Notes on Salience: Where Does It Come From and Where Does It Go?

Abstract

While salience implies a discontinuity with a temporal or spatial surround, one that generates the qualities and meaning of the universes, cosmoses, or Umwelts that we inhabit, it nonetheless represents an artifactual reality that comprises experience, not a foundational one. To the extent that we are salient sentient beings—well-formed centers of worldly experience—we are discontinuous with the worlds we inhabit. But as material and biological entities, and especially as “minds” continuously metabolizing and integrating the moving particulars of the physical world, we are not “in” the world but actually are the world. Our sensory capacities are in no way limited to the apprehension of change that presents uniquely as distinction, but also track and participate in the unfolding of reality just as the hot air balloonist’s gondola moves with the ambient air so that no matter how turbulent the wind, no hair moves on the heads of the balloon’s passengers. To attain experiential knowledge of this external matrix requires a cultivated transformation of the internal world and the ecstatic relinquishment of the stubborn infrastructures of monadic selfhood.