In our memory course we briefly introduced the distinction between flux and flow by quoting Nick Lane’s Transformer:
Flux is a form of flow, but with one crucial difference. Water can flow in a river, or traffic down a street. What goes in at one end and what comes out at the other is the same thing--- water, or cars. In biochemistry, flux is the flow of things that are transformed along the way. Imagine a car entering a street; let’s say it’s a VW Beetle. No sooner has it gone ten yards down than there’s a blinding flash and it’s become a Volvo. Bang! It’s a white van. Zap! Now it’s a minibus. Flash! It’s a tractor, which leaves the street. But the strangest thing about this street is that the same thing keeps on happening: only VW Beetles ever enter the street; only tractors ever leave. The same succession of transformations takes place each time.
Of course, that’s just this street. Take a look at the street around the corner. There you’ll see only Vespa scooters entering, transforming into Harley motorbikes. And just across town there’s a canal where canoes change into speed boats. (p. 6-7)
I want to pair this with a long passage from Harry Hunt’s *On the Nature of Consciousness, *on page 116, where he writes about William James’ descriptions of consciousness:
From William James’s early writings, where he emphasizes the continuous “flow” of awareness, to his later discussion of its moment-by-moment “pulsing.” Hames describes how the one feature is always found within the other. In “The Stream of Thoughts” he distinguishes withina primary flow of consciousness the coexistence of both “transitive” and “substance” aspects. There are no thinglike units or elements in awareness, he says. “Images” and “feelings” are the relatively substantive lingering and circling of awareness. They reflect the slower parts of the same stream whose more rapid, transitive flows give our self-aware consciousness its sense of direction and relation.
The transitive side of our experience consists in the “flow” or “fringes” that Gendlin would later term “felt meaning” --- the impalpable sense giving birth to more explicit “thoughts.” The very attempt to capture this flow of consciousness in our introspective awareness, as with the later indeterminism of subatomic physics, transforms the flight of awareness ever past itself into the sensory-imaginal “smears” of laboratory introspectionism. As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing.
The William James of A Pluralistic Universe, might at first seem to have shifted his ground and to be recasting a continuous flow in terms of its moment-by-moment drops or pulses. Our experience, he says, comes to us in drops--- as does time itself. Yet the drops that James says come whole or not at all from the bottle spout are also merged within the bottle into a single fluid medium that bears no trace of its pulselike manifestations. Indeed, James insists that each pulse or moment of awareness has within it the same transitive streaming of his earlier analysis:
![info] The concrete pulses of experience appear pent in by no such definite limits as our conceptual sustitutes for them are confined by. … The tiniest feeling that we can possibly have comes with an earlier and a later part and with a sense of thier continuous procession. … Every smallest state of concretely taken, overflows its own definition.
– William James