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There was, earlier, a question (from John M. I think) about what
the "ambience" is defined as in my father's work. Here is the best description I
can offer. From page 40 of "Life, Itself":
Robert Rosen wrote: "Science is built on dualities. Indeed,
every mode of discrimination creates one. But the most fundamental dualism,
which all others presuppose, is of course the one a discriminator makes between
the self and everything else.
As Descartes argued long ago, the only absolute, undoubtable
certainty lies here, and he put it with the ultimate terseness: Cogito, ergo
sum. By "cogito," Descartes meant the entire spectrum of the activity of his
mind: perception, cognition, ideation, will, imagination. Also, although this
gave him a great deal of trouble, because it involved something beyond this warm
circle of certainty, he meant the capacity for action.
Thus, as Descartes says, we know our selves, without even
having to look, by an immediate kind of direct apprehension and with a knowledge
that brooks no skepticism.
Oddly, I have not been able to find a really good word that
incorporates all of the activities of the self that we know with such immediate
certainty. In physics, the word observer is often used, but as we shall see,
this is too passive. There is the Freudian word ego, which is more encompassing
than "observer" but has become ringed round with connotations irrelevant or
misleading for our purposes. Perhaps best, as we have done, to continue to use
the noncommittal word "self", though it seems rather drab and humble, and
certainly insufficiently technical, for the exalted role that Descartes gives
it.
At any rate, we know our self with ultimate certainty, even
though this knowledge is subjective; it cannot be experienced as we experience
it by anything else; at best it can only be reported. As noted, we encompass as
belonging to the self, or contained within it, our perceptions, our thoughts,
our ideas, our imaginings, our will, and the actions that spring from them. This
is the INNER WORLD. Everything else is OUTSIDE.
What else is there? Whatever it is, I shall call it "the
ambience". Most of us believe there are indeed many things in our ambience; this
is the EXTERNAL WORLD, the world of objective reality, the world of phenomena.
That world is important to us, because our bodies are in that world, and to that
extent at least, we must seriously care what goes on out
there.
Much more could be, and has been, said about this fundamental
dualism between the self and its ambience, but we shall need no more than the
simple fact of its existence. Science, in fact requires both: It requires an
external, objective world of phenomena, and the internal subjective world of the
self, which perceives, organizes, acts, and understands. Indeed, science itself
is a way (perhaps not the only way) of bringing the ambience INSIDE, in an
important sense, a way of importing the external world of phenomena into the
internal, subjective world that we apprehend so directly. I shall have much more
to say about this when we come to the idea of natural law, and especially, the
idea of a model. Indeed, as we shall see, the fact that inner, subjective models
of objective phenomena exist connotes the most profound things about the self,
about its ambience, and above all, the relations between
them."
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