footnotes of n_Einstein_Translation.php included in entryNote.php, e_Einstein_HumanDelusion.php, and e_personalMeta.php.

my translation

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 words, in ink (bold emphasis added), in a note now held in the Albert Einstein Archives, Jerusalem. The translation I have made of them, and quoted from, is made in light of the translation that appears underneath them on the note and written in another hand.

There seem to me several reasons to make another translation: to reflect the gender neutrality of the German more consistently; to echo Einstein's use of both the word delusion and illusion; and to better reflect the certitude of the note's opening argument — carried in the brevity of the original German yet somehow stunted in the translation on the note itself in English.

The translation I offer here then, supported by translations by Google on 6 March 2024, is based on that written in pencil on the original note:—

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.

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.

This 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.

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.

 The German word Täuschung in the original note, meaning 'delusion'.

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 the translations that I have found are faithful, quotations, stripped of their context 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 of an original.

Where I have edited translations it has been only in order to address issues of punctuation, prosody, and inference that I felt 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 both faithful, and required to make the fluency, erudition, and sensibility of the originals explicit. Original texts are provided for readers to 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.

Words that are emphasized here, such as virtuality are used to carry a specific meaning that they have rather than in their more common sense.

The thesis here seems everyday, but it is inclusive and fundamental, relying simply upon the observation of elementary phenomena that may be called facts. It is conceptual — as science itself is — so could be called 'ideological'; but virtuality gives it relevance, its argument, despite its poor expression here, unpicking the debates and leadership of our modern mythologies.

Our engagement with virtuality began with the making of 3D simulacra of our world thousands of years ago. In the abstraction of text, these figurative models were disconnected from actuality, and now, through hypertext, the internet immures us in them.

With the powers of a Pied Piper, overnight the internet has powered a 'Snow Crash'. The oversight of democracy is being replaced with the churning of mobs; governments are increasingly ruled by oligarchs, both real and virtual; while learning has been channeled into training and infotainment by vested self-interest.

The fundamental semiotic change virtuality has developed represents a metatransition. for our species, analogous to those that acrasins established for social amoebae.

This is far from the goal of this project. In the beginning it was bursting with hope. Though there is little fun remaining here there is still hope; we have choice and can learn — if only to fiddle while Rome burns.

Meanwhile however, ontogeny flows on regardless.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.    Albert Einstein, 1938.

Echoing Schpenhauer's defence of Kant's work, in respect of Julian Jaynes' work philosopher Daniel Dennett suggested that although some of Jaynes' supporting arguments might be wrong, they were not those essential to his main thesis[43]:

If we are going to use a top-down approach, we are going to have to be bold. we are going to have to be speculative .. and this is not an unparalleled activity in science. .. those scientists who have no taste for this sort of speculative enterprise will just have to stay in the trenches and do without it, while the rest of us risk embarrassing mistakes and have a lot of fun.

Virtuality refers here to the abstraction of semiosis into generalized forms of contextualizing code.

Despite some obfuscation of the terms corporative, and corporatism (for instance in Wikipedia) their definition - of or characteristic of, relating to, or associated with a corporation - and with regard then to government is unequivocal: corporatist adj Of, relating to, or being a CORPORATIVE state or system. corporatism n. American Heritage Dictionary corporatism or corporativism n the organization of a state on a CORPORATIVE basis 'corporatist n, adj Collins English Dictionary the principles, doctrine, or system of CORPORATIVE organization of a political unit, as a city or state. [1885-90] corporatist, adj. Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, control of a state or organization by large interest groups; "individualism is in danger of being swamped by a kind of corporatism" control - power to direct or determine; "under control" TFD Thesaurus, Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. corporative adj. 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 a state organized into and GOVERNED BY CORPORATIONS OF INDIVIDUALS involved in any given profession, industry, etc Collins English Dictionary of or pertaining to a POLITICAL SYSTEM under which the PRINCIPAL ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS, AS BANKING, INDUSTRY, AND LABOR, ARE ORGANIZED AS CORPORATE ENTITIES. Sometimes, corporate. [1825-35; Late Latin] Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary "We are now in the midst of a coup d'etat in slow motion. Democracy is weakening... corporatism is strengthening." John Ralston Saul, 1995. "Mussolini imposed corporatism on the domestic population by force. Today in the US it's enforced by mainstream media and propaganda." from: The Corporate Coup D'Etat, Fred Peabody, 2019. 2010 Supreme Court ruling overturned centuries of campaign finance laws that restricted specific financial support of a specific candidate. The ruling said, in effect, that a corporation has the same 1st Amendment political speech rights as an individual. IMDB citing The Corporate Coup D'Etat

SNOW CRASH is the title of a 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set - a 'snow crash'". Neal Stephenson. from his 1999 essay "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line". The novel is set "in the 21st century, an unspecified number of years after a worldwide economic collapse, Los Angeles is no longer part of the United States since the federal government has ceded most of its power and territory to private organizations and entrepreneurs. Franchising, individual sovereignty, and private vehicles reign supreme. Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts, while private security guards preserve the peace in sovereign gated housing developments. Highway companies compete to attract drivers to their roads, and all mail delivery is by hired courier. The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds, where they do tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the society around them. Much of the world's territory has been carved up into sovereign enclaves known as Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities (FOQNEs), each run by its own big business franchise (such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong", or the corporatized American Mafia), or various residential burbclaves (quasi-sovereign gated communities). In this future, American institutions are far different from those in the actual United States at the time the book was published; for example, a for-profit organization, the CIC, has evolved from the CIA's merger with the Library of Congress." Plot summary from Wikipedia, rtrvd 27/9'24. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash His novel has had significant influence on Silicon Valley.[popNote siliconMeta] In 2022 Neal Stephenson founded a company called Lamina1 to support the creation of virtual worlds using blockchain technology.[popNote Lamina1]

"LAMINA1 is the fabric of the open metaverse - a blockchain providing builders and creators a usable framework to create a better online future." https://www.lamina1.com fragment URL: https://www.lamina1.com/?trk=organization_guest_main-feed-card-text "Lamina1 is a new Layer-1 blockchain technology designed by futurist Neal Stephenson and crypto pioneer Peter Vessenes to fulfill the vision of the Metaverse. The company aims to create an open and expansive virtual universe with Web3 principles" https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220608005423/en/Visionary-Futurist-Neal-Stephenson-and-Crypto-Pioneer-Peter-Vessenes-Announce-Lamina1-the-Layer-1-Blockchain-for-the-Open-Metaverse

Former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer J Allard and former Xbox Live Development Manager Boyd Multerer claimed to have been heavily inspired by Snow Crash in the development of Xbox Live, and that it was a mandatory read for the Xbox development team. Google co-founder Sergey Brin called Snow Crash one of his favorite novels. METAVERSE Software developer Michael Abrash was inspired by Snow Crash's Metaverse and its networked 3D world. He left Microsoft for Id Software to write something in that direction, the result being Quake. The online virtual worlds Active Worlds and Second Life were both directly inspired by the Metaverse in Snow Crash.[30] (Louis Rosenberg, Ph.D., CEO and chief scientist at Unanimous AI) has been working toward a vision of immersive computing since 1991, when he was developing one of the first mixed reality systems at Stanford and the U.S. Air Force. predicts we will not be talking about our digital lives and our physical lives as separate things. "We will just think about one life, one reality, and it will be a combined world of the real and the virtual," he said. "That is the metaverse." "The only thing that changed is the language used to describe our immersive future," (Facebook changed its name to Meta Platforms Inc. in 2021)Rosenberg said that that Zuckerberg and Meta brought into the mainstream the idea of a persistent world in which we'd spend a good part of our digital lives shopping, socializing and working. https://www.techtarget.com/searchCIO/feature/Is-the-metaverse-dead-Heres-what-happened-and-whats-next

Here, a metatransition ia a metasystem transition to EITHER a more complex OR a simpler structure, ultimately leading to a transitory OR a permanent' ETI. NB. The labels, 'more complex', 'simpler', 'transitory' and 'permanent', here refer to relative positions on subjectively defined axis, not to any objective measurements.

Here, refers to the general, rather than a restricted, controlling or organizational system which maintains the homeostasis necessary for the functioning of a system and its subsystems.

Please see the section in the technical account here for a summary and references.

Linked to from: A2-Content.php; n_A2_outro.php.

.. words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, egotize, narcotize, and paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain.

Words and language are 'tools' of expression; semiotic adjuncts. biosemiosis is fundamental and coextensive with life. We, and all other beings, depend upon it, exploit it, and are colonized by it. Communication technology then is effectively 'addictive', changing our perception, our lives, societies and selves, as these grow, develop, and adapt to it.

What is it that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language.

We recognize what we see, this is our perception, inherited then learnt from experience. We see what we expect to see, accordingly constructing and integrating the data that our eyes, and other senses are capable of recording.

Beings, here includes those that are unicellular (e.g. bacteria, archaea, and some algae); and those that are both unicellular and multicellular (e.g. slime molds) as well as those that are multicellular and, therefore, societies —cellular metasystems (e.g. humans, ants, jellyfish).

Bioemiosis proceeds through recognition — through current sense-data that a being perceives then being recognized by it; as being the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something the being has sensed or perceived before. This then is a recursive process, its first iteration (or 'base case') generating meaning by matching current sense-data and perceptions to those that have previously been recognized, recorded, embodied, and inherited.

Here embodiment refers to the biophysical expression of semiosis and to the semiosis that biophysical expression represents; and embodied cognition is then simply a description of biosemiosis.

The prefix "meta-" is used here as it is in the term "metalanguage" — a system of symbols or signs used to describe another system of symbol or signs — to refer to the metasemiotic expression of biosemiosis.

psychosomatic

If it is accepted as unavoidabe that descriptions of the ineffable are metaphorical, and creationist teleologies are set-aside, unencumbered by anthropocentric concepts of the soul BEINGS can then be defined simply as 'vehicles' of life; life can be inferred recursively from BEING, and BIOPHYSICAL defined as referring to its actuality.

BEINGS are BIOPHYSICAL realities. Their abstract characteristics, which, particularly in humans, are referred to as awareness, consciousness, ego, mind, etc., are EXPRESSIONS, in much the same way as perceptual attributes of NOUMENA, such as colour, are — colour relating to both inanimate and animate NOUMENA, consciousness only to animate NOUMENA.

Wellness and illness are PSYCHOSOMATIC, existing in a 'space' that is both BIOPHYSICAL and PSYCHOLOGICAL. Their development is therefore a function of BIOPHYSICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, and environmental factors. These are impacted upon by medical, psychological and social care and support. Although research unequivocally substantiates this it appears still to be inimicable to modern social organization.

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.

Life is the condition of being. Being is the condition of BEINGS An ancestor of a BEING is a BEING A descendant of a BEING is a BEING I am a BEING.

It is just as correct or incorrect to say that hormones create love as it is to say that love creates hormones.

Noumenon, is a Greek word meaning "that which is perceived". It is used here in that simple sense. Although Kant was the first person to use the term as a loanword, it is not used here to refer to his philosophy generally.

Kant adopted the Greek word, noumenon, to refer to the thing-in-itself so that this underlying reality might more readily be distinguished in discussion from the recognition by an observer of it that then renders it as a sign. However, whereas Kant referred to this recognition as perception — and to the perception of the thing-in-itself as a phenomenon — here the term perception is used simply to refer to a specific step in the process of biosemiosis.

A language is a system of arbitrary signals used to communicate information. To communicate, is to convey information through a system of arbitrary signals. Semantic means of or relating to meaning. Meaning refers to the sense or reference of an expression. To recognize, is 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.

Anthropocentrism is narcissistic, the belief that the human species is the central fact and final aim of a universe that should therefore be understood in terms of human experience, needs, and values.

scientism

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 are among the brutal consequences and stark reminders of not recognizing this distinction..