KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA 60 (Grandpierre)

Commentary 4 (to C2 by Müller)

( DESCARTES )
by Adrian van der Meijden
1 July 2003, posted 15 July 2003

<1>
Perhaps in simple terms it goes like this. It's a theoretical construct, which does not apply in any real world.

<2>
Paradox is formally an unsolved problem. My theory of it is as a category muddle caused by the well defined word, language being ambiguous. Also if words are treated as real then, of course, any paradox has to be taken as unreal or, for psychology, anything outside the social world model has to be a hallucination. Legally this matches as only what is enshrined in law is rational, therefore we can be punished by acting against "god's" will.

<3>
Descartes is usually taken. etc we both read books.

IF he cannot find a link or connection or relation between mind and matter, how could matter change matter ? This, as you just got my note on that, is embedded in our social structure which denies the citizen the power to act, consciousness and all that, by rhetorical or theological patterning, rather than logical. That resulted, by an imitation of the Renaissance visual perspective, as a ?hidden? third dimension projected on a painting, in the detached observer, as a necessary ploy to re-introduce mind or consciousness into this model of the world. By this device a certain style of writing was produced, politely called "discourse" conducted by an "authority". Again this we may see as grounded in Egyptian hieratic thinking of the social pyramid. All this produces an impossibility namable as the material thesis. One cannot logically maintain that something which cannot be determined of or decided upon, our mind, consciousness, freedom, power to act, etc., to act on inert matter. Again this rests on the god-king ploy or device by which he arrogates all powers necessary to act in himself. That is an imitation of god creating the world.

<4>
In Theology god is treated by way of three possible such arrangements, viz

a : God creates the world and remains detached from it, giving its product to self-act in freedom.

b: The world is god's body, etc, so detachment is not possible and thus can self tinker per medium of its embodiment, being what?, and thus evolution can take place, together with growth, progress, creativity and all the other fibs.

c: a mixture of a and b whereby God is not "the same" as his creation, but benevolently keeps an eye on it and produces the occasional miracle.

Theology was de rigueur before the 1850 Education act. But all this is pure relativity.

<5>
This can also be rendered in Set Theory as the union with (b), isolation from (a) and interaction with a set(c). Catholic Theology has it very muddled up and a better version is found in the myth of Isis, Osiris and Horus, + wicked uncle Seth. We can call this relativity, as embedded in language as that 1st, 2nd and 3d person. BUT "discourse" only permits 3rd person. Quantum Physics postulates or infers pattern (b) as the interaction nof mind and matter. In fact they are not even distinct, verbally being turned into Object and Subject. That of course, is the mystical thesis, only mind is real, the rest are products of that mind of god, sustained in existence by god's creative power we "borrow". ie, Nearer to thee my god, but never the same. Plotinus went a shade too far. This models it as an asymptote in the relation od god and man, copied into social world model construction during mythical times. The god-king ploy allows only God the power to act.

<6>
But, again, this is merely analogical patterning as of between a whole and its parts. This is embedded in myths and mythical thinking whereby, on grounds of internal consistency the rational and mythical ways to think cannot be simultaneously be used to make up such patterns. The detached observer is analogous to Jain myth, as well told in Moby Dick, togeth er with its ascetism, whereby we have to totally reject the body to regain our mind, also being made out as detachable. The material thesis totally rejects mind. Therefore we cannot - actually are not allowed by this pattern - penetrate into the mists of antiquity, marked in time by the arrival of writing around 6,000 BCE, later on again reduced to the demotic, which makes or allows only binary associations between a squiggle and its meaning, actually its sound pronunciation. We cannot even talk of meaning here as that would, again, entail mind included in the picture. That makes "meaning" an insoluble problem too. False causal thinking makes problems insoluble.

<7>
All is merely verbal patterning whereby, socially, words alone are allowed to be "real". This was necessary to validate record keeping of goods stored in Temple cellars. Just as not too long ago, the state bank guaranteed to pay the equivalent of gold value for any bank notes, now got rid of. We have a survival of it as "a man's word is his bond".

To think we are not dependent on words, nor even to communicate, using the animal level of body language also disallowed in "discourse" and repressed as subjective nonsense of no logical validity. Therefore what we are babbling on about in this consciousness "conundrum" amounts to the deep structure of our society. If I may say so, it is buried and repressed, in education by that obedience racket of "do as teacher tells ya, or else". Unfortunately it does not *take* with every child so we get dissentients and all that. This seems to happen in a way to retain one's original genius, and displayed by untestable geniuses, and all that.

<8>
If now we shift our attention away from words as meaningful we attach it to pattern or gestalt recognition, also known as transfer of understanding, and more of that ilk, it becomes readily obvious. Our "mind" does not think or data crunch words, only in the Freudian repressed does this verbally "exist". It works by patterns, while our senses focus on details. This constitutes the conflict between understanding, we are born with, and knowledge brainwashed in at school as also between "intellect" the verbal data crunching tools, versus intuition. Genius is untestable for that very reason, as all too demonstrable with IQ tests and *facts*. A further lot of people in which education only partially takes we get the miscalled mystical experience, which is simply the retrieval of what one may call our original mind before it got muddled up by cultural patterning. To handle this in discourse we have to aver to words like transcendental, para and all that, which by virtue of the social model being made out as *real*, has to be imaginary, hallucinatory and other charming labels.

<9>
In fee simple if you *buy* or believe the social model all this lies outside its domain of discourse. Thus I raised my paradox. Even in Physics this occurs as that 4th dimension of "change" to retain the validity, reality and consistency of the material hypothesis by allowing only the 3 dimensions of space. I forget Greg Nixon's precise phrasing but we're trapped in our own imagination, or imaginary verbal constructs. This can of worms was opened up by the finding of Quantum Phsyics, and, I must say, also rather poorly interpreted, of course, because people writing about this has to preserve the decorum of discourse, and some don't even understand it. Feynmann reckons it cannot be *understood* and I wish him well of the fancy. Of course it can be understood, "we" made it all up and have to get out of Hansel and Gretel's cage by finding the key. It's well told in the tale of Faustus who sells his soul in return for worldly goodies. Hamlet was written around this too in political terms.

<10>
In the Rg Veda one hymn has "The Gods come after Creation", which implies the rsi priest did not believe his own fibs, making him a brahmin who is above or transcendental to the other three castes. This survives as the difference between Palace politics to get and amplify one'spolitical power base, versus doing as the law says or manipulative public politics.

It is also the same as the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican "centre of the world". It was not adopted because it was better or more real, merely made calculations simpler. Here too this whole schlemozzle unpeeled we're no longer trapped in binary verbal thinking. From my experience in not being "understood" that being either real or a rhetorical profspeak ploy, it is rather obvious the adoption of a new paradigm amounts to a major mental overhaul of the drastic kind, such changes always are. To rationalise this I'd have to say that I am "aware" in my "unconscious mind", which is mere nonsense. Whitehead applies when he wrote that truth always prevails. Kohler's Gestalt fits too, but he did not spell that out too well either. Chomksy looked for deep structure inside words and language. It's in our mind that this is the case, repressed by the social world model.

<11>
"in the beginning" none of this applied, but as society got its act together it was applied as the god king ploy. While folk simply "knew" that god exists it worked but as it got "mundanised" [is that a permissible verb?] and got removed from the congeries of social model propositions it turns obvious that the whole schlambangle of ?propositional? talk would show up because there's a missing gap in the god proposition, he no longer or does not exist. We're now back at where it begun as the "numinous" pervading everything. All the talk by Q Physicist about quantum tunelling in micro tubules is so much verbal garbage, identical in pattern to that 4th dimension. Fancy now if the people became aware that they are free and all that ? We'd have a revolution, politics would say chaos has arrived the social order is kaput. So Hamlet has to commit suicide, if you can recognise the patterning and patterns. We would actually not have a resolution but instead all authorities would have the fiction that provides them with social power taken away. We'd have to go back to cooperation rather than legally extracted obedience rackets.

<12>
Jeepers if I dare tell you. Next door's dog when one approached it cowered. It took me two months for him to let me pat it's head and another month for it to think it through. Now when I turn up he comes bouncing up to me and is a different "person". I checked it, he was beaten before the current owners got it. Interpret Pavlov's designed and expected behaviour versus paradoxical and ultra paradoxical. In paradoxical dog displays uncertainty, ie is neurotic, and still tries to communicate that to the handler. In the ultra-paradoxical dog either sulks or bites the hand that feeds it. Why did Pavlov call it paradoxical, because it goes contrary to that obedience racket. Dog has now turned more cheeky and dares jump over the fence and when I walk to the shop comes bouncing along with me.

<13>
I taught "dumb" kids and untangled some of them. Uses a variation of the Double Bind as an unbind. "Sir, I cannot do that, I'm stupid" ME "Oh, that's curious, as far as I know stupid people cannot know they are stupid:, typical prognosis of a moron. Give it a week or two, and they come back with " My Father, teacher, etc blahh; whichever "parental" with authority, kids readily accept having follow the leader built in as instinct, always called me stupid. When I say" Hah, and you believed that fib?" in one of those heavy voices. And before too long one found a change in the kid, more open, curious, self accepting. I'm doing over an illiterate genius right now. He fell on his head, while climbing out of his cot, and tore his chiasma which gives him a word pronuciation problem so he was classed as dumb. Socially speaking he was "taught" to play "victim".

<14>
But I found no credibility in my colleagues, who thought me nuts because they "knew" in that static thought mode that that kid could not change, by virtue of God having created the world and us, so we could change only by way of a miracle. Since is was obviously incapable of producing miracles what else can one think ? They were all religious types, of course. Nor could the poor dears untangle themselves in what one may call a para-paradoxical anti-double bind of the sort Berne, Bateson, Laing and others peddled a few decades ago. As a psychiatrist you must have come across the thing. Fritz Perls it was I believe, who could do this in a quarter of an hour on stage. He was a cripple, as I recall, which may be but fantasy, it was a while back. Unfortunately I find that like other religious conversions of the Wesleyan & Billy Graham type, it does not stick for long as has to be followed up in boring repetition, unless they really want it in their own right.

<15>
I cannot write this in mono-typical, single attribute discourse and have tried to present it from several angles in a kind of psychedelic pastiche or surrealistic perspective. Bill Adams calls it poetry, perhaps it is, who really knows ? I use what Theology calls typology or iconography.

I shall now do the Isis Osiris myth in logical format. It uses binary thought mode. Since I surmise you know the tale, i'll take it for granted. Osiris is a good king. Therefore he and Seth, his twin or actually a triplet, cannot ACT in a same context,. so he has to be got rid of so Seth can be the baddy to act. The same schema obtains for the Irish Kings of Tara, only two of them can be in Ireland at the same time or occasion, This one has to die and the third member can enter Ireland to put things right again. This is inverse to the Osiris form, bad comes first and good second, which is typical cargo cult thinking on how to get out of a muddle by being "rescued" or theologically making it a miracle.

<16>
Ditto for Shakepeare's histories in a Boolean truth table.

Good king and good people, good life.

Good king, bad people, bad life

Bad king good people, bad life

Bad king, bad people, bad life.

This is done with an AND, while if we change this to an OR, it isolates and inverts it into FFFT, called complementing by that A and notA gambit Jung was bothered by the relation between the quadruple and triad, and there it is. Good is a cooperation module or a union, while the rest has to be an obedience racket or the kind of "rape" we indulge in by ruining our environment as well as the people. They have to be made to behave or do as told.

<17>
Now, once again,

Creative person, inert matter, no dice.

Obedient person, inert matter, ONLY within an allowable context and theory. The rest will be transcendental and therefore incomprehensible. I'm sure you can follow the rest.

Your 0-D ploy is interesting because it works on an AS IF while not breaching the rhetoric of discourse which would have to call it panpsychic or mystical. My saying we MAKE beginnings amounts to re-inserting creativity, freedom and all that as pre-logical.

"Anatole realises that the frame of time and space, which has always seemed to be the fundamental map upon which existence itself must be drawn, is as distorted a view of reality as the Mercator projection of the Earth's surface, no less useful, but artificial. -- Brian Stableford

Let me know what you think of it.

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Adrian van der Meijden