1. Some thoughts inspired by reading Henri Bortoft by Shantena Sabbadini
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Some thoughts inspired by reading Henri Bortoft
Shantena Sabbadini, 4 March 2014
Henry Bortoft: Taking Appearance Seriously pp. 18-19
intrinsic direction of experience
------------------------------------->
the experiencing of what is experienced <----------------- what is experienced
“Philosopher consiste à invertir la direction habituelle du travail de la pensée”
(Henri Bergson)
“What we have to do instead is learn how to go back upstream and flow down to
where we are already, so that we recognise this as not the beginning but the end”
(Henry Bortoft, p. 18)
Upstream and downstream in the “persistence of information” approach
The great novelty of quantum physics with respect to classical physics is that it does
not provide a closed description of the world of matter, of “what is experienced.” It
cannot be formulated without referring to the act of observation, i.e. to
“experiencing.” I would like to suggest that quantum physics is not a description of
the structure of matter, but a description of the structure of experiencing.
Experiencing is the primary “stuff” the world is made of. This is difficult to
understand beacause we are used to think in terms of a pre-existent subject
experiencing a pre-existent object. In the conventional view experiencing is a
happening a posteriori: it is a specific relationship that a subject can engage in (or not
engage in) with respect to an object. That is what Henry Bortoft calls downstream
thinking.
Going back upstream means returning to the experiencing itself. That is something
we have to learn because it implies reversing “la direction habituelle de la pensée.” It
implies, in Husserl’s language, an epoché, a suspending or bracketing our taken for
granted assumptions about reality.
How are we to understand experiencing without a priori postulating an experiencing
subject and an experienced object? At the most fundamental level there is just
experiencing, just THIS, just NOW, the Dao beyond naming. About this nothing can
be said.

2. Some thoughts inspired by reading Henri Bortoft by Shantena Sabbadini
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But the unnamed Dao is also, Laozi tells us, the multiplicity of the named (“these two
arise together...”). Experiencing is multi-focal and structured. It has a coherence, both
in terms of the experienced (e.g. Husserl’s description of how various perspectives
cohere in defining the notion of a tridimensional object) and intersubjectively (our
individual experiencings point to a world we intersubjectively share).
The bare bones of this structure, the basic level of the world intersubjectively shared
is the so-called “objective world” described by mathematics and physics.
This is the ultimate downstream, in the language of Henry Bortoft. But, surprise,
surprise: the objective world is not a closed reality. It points to something beyond
itself: it points to something which is before (or upstream from) itself, i.e. it points to
experiencing. When we get as far downstream as we can, we find an arrow pointing
upstream: this way back to the origin.
Quantum physics purports to be a description of the objective world, but ends up
denying the self-standing existence of an objective world. So it ends up being a
description of what? It ends up being a description of what is upstream from the
objective world. It ends up being a description the structure, i.e. of the world-creating
activity, of experiencing.
We tend to still think an “observer” is someone wearing a white coat and standing in
a lab. But there is no need to restrict experiencing to such a subject. In fact, if we
look for the most essential characterisation of experiencing in the language of
quantum physics, firstly we are naturally led to the quantum measurement process
(which is the basic pattern underlying all acquiring of information for an embodied
observer).
Then we must strip such a process of all reference to an observer, a measuring device
and an observed system. What are we left with? With the bare notion of a von
Neumann chain. Actually with the simplest possible von Neumann chain: with a
quantum interaction that generates a correlation between the values of two
observables.
Then is experiencing at the quantum level simply correlation, information sharing?
That seems too simple and too general. But I tend to think that that is as it should be.
If we give up the anthropocentric notion that we (humans) are the experiencers
creating the universe, the next natural generalisation is to give up the notion that
experiencing is limited to some specific kind of organism or physical system. Then
why not look at the most elementary physical process that could in some sense be
characterised as “experiencing”?

3. Some thoughts inspired by reading Henri Bortoft by Shantena Sabbadini
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Then, of course, the whole world is experiencing. We run here into a circular
argument, a kind of ouroboros: experiencing creates the world, but it is the world
itself that does the experiencing. The world creates itself by experiencing itself.
It seems paradoxical, but it could not be otherwise, if we stick to our presupposition
that experiencing, and not subjective or objective reality, is primary. If we split the
circle in half and say just “the world is conscious” or “consciousness creates the
world”, we fall back into the subject-object split.
But the challenge of Henry Bortoft’s “going upstream” is not simply to go back to the
primary fact of experiencing beyond subject and object. It is also “to flow down to
where we are already,” to account for the appearing of the world, with all its subjects
and objects.
The “persistence of information” argument is a step in this direction . It explains why
an embodied subjectivity necessarily perceives the world as objective. In other
words, it shows that the structure of experiencing is such as to create the appearance
of the experienced world as a given, as existent-in-itself. We could rephrase that by
saying that the upstream becomes invisible in the downstream: its presence is only
revealed in a gap, in a lack of closure of the experienced world – in the fact that there
is no self-contained description of matter, of the “experienced.”
But of course there is more to the challenge than that. There is the whole task of
phenomenology. And actually the task of a circular phenomenology, in which the
upstream and downstream are like in a drawing by Escher...
Reference
Henri Bortoft (2012) Taking Appearance Seriously; Floris Books