Cockshott, Ryojin, Numbers, and Experience
I heard a lecture recently by the materialist philosopher, Prof Paul Cockshott, concerning the ideas we have about infinity and the endless division, or extension, of numbers. In the lecture he mentioned a theory that understands our concepts of number and counting to come through a cognition of repeated movements – such as strides in running – which appeared in our consciousnes through the evolutionary process. This appears to me as a persuasive theory. At least one rooted in a sensible view of experience.
In fact, the idea – the perhaps pre-cognitive roots of counting and number and subsequent notions of finitude and infinity -is one that implies the presumed-entirely objective realm of mathematics is rooted in experience; not simply subjective, but not excluding of subjective experience. In other words, mathematics and discursive thinking generally (including philosophy) is abstracted from experience. This puts a much more intimate foundation under the debates characterising such trains of western philosophy as materialism/idealism, realism/empiricism/rationalism. It could be seen as recontextualising all of the above dualities as abstracts from experience. This foundation is neither subjective nor objective, but inclusive of both sphere’s within the embodied experience of human beings. This reminded me of a teaching by the Pure Land/Shin Buddhist thinker and reformer, Soga Ryojin.
In his discussion of the human being as both a creation of and embodiment of the ‘alaya vijnana’, the Storehouse Consciousness, the enlightened aspect of which he could personalise as Dharmakara Bodhisattva, or Amida Buddha, he spoke of the immanence of the entire history of the Earth in the human form. In a very basic way of saying it, we come out of the Earth, we are supported by the Earth, we share affinity with all the other forms of life on the Earth. The experience, and pre-cognitive knowledge of the development of life of and on the Earth is embodied in us, and as dynamic beings, we carry that creative dynamism further in every moment of life.
Of course we could now carry that understanding itself further and say that the Earth itself is a creation of the universal creative dynamism, and just as all the history of the Earth is embodied in us, so the Earth too is the embodiment, or part of the embodiment, of the total history of existence. If we can speak of such dynamic change, productivity, development, and even creativity as the working of a consciousness, it must not be a limited or abstract or purely intellectual form of consciousness. In fact, it can’t be either ordinary consciousness or unconsciousness but the embodying and embodiment of a universal consciousness. This consciousness would be nothing apart from it’s embodied experience, and yet in that experience totally pervasive, totally potent, totally present and it's ‘history’ as embodied knowledge at the root of all subsequent experience and cognition.