α1 | preamble |
setting-out
After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. (And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation; For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.)
Each day the goal of my ramblings appears no closer than before. Overnight my thoughts slip from the words and lines I tie them to, and although diagrams I've drawn along the way show the journey I've been on I was trying to get somewhere else. Words are illusory, maps not territories. And expression is recursive. This was my Red Pill.
Unable to see how culture could trip me up, I arrived in Finland from London, enchanted. I was falling in love. The country felt soft the people seemed kind, and unlike Greek or Chinese I could at least read Finnish. Yet when my love died the society I had been part of died too. Overnight I found I had become not only alone but also incomprehensible.
As a child I was lost. Searching for a world of black and white, the simple logic of maths and science became my safe place. And seemed to be the perfect guide. Yet for navigating the everyday, its straightforward appearance is misleading, as readily describing chaos, as order.chaos
Scientists imagine their facts change the world but only the stories told with them do that; meanwhile, the investments we've made in the stories we know keep it the same. Facts are unhelpful in themselves. We've not dropped far from the trees. Leaders know that gibberish and violence sway us more than reason or courage.
Stumbling over this "wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction", I have ploughed on with my story of stories — on being heard — inspired by the passing virus which killed the Wrath-of-god, but approaching its end I find that I am changed. This story has rewritten me.
From the preface to: Philosophical Investigations, by its author: Ludwig Wittgenstein; Cambridge, January 1945, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe.
You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Taking the Blue pill represents submission to psychological enslavement, a commitment to the delusion provided by a prevailing paradigm. The Red Pill represents commitment to engage with whatever is the overarching reality of that paradigm. While continuing to take the Blue Pill feels more comfortable, and safer, as the delusion it generates is ersatz it is ultimately less fulfilling than the reality revealed through taking the Red one.
writing recursions
Like speech, writing appears to be transparent. But meaning is not intrinsic to words, or to any sign; it must be deduced — imagined. For meaning to be established, a context for the signs is required, a conversation of some kind. Computers have no need for meaning, nor for understanding, and so have no need for discussion.
Writing engages both hemispheres of the brain. The conversation between them that then takes place stabilizes and develops a writer's perception — to fight the demons that visited them in the isolation of their cells, monks were advised to write journals.
In February 1941, T.S Eliot began work on his poem 'Little Gidding', but with every draft became increasingly dissatisfied. Despite his fluency, writing was a journey even for him. Realizing the problem was with himself not the poem, in September that year he stopped writing altogether. A year later he began again and completed it.
see: Left hemisphere speech: Parts of the brain involved in speech, healthline.com, May 2019, retrieved: 5 Jan 2022.
and: 'Writing with the right hemisphere', Steven, Rapcsak, Pelagie, Beeson, and Rubens, Nov 1991, in Brain and Language, Elsevier.
contents of n_A1pre_Chaos.php inserted into footnote 'Chaos' in e_Preface_Footnotes.php via PHP-include, - called from e_Preface.php#infoHum and A1-Footnotes.php#A14..
chaos
Chaos refers to the apparently random states of disorder and irregularity that are exhibited by complex, nonlinear, dynamical systems actually governed by interconnectedness, underlying patterns, and self-organization. While these systems are deterministic, their predictability is limited as it is impossible to completely know their actual state at any point in time and the smallest difference in this from what has been assessed leads to behaviours that diverge exponentially over time from that foecasted —a characteristic often referred to as the Butterfly Effect.
the wrath of god
Timur, the last great nomadic emperor, known as the 'Wrath-of-God', invaded Baghdad in June 1401. After capturing the city, Timur ordered every soldier to present him with at least two severed human heads. When there were no more men to kill, many warriors killed prisoners captured earlier in the campaign, and when they ran out of prisoners many resorted to beheading their own wives; 20,000 citizens were massacred. Scholars estimate that Timur's military campaigns overall caused the deaths of 17 million people. Four years later, in the city that is modern-day Shahrisabz, as the 'Wrath-of-God' prepared to invade China he was killed by a virus.
The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?
Fluency, is generally limited to describing dexterity of verbal expression; however FLUENCY here refers to EXPRESSION in general, and in particular to its aptness, in its environmental FRAME, to the communicative goals of the MEANING that informed it..
MEANING here, refers to that which a BEING PERCEIVES of the EXPRESSIONS of NOUMENA. Developed and encoded through the FRAME of ONTOLOGENY, MEANING is then inheritable.
signs
Aristotle and Plato wrote about signs, and about symbols; signs in the world of nature, and symbols in human culture. Now, symbols are considered to be a type of sign; whether they are iconic or signified through arbitrary conventions rather than through any direct relationship with what is signified — such as numbers, letters, words, etc.
Words in their primary or immediate Signification stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them.
Derived from the Greek, semio-, meaning a sign, and its suffix -sis, meaning the equivalent, in English, of -ing, the word, semiosis, is then literally defined as sign-ing, sign-action, or signification; the process of attributing and responding to MEANING.
Anything when RECOGNIZED, becomes a SIGN of whatever is RECOGNIZED. BIOSEMIOSIS is the process which generates that RECOGNITION; ENDOSEMIOSIS, that which takes place within a BEING and EXOSEMIOSIS, a BEING's external EXPRESSION, representing signification in a natural world that also contains human BEINGS.
An icon is an image, or a figurative representation, of an animate, inanimate, or abstract object.
Taken from: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I.ii.2: 405, John Locke, 1689.
BIOSEMIOSIS is a recursive process, enabling BEINGS to generate MEANING by aligning their PERCEPTION of current SENSATION with what they can RECOGNIZE from MEANING previously EMBODIED in them, either through inheritance or by themselves. ENDOSEMIOSIS refers then to their RECOGNITION of those NOUMENA that they EMBODY, and EXOSEMIOSIS to their communication with their external environment through EXPRESSION and SENSATION.
BIOSEMIOSIS is a recursive process, enabling BEINGS to generate MEANING by aligning their PERCEPTION of current SENSATION with what they can RECOGNIZE from MEANING previously EMBODIED in them, either through inheritance or by themselves. ENDOSEMIOSIS refers then to their RECOGNITION of those NOUMENA that they EMBODY, and EXOSEMIOSIS to their communication with their external environment through EXPRESSION and SENSATION.
Noumenon, is a Greek word meaning "that which is perceived", and the word that Kant then used to identify the thing-in-itself — the underlying reality that may then be RECOGNIZED as a SIGN.
NOUMENA include energies as well as objects. They may function as SIGNS of themselves, as rocks, or heat, or holes, or hands; or as qualities they may be associated with, food, green, danger, etc. NOUMENA may also SIGN things distinct from themselves — a woman may SIGNIFY a mother; a sound may SIGNIFY a river, a phoneme, or "Mum!" A mark may SIGNIFY a word, a smudge, or a symbol, like pi; or a photograph or a drawing a a pipe, or a pie.
Kant referred to recognition of the thing-in-itself as perception, but here, PERCEPTION, is used to label one of the four processes of BIOSEMIOSIS.
The entire sequence of events involved in the development of an individual BEING over its lifespan.
...ontological (is) the best adverbial or adjectival derivative of being.. ..Ontological security.. is the basic existential position from which a person encounters all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological, from a centrally firm place of his own and other people's reality and identity.
If experience is denied, our awareness of what we are is restricted, we are estranged from our actualities. We are in a state of ontological insecurity, unable to take our being in the world for granted.
science
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. Albert Einstein.
Science is an elementary practice. Scientism is a belief. Eugenics and the Holocaust it drove are among the brutal consequences and stark reminders of not recognizing this distinction.
Hormone, from the Greek, hormon, meaning 'that which sets in motion'.
from the poem The Stare's Nest by My Window, published in Meditations In Time Of Civil War (1922-23), by William Butler Yeats — on the Irish Civil War.
corporative —
of a state organized into and governed by corporations of individuals involved in any given profession, industry, etc. — Collins English Dictionary.
of or relating to a government or political system in which the principal economic functions, such as banking, industry, labor, and government, are organized as corporate entities. — American Heritage Dictionary.
of or pertaining to a political system under which the principal economic functions, such as banking, industry, and labor, are organized as corporate entities. — Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary.
corporatism —
the organization of a state on a corporative basis. — Collins English Dictionary.
the principles, doctrine, or system of corporative organization of a political unit, as a city or state. [1885-90] corporatist. — Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary.
the control of a state or organization by large interest groups; "individualism is in danger of being swamped by a kind of corporatism" — TFD Thesaurus, Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection.
biopsychosocial
After nine years of international revision efforts coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Health Assembly on May 22, 2001, approved the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health and its abbreviation of "ICF." This classification was first created in 1980 ...to provide a unifying framework for classifying the consequences of disease... ...Functioning and disability are viewed as a complex interaction between the health condition of the individual and the contextual factors of the environment as well as personal factors. The picture produced by this combination of factors and dimensions is of "the person in his or her world." The classification treats these dimensions as interactive and dynamic rather than linear or static. It allows for an assessment of the degree of disability, although it is not a measurement instrument. It is applicable to all people, whatever their health condition. The language of the ICF is neutral as to etiology, placing the emphasis on function rather than condition or disease. It also is carefully designed to be relevant across cultures as well as age groups and genders, making it highly appropriate for heterogeneous populations.
The biopsychosocial overview of wellness and illness, which the WHO describes, is taught today in medical schools; however, despite the publication of the ICF, and the ICD (International Classification of Diseases), its significance still seems relatively unrecognized and its impact on social organization and its institutions relatively minimal — on account, perhaps, of shadow political lobbying.
The focus of the adjective, biopsychosocial, is intentionally on human beings. To allow a universal focus, on BEINGS generally, and explicitly avoid anthropocentrism, here the neologism, ONTOLOGENY, is used.
Human beings are spatially and temporally limited parts of the whole that we call "universe"; yet we experience ourselves and our feelings as separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness.
footnotes of n_Einstein_Translation.php included in entryNote.php, e_Einstein_HumanDelusion.php, and e_personalMeta.php.
Ein Mensch ist ein räumlich und zeitlich beschränktes Stück des Ganzen, was wir „Universum“ nennen. Er erlebt sich und sein Fühlen als abgetrennt gegenüber dem Rest, eine optische Täuschung seines Bewusstseins. Das Streben nach Befreiung von dieser Täuschung ist der einzige Gegenstand wirklicher Religion. Nicht das Nähren der Illusion sondern nur ihre Überwindung gibt uns das erreichbare Maß inneren Friedens. Albert Einstein, 1950.
Einstein wrote the above (bold emphasis added), in ink, in a note now held in the Albert Einstein Archives, Jerusalem. The edit I have made is of the translation, written in another hand, that appears underneath them.
There were several reasons for editing that translation — to reflect the gender neutrality of the German more consistently; to echo Einstein's use of the words, delusion, and, illusion; and to better reflect the certitude of the note's opening argument, carried in the brevity of the German yet somehow absent in the translation on the note itself. In the end, the edit below, supported by translations by Google on 6 March 2024, is only a minor edit of it:
Human beings are spatially and temporally limited parts of the whole that we call "universe"; yet we experience ourselves and our feelings as separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. The striving to be free of this delusion is the only object of real religion. It is not nurturing the illusion but only overcoming it which gives that measure of inner peace which is attainable. Albert Einstein, 1950.
The translation, in pencil on the original note, became the text of the condolence letter sent from Einstein to Dr. Marcus on 12 February 1950. The first two sentences of it were then used to open the letter of condolence sent on the 4 March 1950 to Norman Salt.
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of pure religion, not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.
delusions and illusions
Einstein spoke the refined German of the Bildungsbürgertum, a language characterized by its precision. It might the be reasonable to assume, as an inspection of Einstein's note also suggests, that his use of the word Täuschung (delusion) twice and Illusion once, was considered not careless.
Etymologically the word delusion implies an action, a deceiving, referring here to that suffered by human beings through our consciousness, through which we perceive a deceptive appearance, the illusion of being "separated from the rest".
Technically, delusion is a belief that, though false, has been surrendered to and accepted by the whole mind as a truth; illusion is an impression that, though false, is entertained on the recommendation of the senses or the imagination. Illusion (n.), developed in Church Latin from the late 14c. onwards to mean: a "deceptive appearance".
Although I believe that translations I have found are faithful to the originals, stripped of their context, quotations can lose much of their quality. Transliteration of punctuation, for instance, can result in an English that makes their authors sound coarse or uneducated; and 'grammatical transliterations' may substitute gender bias for the gender neutrality in an original.
Where I have edited translations it has been only in order to address issues of punctuation, prosody, and inference, that I found detracted from the content of the originals. The edits have been made with due diligence, and although I am not a professional translator or writer, I believe they are faithful, and required to make the fluency, erudition, and sensibility of the originals explicit — original texts are provided so readers may draw their own conclusions.
Footnote {delusion01a} of n_Einstein_Translation.php.
..as free-spirited and anti-bourgeois as Einstein may have appeared to be all his life, his language remained the refined German of the Bildungsbürgertum of his time, a language he mastered with virtuosity.
I'd like people to reconceptualize cancer as a biological event that triggers stress responses affecting how the disease progresses... Managing those stress responses by adopting healthy eating and exercise habits, getting a good night's sleep, and finding good emotional and social support, should be regarded as much a part of cancer treatment as chemotherapy or radiation.
The article from which the quote was taken, although accessible in 2024 — at https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2003/10/stanford-research-builds-link-between-sleep-cancer-progression.html — has now been taken down. The new article, (at Stanford research builds link between sleep, cancer progression), while still referring to Spiegal's work carries an expurgated quote that seems, intentionally or otherwise, to downplay the research and to distance Stanford from Spiegal and the opinion he expressed.
bio-psycho-physical
The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one? Albert Einstein.
If it is unavoidable that descriptions of the ineffable, in some manner, are metaphorical; and if anthropocentric conceptions of the soul are set aside; then BEINGS can be defined as 'vehicles' of life, and LIFE inferred recursively.
Every BIOPHYSICAL construct requires a psychological correlate in order to survive, and any psychological construct requires a BIOPHYSICAL correlate in order to exist. In actuality, psychology is then the METABIOPHYSICAL account that is SIGNIFIED by a BEING.
BEINGS are the BIOPHYSICAL EXPRESSION of their ENDOSEMIOTIC systems, interpreting and driving change in their selves and their environments, and generating their ONTOLOGENIC sensibility of self and other that informs and motivates them..
From Cosmic Religion: with Other Opinions and Aphorisms, 1931, Covici-Friede, quoted in The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press; 2nd edition (May 30, 2000); Page 208.
context is king
A FRAME refers here to a frame of reference, a reference frame, or category. They are LANGUAGES, meta-LANGUAGES, that by contextualizing and defining the SIGNS that they contain and refer to, give them their meaning.
CULTURES are environmental FRAMES, meta-LANGUAGES that aggregate a community's PERCEPTION and EXPRESSION. Reflecting the wisdom, fears, and strategies that have been learned and passed on, their histories of families, communities, and peoples, are histories of privilege and trauma as varied, intransigent, and challenging to unravel as those of any individual are.
The differences between CULTURES provide opportunities for learning and development, but contextualizing and defining the LANGUAGES that evolve with them, and informing the interpretation of those that have not, they also construct semantic FALSE-FRIENDS.
..a structure of concepts, values, customs, or views by means of which an individual or group perceives or evaluates data, communicates ideas, and regulates behavior.
This definition of the term, frames of reference, taken from the Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, aligns with the broader application of it here for FRAMES.
category mistakes
In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes referred to the category errors that philosophers make. Three hundred years later, Gilbert Ryle coined the term category mistake, in The Concept Of Mind, illustrating it with several examples, one concerning a misunderstanding about universities.
A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks "But where is the University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University." It has then to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their co-ordination is understood, the University has been seen. His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if "the University" stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong.
The philosophical error had also been identified, by professor Heinrich Hertz, in respect of physics.
Our confused wish finds expression in the confused question as to the nature of force and electricity. But the answer which we want is not really an answer to this question. It is not by finding out more and fresh relations and connections that it can be answered; but by removing the contradictions existing between those already known, and thus perhaps by reducing their number. When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.
MEANING does not refer here to the output or conclusion of a cognitive function or human mind, but to motivation, founded by learning and LIFE.
As little as a ball on a billiard table can move before receiving an impact, so little can a man get up from his chair before being drawn or driven by a motive. But then his getting up is as necessary and inevitable as the rolling of a ball after the impact. And to expect that anyone will do something to which absolutely no interest impels them is the same as to expect that a piece of wood shall move toward me without being pulled by a string.
being — defined recursively.
Life is the condition of being.
Being is the condition of BEINGS.
A BEING is a descendant of BEINGS.
I am a BEING.
A metatransition is a metasystem transition to either a more complex or a simpler structure, ultimately leading to a transitory or permanent evolutionary transition in individuality.
The prefix "meta-" is used here in the same manner as it is used in the term meta-language — a language that describes or contextualizes a language.
Language: a system of arbitrary signals, symbols or signs, used to communicate information.
to communicate: to convey information through a system of arbitrary signals.
Semantic: of or relating to meaning.
Meaning: the sense or reference of an EXPRESSION.
to recognize: to know something as the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something known before.
Hydrozoa show great diversity of lifestyle; some species maintain the polyp form for their entire life and do not form medusae at all.
Polyps of some species propagate vegetatively, forming colonies.. polymorphism occurs in colonies of some species of hydrozoans and anthozoans, the polyps being specialized for functions such as feeding, defense, and sexual reproduction.
Ruppert, Edward E.; Fox, Richard, S.; Barnes, Robert D. (2004). Invertebrate Zoology, 7th edition. Cengage Learning. pp. 148-174; cited in Jellyfish, Taxonomy (list item: Staurozoa), Wikipedia..
Fautin, Daphne G. and Sandra L. Romano. 1997. Cnidaria. Sea anemones, corals, jellyfish, sea pens, hydra. Version 24 April 1997. http://tolweb.org/Cnidaria/2461/1997.04.24 in The Tree of Life Web Project, http://tolweb.org/.
Emphasizing the whole and the interdependence of its parts.
The WATERSHED here, refers to the transitional period between the Powell Memorandum, of 1971 (Greenpeace.org), and the full commercialization of the internet in 1995, from which sprang what some historians call, a second Gilded Age.
After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. (And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation; For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.)