Immateriality and Materiality Together: A Prophetic Think Tank
The Immaterial and Material Together, to Death or Life: The Phenomenology of Sacred Symbolism
The physical world is made up of things and laws, and so is the immaterial mind.
The immaterial world is a pre-prepared field of states, as the physical world is a prior field of objects. A state is distinguished from an object in that a state is the operating parameters, limits, and rules and the object is what is placed within it and controlled by them. A state is generally a cordoned off area of operations, in which the operations made there are set by the type of area which expects a certain kind of object.
The material world we are dropped into is an object-oriented world, a world of “things” with a back view of its state. We see shapes, colors, hard things, soft things. Our bodies are also a “thing,” an object, our first connection to things outside of us being the connection of our bodies to these external things. This connection of body to object first appears as one of degree within the same type. It takes time to notice in this world that the body also has a connection with external things by kind as well: that objects are not the only things that exist in this world, but the world and our bodies are subject to immaterial/material forces: gravitation, magnetism, radiation, energy, entropy, dimension. Even the feeling of air blowing across our skin points to the unseen influences of materiality. It is still primarily an object-oriented world, but it clearly contains forces that are not objects and not material but are static immaterial forces influencing material objects.
But the mind is not object-oriented, it is law, or state-oriented. The relation of material object to its material unseen law in the material world is reversed by both degree and kind in the mind, where all objects, or things, are immaterial and their immaterial law is superior to any of its controlled immaterial objects.
Objects, either material or immaterial, are symbols of the physical world and the mental world. In the material world the object, the content, as I use the term, is of superior presence and consideration to natural law. In the mind, its immaterial symbols, the tokened thing which is directly manipulated, is inferior, submissive and reactive of the law, the mind’s background field of influence.
To illustrate, consider a material and immaterial symbol side by side.
In the material world, all objective things are symbols of something else. At a minimum, they denote space, weight, color, component, density, element, gravity. These are not concepts first but before humans kinds integral aspects of the physical objects which are unseen and which consequentially organize objects into classes. That is not to say that “density” cant be seen, but that density is an abstract dimension of possible objective states for Matter before the matter is organized into the kind that it is. Matter itself is before “density,” its appearance necessitating such organization by kind.
My desk is a symbol for its constituent elements, which are at least partially hidden, and even those which come to the eye are not all known unless it is looked at closely. The wood of which it is composed is of a certain species, but even the appearance of the object of a tree hides to us a multi-cellular world of biological processes, chemicals, and their interactions. This symbol to hidden meaning aspect exists long before humans enter the picture and conceptualize the desk or tree in the mind, and we take this open/closed example there to create our own objects to be controlled by the mind’s own abstract, ineffable and preexisting rules. We duplicate the outside world within. The problem with intellect is that it’s a different kind of space, where objects do not come first and force meaning, but meaning, unlike density, takes the position of controller of all mental objects.
We create the symbol of the “UN” flag. It’s a material object meant to project a conceptual object within the mind, followed by meaning for that conceptual object. On a purely physical level, the physical symbol of the UN flag as a signification, a law, which is the actual organization based in New York, made up of people, buildings reams of documents and a complexity of sessions, meetings, and protocols. But the UN flag is made only for the purposes of the mind, to establish a mental object concept and a corresponding meaning, not for itself. The organization, which is a physical but great and distant complexity, demands outer representation by a simple example to flag its existence and function. So does the mind in tokening knowledge by ideas, and this is the greater function of the UN symbol.
A material objective symbol is the flag of the UN, or “UN” written or spoken. This has a definition, a signification, a meaning in the concept of the entity United Nations or “peacekeeper.” But what the physical symbol “UN” points to, such as “peacekeeper,” or “Organization of countries based in New York,” although inferior to the actual flag in objective reality, in the mind is the inferior to its law when transferred to an idea. Of course, in the mind, we could not hold the meaning of UN or “peacekeeper” without some kind of palpable conceptual sign of it there, but without the background, controlling field of meaning, information, facts, data, there would be no reason for any symbol of representation. In the mind “meaning,” in essence, demands and controls all conceptual objects. Those objects allow meaning to be organized, collated, indexed, marked, searched and its corresponding meaning found. Ideas do not make or create meaning, they are not in the first place as the object of the material world, they reflect meaning for a mechanical purpose and allow it to be neatly organized.
The immaterial symbol in the mind, its object, has a substantive influence only on its immaterial world, but the order of influence between object and law is reversed. I want to keep on this subject because it is the key to understanding why the Transcendent symbol, our main subject of discussion, can be denied while firmly believing that we have done the right thing.
I might say that “technology will free man from his bonds in time.” This symbol is a material objective one in that it is an aural/graphical creation of man. Naturally, because it emanates from a physical body, the object of the physical body already dictated what and to what degree the forces of nature will act upon it.
But the symbol “technology will free man from his bonds in time” is ultimately not a material symbol, its a conceptual symbol, a spiritual one. Obviously, the material world of objects gives us the ability and necessity of configuring it to our liking in order to make our stay a comfortable one, but in the mind, objects don’t force this, “meaning” does. “Meaning there is not at its lowest level a symbol, its information, sense data awaiting organization, which organization. When a mental symbol of it is created, it’s by the instrumentality of the symbol, but without reality for its representation the symbol is worthless. But the reality, the facts of the world, have the intrinsic value. Their importance is not determined by tokens of them but the existence of reality only requires an ability to find it and remember it and ascribe importance to it. In the same way that we set upon a new life form as the crucial aspect of understanding long before we examine it and find a way to think about it, giving it a taxonomic name.
Before there is a symbol there must be data coming in from the outside world that requires an understanding by idea creation. The more data, the more ideational symbols are required and made.
If we used ideas in the mind like any material symbol, we would be persuaded to take the symbol as axiomatically as we do that the objects of the world that necessitate us making things and innovating to control that material world. But, on reflection, this example sentence, “technology will free man from his bonds in time,” is not only a primitive conceptual symbol but an immaterial one of belief, making the following point all the more important. The symbol “UN” is a concept and image in the mind, but it has direct correspondence downward into abstract noetic reality to the meaning and upward into reality as a physical object, since the UN flag exists as a material object. But are beliefs found in the physical world? No, they are found to have reality only in the immaterial world of states, not conceptual objects. States of phenomenal meaning push out and dictate their symbols, not the other way around. Again, we cant take the belief concept as forcing meaning, again, since they are constructed by us. Phenomenal data is not. No matter how corrupt is it, or how unbalanced it is between what is crucial and what is trivial, its the place that is the reflection of reality and the place where, whatever you do or say, is what you look at to find beliefs, not what you do or make.
I will expand on this shortly, but I might say along the way that the results of this belief tokening in the mind is not to be taken as a purely optional recreation, or our standards for holding true to its laws not to be taken as having as severe consequences as we would ignoring the relation of object to laws in the material world. If we thought in the material world that law should have an a priori status in the formulation of our actions, this means that the consequences for objects are not important, but only operating rules, of which we can’t see and are abstract. If objects are not first and made first by experience in seeing what happens to objects in various circumstances, we would act by only the influence of abstractions. We could think it might be OK to jump a gap over a crevice due to reconfiguration and mental rewriting of location, composition, angle, and width of the gap, and perhaps conclude that the effects that gravity would have on our bodies are not so germane. In the mind, we have to get its own relation of object to law right or our beliefs or we will be just as senseless: objects are not first, they are secondary to meaning.
The field of the mind in which we find ourselves, this prior law or state or field set up for the creation of mental objects, it is not like Locke’s Blank Slate, the topic that preoccupied empiricists and rationalists in the Enlightenment. The slate begins blank of content when man inherits it, but the slate is not necessarily prepared for any kind of writing we will write on it.
That is, the mental world begins as a template, a wired configuration for certain rational and emotional thought content: ideas, beliefs, sentiments. You can’t have this content, whatever it is, without the schema, the slate, and the wiring before it, and that is capable of displaying it. It’s not blank if it’s prepared for a certain input.
But back to the types, a material symbol is, for example, a political rally. We see the pageantry, the politicians, the speeches, the signs, the enthusiasm. This is its content, the material symbol. The container, its field of abstract control, is mostly the expressed political philosophy, expectations of the political plan. We would have little reason to produce a written or spoken political philosophy if we did not intend to symbolically express it materially. Politics is first and foremost action, object, not meaning, not abstracts, no matter the importance of the political philosophy.
But the point is that material symbols are responsible for signification and meaning only of the same nature and scope as the material object that represents it. They are not responsible for your mental creations and actions around them, that is the function of immateriality. The material symbols “signification,” by way of speaking, is not conceptual. When I say a “political philosophy” I do not refer to a belief or concept in the mind but writing and speaking. The concept of the philosophy or the belief in the philosophy is found only in the mind and is purely abstract. The mind pushes the material symbols out into objective reality. Material reality gives opportunity but not the necessity of conceptualization or belief.
With the immaterial symbol, the meaning is not invested mostly in the mental object of idea, principle, belief statement, or emotional or propositional attitude. Also, when I say “belief” I do not refer to the spoken or written material expression of the belief, nor a statement, mental or spoken. That is, one’s belief in the truth of a political philosophy is not the hermeneutical key to its laws in the mind but, again, refers primarily to one of these prior and determinative states or fields of influence that are only found in the mind out of which material the subjective belief statement held in the mind is created and which it exists only so that the mind can manipulate it.
The Phenomenology of Belief
Again, a state is the informational, emotional, attitudinal, rational, needful preconditions that force the mind to form myriad summarized tokens of them that can be called up at any moment and used in thought to build meaning and hold out to point to the integrity of our prior mental state of the founding authorities for thought.
I know this is highly abstract. You can only speak of these things in general terms, but the objects of the mind which does tokening and these various mental laws can be seen in the difference between a belief statement and belief premises. This is where we are supposed to correctly assume the premises, data, phenomenon, are forcing meaning into the statement, the object, instead of the reverse found in the material symbol. I don’t have to give detailed examples of this, it is only necessary to say that we are not inclined to think that a belief, such as “the example displayed by my political party will one day lead us to utopia,” is source of or support structure of its meaning, or its truth, but is only the vehicle that brings such meaning into view. It directly infers a hidden but more substantial reality that begs investigation such as our arguments and reasonings for holding this view, which alone determine its reality.
A tree or a graphical logo, a musical score, the Golden Gate Bridge, or any things that have an appearance in the material world, however, are taken as being the primary source of material knowledge, not particle physics or atomic theory. A pebble, a logo or a bicycle and like things make it possible to reflect on those forces, and necessitate and demand those forces, but in the mind, the more abstract authorities, the meaning, the facts, the unexpressed attitudinal state, makes it possible for us to symbolize by concepts. Without real, unconstructed belief authorities in the mind, the belief could not, or at least should not, exist there. We correctly assume that we hold various numerable informational, emotional, attitudinal and particularly valid factual reasons for us to hold a belief, without which we are not thought thoughtful or “immaterially moral.”
The objects in the immaterial world are state objects that run the gamut between an image to a full-blown faith statement. This content to the immaterial symbol does not exist in physical reality, at least to the extent that it is at most a facsimile of an object in physical reality, where the content of the material symbols always does. These mental symbols stand for various collected state predicates to which we have an attraction for some reason: a kind or category of facts, intuitive impressions, stored memories and information, rational principles.
The part of these which have an objective tinge have an objective material reality of objects as their main hermeneutical influence and the ones that have the tinge of law come mostly from that field of pure consciousness which is set up for certain objects to be placed there and controlled in certain ways. One mental object, such as a memory, is predominantly of something that was experienced in physical reality. Much of the information and facts of the mind’s symbolic container have been transferred into it by external language, or material symbolic types. But rational principles, beliefs, and sentiments in the minds symbolic container are transferred from the sole sphere of the mind into the container of physical realities symbols that are tinged with the aspect of law, such as a handshake, having the materially non-local container or signification of friendship and goodwill, and less to a creative object not expressly made to be objectively symbolic, such as a bicycle, which symbolizes indirectly something about, perhaps, human inventiveness, the need for physical ease, or a solution to environmental damage. The immaterial and material spheres feed into each other to build up and establish meaning
We store various information and knowledge mentally and then we have to have a way of indexing it and calling it up, especially in various categories. Between the state object and this state law, we have the spirit of the individual himself who expresses his view of the world by gathering materials from the immaterial field of law and recalling them in the immaterial symbolic objects of statements.
We attach these mental tokens of spiritual meaning to various subjective material symbols we have created, such as the word “blanket.” Saying that the word “blanket” without knowledge of its definition is then just another way of saying that we don’t hold the mental token of “blanket” in our minds with its associated informational container. We have an object without knowledge. Conversely, we can form the image of the blanket in our minds without its associated informational container only if we have seen the blanket in physical reality but have no knowledge of what it is by inductive investigation or learning through the senses.
Our main point about the immaterial symbol is that the person does not consider that the truth of the meaning which he believes in is because he has beliefs, but that the beliefs are grounded and subject to their lawful field.
Jerry Fodor’s Language of Thought[1] Hypothesis (LOTH) might be helpful here, but you have to be careful about learning something about it, because we use immaterial symbols to do so, and it is easy to speak about these mental symbols as we do about material symbols, where the object forces meaning.
The theory states that thought is a kind of mentalese, a unique language of tokening [i] of attitudinal states. One writer explains the representational realist version as saying that it is to “think that some, many or most mental state attributions that involve apparent content, e.g., the belief that there is no justice in poverty, correspond to mental states that are related to explicit tokens with the expressed content. That is, what makes the above attribution true is that the mind/brain actually possesses a representation that means that there is no justice in poverty.”[2]
We see that there is a token and an attitude, and the token of the belief is a symbol just like any other symbol. This is good. But we can see already that the problems that using symbolism in just writing about this truth cause for us, where, in the above quote, the writer says that what makes the above attribution true is that the mind has the belief token. Fodor himself assumes this. That meaning, by extension the deeper objective truths of existence, are in effect real or true only to the extent that certain mental symbols exist for it. Just as the naturalist assumes, but a huge difference applying it to belief. The hidden material influences of materiality are anterior to the object itself and will only be exposed by focusing exclusively on a physical examination of the object. However, in the mind, a belief statement is true only by focusing exclusively upon its informational belief authorities. The truth of a Belief then is true not in the sense that it is tokened in the mind.
This LOTH hypothesis seems to be an attempt to naturalize the brain, and to the extent that it tries to make thought open to scientific examination as to its structure as any material thing, especially the nature of belief, it is good. But the assumptions of a naturalistic theory is in use here, which is incompatible with the subject.
Since, as in the object-oriented physical world, the emphasis is laid upon the thought symbol. It is in LOTH the object of study in its structure, semantics, and syntax, but in direct relation to the external subject of the brain as essentially Matter, not “spirit.” It is correctly assumed that any object can be disassembled to reveal its parts, which is the founding assumption of all systematic study of anything, but the trend in their field, as in all naturalistic science, is to always hold the parts to the object, instead of the object to the parts, regardless of the kind of object it is. However, some truth comes out, such as that the separation in thought from “token” and “attitudes,” for example the following statements in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [3]
The Language of Thought Hypothesis is so-called because of (B): tokened mental representations are like sentences in a language in that they have a syntactically and semantically regimented constituent structure. Put differently, the mental representations that are the direct “objects” of attitudes are structurally complex symbols whose complexity lends itself to syntactic and semantic analysis. This is also why the LOT is sometimes called mentalese.
A mental belief sentence or statement as a symbol is like a sentence in one’s mental language.
According to LOTH, when someone believes that P, there is a trivial sense in which the immediate “object” of one’s belief can be said to be a complex symbol, a sentence in one’s LOT physically realized in the neurophysiology of one’s brain, that has both syntactic structure and a semantic content, namely the proposition that P.
The next step is also valid: you at least can’t say that you believe a proposition without a “mentalese sentence” to represent it.
So, contrary to the orthodox view that takes the belief relation as in a dyadic relation between an agent and a proposition, LOTH takes it to be a triadic relation among an agent, a Mentalese sentence, and a proposition. The Mentalese sentence can then be said to have the proposition as its semantic/intentional content (container). It is only in this (perhaps indirect) sense can it be said that what is believed is a proposition, and thus the object of the attitude (Parenthesis mine).
To be continued…
[1] (Fodor 1975, Fodor 1975)
[2] (Kaye n.d.)
[3] (The Language of Thought Hypothesis 1998) This is an online resource. It is not published in print.
[i] Is the material world forcing meaning into the immaterial world, as it is that the object of the material world forces the meaning of its symbol to be capable of being handled by the mind? The question is of course posed from the perspective of an observer from the outside of the material and immaterial realms. Only if we take the material and immaterial as exclusive realms can we say that the material world is forcing meaning, or form the human perspective. Outside of them we only have transcendence, who views them as a co-equal unit symbolizing the dual nature of man. Mans creative works are superior on inferior with their relative substantial distance from the substance of transcendence, the closes of which is the immaterial realm, making it the superior to materiality.
Prophetic Theory, part I: Subject and Object: A Prophetic Think Tank
Sacred Symbology: The Sump and the Cure of the Transcendent Type. Part 4
Sacred Symbology: Transcendent Strangeness, the Strangeness of Man to it: Part 2
