for you if it doesn't first appear. The billions of neurons in your brain, firing and triggering each other in constantly shifting yet reiterated patterns, constitute your experience of the phenomenal world. That is why you are the ‘sole heir’ and ‘king’ of it, no matter what role your puny self may play in the social scheme.

We cannot simply dispense with our habitual way of talking about the world, but as Crick says above, now we need to speak of it ‘in another sense’. You can do this only by projecting your point of view outside of your ‘self’, making an imaginative leap into the role of third person, becoming a virtual observer of your own brain and its maps of your body. You can do this because you can observe other bodies and learn about their brains; but you can't do it without an imaginative leap because it is always the first person speaking, and the first person seeing. (Don't imagine that this imaginative leap is made deliberately or consciously. Ordinary human consciousness is grounded in this leap, or in the intent which motivates it – not the other way round.)

So the revelation in a nutshell, the astonishing hypothesis, is just as our previous chapter said: the subject of your experience is none other than your living body, the same body which to other subjects (and even to you) appears as an object. That subject is at once the subject of this book and the very body which is presently reading it. Or at least that's how Merleau-Ponty might have put it. Crick's more ‘reductive’ version takes a cue from Alice about to wake from Wonderland. On trial in the dream kingdom, Alice loses her patience and tells the court that its proceeding is all ‘Stuff and nonsense!’

‘Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time). ‘You're nothing but a pack of cards!’

However, Crick also wrote (later in the book) that ‘the words nothing but in our hypothesis can be misleading if understood in too naïve a way’ (1994, 261). The same is true of the inside/out distinction.

What ‘inside’ and ‘in’ means is no simple question. The simple ‘in’ of a skin envelope assumes a merely positional space in which a line or plane divides into an ‘outside’ and an ‘in.’ But the ground pressure is exerted not just on the sole of the foot but all the way up into the leg and the body. From almost any single bone of some animal paleontologists can derive not just the rest of the body but also the kind of environment and terrain in which the animal lived. In breathing, oxygen enters the bloodstream-environment and goes all the way into the cells. The body is in the environment but the environment is also in the body, and is the body.

— Gendlin (1998, I)

Umwelt and Innenwelt

Any animal's ‘view from within’ is primarily of the world without, with which it is structurally coupled and to which it adapts its behavior. This ‘world’ includes only those objects with which the animal is equipped to interact (perception being inseparable from interaction). Each species has its own Umwelt, as Jakob von Uexküll called it, which may not include some features of its environment as seen by an observer of the coupling process. Such an observer would see this coupling as a relationship between the organism's Umwelt and the Innenwelt constituted by its ‘inner’ states of feeling, intention and cognition. As structures, Umwelt and Innenwelt are complementary, each defined by its relations with the other. The cognitive aspect of this is a modeling or mapping relation, the organism's Umwelt being that face of the external world which its own embodiment enables it to map. The interplay between this model and the animal's intentions constitute its experience of the world, most of it seen by the subject as the world and not as itself, though the observer would locate all of it in the animal's Innenwelt. Experience can thus be seen as the mapping of Umwelt into Innenwelt reciprocally coupled with the projection of Innenwelt onto Umwelt.

The complexity of your Umwelt is a reflection of your own complexity. The human Umwelt appears to be qualitatively different from that of any other species because our modeling capabilities extend far beyond immediate biological needs. This enables us to reason about entities and situations other than those presenting themselves to us immediately. We imagine unknown realities and unrealized possibilities. No other animal, as far as we know, can theorize about itself or its own Umwelt or Innenwelt, because it knows only through its modeling and not about it. Not even other social animals project their attention so far beyond immediate needs as we do with our enhanced means of mediation.

Since the human animal is the most complex we know of, each individual human has a world differing in some details from any other; but because each is an incarnation of the human kind, all humanity has its Umwelt in common. This conjunction of unity and difference makes culture and communication possible among humans. It also makes the human Umwelt so distinctively variable that some prefer to use another word for it (or for its variations). Husserl called it Lebenswelt (‘life-world’; Deely 2001, 10). Inhabiting such a Lebenswelt allows us to be virtual observers of ourselves, and thus to see ourselves as it were from within and without, though not quite both at once. We cannot sustain both views at the same time, just as we can sustain only one view at a time of a Necker cube – the familiar line drawing of a transparent cube seen from an angle. Since your brain tries to interpret the two-dimensional figure as a three-dimensional object, the front and back ‘faces’ appear to change places as you stare at it, your view flipping from one perspective to the other. Each view is a complete form or Gestalt (a term lifted from German by psychologists), and the flip is a ‘gestalt switch’. When you flip the first-person view from outward- to inward-looking, or vice versa, the world turns inside out.

We generally become self-conscious only when our interaction with the world has already been interrupted. In the normal ongoing action-perception cycle, you are minimally conscious of your body (that is, of the body seen by others as you). The body at its most transparent – as it is for the player immersed in the flow of the game, for instance – does not appear as an object at all, and what happens appears ‘out there’ in real spacetime.

The tennis player learns how to be guided by perception so that the approaching ball is transferred to a designated position in the opposite court. Indeed, there is evidence that motor-perceptual learning that concerns distal events of this kind is more primitive than motor-perceptual learning that concerns merely motions of the organism's own body.

— Ruth Millikan (2004, 199-200)

In Chapter 2, when you were asked to turn your attention to a mirror, you had to make a choice: either do that ‘literally’ (and stop reading!) or imagine the experience. And even if you did actually look into a mirror, you must have stopped doing that in order to read on. As you read on through the words about looking into the mirror, your imagined (or remembered) experience of doing that was the object of those word-signs. When you imagine, remember or think about an experience, it becomes an object of some sign – some thought, word, image or idea. The result of that semiotic process is a new experience, differing in some respect from the object experience, the one you are thinking about. That new experience is the interpretant of those signs.

Your Innenwelt is a single sign, your Umwelt is its object, and the direction of your life is its interpretant.

An ‘experience’ that you can think or talk about cannot be your present experience, just as a physical object that you see outside the window cannot be your experience of seeing. An ‘experience’ of yours, when seen or imagined from the outside (whether by somebody else or by your own remembering), can only appear as a process, or at least an event. What appears from the outside as a semiotic process or event appears from the inside as immediate experience – but only so long as you don't think about it, or try to describe, imagine, remember or name it: as soon as you do that, the experience is gone, and in its place is the object of a new sign, a new nexus in the flow of semiosis.

You're not a pack of neurons but a process animating everything they do. That's how it looks from the outside; from the inside, you're the one and only reader of these words and of this world. And to this one reader, ‘you’ yourself are a symbol, just like all the other selves that you imagine to inhabit the world. All of them, and your ‘self,’ are the objects of (your) attention – which you can only give wholeheartedly if you believe implicitly that they really are who they are, independently of your (or anyone's) attention.

When an ideal observer of your brain at work interprets what she sees as a semiotic process, she does not see what you see from inside that process, but she does see that process itself in a way that you can't. Insofar as what she sees can be made public, it can serve you as indirect (virtual) self-knowledge, once you internalize that public model.

To be a distinct individual with ‘a local habitation and a name’ is to wear the mask of a third person, to play a particular role in the universal drama. On this vast stage, even a starring role is a bit part, a particle. This is the self you present to others, and to yourself in your self-conscious internal dialogue. Wearing the persona is something that you as first person can do in your sleep, and indeed most of us do it quite unconsciously most of the time, personality playing itself out like a dream. Waking up is realizing that all these persons or ‘points of view’ are expressions of a single self (or a single system, to put it impersonally). In reality, the distinction between you and the universe is local and temporary. ‘If that there King was to wake, you'd go out – bang! – just like a candle!’ This little bang at the end of time is what Sufis and Buddhists call ‘extinction’ (fana, nirvana). It's waking up to a world undivided between shadow and light, subject and object, self and other.

The lightning glass

It's all very well to say that your world is all in your head, including your habit of projecting it out there – but we don't really believe this, do we? We believe instead that there is a real world out there, and what we see is an appearance of it: an edited, scripted, domesticated version. How can we truly recognize that wild reality out there, when all a body wants to do is to find a safe way through it?

We begin with the discovery, always begun, never finished, that the finding of ways is part of that very world. We are not in fact alien visitors from another dimension or ghosts in a machine; rather we are habitual itinerants. We are on our way back to the strange paradise which we desperately miss even though we have never left it. Somehow this never quite sinks in, which is why the revelation of it, and our sense of the sacred, must be constantly renewed.

We find ourselves in the cosmos, and our stories about the cosmos turn out to be autobiopsychographical. As Arthur Green suggests in an essay about the Zohar, scriptures often reflect a ‘mirroring onto the cosmos’ of one's own deepest experience.

The language of Kabbalah is cosmological. Hence, as our experiences are structured by the language system within which we work, the Kabbalist envisions his inner reality as the unfolding of universal life out of the Godhead; his chief preoccupation is the cosmos, not ‘merely’ his own soul.

— Green (in Fine 1995, 48-9)

According to the Aggadah, it was only after the fall that Adam's enormous size, which filled the universe, was reduced to human, though still gigantic, proportions. In this image – an earthly being of cosmic dimensions – two conceptions are discernible. In the one, Adam is the vast primordial being of cosmogonic myth; in the other, his size would seem to signify, in spatial terms, that the power of the whole universe is concentrated in him.

— Scholem (1960, 162)

The universe is the true Adam, the creation the true fall; and as we have never blamed our mythical first parent very much, in spite of the disproportionate consequences of his sin, because we felt that he was but human and that we, in his place, might have sinned too, so we may easily forgive our real ancestor, whose connatural sin we are from moment to moment committing, since it is only the necessary rashness of venturing to be without fore-knowing the price or the fruits of existence.

— Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. 3, Chapter X

They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them.

— Bhagavad-Gita 2.55 (Easwaran)

In short, myth, science and philosophy agree that the world really is both inside and out. The subject and object of experience are two faces of a single coin, as it were, and not really separate, any more than mind and matter are separate. Peirce, in an 1892 article in the Monist, put it this way:

… it would be a mistake to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspects of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct. Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness.

— EP1:349

But the ‘viewing’ of which Peirce is speaking above cannot be primarily visual, and the kind of ‘thing’ to which he refers need not be limited to primates, or even to animals. Suppose it's a rock, for instance. It ‘appears as matter’ in the sense that we could classify it as a material thing, based on the way it can affect or be affected by other things. But what would it mean to ‘view it from the inside’? It can't mean visually looking from the physical inside of the rock. Does it mean imagining what it would feel like to be a rock? Maybe – or maybe it's a mistake to choose a rock as an example, as it's not the kind of thing you can ‘view’ (or rather feel) ‘from the inside’ at all. A body would have to be viewing itself from within to ‘appear as consciousness’ (or as some would say, to appear as the content of its own consciousness). This could only be done by the kind of thing we would classify as capable of experiencing (feeling, thinking, acting, ..... ). So maybe there are limits after all to what can be viewed from within.

However, by the time we can classify something, we've already gone well beyond ‘looking at its immediate character as feeling’. Classifying is a matter of Thirdness, generality, mediation, while ‘immediate character’ is First. If you did experience the feeling of being a rock, you wouldn't think of yourself as a rock. Nor would you categorize yourself as a human (or anything else) if you experienced being what you are in its pure immediacy. Before you can sort the universe into types, you have to divide it into parts; but ‘immediate character as feeling’ has no parts, as Peirce said above of the First. Nor does it have unity, since

Nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

— Yeats, ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’

From this it would follow that whatever you ‘view from the inside’ cannot be a particular thing, cannot be a mere part of the universe – not if this ‘view’ is wholly immediate. Conversely, anything you can view from the outside can only be a part of the universe, whether the thing has its own unity or not, simply because some other part of the universe is not included in it. Its very identity is determined by its ‘relations of action and reaction with other things’, and its observer must also be among the others.

Just as Peirce's ‘viewing’ is not merely visual, or even perceptual, his ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ do not merely refer to relative placement in physical space. A system or thing ‘contains’ its inside not as a cup contains coffee, but as a whole contains its own parts. A part cannot view the whole from the outside, and any view it can have of the whole from inside can only be partial. Anything ‘viewed’ in its ‘immediate character as feeling’ cannot appear as a part, or as apart, and thus must be wholly one with the ‘viewer’. In immediacy can be only one inside. This is the heart from which the primal person speaks.

Wholes in our logic

This immediate character of your consciousness, grounding as it does your entire experience of the world, must logically extend to the whole universe insofar as you can know it (and as Peirce often said, it makes no sense to talk about something you can't possibly know). The universes of discourse and of reality can only be wholly thus. Heraclitus put it this way:

Listening not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one. [οὐκ ἐμοῦ ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι.]

Phaneroscopy is the description of the phaneron; and by the phaneron I mean the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not. If you ask present when, and to whose mind, I reply that I leave these questions unanswered, never having entertained a doubt that those features of the phaneron that I have found in my mind are present at all times and to all minds.

— CP 1.284

With the phaneron or some part of it already ‘present to the mind’, we can open up the question ‘of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not.’ Here begins the path of inquiry; and just as we are (doubtless) talking about the same phaneron, we all believe in a (single) reality quite beyond what anyone thinks of it. We also believe that some of our statements can be true, regardless of whether we know or believe them to be true or not. As Peirce put it, ‘Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question’ (EP2:240). The fact that we have embarked on an inquiry demonstrates our belief in a reality beyond us, about which we may yet come to know something. That subject of our inquiry is ultimately one, as Peirce remarked in the third of his Harvard lectures:

Every proposition whatever has the Universe of Discourse for one of its subjects and all propositions have one Subject in common which we call the Truth. It is the aggregate of all realities, what the Hegelians call the Absolute.

— EP2:173 (1903)

What is common to all who engage in genuine dialog is a triad of universes: what appears to us ‘in here’ (the phaneron) is one; reality ‘out there’ is one; and the logos mediating between them is a semiotic universe. If you actually ‘entertain a doubt’ of this universality – a real doubt, not a ‘paper doubt’ (as Peirce called it) – then lacking any logical standard or common system of reference, you can't believe that any of us knows what we are talking about. Now that would put a damper on the dialogue, wouldn't it?

And that's why, listening not to me or Peirce or Heraclitus but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one. Though ‘the many live as though they had a private understanding’, the primal person has no such illusion, and neither does the logician. As primal person, the phaneron is your ‘original face’ (to use a Buddhist term), and is neither here nor there.

Thus when Peirce speaks of ‘viewing a thing from the inside’, he is not speaking of a view from inside the thing, or even from inside an individual person, for the latter indeed is ‘only a negation’:

The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation. This is man,

proud man,

Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence.

— Peirce (EP1:55)

The ‘view from within’ as i have ascribed it here to the primal person differs from the ‘first-person view’ spoken of in neuropsychological models of the mind. Again we have a subject or system viewing itself from within, but now it's a matter of one part viewing another. Consequently the system has a ‘sense of self’, which is just what the primal person cannot have. This is the difference between the first person and the primal person.

A human brain constantly monitors its body, or certain aspects of its functioning, and some aspects of the body-map thus generated are accessible to consciousness, letting us know what it feels like to be that body. This phenomenal self-model, as Thomas Metzinger (2003) calls it, is quite different from the ‘immediate character’ which ‘appears as consciousness’ in Peirce's ‘view from within’ as described above. The PSM is thus called because it appears to you as your self, while a third-person (theoretical) view would see it as an internal model of your own body. This self, being a function of your brain, is physically located inside your body; but unlike your view of the external world (which is also a brain function), it also feels like the inside of your body. And that's not all: since your brain can monitor some of its own activity, you can even feel your selfhood from the inside, not just as a living body but also as a subject perceiving some object or other. Following the tradition which refers to the subject-object relation as ‘intentionality’, Metzinger calls this a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, or PMIR for short (2003, 411). This enables you to be conscious of yourself as conscious, thus taking a ‘first-person perspective’.

Humans, then, practice a special kind of self-observation – but a truly external observer, viewing this whole process from the outside, would distinguish between the observing self (which is the whole system) and the ‘self’ observed (which is a model within the system, a subprocess whose function is to appear as a phenomenon within the phenomenal world). It seems likely that this rare ability could only evolve in social animals. Conscious subjectivity almost certainly develops in tandem with intersubjectivity: the possibility of ‘having’ a conscious self arises with recognition of others as subjects of experience (i.e. with implicit modeling of others as selves). This is the developmental aspect of logic being ‘rooted in the social principle,’ as Peirce put it (recall Chapter 2). Since all of this applies as well to language, the grammatical ‘first person’ would seem inseparable from the cognitive first-person perspective. If so, then the system's ‘view’ of itself ‘from the inside’ does not really appear to the system as consciousness until it has incorporated enough of the ‘view from outside’ to distinguish between the world and its consciousness of the world, and thus to include self-consciousness within phenomenal consciousness.

On the other hand, you might well ask how a body can recognize others as other selves (and thus have a social life) without first recognizing oneself as a self … and round we go again.

If all this appears needlessly complex, that's because it's an attempt to explain in logical and scientific terms why the deceptively simple language of the primal person – of scripture and revelation, or turning words – must often appear obscure to common sense: because the first-, second- and third-person perspectives are all extraneous to the primal person's point of view, which only dons the mask of personality in order to furnish that primal point with a tongue.

Most ignorant of what we're most assured, we collide and collude with the limits of language at every turn. Every whole-body reading of the word or of the world, every act of cognition or perception, is a flash of light-and-darkness or birth-and-death. This was already intimated in Chapter 2 with a quotation from Dogen's Genjokoan, and here it is again in an alternate translation:

When you see forms or hear sounds, fully engaging body-and-mind, you intuit dharma intimately. Unlike things and their reflections in the mirror, and unlike the moon and its reflection in the water, when one side is illumined, the other side is dark.

— (Aitken and Tanahashi, in Tanahashi 2000, 35)

Next chapter: Revelation and Concealment →