KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA33 (Mancuso)

Commentary 5 (on C3 by Mahoney)


ANCIENT ITALIAN WISDOM
by Adrian van der Meijden
14 February 2001, posted 20 February 2001

 

<1>
This totally echoes my sentiment + excitement and thus hunting for new coinages is an excellent pastime. I looked up "hyperspace" in a search engine to find, in very crude, it offsets the scientific attitude that reality is a roulette wheel only to be imagined by Lie algebras and super symmetries and instead expands on the quantum notion that it is our mind which manages at least part of the show. This enables humble folk like me who already holds he wants to except from "history" to apply some understanding.


<2>
The sad fact is that much of such an exploration is relegated to "dreams", hallucination and fantasies as against "the real" whereas this intimates how we can better explore how individuals and "myths" represent this wider version of our minds by way of psychocollages, and as mediated by meanings. Even a "gestalt" is too fixed in its ways. Here what seems needed to reconcile 1st and 3rd person modes is by a better study of the many ways this can be self represented as we all use a range of meanings entailed on our sensorium such that indeed we imagine we communicate whereas we don't. The well defined word does not help much here. What we seem to need is a "superpositional" model that contains all of the possibilities we deploy, not unlike hypercubes can be expanded from and infolded into a simple cube. And here our 3D world needs expansion into other dimensions than sensorily tangible. Stephen Hawking introduced the idea of a quantum cosmology, an oxymoron which, like a metaphysical conceit, points in a direction we can explore by how our all too tiny "mind" can indeed affect our world, and not necessarily in a standard scientific sense only. This can reconcile micro and macro better than mere analogy.


<3>
In this our standard five senses are quite unsatisfactory as we deploy a near multitude of "sensors" of which our brain is one and which collates with others elsewhere in the body to a degree that we can enumerate some fifty or more with ease. Is "balance" a sensor? Is texture handled by a sensor? How do we use those "mirror neurons" just mooted other than by mere "empathy" to say "I know how you feel"? For instance when we feel hungry it is a rendition of a sugar & protein test of the blood. We can sense our inner states and even diagnose which body part bothers us and for which "nerves" does not quite explain in full enough. Even the integration of our entire cooperative "keeping in tune" metabolism needs fresh examination. It is for example well known that emotional states affect our heartbeat for one. Seeing "auras" is mediated by a use of movement detector cells in the retina which otherwise to focus pupillarily is "unconscious" so how do we manage this, rather than "Is this real?"? Is psychosomatic disease "caused" by an overuse of certain psycho-collages already in evidence by how we use personal metaphor as "this is too heavy" correlative to backaches when done over many years? Practically all diseases now appear to have psychosomatic components if not more; consider spontaneous remissions as held to be an "anomaly". Could "insanity" amount to using not socially accepted psycho-collages? I could go on and on for more. Would not much of that "metaphysical" stuff be brought better down to earth?

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Adrian van der Meijden