The biological man, the animal even, have
beingness. But man can turn around beingness using his
mind full of knowledge and then he gives new resonances to awareness.
His state of awareness, filled up with knowledge, becomes a state
of essence. This return assumes the use of reason and of his
intellect, i.e. the scientific knowledge exercised upon the surrounding
existence (a process with obviously social character) but also
upon his inner world, upon his internal processes, and upon the
possible connections between these processes and the material
world. But regarding the investigation of these latter aspects
science is still only at the beginning.
In order to explain the meaning of beingness
one possible solution is to assign to it the character of a certain
form of material movement on a certain level of complex organization.
In a first model beingness and hence awareness will appear
as a superimposed signal generated by a neuronic movement in the
brain (the central nervous system). Beingness is not given by
a point on the cortex, by a neuron or several neurons, just as
the sensation of a light spot is not given by the point on the
cortex where the information from the eyes arrives, but by a larger
involvement of brain's neurons, in a circuit, in a system. This
neuronic movement (a real neuron vortex) could determine a new
quality of material movement; we should remember that it also
involves the rinecephalon3
(the language system, connected with affectivity) the reticular
system4
(connected with the state of awakeness), etc. Then we could imagine
the neuron vortex as a new type of wave carrying beingness, as
a phenomenon new to everything already known about the living
substance. This neuron vortex, and its associated wave, embrace
the sensorial, affectional, and command parts of brain's anatomy,
less the intellectual parts, i.e. the frontal lobes. For this
reason it is expected that the process also exists in brains having
reduced frontal lobes or cortex, as for example at animals with
the "old"5
brain type.
Beingness is in fact so much different from
all the hardware and software of the human machine that we should
consider it as a new manifestation of material movement.
A possible model is that of a special wave propagating in brain's
material support (and somehow attached to it) and containing beingness.
The generation of this wave is neither an intellectual process,
nor a will process, but a natural phenomenon. Beingness is partially
in our organism, and partially in this wave. The degree in which
such a model can be scientifically justified is a matter of future
research.
Within a philosophical framework, the notion
of wave must be considered in a wide sense. Instead of
brain generated wave it is just as possible that a new form of
matter is used, e.g. a field. And is possible that what it appears
as a field is in fact one of the deep substances of matter, i.e.
informatter.
We conducted the awareness experiment in a
rather biological framework. It is true that for its description
we used the natural language, and that this is not only a biological
but mainly a social product; nevertheless the experiment in itself
has a purely "animal" nature. Beingness is a state disjunct
not only from reason and intellect (via a process which in man
is not easy) but also from the social inside the man. This aspect
begins to be felt in scientific works of various domains.
W. Buckley6 considers
the process of knowledge as a system for processing information
in which the social factor plays an essential role. For him, knowledge
is an extremely complex process consisting of multiple perspectives
interacting and of continuous interpersonal validation, epistemology
having thus a rather group reference level and not a purely individualone.
Beingness as an act does not mean knowledge
but a process, a phenomenon. It begins to become knowledge when
we constitute in our mind its meaning and its symbol via "to
be" and "to know". As an act of knowledge, it is
individual up to the use of the words for marking the state-symbols
recognized through the awareness experiment. But the moment we
use the natural language we also produce a socialization of the
awareness act, since it becomes an act that can be compared with
that of other individuals via verbal communication. But
can an other communication exist ? "To be" +
"to know" represent a primary, individual act of
knowledge, naturally generated by the human machine. In relation
to beingness, "to be" and "to know" determine
a relationship that has an informational aspect. This elementary
act of knowledge proves that knowledge is indeed a construction
and not a mere photocopying process. During knowledge, the human
reason builds up various models of the external reality (and "internal"
as well, since in a wide sense of the word internal can represent
an other type of externality).
The construction of knowledge is based on
human reason, the only one which can filter the data provided
by external and internal experiences, fed into the central nervous
system by the sensory organs, or obtained by its direct contact
with the moving forms of known, or yet unknown, matter. Reason
is naturally, instinctively, nucleated in humans but it is then
enriched and historically developed. The way logics is spontaneously
utilized by children has been already shown. A four year old child
"knows", without learning from anybody, that if A >
B and B > C, then A > C (obviously not in symbolic form
but within some simple minded
experiments)7.
If beingness can be separated from reason
and socialness, this only happens in a first stage; later, when
the state of living is to be recorded as resulting from the confrontation
between the giving state and the recorded state, then the intellect
will be invoked and the reason will experience a state of "know".
These are not yet language, but only state and state-symbols and,
if one could say so, they are the most primitive language,
the biologic language. This language is probably contained in
an extremely complex manner in our being; it is a language of
states and must be the biological support of any more evolved
language such as the language of images, the language of animals,
the natural (human) language, and the mathematical and scientifical
languages. Is it not that such a vague primitive language
is called upon by the scientist when he feels something in his
intuitive mind, something that he cannot express in words nor
in mathematical symbols ? The natural language has a higher precision
than this primitive language, whereas the mathematical language
is even more precise, more rigorous than the natural language;
but both, while gaining in formal rigorousness, lose more and
more of the intuitive powers of the primitive language. The natural
language was born on a certain biologic and genetic background,
during the practical common activity of humans, to the purpose
of mutual communication. Without this specific human property,
without the need for action to the purpose of assuring and reproducing
life, without work activity leading to economic and social activities,
the appearance of natural language could not have been possible.
And without the natural language, neither mathematics, nor scientific
languages, could have appeared. Work, reproduction, language,
economics and society form an unitary whole.
But there are two animal, biologic thingsthat stay behind these:
- the biological human machine
with its genetically inscribed programs, with the open possibilities
of its nervous system to structure and restructure itself according
to external stimuli, essentially of social nature;
- beingness,
man's property, but of a different order, that lights on the first
authentic signs of reason and knowledge, either directly, or indirectly
(as in the near human) but always with a direct origin.
Beingness leaves its direct or indirect trail, not only in reason,
but also in affectivity, determining the higher spheres of spiritual
life.
Man, as a biological machine, is open through
his actions towards society and intro-open through himself
towards beingness.
The Awareness Experiment
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