Emerging Reality

                                               EMERGING REALITY

  

QUALITATIVE NUMBERS: NATURAL
 

Composite Understanding

I have defined this first composite stage as that time, where conscious phenomena achieve a degree of constancy and can therefore be clearly identified.

A remarkable transformation in psychological understanding is necessary to achieve this, which involves the ability to separate quantitative from qualitative characteristics (i.e. to separate partial object phenomena from holistic dimensional experience). In other words for the first time the child is able to clearly locate objects in an environment of space and time.

This crucial change represents a degree of differentiation of conscious structures, enabling more creative interaction with the unconscious. The child now is able to posit distinct object perceptions through the conscious mind and also through interaction with unconscious - at a superficial level - general classifying concepts.

In psychological experience, perceptions represent the quantitative physical data, whereas concepts represent the qualitative mental dimensions. In other words we place our perceptions in an environment of space and time, through classifying and ordering this data mentally through the use of concepts.

In a direct sense the physical data come through the affective mode of response, and the mental concepts through the cognitive mode of control.

The existence of objects and dimensions psychologically are therefore purely relative and the result of dynamic interaction.

Accepting that psychological and physical reality are complementary, this implies that the universe itself is a dynamically interacting process involving - at all levels - complementary patterns of response and control, which generate matter and dimensions (of space and time).

 

Experience of separate phenomena is always composite in nature. Of necessity, to identify an object we must be able to relate the (quantitative) perception, with a (qualitative) concept. If I for example identify a window, this involves a dynamic interaction of the (quantitative) perception of " a window", with the (qualitative) concept of "window". Neither the perception or concept - in isolation - can provide me with experience of the window.

Thus experience of natural objects arises from this composite interactive understanding, whereby prime perceptions and concepts are brought into a meaningful pattern.

 

It is exactly complementary in relation to numbers. Composite numbers are formed from combining, quantitatively and qualitatively, prime numbers. When this is done for all possible combinations, we generate the natural number system.

This is all tied up with the mathematical process of multiplication, which involves both a (vertical) qualitative as well as (horizontal) quantitative transformation.

Again, if 2 is multiplied by 3, there is a vertical transformation, in that there is a move from one to two dimensions. (This can be simply represented in geometrical terms with 2 and 3 representing adjacent sides of a rectangle). The horizontal transformation is in the (reduced) one dimensional quantitative value, which is 6.

Though this qualitative aspect is necessarily involved, conventionally it is ignored and mathematical operations involving numbers are interpreted in terms of their (reduced) quantitative values.

 

This exactly mirrors the psychological experience of objects. Object experience always involves composite groupings of prime elements, whose integration results in the experience of the object.

The experience of a house for example, involves putting together a grouping of other objects - which themselves are composite - into a pattern which when recognised is identified as "a house". Thus component elements could be separately identified as walls, windows, doors, a chimney, a roof etc. However just combining these together does not give a house. A qualitative holistic dimension - related to the unconscious - is required, leading to creative insight which enables one to interpret the new pattern. However, though this intuitive insight is continually required to "read" the object patterns, it remains implicit, and the objects formed are reduced to mere horizontal interpretation. Thus, conventionally, one interprets that a composite object such as a house has a self contained independent existence, which is consciously observed.

In truth, it is an arbitrary reading of a dynamic interaction pattern involving both conscious (horizontal) and unconscious (vertical) understanding.