1-C31MEI

KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA1 (Müller)

Commentary 31

REVIVALS, REBIRTHS AND RENAISSANCES
by Adrian van der Meijden
25 March 2005, posted 2 April 2005

<1>
Quantum Physics finding that consciousness is entailed on the behaviours of matter has raised a discursive polarity between mind as a brain epiphenonemon versus mind at large as non-local consciousness, whence HM started with a TA1 "is the Mind Real ? in 1997, it is now 2005. This is a scientifically framed question where one would expect something like "How does the mind function?" or operate, science being into *how* where philosophy is into *what*. There is no issue as to whether mind is real. Without a mind there would be no matter. HM's question is a rational question and the original sense of rational is to put things in their proper ratio or proportion, and whatever *things* happen to be entailed. And that, recent events are showing, includes a revival of interest in myths as one outcome of spaceflight discovering some 12,000 solar system objects we did not know before existed. It is suggested that most likely they travelled from the Kuiper Belt, just outside the solar system, and were blown here by novas and other adventitious radiation over millions of years. These objects range between small and up to planetary size and have anomalous to erratic orbits that are only short term predictable. Earth alone has some 20 odd such objects spinning around it [ I did not exactly count them, so it is a guesstimate from a mobile graphic] in elliptic to near paraboloid orbits that come close enough to earth make a possibility of impact likely. Anyhow there are enough impact craters and accompanying disasters in earth geography and history going back to millions of years to make the surmise they are likely left over non-impact objects, but one can never be sure. Some graze earth at 20 million km, which makes feasible they can be attracted by earth gravity. It makes the occurrence all over the globe of skywatching in mythic times more sensible and rational than hitherto believed. Such objects can only be correctly tracked when they become easily visible, which is at AU size short distances. Fancy having an earth with 20 moons?

<2>
Naturally this has raised public interest. Now the rational, so called, as a recent event in history resulted from the likes of Ramusian Protestantism in the later Middle Ages, which denuded the original Greek excursions in thinking from its intent to encompass a riddle which still eludes us. For the discovery of Centaurs and many other labels, still hotly debated, changes the old rational opposites as of chaos and order into a range as between self organising autopoic chaos, as Prigogyne has it, for short term unpredictability and long term more stable planetary predictability. It would seem the Greeks lived in a solar system quiet time and so assumed everything was eternally stable, which is falsified by both very long term and recent events. If therefore we take our cues from Greece as done in the recent past by rational reductionism we will be misled. The recent outburst of information includes material that forces many kinds of revision, most of which already ongoing. The current trend if it can be "predicted" at all, being very complex, is that all Medieval philosophy is being reversed into proto medieval, Linear extrapolation is a hazardous pastime, as the Club of Rome events show.

<4>
Since science like all other institutions, the Roman Empire, Catholic Church and the Enlightenment and Renaissance included, have all ossified we should not be surprised to see what politics knows as 'revolution from the grass roots' finds itself attached to another false opposite as between scientific and literary discourse, or as one would say nowadays in pop culture alive and kicking on internet. Vaihinger in His "The Philosophy of 'As if' " mentions this matter of institutional ossification into dogma which may well have led Popper to state that change results from dissension and disagreements. Internet is an ideal medium of communication for such grass roots still somewhat speculative enquiry in process, that no doubt will also will suffer ossification in a century or so [ who really knows?] as uncertainty is shifted into certainties, only to lead into some other something we hitherto failed to notice as one may describe the flow and process of history. One side effect of such historical tides in the affairs of man is psychologismic pathology for not being, as they say, politically correct. I must here thank Johnson for his pointing out his dislike of -isms, as but another outflow of the same pre-occupation with order of the monistically selective kind.

<5>
Now what led to this preamble is my dissatisfaction at the more or less bare statements without much detailed contextual backing up by HM in his TA1. For in his point about Cartesian dual mono materialism he alludes to Parmenides subject object split. I refer here to the article on Parmenides in the Newly available Internet 'Encyclopedia of the History of Ideas' where it is blandly pointed out that Parmenides was what nowadays we would call into the mystical but at its time metaphorised and mythified as journeys into the Underworld of demons or upperworld of the gods. For Parmenides did the opposite to Descartes - and he is not the only one - he introduces this SO split only in order to deny matter as real. I quote from Wikipedia "That which does exist is The Parmenidean One which is timeless, uniform, and unchanging." And Parmenides tells us he went to visit his goddess to find out such things. Well, of course the UNI-verse would have to be a unit as a whole.

And I do all this name dropping in an effort to be scholarly in my opinions, because I know very well I am hardly ever politically correct, so any reader may check out I don't spin such ideas from thin air. Another idea that pops up from reading Greek myths and history as recently researched, is that the creative can be equally demonic and innovative, which is why the Rational was mooted as a means to keep a balance, something well told in the legend of the Centaur Chiron, whom recent astrologers have named as the wounded healer which tells us that one has to have "been there, done that" to experientially learn how to manage such things. It made Freud fear and try to suppress the ID into pathology, and where he differed considerably fom that Plato meant by "the good". BTW 'idea' is just abstract 'eidolon' for what emotionally is an attitude issue which seems to decide what one pours into one's theories, a *logicalising* step I try to painfully avoid getting embroiled with. I rather doubt from recent history and THE news that Freud's attempt at suppression works too well.

<6>
Now I note from HM's TA1 several such ideational indicators that what began as a set of tentative ideas have been reified by repeated referrals in his comments to "comments and other TAs SUB-mitted by members". HM's Table 1 fi mentions, quote "A simple neutral term might be: ZERO-REFERENCE METHOD" which neither the method I have asked to be explained was ever done nor the original "might" in that sentiment, stuck with. There is no such thing as an unbiased person or detached observer any more; it is an intellectual fiction. The only zero method I know of is St Augustine who had no problem believing the good Lord could create anything from nothing, wHere Plato held that "nothing from nothing comes" which he rationalised into all ideas being eternally pre-existent, as but another long historical strand of ideationism in philosophy and literature. I have several times asked HM to account for the step from his 0-D into how to get into the 1-D after which simple repetition willl suffice. Now whereas the Greeks chatted with their demons and gods today we have a few more clues as to how to make such connections, as fi the Holograom, Sheldrake's Morphogenesis and other pop-up ideas from the grass roots, for which I quote:"" Real thinkers never stop, never come to rest, and are always overflowing and superseding themselves because the thinking has gone beyond the chains of the brain and has become organic, etheric, alive, and nothing can stop it in its creative, transformational and liberating flow. Krishnamurti referred to thinking as a never-ending movement that has no point of rest, and this a good spiritual description of Steiner in his last years. Juan Antonio Revilla. So much for making one's mind into a mausoleum of a theory and deploying a method and anent any process theory or dynamics.

<7>
And what I note is that HM never changed from his original position, he keeps on harking back to and by the means he uses to run this list, oops forum, oops mailing list, he makes it impossible for other such ideational schemata to be suggested and discussed by others in the hope and expectancy a consensus of sorts may or may not result. The kindest interpretation one might make is that he is on a fishing expedition with his own ideas to bolster them up some at which he finds constant fault with others. I can think of several other interpretations too, but forbear. For as history teaches us: that thinking never stops and is always in flow, unless one believes in newpapers who tend to drown yesterday in egyptian darkness and pour fear and terror into a tomorrow. I further note an antinomy as from Locke's tabulas rasa, which imitates Plato's slave and soundly confuses education as an art of leading OUT with the modern technique of stomping facts IN."Fact" is cognate to West Indian Feitico as in 'fetish'. Further in an insistency on constructivism, which is a pedagogical device, as I dare not call it a theory, which muddles up subjectivity with ignorance of manmade knowwledge and extends this by confounding such ignorance of the unlettered with an inability to think, which muddles up that such thinking is couched in an iron clad method, such that the mind of any real thinker would be thoroughly confused if he allows this happen by adopting certain beliefs. Now either we go back to good old fashioned Greek rationalism which is about putting one's soul in proportion with one's mind OR sticking to the context of modern rationalism which lacks explanations for the intuitive, mystical, creative and innovative such that the introduction of many mystical ideas culled from diverse sources, fi Rilke's "umgekehrt" simply does not LOGICALLY add up. Rilke speaks of introversion as against extraversion. The apeiron is no longer the source mind is, and consciousness. I would appreciate any explanation of either how one gets from 0-D to 1-D as I have asked several times only to be called Obelyx for my doing so, OR how to fit mystical notions into that post medieval Ramusian Protestant anti-eidolism called the rational turned into another -ism. It's one thing to have a brainstorm it's quite another to get it in harmonious proportions with one's rationis. I hope the reader will put up with my cryptic writing of what could easily be expanded into a book.

<8>
HM's table appended below, which contains many more such antinomials, FI there is NO unstructured matrix for which Feynmann, Einstein and Others have exclaimed they want to read & know the mind of god. The aether amounts to unstable matter under formation, which does not tell us anything much about the mind. The so-called aether, zpe field etc., is a sea of ENERGY in reverse directional process of what Einstein made happen as the atomb bomb, and in which mind is entailed but it sure ain't either Locke's Tabula rasa which ignores we come well equipped to make natural sense of any chaos as built in data crunching by millions of years of evolution. The aether flux, margined by Plank's constant merely marks ultra short from longer durational stability of matter, which ignores the intangible role or function of mind. "matrix" is an oxymoron because one cannot have a matrix without structure,even chicken eggs know that much, which has led fi to the notions about fields introduced in Physics. At best one may speak of an unknown ground of existence which has nix to do with zero or a dimension. FI Jaspers "umgreifende" is an existentialist not a rational notion, which, If I may foreground my being a mystic for the moment, I have seen sign nor notion in HM that he raw, natural experience like, has been anywhere near one, because I know how such minds behave after the experience thereof. OR he might be a well disguised closet case, as another possibility, which is not very conducive to open minded discussion. If mystical notions and ideas could be rationalised it would have been done long ago. An approach to an explanation might be put as a mystical experience simply so overloading our mind with a data flux that the mind blanks out. BUT this confounds two aspects of mind, the real or whole mind, whatever that means, versus the sensory, intellectual or conscious mind which camnnot handle nor explain that real mind in action - which is why it is called unconscious - and if it funks out almost all the kinds of all mystics that ever occurred including mine, don't see how one can pickle it in words when the others all failed, but I do try all the same, as they all did too. Even William James could not make whole sense of it and that's THE problem. ThE conscious mind is organised around sensory anomaly hunting, like hunger and broken windows, to solve such problems while the intellectual interpretation of that set of mental functions, which have been facultised and nominalised, and to come to terms with the whole mind which includes both beastly and godly impulses simply blows that intellectual mind up to awake to its limits. Further there is a whole lot of recent, new data and information to consider. In NHM's own favorite phrase "it makes no sense"; At all. Medieval rhetoric distinguished the natural from the artificial mind, the latter now called intellect.

QUOTE: As a researcher in computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) for over twenty years, I am known for my work on a variety of automated planning systems [Georgeff+Lansky1, Georgeff+Lansky2, Lansky1, Lansky2]. For instance, I have built artificial agents that "perceive", reason about their environment and about their own "beliefs", and take actions as a result. Despite, or perhaps because of my expertise in this area, I find myself alarmed by the emerging trend in the consciousness community to equate consciousness with simple awareness, or even with more complex forms of reasoning and action based on awareness. The natural result of this equation will be to find computers capable of consciousness or, perhaps even worse, to view humans as complex machines [Dennett]. "Consciousness as an Active Force" Amy L. Lansky, PhD Renaissance Research 4119 Alpine Road, Portola Valley, California 94028 lansky AT renresearch.com http://www.renresearch.com

AND HE OUGHT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT LOGIC THAN MOST OF US. For one example bread making is now fully automated, as is car manufacture, with several programmers on constant call over regular breakdowns. Overdone or strict logic leads to paradox which in computers leads to hanging as a conflict of instructions called a bug. A conscious computer, as in a Turing Machine, OUGHT to be able to fix that.

"""Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine." K Godel. OR, as pointed out by Leibniz, another polymath, who worked, among other things, on calculating machines, that the simplest of questions have the most long term complex searches for explanations imaginable.

BTW Parmenides is mentioned in the EHoI in 28 papers, from 254 contributors, some 65 instances, which by ratio does not make him a very important thinker, PYrrho and Anaximander score better. Logic has 232 papers & 1383 instances, while rhetoric comes at 86 & 528 although when one adds up belief with older faith which makes 223 + 179 at 1554 total instances which thereby dominates enquiries made, while Leibniz ranks 82 papers with 302 instances. I begin to sound like ben jonson who also could never finish a project. I'd love to know more about HM's zero reference **METHOD**, which reads like a conceptual congeries with no conclusion. At which I'll stop with my ongoing deconstruction, for the moment.

TABLE 1 :

-THE UNSTRUCTURED MATRIX

as the origin of mental structures (various terms)

-*The APEIRON is the source and sink of all structures (Anaximander and others)

-"CHAOS (originally = cleft, later = disorder) in Greek thought since at least

Hesiod

-*TOHU WA BOHU in the Bible

-*TABULA RASA as the start of thinking (Locke and others)

-*The ENCOMPASSING (das Umgreifende, Jaspers)

-*FACING NOTHINGNESS (and doing something with it: Existentialists)

-*CONSTRUCTION and DE-CONSTRUCTION as needed (i.e., ad-hoc; Postmoderns)

-*VOID as background of thinking (Murdoch)

-*BACKGOUND (Searle)

*GLOBAL WORKSPACE (Baars)

A simple neutral term might be:

ZERO-REFERENCE METHOD

--------------------------------------

FIRST ADDITION

ON THE PARANORMAL

Bloom wrote two books one on the cognitive, another on the affective domain. This one is interesting by 20 profs Consciousness: 4 DVD Box Set so is this one and Bierman's proposal of duality http://psiland.free.fr/ebooks/earticles.html

& http://www.emergentmind.org/new_page_194.htm.

Bauer Eberhard Criticism and Controversy in ParapsycMarc Barasch

"Welcome to the mind-body revolution", Psychology Today, Jul/Aug 93, Summary: Discusses how evidence that the mind and body influence each other suggests that awareness isn't confined to the brain, it operates 'nonlocally,' beyond the biochemical links between brain and, say, the immune system. Rene Descartes, history's most persuasive partisan of the mind-body split, a bedrock notion of modern science; Work of William G. Braud, Ph.D., all aimed at detecting the nonlocal influence of consciousness on biological processes;

Marc Barasch

Patricia L. Barker, Ellen Messer and Sally Ann. Drucker (Maimonides Medical Center) psychology – An Overview, European Journal of Parapsychology, 1984, 5, 141-166

ETC>

& http://www.firedocs.com/remoteviewing/answers/docs/ervintro2.cfm quote>

Some historic perspectives… RV is magic. Plain and simple magic. I will not be able to provide you any insights into why it works since it is magic and nobody really knows why magic works… Hell, most scientist don’t know why electricity works so I don’t feel the least bit inadequate. Anyhow, RV is a mental thing. An ability to access the universe from any point and at any time and to report back on that image.

A real smart science guy once wrote a book which I read while I was assigned to the military unit). It outlined a rather phenomenal theory. Since I am not a scientist… hard time just passing algebra... so bear with me if I tend to over generalize.

All things living and dead give off electromagnetic vibrations caused by the jiggling and jostling of their atomic structures. These vibrations, now called electromagnetic waves (EMs), emanate out (move away) from the object at warp-1 FOREVER!! - since virtually nothing can destroy an EMs on the move. A rock gives off these emanations, cute redheads give off these emanations, dogs, cats, trees, and of course nuclear explosions. The difference is that the rock gives off its emanations fairly constant, changing only when its smashed, heated or frozen. The cute redhead, on the other hand, changes her emanations every time she breathes, moves, touches something or (now write this one down because its important), has a thought! The thought thing is most interesting since it is the core of the concept of some of the magic that might be the reason RV works.

--------------------------------------

SECOND ADDITION

QUERY TO TA1 TOHU WA BOHU IN THE BIBLE

There are two items. Any elucidation would be welcome

A:
In a long term endeavour to come to terms with M's terminology in TA1 and the feasible reasons for the congeries I googled the phrase "Tohu wa Bohu, in the Bible" from table one and discovered that all sites which translate Hebrew into Engliah charge and Aramaic does not occur.

So I wrote to an acquintance, a reverend with Hebrew and Aramaic and a long line of reverend ancestors to get this reply. Pasted below. To give out his name I swould have to ask his permission. I am totally puzzled and of course have neither Hebrew nor Aramaic. It would also be nice to have its author, verse and context, as the bible is rather big. I don't have a user friendly rabbe, as what is meant by "bible" gets complex.

Quote.

Adrian, I can't be certain with regard to the spelling as nothing really comes seriously close, however, when pronouncing the words as you've spelled them … I'd GUESS via a long shot, something along the lines of (Deceitfully throwing cries) or (weeping out fraudulently). Something like a person who is crying out but faking it to gain pitty or to catch attention so they can rob them or get something from them.

You stated the words are from the "Bible", send me the verse and the particular words within the verse and I'll toss it through my Concordance.

Sincerely,

Mike

end quote

B:
At another angle sometimes one finds a real gem, and

www.headless.org by Douglas E Harding provides a non-religious, non mystical and very simple, pragmatic approach to real first hand experience of that subjective item called the 1st person pronoun, not the Lockean pedagogic version. I won't summarise and suggest anybody curious enough to try this should visit the website, as I do not wish to offend against the gentleman's sincerity. It could just as well be called Anaximander's Apeiron. but that's a long, tedious tale. It makes St Francis of Assissi his "What we are looking for is what we are looking with" exceptionally easy to explore.

--------------------------------------

Adrian van der Meijden

e-mail <adrf@orcon.net.nz>