Here's how Morris explains the Muller-Lyer illusion:

"The line segments are welded into arrow structures the visual expanse of which bulges outward or pinches inward. In the visual field, the line segments are therefore of neither equal nor unequal size, since the eye is neither abstracting line segments nor comparing their size, it is seeing and comparing arrows that each constitute their own standard of expanse. It is as if, Merleau-Ponty writes, the one line 'did not belong to the same universe as the other.' Since the figure gives no basis for comparing objective size, it is misguided to call the phenomenon an error of size perception, an illusion (PP 12/6). On the moon, with its weaker gravitational field, an apple will feel lighter than the same apple on earth; does this mean you are in error about the apple, since its mass remains the same? No, your perception is correct. With respect to perceived weight, the apple on the moon and the apple on the earth are not quite the same apple. It is as if they belong to different ‘universes’ of weight.

...Comparison across these ‘universes’ does not really give a basis for comparing objective weights, rather (granted other knowledge that the apple’s mass remains the same) the comparison indicates differences between the lunar and terrestrial perceptual fields: things feel lighter on the moon. Similarly with the Müller-Lyer’s figure. The unaided (or untrained) eye can no more escape the visual ‘weight’ of arrows that each constitute their own ‘gravitational field,’ leaping to a measure of the optical ‘mass’ of line segments, than the unaided body can escape the gravitational field in which it weighs the apple, leaping to a measure of the apple’s mass. Indeed, these fields with their ‘distorting’ influence are the condition for perceiving the things in question (arrows with a visual expanse, an apple with a weight) and are thus intrinsic to perception". (The Sense of Space, p. 21-22)

Great stuff Street. That's a very nice account of the illusion from Morris. And on the whole I'll struggle to find anything to disagree with in what you've said. But one thing strikes me (and sorry if this is too much of a side-issue):

While the traditional understanding of perception turns on the idea that we see the world ‘as is’, attention to phenomena like illusions show that this is not in fact the case. Citing the work of psychologists Claudia Carello and M. T. Turvey, David Morris notes that when wielding an object with our eyes closed, the ‘felt’ length of the object (a cane, a tennis racket), is often quite different from the object’s geometrical length. The reason that this is so is quite simply that we do not perceive the object’s geometrical length. Rather, we perceive what Carello and Turvey call it’s ‘wieldiness’. — StreetlightX

Is the geometrical length to be privileged here, as the "as is"? While wieldiness, and illusion, are objective in just the way you describe, is measurement more objective? Or is it maybe just a different kind of objectivity? Doesn't the contrast between on the one hand perception as part of the way we are implicated in the world, and on the other hand the measurement of the "as is", invite the kind of thinking that leads us to the idea that perception is but a distortion of reality? But clearly these are different fields, viz., the perceptual field and the geometrical field, so how do we avoid this hoary old appearance-reality dichotomy that always seems ready to jump out from the next corner?

Boy oh boy, I thought you were gonna go all Karen Horney here, StreetlightX:

The second characteristic inherent in all the elements of the search for glory is the great and peculiar role imagination plays in them. It is instrumental in the process of self-idealization. But this is so crucial a factor that the whole search for glory is bound to be pervaded by fantastic elements. No matter how much a person prides himself on being realistic, no matter how realistic indeed his march toward success, triumph, perfection, his imagination accompanies him and makes him mistake a mirage for the real thing. One simply cannot be unrealistic about oneself and remain entirely realistic in other respects. When the wanderer in the desert, under the duress of fatigue and thirst, sees a mirage, he may make actual efforts to reach it, but the mirage—the glory—which should end his distress is itself a product of imagination.

Actually imagination also permeates all psychic and mental functions in the healthy person. When we feel the sorrow or the joy of a friend, it is our imagination that enables us to do so. When we wish, hope, fear, believe, plan, it is our imagination showing us possibilities. But imagination may be productive or
unproductive: it can bring us closer to the truth of ourselves—as it often does in dreams—or carry us far away from it. It can make our actual experience richer or poorer. And these differences roughly distinguish neurotic and healthy imagination.

This is reminiscent of J.J Gibson's idea of affordances. Namely that to perceive a thing is to perceive the actions that it may promote.

"If a terrestrial surface is nearly horizontal (instead of slanted), nearly flat (instead
of convex or concave), and sufficiently extended (relative to the size of the animal) and
if its substance is rigid (relative to the weight of the animal), then the surface affords
support. It is a surface of support, and we call it a substratum, ground, or floor. It is
stand-on-able, permitting an upright posture for quadrupeds and bipeds. It is therefore
walk-on-able and run-over-able. It is not sink-into-able like a surface of water or a
swamp, that is, not for heavy terrestrial animals. Support for water bugs is different" (JJ Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception).

I take it, however, a major point you are highlighting is that there are conditions on affordances which render them possible or impossible, and that can change their nature. A concrete example is the affordance of chairs for support: They would unlikely have this affordance if humans did not have arses or tired legs. But to think the objectivity (not just the sharedness) of illusions I think means sharpening these conditions - strictly speaking, what it is they condition in the first place.

"arses" and "tired legs" are not special insofar as they condition the affordance of support, there is a massive, many sorted, relational complex underlying and constituting the support affordance (read: perception of) of the chair. It is composed of physical properties (tensile strength, elasticity), biophysical properties (lactic acid build up), mental properties (fatigue) and importantly relations between these properties - such as a chair strongly affording support when a person returns from the gym after work. It clearly also depends on the historical transmission of this web (paleolithic spear tips are still for-stabbing). Hopefully chairs are not special in this regard either, and that each affordance is associated with a relational web that is implicated in the affordance.

To account for the objectivity of an illusion, then, is to find the conditions on these webs of affordance that give rise to them.

While wieldiness, and illusion, are objective in just the way you describe, does measurement give us a more objective kind of description? Or maybe just a different kind of objectivity? — jamalrob

I realize this was directed at Streetlight, but it's an interesting question. I think the contrast between those two phenomena highlights a contrast (the way we think about?) measurement and illusion. Under the above, the relational character of measurement differs from the relational character of other affordances. I suppose in a certain sense the length of an object doesn't depend on a meter stick, nor could the affordance of for-measuring that meter sticks have arose if it did.

Is the geometrical length to be privileged here, as the "as is"? While wieldiness, and illusion, are objective in just the way you describe, is measurement more objective? Or is it maybe just a different kind of objectivity? Doesn't the contrast between on the one hand perception as part of the way we are implicated in the world, and on the other hand the measurement of the "as is", invite the kind of thinking that leads us to the idea that perception is but a distortion of reality? But clearly these are different fields, viz., the perceptual field and the geometrical field, so how do we avoid this hoary old appearance-reality dichotomy that always seems ready to jump out from the next corner? — jamalrob

Yeah this is a good point actually - a need to be careful with language. To thematise it though, Morris for instance frames the geometrical field as an augmentation of the real: "Things are not illusory because they fail to match up with our own transcendental standards of truth, things are illusory because they are at odds with themselves; the Müller-Lyer’s figure itself is odd, since it invites further explorations that reveal that if you look at it one way the arrows do not match, if you look at it another way, they do. Internal tensions of this sort prompt augmentation of perception, by constructing instruments like rulers and balances that let us return to perception and transform it. This transformation amounts to discovery of new standards immanent in the phenomena, and against these standards phenomena like the Müller-Lyer’s figure can be interpreted as involving errors—but not of perception, of measurement."

I like this way of putting it because it doesn't ratify a hierarchization of reality so much as a lateral expansion of it; geometrical measurement opens up new possibilities of enworlding (I don't want to say 'interacting with the world'), allowing fields like science, for instance, to operate as an autonomous realm. I guess the idea is that perception and measurement belong to two different 'universes', and it is something of a category error to try and make direct comparisons between the two.

@fdrake: Yes absolutely is it a question of the the very conditions of affordances. What's important here is that this ties perception right back into an evolutionary-developmental history, showing that perception is itself historical and environmental through and through. We perceive things the way we do because of the sorts of bodies we are: front facing, upright, motile, with hands for grasping and manipulating things, etc. Different bodies would have different phenomenologies. Morris has a nice thought experiment involving spherical beings, who would not have a sense of directionality (up/down, front/back), in the sense that we do:

"Imagine an intelligent creature whose body is a sphere with eyes and arms distributed evenly across its surface, that respires and ingests through diffusive processes distributed across its surface. We would not imagine that this creature would have evolved neural networks that would duplicate Lackner’s results [on body orientation in zero gravity - SX] —it could not have, because it has neither the neck nor the postural possibilities of the human body. Human astronauts report discomfort in weightless conferences if their heads are pointing in different directions; sphere-creature astronauts would not have this problem. Even if we could identify some neural network that produces Lackner’s results, we would not be explaining anything unless we understood why that network had evolved, and that would mean attend- ing to our body not as an isotropic sphere, but as having certain symmetries and asymmetries, as being articulated by a neck, as evolving through a life in which the way one faces the world matters quite a bit."

One of the things I've been thinking about recently is how speaking about perception in terms of 'embodiment' is not enough. It is not enough to point out that perception takes place in embodied beings. What matters too is the type of bodies involved, and the way in which those bodies are simultaneously shaped by, and shape the environment in which they evolved and developed in. 'Embodiment' names a problem to be worked through, rather than a solution to the impasses of thinking about perception (what, after all, is not embodied?). Illusions testify to the historicity of our bodies, of our envelopment in the world among which it co-originates in a dynamic reciprocity of becoming.

This view upon things has all sorts of philosophical implications. One among them, off the top of my head, is giving lie to any sort of panpsychic thesis. The kind of body that rocks are, say, would not require of them any need of perception; rocks are not motile, they do not manipulate things with any degree of agency, they do not avoid predators, seek out sustenance in the form of sunshine, water or flesh, etc. Lacking a metabolism or any sensory apparatus there is simply no 'need' for rocks to experience things. There would be no occasion for a genesis of perception. And then there's the anti/realist debate, but that's another story...

""Things are not illusory because they fail to match up with our own transcendental standards of truth, things are illusory because they are at odds with themselves;"

While I agree with this, the upshot is that, as all things are at odds with themselves, all things are illusory (depending on your standards and how hard you're willing to force things to be rigorous or not be at odds with themselves). That is, nothing about the world 'makes sense' on its own terms any more than the gestaltist illusions do.

Yes absolutely is it a question of the the very conditions of affordances. What's important here is that this ties perception right back into an evolutionary-developmental history, showing that perception is itself historical and environmental through and through. We perceive things the way we dobecause of the sorts of bodies we are: front facing, upright, motile, with hands for grasping and manipulating things, etc. Different bodies would have different phenomenologies. Morris has a nice thought experiment involving spherical beings, who would not have a sense of directionality (up/down, front/back), in the sense that we do — StreetlightX

Glad we are on the same page. Fundamentally I don't see the point in this kind of inquiry insofar as it's speculative though. Will try and flesh that out a bit. Maybe too meta a response.

One of the things I've been thinking about recently is how speaking about perception in terms of 'embodiment' is not enough. It is not enough to point out that perception takes place in embodied beings. What matters too is the type of bodies involved, and the way in which those bodies are simultaneously shaped by, and shape the environment in which they evolved and developed in. 'Embodiment' names a problem to be worked through, rather than a solution to the impasses of thinking about perception (what, after all, is not embodied?). Illusions testify to the historicity of our bodies, of our envelopment in the world among which it co-originates in a dynamic reciprocity of becoming

I agree on all accounts, but I don't see the significance of this as a ground for philosophical speculation. In the absence of any transcendental condition (logical necessity) that predates (logical priority) the genesis of any of the aforementioned affordance conditions, I don't see what substantive claims such an inquiry could provide. At best it's a defense against bad thinking, perhaps this suffices.

"Embodiment" naming, if you'll permit the shorthand, a (the?) mechanism that reciprocally, and historically, enmeshes (using previous terminology) perception and environment within some particular entity, looks to me to resemble any such mechanism which could be derived from this line of inquiry. To put it another way, what's the point in challenging first principles - basic categorizations or thematizations of concepts , when the concepts derived will only name the same space of problems?

More detail on naming the same space of problems: if it's already granted that we're dealing with some notion of what was once contigent [an affordance web being historically-evolutionary conditioned) becoming necessary ( an affordance web being historically-evolutionary stable), how are we to derive any speculative claims about the transference from one to the other given the contingency (particularity?) of the transference? The devil is in the details.

Perhaps what I'm thinking is wrong insofar as it begs for a need to derive these overarching conditions on affordance webs, rather than illustrating their proper treatment.

if it's already granted that we're dealing with some notion of what was once contigent [an affordance web being historically-evolutionary conditioned) becoming necessary ( an affordance web being historically-evolutionary stable), how are we to derive any speculative claims about the transference from one to the other given the contingency (particularity?) of the transference? The devil is in the details. — fdrake

I think this question, right here, is perhaps the philosophical question par excellence for our age. Ever since the post-structuralist onslaught against essentialism - and hence necessity - , the tide has once again been turning in favour of a qualified essentialism wherein what is necessary is that which has become so, where the questions to be asked involve querying "how 'essences' [are] entailed, made proper, installed 'as such' and naturalized within our thought and our being? How [they] congeal into a corporeal reality?" (Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh). It is a question of asking what kind of reality would allow for the 'becoming essential of the accident', or the 'becoming necessary of the contingent' (these phrases belong to Catherine Malabou). This becomes especially pertinent when it comes to political issues insofar as, to quote Kirby again, "essentialism is the condition of possibility for any political axiology: the minimal consensual stuff through which political action is engendered is already essentialism's effect."

In other words, the question is: what kind of reality must it be such that emergent, contingent strcutures can attain the status of necessary ones? And what is the status of this 'necessity' itself if necessity is an outcome of a process rather than a principal that underlies process? Gilbert Simondon, for example, notes that the search for a principle of individuation (first causes, transcendental conditions, etc) presumes a teleology in which the individual is fixed in advance as a necessary outcome of that process - a teleology which is nowhere warranted. And if this is so, we ought to revise our understanding, or, in this case perhaps, our expectations of metaphysics - not as a science of first principles, but as the tracking down of what Foucault once called 'historical a prioris'.

One of the things I've been thinking about recently is how speaking about perception in terms of 'embodiment' is not enough. It is not enough to point out that perception takes place in embodied beings. What matters too is the type of bodies involved, and the way in which those bodies are simultaneously shaped by, and shape the environment in which they evolved and developed in — StreetlightX

A number of things fascinated me about Chalmers' views, one of them being the notion that we might one day have some knowledge about what it's like to be a bee.

Bees are literally our distant cousins. We're more closely related to them than we are to pine trees... but pine trees are also our kin. Are we related to rocks? Of course, but obviously not genetically. To avoid the dreaded duality, we'll have to be relaxed about the contiguity between living and non-living bodies.

Quoting out of order because it best illustrates my point. This is also off topic at this point...

And if this is so, we ought to revise our understanding, or, in this case perhaps, our expectations of metaphysics - not as a science of first principles, but as the tracking down of what Foucault once called 'historical a prioris'. — StreetlightX

This view upon things has all sorts of philosophical implications. One among them, off the top of my head, is giving lie to any sort of panpsychic thesis. The kind of body that rocks are, say, would not require of them any need of perception; rocks are not motile, they do not manipulate things with any degree of agency, they do not avoid predators, seek out sustenance in the form of sunshine, water or flesh, etc. Lacking a metabolism or any sensory apparatus there is simply no 'need' for rocks to experience things. — StreetlightX

In other words, the question is: what kind of reality must it be such that emergent, contingent strcutures can attain the status of necessary ones? And what is the status of this 'necessity' itself if necessity is an outcome of a process rather than a principal that underlies process? — StreetlightX

I don't think it's possible to give a philosophical account of the modality particulars attain after their transference. Summary: processes that generate these (retroactive?) necessities need not work to produce a univocal necessity. Call the process by which X passes from contigency to necessity a "transference mechanism".

a) Assume someone had given such a univocal account.

b) The agglomeration of these necessities together into a univocal account inscribes a distinction between a transcendental (pre-conditioning, all consuming) account of necessity that would need to operate within each of its conditioned processes while being logically(operationally?) prior to them.

c) The transcendence/operation distinction in (b) raises a regress. It is started by noting that the immanence of the univocal conditioning mechanism means that it applies to itself. What, then, forces this preconditioning necessity to operate within its conditioned processes? What maintains its operation without requiring an un-moved mover? If the transcandental condition in (a) is univocal it engenders its own operation since it must also be generated (immanence. non-given-ness).

d) If the substitution of the univocal account into (b), which was utilized in (c), is invalid then there are at least two essentially different operating mechanisms for these transference mechanisms. The one in (a) does not obey the rules of the ones in (b) that it conditions. If it is valid then the univocal account is its own condition of individuation - an unmoved mover.

e) From (d), the conception in (a) is not univocal.

More detail on (a)

I hope this is straightfoward.

More detail on (b):

Such an account would either be a list of all transference mechanisms (cannot be constructed, too many!) or a rule to generate and apply them. This rule, then, constitutes the operation of the transference mechanism. Did it too retroactively become necessary, or was it necessary in another sense? Assume the former, otherwise there are already at least two transference mechanisms.

More detail on (c):

I take it as given that there can be no "ultimate conditions", nothing which was not individuated - no un-moved movers, that "in the beginning there was the Word..." cannot be said. Then, the operation of the univocal necessity in (a) itself had a transference mechanism. Since it is univocal and no transference mechanisms condition it* it must be its own...

More detail on (d):
The transference mechanisms that the univocal account conditions are not their own transference mechanisms. The univocal account is. This, then, marks a difference in kind.

More detail on (e):
This is a bit hasty because of *, but I'm pretty sure the same pattern repeats when asking about the necessity of the co-constitution of the "big picture" transference mechanism and the ones it conditions.

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This isn't to say the process can't be "truncated" in some sense. What you mentioned before about panpsychism is a good example of it, distinguishing different pre-conditioning webs and transference mechanisms highlights that a panpsychist account is problematic:

Lacking a metabolism or any sensory apparatus there is simply no 'need' for rocks to experience things. There would be no occasion for a genesis of perception.

need there being precisely the operation of a transference mechanism, "truncated" to the level of perception.

Edit: I think the utility of such truncations is kind of the point, right?

I think I understand what you're trying to say, and I think it's been something I've been grappling with in my own musings. I think one answer to what you're after is to look at the operation of entropy. We tend to think about entropy in terms of the dissolution of order, but one curious fact about entropy is that 'local' negentropy - hollowed out zones of order among the generalized tendency to cosmic disorder - tends to ultimately be in the service of entropy: highly ordered (negentropic) systems - which are another way of speaking about identities or what we're in this discussion calling 'necessary processes' - require a great deal more work to maintain - and thus churn through the available free energy in the universe - than minimally ordered or unordered systems. Which is just to say that the more (local) negentropy there is, the more efficiently (global) entropy functions.

Now, it seems to me that entropy functions as, as it were, the 'ground' that we're looking for. Although not a process in the sense of the term we're using (i.e. a (minimally) self-sustaining, negentropic system), it plays the role of something like a 'pre-process'. The running down of the cosmic entropic gradient motivates - although it does not direct or oversee, in the mode of a program or blueprint - the formation of localized currents of 'necessary processes'. Now, clearly entropy is not enough to furnish us with something like a principle of individuation, but it does provide the 'kick', the motor that would set things going in the first place.

Individuation proper, on the other hand, requires something more than just the waning out of entropy: it requires a linkage or articulation between two heterogeneous orders of magnitude. This is something that's incredibly hard to explain, but I'll try my best, as I'm working though it myself. Recall that negentropy is an ordered resolution of an energy gradient: an attempt to bring a ∆X to 0 (where ∆X = the difference in energy within a bounded space). Now, if we bring together two separate gradients together and put them into communication such that one disrupts or interferes with the efficient flow (of energy) of the other, as it were, we can set off a process of individuation. John Protevi gives the basic example of hurricane formation, which "involves differential relations among heterogeneous components whose rates of change are connected with each other. [In] hurricane formation... it is intuitively clear that there is no central command but a self-organization of multiple processes of air and water movement propelled by temperature and pressure differences. All hurricanes form when intensive processes of wind and ocean currents reach singular points... triggering updrafts, eyewall formation, and so on." (Protevi, Life, War, Earth)

In the formations of hurricanes, we have two separate differential orders (temperature and pressure) put into 'communication' with each other, requiring a resolution in the form of a hurricance, which most efficiently dissipates the potential energy involved. Gilbert Simondon puts it's programmatically as follows: "The true principle of individuation is mediation, which generally presumes the existence of the original duality of the orders of magnitude and the initial absence of interactive communication between them, followed by a subsequent communication between orders of magnitude and stabilization. At the same time that a quantity of potential energy (the necessary condition for a higher order of magnitude) is actualized, a portion of matter is organized and distributed (the necessary condition for a lower order of magnitude) into structured individuals of a middle order of magnitude, developing by a mediate process of amplification." (Simondon, The Genesis of the Individual). In other words, individuation is the resolution of a differential field polarized between two orders of intensity.

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Now, when you speak of a 'transference mechanism' by which a contingent process becomes a necessary one, what is at stake is how this process of articulation/resolution comes to bear upon itself. In other words, what is at stake is life itself. As Simondon notes, life differs from non-life to the extent that living beings are not merely the outcome of individuating processes, but individuate themselves. He calls this self-individuation a matter of attaining 'internal resonance': "In the domain of living things... individuation is no longer produced, as in the physical domain, in an instantaneous fashion, quantum-like, abrupt and definitive, leaving in its wake a duality of milieu and individual - the milieu having been deprived of the individual it no longer is, and the individual no longer possessing the wider dimensions of the milieu. ... [The living being] is matched by a perpetual individuation that is life itself following the fundamental mode of becoming: the living being conserves in itself an activity of permanent individuation. It is not only the result of individuation, like the crystal or the molecule, but is a veritable theater of individuation. Moreover, the entire activity of the living being is not, like that of the physical individual, concentrated at its boundary with the outside world. There exists within the being a more complete regime of internal resonance requiring permanent communication and maintaining a metastability that is the precondition of life". (GI)

What Simondon here calls 'internal resonance' is another name for the way in which - pertinent to our discussion - things, or in this case, living beings, engender their own operation: "The living being is also the being that results from an initial individuation and amplifies this individuation, not at all the machine to which it is assimilated functionally by the model of cybernetic mechanism. In the living being, individuation is brought about by the individual itself, and is not simply a functioning object that results from an individuation previously accomplished, comparable to the product of a manufacturing process. The living being resolves its problems not only by adapting itself which is to say, by modifying its relationship to its milieu (something a machine is equally able to do) - but by modifying itself through the invention of new internal structures and its complete self-insertion into the axiomatic of organic problems. The living individual is a system of individuation, an individuation system and also a system that individuates itself. The internal resonance and the translation of its relation to itself into information are all contained in the living being's system" (GI)

Now the key here is that the internal resonance proper to living beings is not of a different order to individuation process of non-living things. Instead of resolving a differential field once and for all - as with a hurricane, which eventually dissipates once the tension between temperature and pressure is normalized - the living being sustains itself as a differential field of continual resolution. This is how Simondon links his notion of individuation back to perception itself: "Both the psyche and the collectivity are constituted by a process of individuation supervening on the individuation that was productive of life. The psyche represents the continuing effort of individuation in a being that has to resolve its own problematic through its own involvement as an element of the problem by taking action as a subject. The subject can be thought of as the unity of the being when it is thought of as a living individual, and as a being that represents its activity to itself in the world both as an element and a dimension of the world. Problems that concern living beings are not just confined to their own sphere: only by means of an unending series of successive individuations, which ensure that ever-more preindividual reality is brought into play and incorporated into the relation with the milieu, can we endow living beings with an open-ended axiomatic. Affectivity and perception are seen as forming a single whole in both emotion and science, forcing one to take recourse to new dimensions" (GI)

In other words - and here we can finally turn back to the OP - perception is itself no less subject to a process of individuation; to perceive is to 'resolve' a differential field involving body, world, movement, evolutionary and developmental history, surface texture, light, temperature and so on. This is why illusions are 'objective'; the perception of an illusion tends to resolve itself in similar manners to people who have similar evolutionary-developmental histories to us. Anyway, the main takeway here is that metaphysically speaking, what primary here is not an unmoved mover, but simply movement as such. The running down of a difference which is itself productive of differences (i.e. individuation). We can have our univocal cake and eat it too (If you get the chance, read Simondon's article (itself only an introduction to a larger book-length work). It is, I'm starting to be convinced, perhaps the most important piece of philosophical writing published in the last century).

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Also see a recent blogpost by Levi Bryant where he makes some similar points: " The most elementary model of the thing should not be the rock, nor the hammer, but rather the vortex as in instances of whirlpools, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Everywhere being is composed of vortices. There is, first of all, the field that is everywhere populated by turbulence. Here we encounter a very delicate and intricate a-theological issues: motion, turbulence– which is to say, the formation of form –does not come to being or the universe from without, but is always-already immanently operative within being. Being, the universe, requires no prime mover in order for motion to take place. Rather, everywhere there are flows of turbulence. Occasionally those flows come together and a vortex emerges. These vortices arise from these fields of turbulence and continuously draw from these fields of turbulence. Even vortices like rocks require turbulence to continue. This is why rocks are folds of a field that exceed them, while nonetheless being distinct from these fields (conditions of temperature, pressure, etc). If they depart too far from the field out of which they grow and live, they dissipate like so much morning mist.

A vortex is thus a particular organization, as ongoing process, of a field of turbulence. It is turbulence that has attained rotary motion. Yet in attaining rotary motion, vortices do not simply withdraw into themselves. Rather, they rebound back on the field of turbulence out of which they have grown. The field is reconfigured as a result of their rotary motion, creating circumstances in which different forms of turbulence and other vortices come into being."

Reading. Will have something to say soon.