One of the best cracks I've found expressed by don Juan....

"Everything that we do in the world," he said, "we recognize and identify by converting it into lines of similarity, lines of things that are hung together by purpose. For example, if I say to you fork, this immediately brings to your mind the idea of spoon, knife, tablecloth, napkin, plate, cup and saucer, glass of wine, chili con carne, banquet, birthday, fiesta. You could certainly go on naming things strung together by purpose, nearly forever. Everything we do is strung like this. The strange part for sorcerers is that they see that all these lines of affinity, all these hues of things strung together by purpose, are associated with man's idea that things are unchangeable and forever, like the word of God."  - don Juan, Castaneda, Magical Passes

Just read this quote above this morning and while I have been studying the and articulating the limits of langauge and thought expressed here by don Juan, I can't remember it ever being put so well in terms of simplicity and coherence. I think he gets right to the point without even ever really labeling the nature of it. One of my fav quotes.

Emergence and organization towards a taxonomy of organizing relations

I have argued for a physical basis for all ontological forms of emergence and consequently appear to be denying the possibility of a great wonder of the universe: its meaningfulness. But I want to suggest here that in fact I am arguing for an even greater wonder and that is that the physical, material universe itself is capable of conscious existence through its interdependent accumulation of complexity. In other words what we normally think of as "mental" is in fact a characteristic of complexly organised forms of ordinary matter and requires no miracles for its development.
- Jones, S.
______________________________________

Find that explanation hard to digest? This is the state of the art as far as ontological reason applied to the subject of consciousness expressed by physical beings. It renders the flatland of reductionism with and added dimension of cascading or ordered magnitudes as an essential MEANS by which a possible explanation for consciousness as emergent from the physical stuff of our physical being's constitutent parts. In other words where ordinary reductionism satisfies the necessary links and connections which exist among an organized set of constituent parts forming the basis for the emergent coherence and object being expressed at one step higher but due directly to the interrelations among parts. What Jones is attempting to ram down our throats is that consciousenss is just a meta level spanning the entire system and emergent from both all levels, all objects of coherent function and all constitutent functioning. From that perspective he suggests what emerges is the experience of being conscious. While it extends the reason along already emerging lines of meta logic on the integrating one's VALUE across and/or spanning separate paradigms, it to do any justice to the nature of coherence which consciousness must express as emergent from the physical.
What is the snag here preventing us from languaging the reality of consciousness, of which Jones' attempt was a gallant attempt but nonetheless worthless in identifying the emergence of consciousness ontologically. He does this knowingly it would seem as I recall early in his paper him speaking about the Irreducible quality of consciousness which is non-physical, but in the conclusion he forgets to address how function emerges in a non-physical operation to create meaning and value abstractly vs among the array of methods properly defininig a neuro net and feed back system.
His attempt to rebuke I think comes in talkin about the ontology of language and how nothing in our language exists without some phyical corresponding reference. This kind of specious reasoning is a bit disappointing. On the one hand ontologically one defines language by physical measures or info perceieved and inventoried into sets which then are given linguistic names. However, that doesn't prevent the evolution of memes taking place on purely randomized non physical days of foamy chaos. We live for these days or at least our best humorists do and the reason for that is because it is precisely this ontological blind spot of Jones' which completes us as human beings.

~Yours Truly

In response to a challenge from a poet's community of mine over the following quote ... A poem is never finished , only abandoned - Paul Valery (1871-1945)

Yours Truly

Poetic power is a creative strength,
less an order of magnitude. What is
at the source, words, needless define
a subtle quality then missed in rhyme.

Here in the west, horizons list, belie
a future we believe, just emerges; here
we wait while time gains on what not
while future stays forever past us, there.

Thus never finished, only abandoned
in west, by flight to inner eastern light
where nothing begins, a route to end
makes a void, humorless, tasteless, fin.

So it was this poet traveled far away
before transcending the old manner
reversing the slide of my muse in stride
where words I used, used me instead.

Don't fret the mystery, for the mystery
can be gotten without effort or sweat
evolving the mean to encompassing
when the poet vanishes in a muse ally.

I say get used by the word, all mystery
and your act inscripts thus creatively
being free of any efforts to achieve
as you simply let be, YOURS TRULY.

1/15/2011 rjduberg

Hold on to your Hat