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Submodalities

All NLP techniques consists of the manipulation of submodalities. Submodalities, or qualities as they are called in philosophy, are properties of the five modalities. So if you see something what you see is either in color or black & white, two dimensional or three dimensional, it has a size etcetera. The same goes for hearing, smelling, tasting or feeling something. Submodalities are they way meaning is coded in our brain. For each different meaning we know there is a specific combination of submodalities that represent that meaning inside our brain. The most important submodalities are visual, auditory and kinestetic.

Qualities are our insurmountable barriers; we have no way to stop ourselves feeling mere quantitative distinctions to be something fundamentally different from quantity, namely to be qualities, no longer reducible to one another. But everything for which the word ‘knowledge’ makes any sense refers to the realm where there can be counting, weighing, measuring, refers to quantity – while conversely all our feelings of value (i.e., all our feelings) adhere to qualities, that is, to the perspectival ‘truths’ that are ours and nothing more than ours, that simply cannot be ‘known’. It is obvious that every being different from us feels different qualities and consequently lives in another world from the one we live in. Qualities are our real human idiosyncrasy: wanting our human interpretations and values to be universal and perhaps constitutive values is one of the hereditary insanities of human pride, which still has its safest seat in religion. Need I add, conversely, that quantities ‘in themselves’ do not occur in experience, that our world of experience is only a qualitative world, that consequently logic and applied logic (such as mathematics) are among the artifices of the ordering, overwhelming, simplifying, abbreviating power called life, and are thus something practical and useful, because life-preserving, but for that very reason not in the least something ‘true’?

Notebook 6, summer 1886 – spring 1887 paragraph 14

Might not all quantities be signs of qualities? A greater degree of power corresponds to a different consciousness, feeling, desiring, a different perspectival view; growth itselfis a craving to be more; the craving for an increase in quantity grows from a quale; in a purely quantitative world all would be rigid, unmoving, dead. – Reducing all qualities to quantities is nonsense: what follows is that one thing and another stand side by side, an analogy.

Notebook 2, autumn 1886 – autumn 1886 paragraph 157

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