What is there? "What" indeed and "is" actually. I can only speak for myself because all I perceive or experience or think about is contained within a particular point-of-view, mine. "What is" is a now, an actual occasion, and an experience (if this includes not only receiving data, but processing it or recalling it). This now is a chunk, a quale (a term meaning "what sort" or "what kind", sort of), and a single uneducable entity lasting for some duration and occupying some region.
If I focus on this now there is come sense of past and origin (or cause). I am now in this now because I decided to focus on it, whereas before I was focusing on typing a sentence. In this case the cause was an internal event (something I experienced and controlled). The cause can also be (what I will call) an external event; something I do not control which did not origin within the previous now.
For instance, I set up some experiment to measure light as a wave or a particle. After a long series of actual occasions (designing, building, incrementing) I sit back to "observe". That observation is an actual occasion beginning (roughly) with something not in my previous now, a wavicle of light entering my perception from somewhere beyond (this is what I call the external).
Or, for instance, I am at Madam Lulu's (an oft-frequented club in Vientiane in Laos during the Southeast Asia conflict) and someone relates a story about two of her recent graduates (worked there but moved on). Realize I am not a Laotian, I come from a sexually hung up puritanical culture and Religion. It seems there is a village along the Mekong to the Southwest of Vientiane famous for its neuua (hashish) which just could not get its product to market due to the fact that the Mekong always flooded during harvest. The village kept rebuilding the roadway but it would always disappear. So the nyai baan (headman) got a friend of his to contact USAID. USAID drew up a plan for a bridge (actually extensive drainage under an elevated roadway) but would not fund it. So the police chief went to Madam Lulu and got an arrangement whereby the village would get the profits from a girl provided. Madam Lulu said she would care and feed and provide the loan for a three year commitment. The village thought that instead, giving Madam Lulu three girls for one year was a better offer (no one wanted their daughters way that long).The headman, police chief and priest all had eligible bachelor sons (the priest had not taken vows until after his wife died) and decided that they would offer the hands of each to one of the three girls selected. Every girl in the village volunteered and the three most beautiful were selected by the council for lease to Madam Lulu. After about eight months of plying their trade, Madam Lulu (being particularly honest with her girls) sent the three home with more than enough to pay for the road. The raw material was bought and the road built per specs (it stands to this day). The day it opened there were three marriages and a lot of neuua went up in smoke. The present day headman, police chief, and abbot are the grooms, sons, or grandsons thereof. The whole point here is that smoking hashish and sex were so “matter of fact” that the economy of a village was based on the former and the future village council composition defined by the latter.
The reason for that long story is that, at least as far as a psychological “mindf__k” caused by a mental event (someone relating a story I had to translate into terms within my experience); it is a perfect analogue for the wavicle. I could never (probably) come up with the idea of a wavicle on my own (this is an actual occasion that is by perception via instrumentation is both wave and particle). Nor could I ever imagine that a village council would offer up the three most eligible bachelors as a reward for plying the trade with foreigners. To this day this story results in cries of “liar”. Believe me it is true.
So there are actual occasions that can be caused by both external and internal pre-existing occasions which may be both physical and mental (all four terms are used in the common-sense manner, and not in how I see them, which will come later). Experiences rise from previous events, which are in turn experiences (for something). At some point this “merging” of events in space and time become actual. Before that they are merely potentialities. I could have tested for a wave if I was testing for a particle. I could have denied the existence of the village or hypothesized some (to my culture) reasonable explanation (a “conspiracy theory”).
What is is a vast collection of these experiences. Some are yours some are mine, some are ours together. Some are the qualia or prehensions that trigger (or kinda cause) a quantum event (an underlying law). Some are prehensions that trigger cosmological events. But that is all there is.
I draw four conclusions from this basic representation. First, that there is something (a collection of actual occasions) which exists outside of my control, call this external reality. Second, what is within my control (or perceived control) is likewise a collection of actual occasions (actually just now as an actual occasion, dreaming of future potentialities, and flawed memories of past events), all this internal reality. Together they are reality, the Kosmos, everything there is, was, and will be. That reality has a time component and a complex location component. Complex because it can be expressed many ways: as the three (or however many you care to postulate) dimensions of physicality, as a similar set of dimensions of mentality.
Experiences or actual occasions are becomings in time and in space. They have duration in time and a locus in space. They are not matter or energy or information or mentality or spirit (in the common-sense use of any of these terms). They are aggregates of all of the above. My wavicle experiment had mental components from both from the level of me (my decision what to measure) and from the level of the wavicle (how it would manifest). My Laotian story had very definite physical components (both in the term of where I heard it and where it was the story occurred).
Third, there is no being. Only change. Beingness is an abstraction that is not supported by the facts of actual occasions. No self, no eternal unchanging location or time or God. And, do not get me wrong abstractions like mass and energy and center and that time when I was born are very handy. Like the autonomous nervous system we would die without them. They help us drive automobiles, duck when someone shoots at us. They help us maneuver in the Kosmos and (in some sense), are parts of the Kosmos (because we can hypothesize causes and components). But when they are part of the Kosmos they are our experience of the abstraction.
Fourth, there is a component within each actual occasion that is something different… call it creativity, the spirit, divine, G!d’s presence. While we have data coming in (sense experience or ideas or simple prehensions or simpler qualia (feels) and a complex feedback network within the experience (and inter-penetrating into other actual occasions) there is something else. A spark. The meta-rules that determine syntax and semantics, logic and mathematics, Ich und Du, within and without, before and after. That of G!d within.
