The more I sit with the 'two mode' idea of 'substance', the more it strikes me as appropriate. I came up with it on the spur of the moment, as I was writing my last post, as a response to something I was reading about Spinoza. If you study philosophy from the time of Spinoza forward, you will find common references to 'thought' and 'extension', as a comprehensive descriptive mode for analyzing the world. My study of Descartes is long enough ago so that I can't remember how much these terms and this division explicitly owe to him, although he made the generic distinction and is held responsible for much of the radical dualism in modern western philosophy. So, when I came to focus on these two terms in my present reading about Spinoza, what happened was pretty much reactive. The problem of monism and dualism reappears today in conjunction with consciousness studies and a peculiarly assertive contemporary materialism. I've touched on this in one or two of my earlier posts.
            But, as I sit with it, my own division strikes me as appropriate and radical. However, my thought has moved on from the initial, relatively spontaneous proposition in my last post. Obviously, while I was turning the evolutionary argument of the materialists around and poking it at them, with a little bit of satirical intent, I was also deadly serious. The evolutionary argument can be pushed either way. We can start from matter or substance. Or we can start from consciousness. But I now see that my division was totally appropriate. The only real modification I need to make is to define 'evolution' cosmologically as well as biologically. That is, the 'evolution' here is the evolution of the universe from the big bang to the present, including biological evolution. If we assume that 'proto-consciousness' is present in 'matter' from the first, then the evolution of cosmos and life are not discontinuous.
            What philosophy has generally failed to account for but physics has now exhibited clearly is the nature of the moment of experience. In physics, of course, it is the moment of observation and the moment of the observer. As such, from the perspective of the physics, it is not so clearly defined in terms of the observer and the experiential psychology of the moment. But this is what is being purveyed in relativity theory particularly. Einstein's Special Theory, as I've said repeatedly, is based on the 'double nature' of light. But light is not two things. What the Special Theory shows, when we look at it philosophically rather than 'objectively', is that we are seeing light through the double nature of the moment of experience. There is a wholeness of the moment in which light is instantaneous and spontaneous, and therefore 'infinite' in speed. But the wholeness can also be viewed as an instant in a sequence, at which point, light has a 'finite' speed. But these are two moments of consciousness, and not of light.
            Paradoxically (paradoxically, that is, from our western point of view), the only view of the moment that has real closure directly from the perspective of awareness itself is the wholeness of the moment, the moment as essentially a 'spiritual' phenomenon in which all that appears in the moment is spontaneous, and is therefore without formal or radical cause. Here, by antithesis, is the peculiar power of 'science' as an historical development: it finally validates sequence in a way that 'philosophy' alone never can and never has been able to do. The self-validating moment of awareness is the moment of wholeness. But, now, in the west, we have become addicted to this sequential interpretation to the exclusion of the nature of the moment as a self-validating whole.
            Now, quantum phenomena are suggesting the nature of the moment as the whole is also inherent in the behavior of subatomic particles. In other words, certain of the quantum phenomena suggest that the whole of time and space are somehow immediate in the present moment of experience, the present moment of observation.
            But what we need to do is look at the fact that physics, as it stands now, apart from cosmology, is a science of the moment. That is, the science is based on the moment of the observer, and is therefore not only a function of 'the world', but also a function of the moment of experience. I would suggest that we cannot divorce either quantum physics or relativity from this peculiar double 'psychology' of immediacy. As a consequence, what stands outside the moment is evolution, as I have defined it. Physics, per se, is as much 'subjective' as 'objective' because it subserves immediacy as well as the observed behavior of 'matter' in the moment of observation, that is, in the moment of immediacy.
            As I said in my last post, the only moment of actuality is the present. That is, the only 'point' by which we can test 'being' or 'reality' is the actuality of the present moment. All other time is essentially fictitious in an absolute sense. We create history through reflective awareness. This is what separates us from the 'pure' immediacy of animal awareness. We assume that both time and cause are 'real'. And, as I have said, historically science finally validates these two propositions. But, in a sense, it can only validate them as legitimate functions within the frame of immediacy.
            In my own mind, as I have turned these things over, I have sometimes wondered if the big bang is not actually happening now, that is, that we are still in the first instant of the big bang, and that the whole process of the big bang is here present. When we understand the double nature of the moment of consciousness, this paradoxical proposition is no more paradoxical than the double nature of light posited by the Special Theory of Relativity.
            But, since science does validate sequence, and therefore, apparently, time, and cause as sequential causality, evolution in this larger sense is the grounded validity outside the moment. The moment, however, remains a function of consciousness, and therefore sequence is also necessarily contained in the wholeness of the moment.
            But, obviously, awareness is also not 'substance' per se. If science validates sequence, it validates an 'externality' outside of awareness, something that cannot be assigned to awareness. As much as consciousness as reflective awareness creates not only the 'forms' by which we experience 'the external' but also the formal nature of relationship, such as 'cause', by which we experience the mutuality of 'things', there is still necessarily something other than consciousness. But if I say that 'substance' is independent, that it is other or external, or if I say that consciousness is also independent, clearly what I am speaking of is modes of the one substance from which the universe appears.
            If science validates causality, then we have to assume an intimate mutuality between 'matter', as that in the substance which is other than consciousness, and consciousness itself. Matter and awareness have to have been mutual from the first, in order for perception to arise, whether as spontaneous or reflective and abstract. Hence, by the same token, we cannot divorce 'matter' from consciousness, since awareness, in some protean form, would have had to be indigenous from the first. 'Matter' cannot create it, because matter precisely does not contain the ontology, the radical 'reality' of immediacy. Matter is the creature of cause and evolution as opposed to immediacy. And when we try to pin matter down, no matter how we approach it, what we wind up with is validity, that is, the experience of validity, as if value itself had become external. But the value cannot be external, since validity depends on the moment of experience and precisely the wholeness of the moment of experience to which 'matter' has no access. Only consciousness can arrive at the validity of matter.