The Geometry of Meaning by Arthur M Young

Arthur Young is also the author of “The Reflexive Universe” which I think is a great book worth reading. I struggled somewhat with this one, so instead of summarizing I’m simply copying the quotations I typed. It’s the lazy way to add an entry to the blog, but hopefully anyone interested in the book will read it.

P xiii ‘All meaning is an angle.’ (possibly from ancient Egypt)

P 50 Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s essay titled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’: Peirce describes four steps which lead to action. We begin with sensations, of which we are immediately conscious. These, he maintains, occur in succession and create a thought, just as the succession of musical notes creates a melody. The goal of thought is belief; we continue the activity of thought until we reach a belief, the ‘demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.’ He goes on to say that belief establishes a rule for action, so that the final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition.
Thus we have the sequence: sensation to thought to belief to action.

P 58 This is why the Zen master, when asked the nature of the Buddha, strikes the student on the head with a stick. No words can convey participation or the realization to which participation can lead.

P 64 Somewhere within us there is an instinct for this abstract world—a world that is in some sense outside life, yet upon which all life pivots; that supports it like the pins of a great steel door to a bank vault, so that if one but had the key, all would be open to him. This abstract world is at the core of our existence.

P 69 …nuclear particles defy explanation by rational theory.
The reason, I believe, is that the realm of nuclear particles precedes form. It is the realm of raw substance: the possibility of form has not emerged, and will not emerge, until the atom exists.

P 74…we may now say the encounter with reality consists of steps that follow and build on one another:
The first step is awareness itself. The second is experience in time, a sequence of events accompanied by feelings.
The second level—threefold: past, present, future—presents memory of past feelings and their relation in time.
The third step occurs when a present and a past experience are compared and a concept is found which measures or identifies an experience or what is common to experience. These concepts permit laws or generalizations to be formed about events, and the distinction between internal and external (objective) becomes possible.
The knower can now test these generalizations or laws.

P 101 Psychologists and teachers are discovering likewise that animals or children cannot learn without doing. They find that the learning process does not consist of filling a creature with information, as one would program a computer, but of active interaction with the environment.

P 129 Quantum physics, I believe, tells the same story. It tells us that behind the phenomenal objective world there is something we cannot in any objective sense know, something which can be characterized only as uncertainty, but something which is the cause. It is a quantum of action, a whole act.

P 148 We are thus brought to a rather drastic revision of our view of the universe. We cannot insist that it be exclusively objective. The universe is also projective (or even subjective). This is not idealism or solipsism. The projectivity is not in me, it is in the universe. The universe is thinking or feeling itself into existence.

Tags: Arthur Young, Consciousness, Geometry