KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA 60 (Grandpierre)

Commentary 8 (to C5)

MIR - ANNULLMENT
by Adrian van der Meijden
28 July 2003, posted 12 August 2003

Re-comment.

<1>
Indeed Descartes using the then new-fangled logic, but taught to think in theological terms, admitted he could find no relation between mind and matter - the senses rather - had his interpretation changed when mono-attributive logic turned pop into how we interpret it now as materialism only. Obviously this used the isolative "OR" by way of how words work. The shift from Theology into logic percolated through between the 17th and 19th Century, mainly via the Education Act 1850AD.

<2>
But what I want to point out is what is miscalled illogical and used prior to Logicalisation, by way of a postulate and all that, comes together again when we super- collate ALL the logical figurae in a matrix or superpositional universal, or superset. Thus for any A and B, beforehand split into that verbal Subject Object, we get it as:

A ^ B isolate

A & B in union

A + B merged together as one; beyond the opposites

A . B by inequality or dominance and subordination as Ab & aB

A = B by way of anastomosis or like an integrated systems

Not to ignore the "NOT" figure we can add to a category singly and by groups or sets, as:

fi: ~A and ~ (A ^B) etc, and in serialised congeries or logical strings

Then we come up with all the possible interpretations of a well-defined set that make up different "theories" about this dualism or disguised binary thinking. By this token one can always null or disagree with an "opponent" by way of discourse by choosing other meanings or assumptions. The issue there is that we then have to make an a-logical choice as to which member of a given set we elect to apply. The logical convention of the mono-attributive string is what handicaps us.

<3>
Thus we can set Descartes aside on discursive grounds, by way of his ignorance of later ideas, like, say, Shelldrake's morphogenesis, or be "scientific" and go for E.M. modelling and so on and on. We could further deny D by charging him with Theological thinking, nowadays rather taboo, and him joining the older 14th Humanist crowd which made man and not god the measure of all things by their abhorrence of things spiritual. You have already pointed out that "authority" is a fiction so why bother re-framing Descartes ? We don't need him if we are going by subjective projectionism. On top of that recent constructionism and deconstruction directly copies much of what Korzybski spent his life pointing out. This ends up in the above sample matrix By this once we get rid of the hegemony of "Reason" and its mono-attributive, linearised thinking we arrive at what is already the case by way of various schools of thought anent any "theory" whatsoever; and all too obvious in discourse. Descartes could not know of Set Theory and various other recent theories of thought.

<4>
Sets are shifted into groups by the following trick. Its negation or contrariety as a set is aggregated such that for any A & ~A we get a group as a means to reach into wider generalisation, and of course, ambiguity. This is done to generate symmetries at higher levels of abstraction not unlike done by algebra beginning with numbers, for which we get 6 different modes of using numbers by inclusion of that famous zero and the more recent imaginary number 'i' which is a variable and not a fixed or absolutised unit as are numbers. Prof Byers did not give us a complete list of all the fibs math uses to bypass awkward ambiguities, paradox and more of that ilk.

<5>
To now return to this period of transition from theology into logic. We can identify that intellectualised 'consciousness' as the theological soul and elan vital, or ipseity, as what gives us life. This was hitherto ascribed to god as the superset of that idea or most generic category and inverted as man's creativity by humanism. That led also to the shift away from Aristotelian deduction into Humean induction. The resultant muddle was pointed out by High Court Judge, Oz, Hodgson as mere folk psychology with no scientific grounding and endemic in the social sciences; especially law and politics. Science absolutises the material hypothesis and denies it all firm ground in what it all starts off as common sense.

<6>
Einstein's comment: "The splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking, and therefore we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe". Since I doubt he meant armageddon it is to be sought for in applied logic. We can now reach into much higher modalities of logic, as shown above, than available during the Middle Ages. We can, once more, begin with the unity of all things and analytically trace the breakdown into parts. IOW our subjectivity, taken in a communal sense, is well nigh guaranteed to come up with every possible and potential variety of meaning. I largely ignore the politicisation of our society into workbench correlated stereotypes of our humanity. This also raises spectres of the Jungian collective and our debatable unconscious. Jung in Collusion with Wolfgang Pauli sought to clear up this mono-attributive thinking, which is indeed very clear and singular but not too trustworthy.

<7>
That word "truth" derives from Teutonic "trau" and rendered as *believable*. But in Dutch it comes closer to "betrouwbaar" hence trustworthy by way of communal hearsay. "trouwen" means to marry, and "vertrouwen" comes to "reliable in the judgment of others". Because of that medieval use of authority humanism decried any such thing in the spiritual sense, as shown by the rise of protestantism. Man could make his own intepretation, in his own right. We could now argue that QPhysics by way of older leftovers in knowledge emerged with consciousness as left largely unexamined. As Freud points out, when in doubt we revert to earlier ideas. onvocations of authority are not much help since it was exactly those authorities which left that problem unexamined. Logic, once one's assumptions chosen, is as mechanical as a sausage machine. Thus, in the words of Anatole Rapoport, we need to reach into higher order generalisations than hitherto in use. Korzybski in particular {Science and Sanity} points out that everybody has their own meanings for any word. When pursued through levels upon levels of abstraction we end up with a baby's non-verbal appraisal of what it likes and dislikes.

<8>
Thus unexamined subjectivity alone is not much use either. In tests done with colour it turns out that most people tend to agree on a given colour which ranges out into a surrounding penumbra of shades. This is an exact match for words and meanings and may be generalised in common for all our senses. But it is not in our senses that the problem hides, nor the mechanoid neural pathways of the brain. It lies in how we make our various choices in a field of ambiguities, made up as a matrix of interpretations. That indeed begins in the "simple" but soon enough breaks down into complexity. We live inside a UNI-verse where variety is the rule. Although, perhaps, the vaunted simple of reason make this out as chaos, by means of its binary thought, it is anything but chaotic.

<9>
Once we abandon MIR as a vaunted objective world we are forced into a more real dualism. Yet we can hardly do without our communal fictions. To attempt to make this out, once more, as a unified and singular theory of everything, seems, to me, a somewhat idle pastime. Why not call that 0-D reality?

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Adrian van der Meijden