Philosophy
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Philosophy / 哲学2026/8/2 13:242026/8/2 16:07Overflowing Curiosity
Philosophy brings us up onto a coordinate plane.
Updating your philosophy brings different actions and different values. Could philosophy be there beside us the way breathing is?
Some will treat keeping a hollow distance from philosophy as a personal freedom. But if you want your perspective back, you would do better to pay attention to the artful social structures of the modern world that make you feel that way in the first place. Unfreedom has in fact spread into every corner of the individual. Will we notice that we are being socially inverted? Necessarily few people notice. Few must, and so few do.
You either think about your own unfreedom or you don't. Having thought about it, you either look for a way out or you don't. Having found one, you either act or you don't.
Here is what I want to ask: is thinking that carries criticism with it still being born inside you? If nothing is being born, your values have already gone rigid. And the more uncomfortable that sentence made you, the more likely it is that you are.
The difference shows plainly in how a person reacts to an unfamiliar concept or event. If the primal drive is in you, you will go and find out on your own. Don't forget the curiosity that overflowed in you as a child, given by Mother. It held an endless tide of ease and unease.
What I would call rigid is exactly this posture: making no attempt to go and understand, and then laying the blame for your own inaction on the unfamiliar thing itself.
I want to point out that there is a shrewd collective-knowledge society doing the planting. What we have pushed forward and called development has taken this shape. It may even be the shape we have wanted across generations. This is not irony. I am serious.
Contemporary Philosophy
Deciding something and declaring it settled — criticised by deconstruction. Holding aesthetic positions while drifting with the current of the times — criticised in The Sickness unto Death. Finding correctness in sheer numbers — criticised in On Liberty. I resist all three, hard, and chase whatever the resistance makes visible.
With gratitude for my encounter with Masaya Chiba's books, and a respect that grows by the day, I set down contemporary thought as it passes through me.
Where is philosophy born?
Sometimes you update it through your own experience or study; sometimes wisdom arrives from a book. Things I had never considered, or had left vague, have suddenly gained weight through a book or a meeting.
I tangle those encounters together with lived experience. I repeat, without learning, the passage of a murky thinking that never comes out clean. The actual and the virtual. Consciousness and unconsciousness. It is near the tangent between them that one can dance. That tangent is the stage.
There is no end to this dance. We never arrive at the world we are after. Sometimes the passage of thought seems to push the world further away. I laugh at myself, and yet it is because this is interesting that people have gone on searching forever, and I will go on too.
The cause is not a shortage of thinking or of inquiry. The cause is that we are finite beings. This is a conversation about the abyss, and equally about feeling toward the world of representation.
The values I can feel in this body have been shaped by many encounters acting on one another. There is a mirrored ego. Their appeals and troubles are complicated, and they repeat a vast cycle through the crossing of great rings. Many claims and many feelings coexist in me, pushing against each other. It is not a matter of which is right.
I have no intention of evaluating philosophy or comparing it. The moment I become conscious of evaluating, I am shut into a narrow, uncomfortable space that does not even exist. All I can do is give everything to what I want to do and what I am able to do. That is all.
I think philosophy is a space essential to all things, extremely gradual and full of implication — a computational platform on which the values of people and societies are updated.
My thanks to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for giving me an ego that can dance without guile at the Dionysian feast.
The Universe and Perception
When we think about life and existence, we gradually want to reach out toward the universe. Is that something everyone feels?
Modern science explains the origin of the universe with the Big Bang. If so, this world is both an inherited continuity and the remains of a past universe.
Charles Sanders Peirce, mathematician and philosopher, was one of those who pursued Tychism, and he held that the sensations we register through the five senses are themselves the remains of the universe.
I feel an undeniable sympathy with this, perhaps because it conveys the grand image of cosmic evolution and the potential of the individual at the same time. But one part cannot be ignored: time.
The structure of the universe from the Big Bang to the present, and the residual sensation from the ancient universe to the present, both have the concept of time embedded in them — and a direction along with it. If that is so, then to enter existence itself, whether ours or the whole universe's or something larger still, I find myself wanting another philosophy. Do you, who arrived here by chance, feel the same?
Kiyoshi Oka, known for his work in several complex variables, pointed out that human beings exist within the when of past and present, and that this is not truly time. Written out in my own register: the classification into past and present is something shareable through human sensation and nothing more, and Peirce was no exception. What we call time, on the other hand, may not have a direction a human could grasp intuitively, and may not be that sort of thing at all.
In the end, both when and space, as dimensions conveyed through sensation, do not leave the range of the five senses. What lies beyond them cannot be proven, though we may feel it by chance.
Natural science has begun, little by little, to admit the existence of worlds humans cannot sense directly — the very small, like elementary particles, and the very large, like galaxy clusters. But the West does not appear to have arrived at the idea of revising its own position with those worlds at the centre. It becomes a problem that cannot avoid religion.
Beyond Existence
When we think about existence with thought that has not been deconstructed, we are simultaneously thinking about not existing. This is typical zero-or-one thinking. What happens if a state that is neither is affirmed? Have you ever considered it?
The sensation is close to the pre-observation state of a quantum, as in Schrödinger's cat. In 2022 a claim began to appear that the human brain is in a quantum state, reaching toward the explanation of consciousness that modern science finds so hard to give. This is known as quantum brain theory, originally proposed by Roger Penrose, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020.
Around the Big Bang, the question of what the Big Bang was born from is always waiting. One leading answer runs: even where cosmic space is a vacuum, it is strictly a quantum vacuum state, and an enormous amount of energy is condensed there.
The claim is that at the Big Bang of cosmic inflation the state was not truly nothing but a quantum vacuum — and that this state still exists today. The energy filling the quantum vacuum is called zero-point energy, and it can be connected to the spacetime continuum of Einstein's relativity.
Because the quantum vacuum is truly a vacuum, no attenuation occurs at all. Information energy, sensation included, is purely wave, propagation and all; and if no attenuation occurs, the wave exists forever. Visible light and every other wave attenuates without exception as it propagates through a medium, and its direction of propagation turns into output the moment a receptor takes it in. In the quantum vacuum, none of this happens.
Suppose the wave does remain forever. Then there is no longer any distinction between old and new in time, and the past, present and future we think and feel may all be there at once. Perhaps the whole world of representation is there, and the Real as well.
Zero-Point Field
The energy field that holds the quantum vacuum state is the Zero-Point Field (ZPF). I met the idea in a book by Hiroshi Tasaka, who is both a nuclear physicist and a scholar of management.
The awkward hurdle many people feel matters here too. By awkward hurdle I mean the cognitively cheap posture of rejecting, with no clear reason and great determination, a ZPF that arrived as the result of a great deal of wisdom and argument. Taking the Big Bang as his example, the author warns with the history of a hypothesis that was not accepted at first and was finally supported by the cosmic microwave background.
To declare something impossible you need corresponding preparation. It is not easy. Most of us prepare nothing, are drawn by the scent of cognitive bias, and reject at an unconscious level. Will that hurdle ever come into view? Consider it for a moment. Do we hold the material to refute, theoretically, Einstein's relativity or the superstring theory that Yoichiro Nambu also pursued? If not, the least we can honestly say is we don't know.
The ZPF may breathe the first shoot of reason into consciousness, déjà vu, premonition — events modern science cannot explain logically. Because the wave attenuates not at all, the ZPF arrives at an idea that crosses space as well as time, and it reconciles religions with one another.
Alayavijnana Consciousness “阿頼耶識”
In the Yogacara thought of Buddhism, the Alayavijnana holds that the causes of past and future exist simultaneously. In the Heart Sutra and the Avatamsaka Sutra, the teaching that form is emptiness and emptiness is form has the world — form — arising from the true vacuum; and the Great Buddha at Nara expresses the teaching that one is many and many is one. Indian philosophy posits Akasha, a field in which all information since the birth of the universe is recorded. There are stars in the universe, and we are in the stars, and cells are in us, and the reverse holds too. A ring.
For the relation between the ring and the transcendence of the ring — liberation — let me defer to Kūkai's attainment of Buddhahood in this very body, that is, to the unity of Brahman and Atman.
In these worldviews, the concept of time we use under current social convention does not hold. They are asking us to reconsider life and death. Thin out the concept of time and it becomes easier to ask for an explanation of the past-life memories children report so readily, or the near-death experiences of those who come back. All information is already there; the question is which of it we pick up, and whether we pick it up continuously or in fragments.
All information fills the universe. What is there is not a mere aggregate of information — it deserves to be called consciousness.
Cosmic Consciousness
We acquire personality and character as words, through recognition of the external world, and by them we recognise ourselves. Without this, self-maintenance is impossible. This is what Yoichiro Miyake calls the objective I, or what Lacan calls the ego.
From the standpoint of cosmic consciousness, the ego, once it loosens, cannot go rigid where it stands; it moves in the direction of touching cosmic consciousness. That direction is the state Buddhism calls satori and liberation, and it corresponds to the transpersonal self. It is nothing other than approaching the Buddha, or the god of any religion. It is an encounter with the subject.
The ZPF can be said to merge with, or be identified as, the Buddha or god. We may be cosmic consciousness — and thinking so brings a momentary, dreamlike calm.
With Art
Without knowing anything about the ZPF, I have been living with a feeling close to unstoppable madness, or curiosity: that the surface world might be describable in structural, repeating mathematical expressions like fractals and trigonometric functions.
I try to fill that madness with an art I keep defining for myself. Into this narrow concept of a world, the ZPF pours colours of light that were not there.
It taunts me to come closer.
I realise that it is me.