TRANCHE 10
Worker bees and army ants don't experience states of Nirvana. Ever wondered why MSG -- monosodium glutamate -- is not rigorously subjected to the truth-in-labeling laws and why the U.S. Government has legalized the spraying of free glutamic acid on most field food crops, the vegetables needing freshening under the nozzle on the market stand, and the “natural” meat under glass? Prol food! Food for the proletariat: eat it and you won't get to Heaven. The physicists I know about study loop quantum gravity while they are conscious; so long as this remains their study habit, they will never understand their subject. Sound like schizophrenic word salad? It is clear from close conscious study of the “tank logs” of John C. Lilly, M.D., that the best way to study the origins of spacetime is while unconscious under ketamine in an isolation/flotation tank. This is not low-dose ketamine challenge while taking cognitive tests and allowing the subjugation of one's interpretation of proverbs to the less-than-literary skills of the 1T2-logic-dominated psychiatrists. This is under full-blown ketamine-induced general anesthesia. Unconscious in an as-if gravity-free environment, as if, that is, in outer space while deep in inner space. But how could there be “logs” if Lilly was unconscious? Ask that question and you demonstrate your lack of experience at being conscious of being unconscious. If you have always been unconscious of being conscious of being unconscious, then you have not had a full-blown near-death experience, for instance -- or your capacity for self-observation in such circumstances is underdeveloped (for lack of the training received, say, by fair-witnesses or special service operatives). Ketamine undermines action of glutamate, the brain's main neurotransmitter excitotoxin used to selectively wipeout neural networks during “maturation”/enculturation of the brain. The best account of this is to be found in Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self by Allan N. Schore, Psychiatrist, UCLA School of Medicine (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994). This is the sort of technical scientific material the government needs to deny the general population access to by requiring access code for entry. See also “Decoding Schizophrenia” by Daniel Javitt and Joseph Coyle (Scientific American, January 2004). This is the kind of technical material the government needs to release to the general population. No mention should be made of the racial profiling in this article. Origin of what sort of self? An m-logically-valued self or a 1T2-logically-valued self? Thus, by glutamate-induced selective neural network wipeouts, can some classes of neural signal be amplified and others be suppressed. Ketamine, however, blockades the harbor of the glutamate NMDA receptor on neuron cells and by that means saves the signals otherwise suppressed. What signals are saved? What signals are suppressed? Eating a lot of MSG puts “excess” glutamate in the brain. Eating a lot of MSG enhances excitotoxic neuronal “etching”, i.e., selective nerve cell death in the brain. A good account of this in relation to Zen Satori, if not Nirvana, is to be found in Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin, M.D., Neurologist (MIT Press, 1998). What kind of brain cell etching produces good capitalist worker bees and army ants? Is this the kind of brain etching that yields states of Nirvana? Does the U.S. Government have a vested interest in its population corpus regularly entering higher states of consciousness or in that same corpus forming itself into incessant daytime workers and compliant armies of the night? But maybe this is all just schizophrenic paranoid delusion, another conspiracy theory. There is nothing in American history that could possibly suggest to any sane person that good American leaders would CONSPIRE to etch the brains of their fellow citizens, though such a thing could possibly occur as an unintended side-effect of well-intentioned idealistic actions to enhance the public good. The Ugly American or The Quiet American, that is the question.
But how does ketamine reduce glutamate NMDA receptor activity (thus producing “schizophrenia” type “symptoms”) and what type of signals are thus saved, what type thus suppressed? What was onetime overseer of neurological research at The National Institutes of Health, Dr. John Lilly, doing to the origins of spacetime while unconscious in that tank? As far as we know, he wasn't catching a comet. What was the old Taoist chronomantic sitting in An Dong Market, described in MOON, doing to his spacetime neighborhood? The action of ketamine on NMDA receptor has to do with the difference between binary product code RFIDs and neural coding of quantum q-bit identity (how information is partitioned in the brain into many-worlds almost immunological in character); alterations of the quantum wave properties of the p-electron gas enveloping the p-stacks of superconductant DNA in the genes controlling NMDA receptor molecule synthesis; superconductant conversion between electromagnetic and gravitational waves during DNA helix-coil transition; the ALTERED electromagnetic properties of autogenic brain discharges in a brain subjected to coercive enculturation/acculturation (forced indoctrination); and with relative-state activation of the brain. Relative-state activation! Hugh Everett keeps popping up from under every stone overturned. Some kind of hidden meaning in those objects. Spontaneous quantal fusion is not being able to take percept fragments and gestalt them into the super-percept corresponding to the objective material object; that is spontaneous quantal localization. Fusion is responsible for quantum non-locality, not locality. How does my I know? Because my I studied Cubism. Because my I practiced reductive phenomenology through concentration in self-observation and Impressionistic-pointillistic painterly concentration in observation of the external material object in a way Husserl did not because he mistakenly thought passing-time was in Existential remembering, not in Platonic forgetting. Practiced until my I was able to see thoughts coming in on my me, until my I had a fully-conscious gran mal “seizure”. Ack! see that last set of quotes. All that time spent in the National Library of Medicine did have some value. And it never occurred to Husserl to challenge the Axiom of Precedence Relations! -- ontological, logical, temporal. A running commentary on these subjects is provided in Derek's Journals in MOON. It is not quite as Javitt and Coyle say (p. 41): “Perceiving fragments as parts of a whole can be difficult for people with schizophrenia.” More accurately stated, people with “schizophrenia” have little interest in reduction of the wave-packet involved in the quantum-measurement act observation of the material object entails. Why? Because they are doing something far more interesting. What? How? Obviously, this has to do with the origins of spacetime, with what spontaneous quantal fusion is, with what happens in the brain as an act of quantum measurement/perception transpires which according to some interpretations of quantum mechanics is spontaneous localization and according to Everett's interpretation is SPLITTINggggggggggg into many-worlds/minds, an issue clearly of the utmost importance to any real account of quantum gravity, any real account of the origin of spacetime. And what, forgodsake, does all this have to do with m-logically-valued monetary units? This “discourse” just has to be crap art, has to be a case of the cognitive category of symptoms of schizophrenia, where loose associations prevail, associations not conforming to clear logic, 1T2 logic, that is. Ain't no anhedonia! That's for sure. Ask Yayoi Kusama. Don't talk to me about m-valued logics, I don't know nothing about that, says your local Professor of Psychiatry. Logic is not his specialty. Loop quantum gravity is not his specialty, either. Nor is the quantum measurement problem. Just as game theory was not the specialty of the psychiatrist who “treated” John Nash. And the NYC psychiatrist who diagnosed Yayoi Kusama as schizophrenic was not an expert on animistic Shinto reference or quantum gravity reference, the two deep-structural referents of her artistic product (which, to someone with covariant knowledge of spin networks and animistic Shinto notions of space and time, are the same category of reference). Too bad she never found her way into the hands of Jungian analyst Shunsaku Kimura, the Kyoto University Medical School Professor and Kyoto-Osaka specialist in “schizophrenic” animistic Shinto reference during autogenic abreactions produced by Japanese diagnosed with schizophrenia, a man who, in 1977, presented a paper on autogenic discharges and Jungian archetypes in the same AT Symposium session Derek presented his first paper on superconductant DNA and the autogenic brain discharge (see the hardbound quarto volume of Proceedings of the 4th World Congress of the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine, Kyoto, Japan, August-September, 1977).
It is not the von Neumann formalism that suppresses the observer's capability to be aware of the many-worlds/minds; it is glutamate etching of the brain under coercive enculturation/acculturation, the effects of which are sociobiologically transmitted from generation to generation as altered quantum frequency parameters of the DNA molecule. Miasm. Oh my god! He invokes that dead horse. Well… were this thesis correct, then, clearly, the glutamate pathway and selective NMDA receptor signal amplification would be involved in spontaneous localization and fusion in relative-state activation of the brain. With H. Hyden, the biochemist of memory storage and information compartmentalization in the brain, we could regard these issues all resolving to functioning of neuronal and perineural DNA-RNA, nuclear and otherwise. But were we to limit our consideration to the quantum-level processes of these molecules, we would fail to understand what relative-state activation of the brain has to do with loop quantum gravity, much less would we gain insight into the relative transubstantiation of electromagnetic waves and gravitational waves under DNA superconductivity.
When, after two years, Roger Penrose had not responded to multiple communications, I sent Wheeler a copy of the paper entitled “Toward a General Theory of Process.” He replied while I was in Japan. The response was with characteristic politeness. He noted that he was not familiar with the equations of atmospheric physics, but felt that those studying tornadoes would be pleased to not see the exotic physics of relativity and quantum theory brought into a classical domain. Several months after Stephen Hawking's paper on particle creation near black holes came out, I wrote him concerning the notion of 3-fold active time, the hypercomplex number systems these involve, and about how the cascade of complex angular momentum in tornado genesis can be viewed as a species of gravitational collapse. I noted that vertical propagation of acoustically-modified gravity wave modes from tornadoes can be viewed as directly analogous to particle creation near black holes. An extremely negative response was received to this communication. There were some subsequent acrimonious exchanges with graduate students replying on Hawking's behalf. Additional communications were posted to Wheeler. Over the years, numerous other attempts were made to communicate with Roger Penrose, all to no avail. Life as a pin-ball bouncing from one bumper to another. After awhile one becomes adept at interpersonal guerrilla theater.
How could relativity and quantum theory possibly apply to tornado genesis? How could gravitational collapse be taking place in the Earth's atmosphere? Dixon's Time Storm (Dixon wasn't interested, either). My I has tapped on every telegraph key identified since 1960. That was the assignment my I received. Nothing, if not well-trained. No place for amateurs. Spacetime gates. Atmospheric comets. Birdbrains riding atmospheric infrasound. So, what is it about Everett's SPLITTINgggggggg, before application of the von Neumann formalism, that gives us new insight into Heisenberg's indeterminacy inequalities, such that the classical limit is removed, poof? And what does that tell us about why each spin network node must have a whole stack of numbers piled upon it, not just one? And what does that have to do with the relationship between spin networks and Hilbert space. And what does that relation imply about the relation between Everett's relative-state and Hilbert space? What is the measure of Planck's length on the Koch curve at the crest of a breaking wave of quantum spin foam? Continuous discontinuity; discontinuous continuity? Is Planck's length m-valued, like Plank's time, like the speed of light? Which light? Second light? What does m-valued logic have to do with Everett's SPLITTINggggggg? What is the relation of relative-state to the many-worlds? Was DeWitt's many-worlds transliteration of Everett's relative-state interpretation a sting operation? Was the DeWitt sting necessary to keep m-valued-logics at bay? It's not as if all this has no hidden meanings, as if there were no relevance to classified dimensions. There's that schizophrenic paranoia again. This just has to be some totally bizarre form of paraphasia! I bet he is sitting there trying to rip that RFID out of his wrist, if he could only find it. Nash-hallucination? Unconscious conspiracy? Conspiracy of those unconscious of being conscious of being unconscious? M-valued logics had been around since 1921! Was Everett thinking about Everett's SPLITTINgggggggg in relation to Post's m-valued logics during the period before he unexpectedly died not from the lung cancer of a chain smoker? Certainly he could have gotten that much out of our late-1980 conversations.
I've written on such questions for over 25 years. Perspectives on possible answers are peppered throughout MOON and across the MOON website. M-logically-valued monetary units are directly (not schizo-loosely) related to theoretical issues in loop quantum gravity because the relative-state reasons for stacking multiple numbers on spin network nodes are the same relative-state reasons for stacking multiple logical values on a given monetary base. The mathematical issues involved in each case are the same mathematical issues. The geon's self-organizing “magic hand” is the same “magic hand” hidden behind market self-organization: quantum relative-state. If my I describes quantum relative-state as animistic part-whole identity transparency and that characterization alienates you, FINE, let the karma roll. According to the briefing my I received before descending into this hell, my me's responsibility was not to be so persuasive as to garner John A. Wheeler's interest in 1975. Given hidden meanings in all that was then transpiring and the karmic play out of what had already transpired, the only sane strategy was to focus on separating the complex matrix from the archetypal constellation. You are invited to figure out for yourself the implied action directives. Alpha-Four-Niner calling Dark Angel. Come in Charlie-Team Dark Angel.
Going, going, going… I just learned (p. 48, January 2004 Scientific American) that Hitachi has recently announced that it has developed a Radio Frequency ID tag small enough to embed in paper currency. Given the central role played by money in determining structures and functions of political and social institutions, once binary-logic tagging of monetary units becomes widely employed the Freedom Party's agenda will be GONE -- even if that is not understood for sometime to come. Market action directives and their reflexivities will be fundamentally altered by such tagging. Exactly how will depend on the type of information the tag contains and how that information is changed in moving through markets. There will be mission creep, as the tag will be made to contain more and more information as paranoia grows, as understanding of the implications of such tagging clarifies within the leadership elite, and so on.
I do not suggest anyone devote themselves to interdicting deployment of Hitachi's technology, which is not a realistic possibility. What one could reasonably hope to do is transform the nature of the application, such that the tagging of monetary units leads to effects on the structures and functions of political and social institutions consonant with the objectives of the Freedom Party. The required transformation is from (security and counter-terror motivated) binary-logic tagging to (sustainable development indicator motivated) m-logically-valued tagging. Existing RFID technology can only handle binary digital signals, whereas quantum computing holds out the possibility of m-logically-valued tagging. However, for all the reasons given in my earlier communications, the quantum processor is being developed for smaller and faster binary computing, not m-logically-valued processing. The quantum computer will be used to more effectively impose a global agenda anathema to the objectives of the Freedom Party. The full range of activities I have proposed over the past several decades is required to meet the rapidly evolving global circumstance. Remember this when your mood-swings swing: though existing institutional formats are against the Freedom Party's agenda, quantum-based technologies are themselves intrinsically insurgent operatives covertly acting on behalf of the Freedom Party agenda.
Advent of the Hitachi RFID technology is a world historical event, as the paper monetary instrument itself can now take on the quantum properties of the electron in “charge transfer processes” governing osmotic nutrient/waste exchange across cell walls. The whole body of theory regarding organizational adaptation through transport of resources across boundaries is immediately invoked. Economics will never be the same again. But, given the certainty that market action directives and their reflexivities will be fundamentally altered by such tagging, it is clear that exactly how altered will depend on the type of information the tag contains and how that information is changed as the paper instrument moves through markets. Whether the U.S. initiates or not, this tagging will transpire with multiple currencies and will employ binary coding (the regressed version of the m-logically-valued notion of currency tagging) for crime-fighting, anti-money-laundering, population-control, and counter-terrorism purposes. Singapore may be first, as it has been deeply into multiple scenarios strategic planning exercises regarding e-money use for well over a decade. There will be mission creep, as the tag will be made to contain more and more information as paranoia regarding continued existence of the nation-state system grows, as understanding of the implications of such tagging clarifies within the institutional leadership elite, and so on. The m-logically-valued possibility and the organizational-adaptation possibility will at first be ignored, later actively shunned, then suppressed. Hope for m-logically-valued monetary unit coding (the origin, back in the 70s, of the notion of currency tagging seeded into the collective unconscious) relative to sustainable development indicators, establishment of fractal boundaries between currency areas, and utilization of such processes and boundaries to stabilize fractured political geographies like the Balkans, Israel-Palestine, the trans-Caucasus, Kashmir, much of central Africa, and so on, will have to come predominantly, in the beginning stages, from creative initiatives made in the knowledge and technology areas determining patterns of application: Art and Technics, essentially: Musculpt in its myriad aspects.
It is now absolutely clear that binary-logic currency tagging will transpire as part of the war against global insurgency and in an attempt to suppress what Hernando de Soto calls “the extra-legal sector”. And it is equally clear that this tagging, though it will have initial signs of success, in the end will be one dimension of failure in planetary counterinsurgency. Since Derek Dillon has been anticipating this and thinking about it for over 35 years, it is unlikely many people are so attuned to it as he has become. The career of the idea of currency tags is a brilliant example of how the collective unconscious patterns historical developments. The notion of m-logically-valued exchange units in significant measure arose while Derek was studying self-organizational processes of the Viet Cong insurgency. Without modern information technology, the VC were able to develop an approximation to m-valued monetary units tied to fractal boundaries. This was done in their constantly adjusting tax-system/black-market by stacking on the “currency” base of barter (analog of a commodity basket) utilization of the piaster and the MPC (military payment currency) along with corvée labor. Their local Finance and Economy Sections constantly adjusted the indicators (in this case of combat intentions, rather than, say, quality of life) relative to constantly changing local boundaries (and the VCI, in turn, continuously redefined all the critical bureaucratic variables relative to the boundary changes) by modulating on a local-need basis tax schemes and payment criteria in the various accepted “currencies” (generally a family unit paid in multiple “currencies”, including corvée labor). Currently, as the nation-state system continues its breakdown under pressure of accelerating dissemination of quantum-based technologies and the evoked psychological, social, political, and economic responses, the extra-legal sector and the global insurgents are and will continue to rediscover all the VCI discovered, rediscover it in new forms appropriate to the new circumstances. This process of rediscovery will be greatly accelerated by employment of binary-logic RFID tagged paper currency by the global counterinsurgents. The low-tech extra-legal approximation to an m-logically-valued evoked response will be resonant with the quantum-based technologies being disseminated which are driving the whole affair. In the end, this resonance will be a major determinant of the outcome.
This arising of the RFID tag for paper currency is a perfect illustration of how projective identification works on the collective level and why it is imperative to struggle in the realms of collective psychology to separate the complex matrix from processes of archetypal constellation. Otherwise, absent such separation, regressed violent expressions are inevitable. Radio frequency pulse weapons (anti-personnel and otherwise) testing began to receive mention in the press in the very early 1970s: reports of naval testing in the Chesapeake Bay, Army testing near the Occoquan Reservoir in Northern Virginia. At this very time, while living in the Washington, D.C., area, Derek began elaborating his ideas about DNA superconductivity relative to the autogenic brain discharge. The notion of radiation exchange involved was developed specifically while reading into the literature on systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and the formation of anti-DNA antibodies associated with that disease. The subject of Derek's first letter to Wolfgang Luthe, M.D., was Autogenic Therapy as adjunctive treatment for SLE. Luthe's extremely positive response was due to unpublished research then being conducted in Tokyo giving weight to Derek's speculations. Derek was elaborating a quantum notion of immune tagging and autoimmune reactivity which could explain radiational triggering of the disease in genetically predisposed individuals, what the mechanism of that genetic predisposition is, and how onset of formation of anti-DNA antibodies is initiated. Sort of like how the RFID reader triggers the RFID tag. These thoughts were in part brought on by Russian studies demonstrating a high correlation between the sun spot cycle and incidence of SLE (when, that is, outbreaks take place). Western scientists have, of course, long since debunked these studies. Giving the immune signifier all the quantum properties of the electron was similar to the idea Derek was simultaneously working with of giving all the quantum properties of the electron to the monetary exchange unit. In this way, Adam Smith's utilization of Newton's laws of motion as the basis for his conception of the interplay between supply and demand would be updated by using Schrödinger's wave-function in place of Newton's laws of motion. Derek was explicitly aware that he was arriving at an immune system model of market self-organization dependent on the quantum notion of non-simple identity. This involved simultaneous modification of the very idea of immune self-recognition and the very idea of what a monetary unit can be. These notions were later worked out relative to m-valued logics and how the quadripolar quantum wave properties radiating from the DNA molecule carry all the information contained in the four nucleotide pairs. These ideas were then applied to modeling of autogenic brain discharges with such DNA molecules in neuronal and perineural cells. Such work was terminated by 1980 on a rising tide of opposition and interdiction leading to many premature departures. Meanwhile, in regressive mode, the processes of projective identification were refining RF weapons and, in due course, one must suppose, spun off into civilian applications that technology as RFIDs, with the tag, of course, being bound to binary logic, thus analogically embodying the global political fragmentation synchronistically appearing. Not only is the photo-acoustic spectrometer an analogue for the biophysics of superconductant DNA, so is the radiation-exchange interface between the RFID tag and its reader -- without, of course, the m-logically-valued aspect required to repair the fragmentation, political and otherwise, created by the initiating processes of projective identification. As Derek has been saying for decades: the tagging of monetary units is going to happen one way or another, for better or for worse. Derek chose for better; everyone else, apparently, chose for worse. As a result, for worse will certainly come first -- and the consequences of that are not going to be small.
In context of the earlier-provided discussions of Hayek's notion of the “time-shapes” of total capital stocks and Everett's “many worlds” as this one-and-only universe's multiple time-shapes, it is appropriate here to make some observations about Oliver Sacks' recent review article, “In the River of Consciousness” (The New York Review of Books, January 15, 2004). I will let Derek have his way with this article, as its content was his home turf during the period 1969-75, as recorded in his journals of that period and published in MOON in 1994. I would only note that none of the “bizarre” mental phenomena described by Sacks in his article go unmentioned in Derek's Journals and that, indeed, many more such phenomena (e.g., taste polymorphism and auditory and feeling-space correlates of “bizarre” visual phenomena) are mentioned in those Journals than are discussed in Sacks' article. One should note that Sacks does not seem to be aware of Luneburg's experimental work on “The Metric of Binocular Visual Space” (Journal of the Optical Society of America, 40:10, October 1950) demonstrating that visual space is a non-Euclidian metrical space (like that of Einstein's relativity theory) with a limiting velocity, a “psychometric distance function”, and a Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction wherein viewed objects contract or smear in the direction of motion (just as is the case under the Special Theory of Relativity). Sacks (p. 42) attributes such visual effects to “certain seizures, as well as intoxication (especially with hallucinogens such as LSD)”, whereas Derek explored these effects through voluntary dissociation and cross-modal correlations of sensory dimensions. Derek is not describing phenomenology of severe migraine, post-encephalitis, parkinsonism, or drug-induced hallucinations, but largely the phenomenologies associated with various modalities in the practice of walking meditation and concentration in self-observation. Though, had he gone to a neurologist during the early-'70s with descriptive complaints of his “bizarre” experiences, he certainly would have been diagnosed with some form of epilepsy and subjected to myriad horrors as a consequence. Instead, in 1979 and '80, Derek became a ghost writer for a neurologist. He received piles of patient files and turned their contents into papers for submission to peer-reviewed medical journals. The neurologist, who was too busy to write papers, was astounded by the outcome of these efforts. It should be noted, however, that in 1967 Derek acquired very considerable experience at delirium, experience finally attributed, after repeated lab tests, by the doctors to FOUO (fever of undetermined origins) following multiple fragment wounds (without involvement of the head). In Derek's “subjective” judgment (as if there were any other kind), the origin of the fever and resultant delirium was RAGE, rage and nothing but rage. The rage to live set against the rage to die (which was the source of Derek's later fascination with Rilke). Seven days of direct experience of this psychosomatically-induced delirium (severe enough to have been initially diagnosed as indicative of falciparum malaria) was the perfect introduction to phenomenologies associated with the forms of meditation he later intensively practiced. The meditative practice would have been far more difficult to fully enter absent the prior practice of delirium.
I mean it's like watching The Gong Show! It's so embarrassing. These Great Scientists and even Literary Superstars like Borges making crass display of their introspective incapacities (and hence the poverty of their immediate experience). Anyone possessing even the most superficial familiarity with concentrated states of self-observation and associated voluntary dissociation could not possibly come up with such puerile explanations of the “bizarre” visual phenomena at issue. Look at what Sacks does in his introductory paragraphs. The same thing Edmund Husserl does at the very beginning of his 1928 The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Both begin their discourses by stating that passing time is an unquestionable fundamental of experience. This is pathetic! Husserl never practiced the reductive phenomenology he preached; he thought about what it must be like if one were to think about it. Sacks, apparently, practices exactly the science he preaches -- a science, the experience of which, does not recognize the existence of experience (unless reported upon such that it becomes data). So Sacks, like Husserl, takes a uniformly flowing passing time (in spite of Einstein's special relativity, not to mention everything that happens to time under general relativity) as the passive backdrop upon which internal time consciousness is to be objectively viewed by the hetero-observant neuroscientist (observing himself would be akin to an onanistic act and this is so offensive on some level that Sacks clarifies (p. 43) the meaning of “re-entrant” as “reciprocal” -- which is anything but the actual meaning of “re-entrant”).
Where do you think Gurjieff's “stop exercise” came from? It came from Tibet, of course, but what was the purpose of practicing such “standstills”? The purpose was to attempt to convey, in a teaching environment, something of the contents of consciousness that become available when the practitioner “falls” into one of the gaps between “identifications” -- which Sacks, putting the emphasis on the perceptual field as do all the members of his cohort, calls “frames”. Sacks is arguing that the stream of consciousness is discrete, made up of frames like that of the filmstrip of a movie. The frames are moving so fast, we don't notice them. Certain pathological conditions -- severe migraine or, even worse, migraine delirium -- can lead to bizarre visual phenomena which make the frames' movement appear to slow down, and even completely stop (in the case of post-encephalitis or parkinsonism). If certain areas of the visual cortex are damaged, a person can suffer “motion blindness” wherein frames freeze for several seconds and no motion of the moving object is perceived. Freeze frame! Freeze frame! as Derek would periodically note. But this, according to Sacks and his neuroscientist cohort, has no actual effect on time-itself which goes on its merry way such that we can measure against that objective and uniform time reference the duration a given frame passes before the “lens” of consciousness prior to being consigned to memory (between six and twelve frames per second, the “perceptual moment” lasting about “a hundred milliseconds”: hence, strangely, we can't normally notice the frames). Measured against the unvarying backdrop of passing time, you see. Sacks traces this notion back to an article by J. M. Stroud in the 1950s, but does not mention the book written on the subject in 1990 by Miroslav Holub, The Dimension of the Present Moment (London, Faber and Faber), which Derek felt compelled to critique in the bibliography to MOON. Sacks states that some of the evidence for this perceptual moment was probably known back to the time of the ancient Greeks (implying that encephalitis, parkinsonism, epilepsy, mind-altering drugs were probably known to the archaicizing Greeks). He neglects to mention that the idea of consciousness being discrete, rather than continuous, is a fundamental principle of Buddhism and Eastern metaphysical thought in general -- arrived at on the basis of the radical empiricism underlying meditative practice (not, as with Western philosophy and science, the Sophistry involved in beginning by proclaiming passing time an unquestionable fundamental, unquestionable because based on the immediate undeniable experience of any sane person, experience, we mustn't forget, not recognized as existing unless transformed into data).
Nor does it seem to register with Sacks or the members of his cohort that by making consciousness discrete and postulating a perceptual moment of a certain duration, they are inevitably bringing quantum mechanics, with all its bizarre properties, into neuroscience. Indeed, not only does this not seem to register, but the whole idea that quantum biochemistry has anything to do with consciousness is anathema, anathema in this era of the "neural basis of consciousness", of "neural correlates of consciousness", of consciousness being an emergent property of the cellular level, hardly of the molecular level, certainly not of the atomic level, and my god, not at all of the quantum level of elementary particle behaviors, perverse as those behaviors are. This was an area that Karl Pribram was willing to briefly speculate upon, but unwilling to devote serious research effort to, serious research in neurology being research on the cellular level. And, with Wheelerian politeness, he was dismissive of the notion of relative-state activation of the brain and the role DNA-generated coherent waves might play as a "reference beam" for neural holograms (though he seemed to have no real ideas about the source of the required "beam" himself, the "beam" required to make his neural hologram hypothesis plausible). Derek has tapped on every telegraph key. Were quantum processes actually allowed a role in brain function, Pribram's ideas about the neural code would be out the frequency response window of the frequency domain, as the binary would inevitably be replaced by the m-logically-valued. Were that the case, a uniformly flowing passing linear-time reference, upon which to base measurements for a "perceptual moment", would similarly, and quite literally, be out the frequency response window. There would be no constant duration for "snapshot frames". Sacks notes that Francis Crick, of genetic code fame, now a consciousness researcher in search of the soul, believes that "snapshotting" is not likely to be constant, that there likely are different durations for shape frames and color frames, for instance. This is a great intuition on the part of Crick, but it only touches the surface of what is actually happening. If shapes have their own snapshot frames and colors their own, then a colored shape has to have superposed snapshot frames, and my god, one is full into Cubism if not quantum neurology. Certainly one is into what Derek for decades has been calling internal Musculpt.
No passing time, no egoic awareness; no egoic awareness, no arrogation; no arrogation, no will to power; no will to power, no attempt to dominate the environment; no attempt to dominate the environment… When you look at what the human species has done to this planet over the past 300 years and at what the consequences of that accomplishment will be in the next several decades, it is clear that anyone who does not have unmitigated contempt for the human species is an unmitigated fool. Etiology, not just pathogenesis, is related to the gestalt of presentation -- presentation of the symptoms. One has to have an extraordinarily reductive mechanistic view of nature to believe that the large number of species, animal and plant, presently going to extinction have no awareness, if only on a collective level, of who is the agent of their demise. And it is the very height of the lateral mental cleavage characteristic of the arrogated mind that it assumes this mass kill will elicit no back-reaction upon the human agent of Floracide and Faunacide. In all likelihood we are already into the very early stages of a scenario quite similar to the storyline of Hitchcock's The Birds. Obviously, such bird-brained behaviors are not, etiologically speaking, just pathogenic; they are collective and cooperative behaviors orchestrated from some level of bird brains. And it is unlikely that this orchestration can be explained solely on the basis of a piece of magnetite embedded in bird brains, even bird brains suffering from avian encephalitis -- or the bizarre visual phenomena one must assume post-encephalitic avians suffer symptoms of. Probably, were one to listen to our Great Scientists, one could work out the mystery of such behavior as exhibited by The Birds through studying bird brains with functional MRIs and functional PETs -- which Oliver Sacks assures us are non-invasive. Non-invasive on the level of tissues; non-invasive on the level of cells; mostly non-invasive on the molecular level; absolutely not non-invasive on the atomic level; incredibly invasive on the subatomic quantum level. Which of these levels is the level orchestrating collective and cooperative behaviors of organisms?
Francis Crick, according to Sacks' account, believes collective and cooperative behaviors in human brain transpire on the cellular level, where there are “coalitions” of neurons and “coalitions of coalitions”. Not sets, mind you, “coalitions”. The snapshot frames, or their components, such as those of shape and color, are formed into a whole, “bound together”, by synchronizing nerve cell firing patterns, such that when a large enough number of cells is synchronized the whole snapshot frame stops being preconscious and becomes fully conscious -- with many such frames passing through awareness so rapidly we see only the movie, not the filmstrip stills. Consciousness is a “threshold phenomenon”: the activity forming the coalition of coalitions must cross some threshold of intensity to become conscious. This is the neuronal basis of consciousness. So, the baud rate of consciousness would be the rate at which the coalitions of firing neurons form and dissolve. And since some coalitions are forming as some coalitions are dissolving, and the coalitions constitute frames, there is overlapping of frames, which contributes to formation of what we experience as the “stream of consciousness” -- the overlapping frames being the overlapping of perceptual moments (whether or not those moments are exactly of the same duration, measured against the uniformly flowing passing time reference). “Coalitions”, mind you, not “sets”.
Leaving aside all the issues of subcortical scanning of cortical neurons and the like, addressed by Derek in his papers on autogenic discharges, why would the neuroscience cohort choose a political word like “coalition”? Of what is this choice a reflection? Having hung with people who have had lifetimes in beam-times, choice of the word “cohort”, used here to denote the society of a scientific discipline, is not arbitrary and speaks to the propensity for projective identification to manifest itself in collective behaviors of such societies. If “coalitions” of neurons exhibit cooperative behaviors and “cohorts” of scientists engage in collective behaviors, is there no end to the loops within loops of reflexivity involved? What is the critical scale level orchestrating all these levels of reflexive critical-state behavior? And what are the logical properties of this “massively parallel” self-reflexivity? I'm not going to restate all the arguments offered in MOON or in the papers posted on the MOON website, but I will provide here an emblematic impression. Bill Sullivan in his book The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time brilliantly argued and documented in depth the thesis that decline of multilevel alpine agriculture and rise of massed warfare in the Andes followed upon a fundamental cultural reversal: agricultural productivity and putative peace reigned so long as functions and structures of social, political, and economic life were cosmologically metareferenced upon natural processes as understood via naked-eye astronomy; when a reversal took place and understanding of natural processes was based on a projection of cultural presuppositions to the phenomena viewed by naked-eye astronomy, agriculture failed and large-scale warfare ensured. The fact that neuroscientists have chosen a word filled with political content like “coalition” over a neutral word like “set” is indicative of a reversal similar to that which occurred in pre-Incan Andean civilization. Even more graphic illustration is provided in the following quotation from a recent Scientific American (September 2003) article on treatment of stress (“Taming Stress”, by James Salzano, p. 68): “Epinephrine is the one handing out guns. Glucocorticoids are the ones drawing up blueprints for new aircraft carriers.” This is not merely the language of popular science, the language scientists use to reach a larger audience; this language use is a collective Freudian slip, part of the psychopathology of everyday scientific life.
There is not a single chance in the hell on Earth long since created and presently being sustained that the perspectives argued by Sacks have any significant connection with the way the human brain actually functions. As another concrete illustration of how the processes of projective identification engaged in by a scientific cohort yield a material artifact mimicking the psychological functions projected, mimicking in regressed form, that is, I submit the TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) unit. This set of coils wrapped in plastic insulation emits pulsed magnetic fields tens of thousands of times the strength of the Earth's magnetic field which can be focused on chosen areas of the human brain to produce localized brain-cell excitation via induced electrical activity in neural circuits. Selective stimulation of the brain by imposed ambient field. Now, anyone who has closely read Aurobindo's Letters on Yoga or who has personally practiced concentration in self-observation with some degree of competence knows that one of the primary objectives of yogic disciplines is to selectively stimulate the brain. Standard issue intrapsychic functions of human organism include the capacity to selectively stimulate the brain. However, due to the long-term effects of prescriptive enculturation chronically imposed upon generation after generation, this capacity has lapsed into the category of intrapsychic functions which are unavailable to consciousness. That being the case, the capacity is projected: unconscious functions are automatically projected. That which is thus projected becomes an object (in the psychoanalytic sense) of obsessive attachment; hence, there is identification with that which has been projected: projective identification. When this process transpires, not only within a single individual, but within the membership of a scientific cohort, the obsessive attachment takes on enormous drive activation and a way is found to transform the object (in the psychoanalytic sense) of obsessive identification into a material object in the physical world (generally a technological artifact of some sort). In this case, the TMS unit. But, since the TMS unit is the product of unconscious collective projective identification, not of conscious individuated integration of the intrapsychic functions at issue, the TMS unit automatically, and almost by definition, embodies regressed, infantile, violent impulses. This is illustrated in the following quotation from a recent article (September, 2003) published in Scientific American devoted to contextualizing TMS within current efforts to fashion “better brains” (“Stimulating the Brain” by Mark S. George, p. 47): “Some TMS researchers, for example, are inducing temporary brain 'lesions' in healthy subjects to gain insight into fundamental neuronal mechanisms such as speech and spatial perception…”
When a wide swatch of science engages in this sort of projective identification, and does so over decades, exemplifying a contemporary version of the cultural reversal studied by Bill Sullivan, this collective psychological process does not transpire in a vacuum and without consequences: social, political, economic, and military. Via back-reaction, collective behaviors are set in motion, collective behaviors like that predicted by Derek in MOON (the first Autogenic Therapy symposium scene) and described in a recent New York Times article concerning a “movement” to kill off urban professionals -- doctors, lawyers, engineers, judges, university instructors -- in Iraq (“Assassinations Tear into Iraq's Educated Class” by Jeffrey Gettleman, February 7, 2004). Given the fact that collective occasions of projective identification have risen to pandemic status, one can justifiably entertain the expectation that back-reactive collective behaviors like that presently being played out in Iraq will, in due course, themselves become pandemic. Indeed, it can be argued, and has been so argued by Derek, that both world wars had etiologies deeply involved with collective occasions of projective identification.
Derek, himself, in MOON, uses the filmstrip analogy, but only as illustrative, and, being a crowkeeper, does not belabor it. Sacks and the neuroscience cohort assume a continuous objective reality coterminous with continuous Newtonian space and time which the brain, with its neural Darwinian political “coalitions”, snapshots discontinuously as overlapping frames at a baud rate so fast consciousness appears unbroken, except under one or another form of pathology. Note that baud rate is the processing speed of the neuronal network, the rapidity with which action-potential electro-chemically moves through the involved synapses. Consciousness, being an emergent property of such networks, has no independent baud rate: there is no baud rate of consciousness, per se. However, though there can be no doubt that passing time and consciousness come in discrete quanta, this surely is not the result of political action committees formed in the body politick of cortical neurons: the very existence of the theory of loop quantum gravity draws this notion of brain function into grave doubt. Quantum-relativistic perspectives on spacetime clearly suggest that the “snapshotting” does not take place on the cellular level of brain function, but is there in spacetime before the brain functions. Indeed, even the activity of the neuroscience cohort itself to build “better brains” clearly suggests that orchestration of snapshot-framing cannot transpire on the cellular level: TMS, in selectively inducing brain-cell excitation, illustrates that the involved orchestration is at least on the scale of quantum field phenomena, which, if I am not mistaken, pulsed magnetic fields are an example of. This must be pellucid even to members of the neuroscience cohort. So, what is the real, if subliminal -- to be overly generous -- purpose of this theory of cellular-level snapshot-framing in the brain? To debunk quantum biochemistry, of course. And why debunk quantum chemistry, particularly as it applies to brain function? Because without such debunking all the bizarre pathological phenomenologies associated with quantum mechanics are going to be generalized into social, political, and economic theory such that “our world” will change beyond recognition. This cannot be allowed to happen! And in order to prevent it, we will build “better brains” -- among many other “better” things we will do.
Given that there is a sub-discipline of physics entitled “the physics of collective and cooperative phenomena” which studies spontaneous onset of order at critical states of matter, it is very unlikely that this physics has absolutely nothing to do with collective and cooperative phenomena -- such as formation of “coalitions” and “coalitions of coalitions” of neurons -- in human brain. Only trouble is, this sub-discipline of physics has to do with quantum phenomena like superconductance of electrons and superfluidity of various kinds of fluids and plasmas. Can't have any of that associated with neuroscience, or “our world” will change beyond recognition! Nonetheless, back in the mid-'70s, Derek and his cohort began applying this sub-discipline to modeling of autogenic brain discharges, and came up with ideas like the coherent wave output of superconductant nuclear and mitochondrial neuronal and perineural DNA, which carries all the information encoded in the nucleotide pairs, being responsible for long-range phase correlation between neurons (formation of “coalitions” and “coalitions of coalitions”), this coherent wave output being modulated by ambient quantum fields and governed by a “minimum time for spontaneous localization” of p-electron parcels in the p-electron gas enveloping neuronal and perineural DNA, the minimum time in question, a discrete quantum time, being an orchestration variable in the relative-state activation of the brain, which, tonic and phasic activation being quantum relative-state phenomena, means -- if Schrödinger's wave-function be not falsified with probability amplitudes so as to insure “our world” will not change beyond recognition -- the brain is not a 1T2-logic processor, but an m-logically-valued processor. And one can go on from there to recognition that this minimum time, itself, can be modulated, and is merely a “reflection” of temporal operations on space; that, indeed, consciousness, itself, existing long before neurons -- and being not only of one type, not only of the “our world” type -- is fundamentally involved with the actions of operator-time. So, what do you think the neuroscience cohorts of the '70s, '80s, and '90s thought about that?
Making “better brains” with MSG, neuroleptic designer drugs acting focally on the glutamate and dopamine pathways, TMS, “non-invasive” functional MRI and functional PET -- non-invasive on the level of tissues; non-invasive on the level of cells; mostly non-invasive on the molecular level; absolutely not non-invasive on the atomic level; incredibly invasive on the subatomic quantum level -- and so on is a hard extension of prescriptive enculturation where neuronal “coalitions” become automatized firewalled circled wagons blocking from ego consciousness all awareness of m-logically-valued quantum relative-state. Spontaneous quantal fusion is blocked, while spontaneous localization is “facilitated” -- facilitation-through-use being a black box term for the quantum-level processes responsible for establishment of long-range phase correlation between neurons. Yogic stop, you see, is not post-encephalitic and/or parkinsonian “standstill” or schizophrenic catatonia; yogic freeze frame, not stroke-induced “motion blindness”. These yogic m-logically-valued collective occasions of experience are to enter what Derek calls “multi-viewing”; to receive into awareness what Derek calls a “Cubistic psycho-ideograph”; to become identity transparent with the base state of Tzog-Chen; to be, like Derek, momentarily frozen in “slow drift mirror modes” (last scene in MOON). Transiting from fast-forward to passing-time slow-down to A. Huxley's Time Must Have a Stop: passing-time itself, not merely time rate perception -- the temporal neighborhood established by the actions of operator-time being a collective and cooperative phenomenon intimately involved with the nature of consciousness. Baud rate of a given state of consciousness, itself -- not the rapidity of neural network throughput -- established by the minimum time for spontaneous localization in the governing ambient field-aligned electron-temperature plasma mirror mode associated with the coherent wave production of the intraneuronal DNA molecules involved in establishing long-range phase coherence between neurons of a “coalition of coalitions” of firing neurons (which our 1981 paper “Autogenic Discharge: Quantum Biological Considerations” referred to thus: “The intensity of the discharge would vary with the range of the coherency established while the modality of discharge would vary with the spatial array of the established coherence.”). When, with Alice, one falls between “snapshot-frames”, one is no longer in “our world”; being deautomatized, one is in the wonderland of “grand central station” relative to the m-logically-valued “many worlds” which are the “time shapes” of this one-and-only UNI-verse -- which expresses itself in many verse forms, many songlines, many acoustically-modified loop quantum gravity wave signatures, many Musculpt compositions.
You ask: What is the difference between m-valued and m-logically-valued in relation to monetary units? Thank you very much! That is the ten-billion-dollar question to which I have nothing remotely like a complete answer. It is clear, though, that the answer to this question, whatever it actually is, is the fulcrum, the tipping point, upon which all actual levers on the prevailing global crisis rest, whether grasped by Atlas, John Henry, Sampson, or Tinkerbelle. And the antecedents of the contemporary factors of pancultural pathogenesis form the base of this fulcrum. While many people have read into the history of the “new physics”, very few have familiarized themselves with the history of modern mathematics. Where are the mathematics appreciation courses to complement the art and music appreciation courses? Without such appreciation courses, how could the very few comparative arts course offerings integrate the impact of mathematical discovery into their purview? And without such integration, how could “art and technology” become ArtScience? Moreover, without all this, how could the prevailing simpleminded historiography be overcome such that contemporary humanity could begin to appreciate the full complexity of factors vectoring the enormous devastation bearing down upon it? Are the historical facts -- the facts, for instance, that the tritone in medieval polyphony was regarded indicative of the devil needing exorcism and that any manipulation of the official interpretation of the Christian Trinity was the bottom line on the very definition of heresy -- totally independent from determinants of the emotionality associated with attempts to apply 3-valued logic to interpretation of quantum mechanics in the years leading up to onset of WWII? Was the explosion and topicality of “Polish jokes” (How many Poles does it take to screw a light bulb into the ceiling socket? Answer: Three. One to hold the bulb and two to turn the stepladder.) in the prewar period unrelated to the Polish discovery of 3-valued logic in 1921? And what are the implications for “causes” of WWII of heretical 3-valued logic having issued from a country so staunchly Catholic as Poland? Does this have anything to do with why Poland was invaded first? Does it matter one iota for causality of events which transpired during WWII whether the discoverer of 3-valued logic was a Polish Catholic or a Polish Jew, whether the generalizer of this logic and developers of the generalization were Catholics or Jews, whether or not these logics were cultivated in the Warsaw Ghetto? Are these crazy questions? Clearly, I am not receiving on Clear Channel, but is this really schizophrenic looseness of associations, a channeling, like seizure-sustaining Georg Cantor, of some spirit entity suffering paraphasia? And if the historical associations are not causal, and do not conform to the rules of classical logic, does that mean they are not synchronistic in the Jungian sense? Does “synchronicity”, Jung's acausal connecting principle, have anything to do with non-classical logics like 3-valued logic? (I will not go into the relationship between the above-given Polish joke and the theory of superconductant DNA exorcised during the 1980s.)
When I was a student of international affairs in the early 1960s, I was required to read a lot of Raymond Aron. So, clearly, Mark Lilla's recent review of Barbara Bray's translation of Aron's The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century (“Stands to Reason: The Liberal Responsibility of Raymond Aron”, Harper's Magazine, December 2003) not only demonstrates constancy of the ideological orientation of the Committee on Social Thought at University of Chicago, regardless of the presence or absence of overtness in its funding sources, but also exemplifies “prevailing simpleminded historiography”. Quoting Lilla (p. 90):
History [Aron argued] is a highly contingent affair that reveals its inner workings only retrospectively; there is, and can be, no prospective science of history.
From that rather commonsensical observation Aron drew several important and distinctive conclusions. One was that politics matters: the choices of particular statesmen at particular times can decisively change the course of events.
Though this perspective on historiography (most elaborately articulated by Popper and Collingwood) certainly has informed George Soros' commitment to ousting George Bush from the American presidency, does it stand to reason with Aron's other views on history? Quoting Lilla again (p. 93):
His [Aron's] perspective on all these events was historical before it was moral: he saw them mainly in light of a confluence of forces that were unleashed at the beginning of the century and have constrained thereafter the actions of nations. “Ever since, under a July sun, bourgeois Europe entered the century of wars,” he noted in a rare, wistful aside, “men have lost control of their history, swept away as they are in the contradictory logics of technology and passion.”
“Stands to reason” in which reason, which logic? How can history be contingent on human decision, point decision, decision at a point of contingency, if historiography credits history as force, if historical forces can cause men to lose control of their history, to be swept away on a tidal bore that certainly must have proscriptive properties? Which logic are we to employ in overcoming the apparent contradiction between these two aspects of Aron's historiography? Certainly, we cannot credit the thesis that Aron, like W. B. Yeats “…was hostile to the Enlightenment when it meant Newton, Locke, and Hobbes, and cordial to it only in its Irish versions -- Berkeley and Swift, preeminently, and later Burke” (Harper's Magazine, December 2003, “What Was Lost: Can A Biography of W. B. Yeats Rely on Historical Fact Alone?”, by Denis Donoghue, p. 100), for Aron's whole orientation to historiography was assumed precisely to protect and perpetuate Lockean Anglo-Saxon values and the institutions they gave rise to in the 17th and 18th centuries from assault by The Reckless Mind (title of Professor Lilla's book) of the intellectual under sway of one or another form of psychopathology (spiritualistic animism being an Irish/Germanic form thereof, and the secular religion which was Marxism being another). The mind gets swept away by its passions, which do not stand to reason. Great leaders, particular statesmen, men of the state, therefore, can “decisively change the course of events” by calling upon the monotheistic superego to suppress the passions of the id such that reason determines choice at particular times -- not unreasoned passion. If this is, indeed, the case, as Aron maintains, then “the confluence of forces that were unleashed at the beginning of the century” had to be forces operating within the psyche of mankind; otherwise, exercise of reason -- whatever reason, whatever logic -- could not in anyway have brought such forces under control of the superego's harness. If these forces of history that sweep men away are resident in the human psyche, it can plausibly be maintained that there are no “laws of history”, that history is contingent and subject to no proscription, if and only if the human psyche is considered wholly lawless. And if the human psyche is regarded wholly lawless, what hope does humanity have for successfully relying on reasoned choice?
The psyche, the unconscious, as wholly lawless is the Enlightenment's boogeyman, the “Dark Continent” needing enslavement by the Leviathan which later morphed into the “Yellow Peril” rats needing…: Hobbes' “all against all” and “each against each”, chaos of the tribe, the black depths of the ocean, of Asian oceanic consciousness with its absence of ego focus. This is psychological projection: that which is unconscious projected onto processes, persons, objects in the external world: schizophrenia as the black man behind the schizoid Plexiglas wall (see the photograph on page 39 of the January 2004 issue of Scientific American, “Decoding Schizophrenia”, by Daniel C. Javitt and Joseph T. Coyle). The Middle East is not far from Darkest Africa. What, projections aside, identifications aside, projective identification aside, could Aron's “the confluence of forces that were unleashed at the beginning of the century” have involved in realms of the psyche, wholly lawless or not? Could this confluence, for instance, have involved Zermelo's 1904 “Axiom of Choice”, that axiom which elicited near hysteria in the society of pure mathematicians of the period?
This is still an issue filled with hysteria (in the technical psychiatric sense of “split-off autonomous complexes”). You will not find the matter discussed free of “affect charge”, to use the term favored by C. G. Jung -- during the 1930s, while the signal events transpired -- as he developed his proscriptive psychological account of the Nazification of Germany. The Axiom of Choice, to paraphrase and more or less quote Stephen Wolfram's websites and book A New Kind of Science, which provide a good account, is one of the ten axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZFC, the “C” for “Choice”) -- not the axiom, however, that allows the existence of infinite sets, which is the Axiom of Infinity. The Axiom of Choice establishes the notion that all sets, not only finite sets but also infinite sets, can be well-ordered, can have ordinal structure, can be arrayed in counting format, in one-after-another shape, if you will. “Given any set of mutually exclusive non-empty sets” (a set composed of elements which themselves are sets, that is), “there exists at least one set containing exactly one element in common with each of the non-empty sets.” This is, of course, formally, and technically speaking, written out as a series of implications in purely symbolic-logic notation: one sees arrows meaning “implies”. Why would such an axiom be controversial, let alone hysterical? And what could it possibly have to do with war, world war, holocaust, and the like? This just has to be merely some move in the esoteric Glass Bead Game the mathematicians play; it could have nothing to do with the real world! Why? Because I don't understand it, and if I don't understand it, how could it exercise proscriptive influence over political history, the history of the actions of the mass of humanity. If I can't understand it, the mass of humanity can't understand it, so it couldn't be involved in motivating the mass of humanity. It just couldn't be a component of a “force of history”. Besides, there aren't any “forces of history”; there are only human decisions and hazard, chance events.
But what if the hysteria associated with this axiom doesn't have to do even with what the mathematicians understand, but with what they do not wish to acknowledge, and what, therefore, remains unconscious, remains hidden in the Dark Continent. If it is unconscious, then it can be projected; and what is projected can be identified with: it can be the vehicle for mass projective identification. Projective identification by the masses (of which those masses are by definition unconscious) can certainly be a “force of history”, if, that is, Aron's ideas about history and passion have any validity. And if so, it is unlikely that the marshaled events such forces configure will “stand to reason” in cause-effect fashion; they, being the products of unconscious forces, are more likely to fall into the patterns taken by events in a dream, possibly even a nightmare. Attempts to rationalize the nightmare will, of course, always be made: otherwise, projective identification would not be plausibly deniable. The Axiom of Infinity (1908) didn't become controversial because all its issues are contained in the earlier formulated Axiom of Choice (1904). But this axiom of 1904 didn't pop out of nowhere, it followed, for instance, upon Russell's explication in 1901 of one of the paradoxes associated with Cantor's transfinite (i.e., infinite) sets. Does or does not, he wanted to know, the set of all sets, not containing themselves as elements, contain itself. This statement is a lie: is it, or is it not? If this sounds like schizophrenic “word salad” loose-association paraphasia to you, so did it to many mathematicians of the period who regarded Cantorian set theory as so much “fog on fog”. Indeed, the word “schizophrenia” was coined by Bleuler one year before Zermelo formalized set theory with the first seven axioms of the ten encompassing ZFC.
Russell's set-of-all-sets paradox had actually been around for about 30 years when he gave it his form in 1901. It was implicit in analogous form in Cantor's famous 1870's “diagonal proof” of his definition of a denumerable transfinite set, the set of all integers, for instance, which Cantor called aleph-0. This definition was: Any set the elements of which can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the elements of one of its proper subsets. In such sets, the part is somehow equivalent to the whole (and the proof involved drawing diagonal lines between elements of the whole set and elements of one of its subsets -- the part -- such that all such elements of both whole and part are seen to be so connectable). That “somehow” was designated as “cardinality”: the whole and the part have the same cardinality. Cardinality embraced an idea of size somehow independent of number, of counting: it was something of a black box term the meaning of which was refined by another black box, the phrase “the power of a set”. The cardinal was distinguished from the “ordinal”: an ordinal set is a set having no structure except order (termed “order type”); a cardinal set is a set having no structure including that of order (“order” being a particular one-after-another pattern, such as seen in the counting numbers). The diagonal proof demonstrated “equipotence” of whole and part, which is equivalence with respect to cardinality, not also ordinality. Establishment of “equipotence”, a particular case of the more general property termed “equivalence”, as applies to sets, makes a statement about the identity of the involved sets. In this respect, Russell's paradox and Cantor's diagonal proof are analogous: both draw attention to the fact that the identities of infinite sets do not “stand to reason”. How can the part be equivalent to the whole when the part has obviously to be smaller than the whole? Cantor demonstrated this is not the case for infinite sets. Does a thing containing all things only that do not contain themselves contain itself or not? No matter which answer to Russell's question, the answer does not “stand to reason”.
The Axiom of Choice was not about cardinality, as was Cantor's diagonal proof; it was about ordinality: it established the condition that allowed all infinite sets to be “well ordered”, meaning that their elements can be rigorously placed in some unambiguously definable one-after-another pattern. This axiom was intimately involved with what was called Cantor's “Continuum Hypothesis”: the notion that there exists a “power of a set”, a cardinality, that is bigger than aleph-0, the cardinality of the counting numbers, the integers, which can be well-ordered and is equivalent to the set of all points on a continuous line. This cardinality was called aleph-1, and the hypothesis involved the speculation that there is no cardinality between aleph-0 and aleph-1. The identity of aleph-1 stands even less to reason than does that of aleph-0. Cantor showed that if you remove an infinity of aleph-0 infinite sets from aleph-1, the “size” of aleph-1, its cardinality, does not get smaller. Subtract anything you want from aleph-1 and it is as if you had subtracted nothing at all. This simply does not “stand to reason”! The Axiom of Choice formalized the condition under which this is possible. In 1940, Gödel proved that this axiom is consistent with the other Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms for set theory. In 1963, however, as explicated in his book Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis, Cohen demonstrated that this axiom is independent of the other Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms. Which was a big surprise to everyone, and paved the way for “non-Cantorian set theory”. As an aside here, I would note that the notion of “consistency” one tacitly employs is explicitly dependent upon the order of logical-value of the calculus of propositions utilized to demonstrate the notion of consistency one tacitly employs. Similarly, what constitutes “dependent”, as distinct from “independent”, depends upon the notion of “identity” one tacitly employs, which is explicitly dependent upon the order of logical-value of the calculus of propositions utilized to make the demonstration. Mathematicians have consistently employed only 1T2 logic to reason about fundamentals of mathematics, even when those fundamentals are m-valued logics. This means that a very, very great deal remains unconscious, unavailable to the mathematician's ego focus and, therefore, automatically projected, automatically identified with, poised for mass projective identification and, hence, ready to become a “force of history”.
Well-ordering an infinite set, as the Axiom of Choice allows, implies that there is some procedure for what is called “transfinite induction”. Hooey! said many mathematicians in 1904, and many mathematicians have continued to hooey ever since. “Induction”, as distinct from “deduction”, means you can actually do it, not merely logically demonstrate that it can theoretically be done. How can you possibly complete a transfinite procedure, a procedure involving an infinite number of steps, in a finite period of time, the period of a lifetime or a finite collection of lifetimes? It just doesn't “stand to reason”! Let alone an infinite number of infinite sets of an infinite number of steps, as in the case of aleph-1. Hooey! The existence of infinite sets is no problem. So what, they exist. But they have nothing to do with the real world of experience. Even in the differential and integral calculus, so often used by the physicists, there are no infinite sets, only infinite sequences, strings of “whatevers” iterating their ways toward infinity but never actually reaching it in a finite period of time, which strings, “in the limit” of the very, very, very small, can be so limited so as to be useful for calculations which otherwise could not be practically performed. Calculus transfinite inductions are actually doable because they have been appropriately “limited”, whereas the transfinite inductions explicit in the Axiom of Choice are unlimited and therefore actually undoable. Existence of infinite sets is no problem, but as soon as you allow them to be well-ordered, as does the Axiom of Choice, then they completely screw up the works! You then have to really explain what “in the limit” really means -- which is still a humungous bag of worms, regardless of how practical that bag of worms may be for getting to Paris or the moon.
Issues regarding the fundamental nature of identity as a metaphysical category entered issues surrounding set theory before issues regarding the fundamental nature of time entered issues surrounding set theory. Issues within issues, sets of issues. We have all heard of the “timeline” with its attached arrowhead. So well established is the notion, the two words have become one word. Each point of the line corresponds to an instant of time. Is the set of all points on the timeline finite or of cardinality aleph-0 or aleph-1? What is the cardinality of the set of all points constituting a segment of the timeline? Does a finite segment of the timeline have a finite or an infinite number of points? How small does the segment have to be “before” it contains only a finite number of point-instants. Quantum time, with its discrete set of instants with gaps between, apparently could not have the same cardinality as classical continuous Newtonian time. In fact, subtracting infinitudes of instants after infinitudes of instants from continuous Newtonian time could never reduce how much time there was, and adding infinitudes of instants after infinitudes of instants to continuous Newtonian time could never increase how much time there was: the cardinality of continuous Newtonian time would remain unchanged. Newtonian time could never become quantum time. Could quantum time ever become Newtonian time? These are not trivial questions as regards issues involved in the notion of transfinite induction, involving issues regarding the fundamental nature of time as it does. And if the issues are so complicated as regards the relatively simple line, just imagine how very, very complex they must be as regards the surface and the volume. Indeed, what is called the Banach-Tarski sphere, a type of sphere made possible by Zermelo's Axiom of Choice, has the weird property of breaking into parts that are inherently unmeasurable, which, when put back together yield a sphere twice as big as the original. You want the whole to be more than the sum of its parts, as do all those in the holistic movement opposed to reductionism, just break the whole into parts and you will find that it is more than it is -- whereas Cantor's diagonal proof only demonstrated that the part contains all the information of the whole, which is the way information is distributed in a hologram. None of this stands to reason! Even if it conforms to the principles of quantum optics.
How can you possibly complete a transfinite procedure, a procedure involving an infinite number of steps, in a finite period of time, the period of a lifetime or a finite collection of lifetimes? Abel apparently did it in the early 1820s when, for the first time in history, the first time on the timeline, he solved an equation of the 5th degree (an equation with a fifth-power exponent attached to one of its variables; not x-squared, but x-to-the-fifth), solutions to which cannot be arrived at in a finite number of steps. Such equations are called “transcendental equations”. Abel was 26-years-old when he was able to bring forth this staggering accomplishment. Furiously, he completed the solution through a long night and scribbled it down for posterity, before, early the next morning, dying in a duel resulting from a love triangle, a ménage à trois. So, you see, a failure of 3-valued logic was at the root of all these conundrums right from the beginning. Almost exactly one-hundred years later, a similarly valued sexual imbroglio, undertaken while practicing Tantric sexual yoga, precipitated the cognitive breakthrough by which Schrödinger was able to bring forth his famous quantum wave equation. Equations that cannot be solved in a finite number of steps make you think of infinity. And that is exactly what Cantor did, think about the nature of infinity, leading inevitably as it did into all the paradoxes of transfinite sets. In order to solve a transcendental equation, Abel had to create/discover (we won't get into that set of issues) the idea of a new kind of function, one Euler had not imagined. This new sort of function Abel created/discovered came to be called a multi-valued function, an m-valued function -- 3-valued functions being the first real case thereof, as 2-valued functions had been quite familiar ever since the advent of negative numbers. The variables in the wave-function of Schrödinger's wave equation are m-valued.
The multi-valued of m-valued functions involves a different sort of identity than that involved in the single-valued of monotonic functions. In the single-valued case, one can only be oneself; one cannot simultaneously be something other than one is. Take oneself into parts and put them back together and one is not twice what one was before being taken into parts. One has simple identity. One is identical to oneself. In the m-valued case, however, one can be oneself and simultaneously m-things not-oneself. One has non-simple identity. The fundamental nature of identity as a metaphysical category differs between single-valued and m-valued functions. As a multi-valued function, one is not identical to oneself m-times over. A consequence of allowing well-ordering under Zermelo's Axiom of Choice is to permit non-simple identity entrance into set theory, which, after Cantor, became the theoretical vehicle by which arithmetic and all other aspects of mathematics were to be rigorously formalized and made quintessentially rational on the basis of axiom systems, if mathematics was to be demonstrated to fully “stand to reason”. What is the nature of identity employed in these axiom systems? This is revealed by employment of what is called an “identity element”. There exists an element e which is an element of P such that pe = ep = p for any p which is an element of P. Operation and inverse operation employing the identity element leaves that which is operated upon identical to itself, leaves its identity unchanged. The identity element in oneself, one could say, is the number one. The basic rules of arithmetic -- associative, distributive, commutative -- as formalized under Peano's axioms are dependent upon identity being of the single-valued variety: one must be one. Otherwise, a number might not be identical to itself; it might simultaneously be some other number; it might be m-valued. My god, how could one add it, subtract it, multiply it, divide it? One couldn't, could one? Abel's ability gave rise to a monster: the one that is not-one, the I that is I/i. And the Axiom of Choice formalized this monster and allowed it back into the foundations of mathematics, back where, if allowed out of its cage, it would destroy everything mankind has spent thousands of years building up. Back! Back! Out, out, damn spot, uh sport! It is easy to see how there might have been disagreement over these issues, fistfights even, how a kind of hysteria might have developed, and how this hysteria might lead to “the confluence of forces that were unleashed at the beginning of the century” -- particularly so, if the fundamental nature of identity employed by the unconscious is that characteristic of infinite sets, which would certainly be the case if professor of psychiatry Ignacio Matte Blanco's thesis, as explicated in his book The Unconscious as Infinite Sets (Duckworth, 1975), is correct. It is no mere “accident of history” that Abel was killed by a bullet immediately after making his universe shattering (not mere world shaking) discovery. How dare you! shred 2500 years of Western thought. No mere destroyer of the Cartesian-Newtonian world construct, you!
The objective I've been pursuing is how to get through the woods, not how to put an RFID tag on every tree. When people don't want to understand, it doesn't matter how you say it, they won't understand; when something happens to make people want to understand, it doesn't matter how you say it, they will understand. When m-valued logics came on the scene in 1921, there was an opportunity to really understand the real implications of m-valued functions, especially those implications as regards the fundamental properties of identity as a metaphysical category. Two laws (conventions, the way people are said to have always done it) of classical Aristotelian-Baconian logic proscribe the nature of identity to be employed: (1) the case is either A or not-A, the Law of Distributed Middle; (2) no A is not-A, the Law of Non-Contradiction. These laws permit employment only of single-valued, simple identity; they disallow employment of multi-valued, non-simple identity. The advent of rigorous treatments of 3-valued and m-valued logics in 1921, however, was something people didn't really want to understand. Call A, one; call not-A, zero. Call one, true; call zero, false. After a finite period of time, a consensus arose that m-valued logics would be viewed as violating the Law of Distributed Middle such that the logical values these logics employ would be viewed as arraying themselves in the interval 1,0. In the interval [one, zero/zero, one] there is an infinite number of real numbers. The m-logical values of m-valued logics would be viewed as indicating these numbers. Since one and zero stand for true and false, the intervening m-logical-values can be viewed as representing the probability that the given m-logically-valued proposition is true or false. Fuzzy logic is one interpretation of this. In this manner, the m-valued notion of identity Abel invoked so as to successfully engage in transfinite induction in a finite period of time (he had but 26 short years) can be swept under the rug which the security blanket of probability theory had become. This collective decision, and the similar one wherein Schrödinger's m-valued wave-function was interpreted in relation to probability amplitudes, sealed the coffin Zermelo's Axiom of Choice had become viewed as representing. Everything hidden inside that coffin remained unconscious, and thus became “the confluence of forces that were unleashed at the beginning of the century”. Opening the coffin will involve admitting that m-valued logics violate not only the Law of Distributed Middle but also the Law of Non-Contradiction. The coffin closed is world war and holocaust; the coffin opened is Pandora's box.
You ask: What is the difference between m-valued and m-logically-valued in relation to monetary units? When indices are added to a currency base and tagged to indicators (economic, alternative economic, sustainable development, quality of life, genuine progress, et cetera), the currency base and indices will be rigorously codified as an m-valued function. There will be non-simple m-valued identity of the involved currency, this sort of identity being responsible for bringing what currently are regarded “externalities” into the purview of market-mediated self-organization. M-valued functions can be processed by parallel binary processors, and hence m-valued identity can be placed on paper money with currently available RFID tags. But if you are looking for how to get through the woods, such tags will not be good enough; you will also require m-logical-values. Processing m-valued indices stacked on converting currency bases (local, municipal, provincial, national, regional, global) according to the conventions of an m-valued logic interpreted as violating both the Law of Distributed Middle and the Law of Non-Contradiction will promote well-ordering of the multiplicity of subsets of the planetary economy into the pattern characteristic of information distribution in a hologram. Part and whole will move toward equipotence in a way not countenanced by market mechanisms in a single-valued monetary regime. Many of the contradictory injunctions prevalent in prevailing micro-macro-economics will progressively disappear as the m-valued and the m-logically-valued are more thoroughly implemented. If you wish to maintain that all this is impossible because there are no infinite sets in economics and no periods of infinite time of economic relevance, I will ask you how many numbers there are in the segment of the real number line representing the interval 0,1. Place an arrowhead on the real number line and call it the timeline. How much time does the segment of this timeline in the interval 0,1 represent? That interval in all likelihood has cardinality aleph-1. That's a lot of time! No graph of the relationship between economic variables is free of an interval such as this. The coffin closed is world war and holocaust; the coffin opened is Pandora's box. But nothing has happened yet, this century or last, of sufficient magnitude to make people want to understand. Regardless of the efforts of Coffinman, Shinmon Aoki, (Buddhist Education Center, 2002), the coffin Abel was buried in has yet to be opened.
“It” still matters because of the implications concerning the role played by m-valuedness in self-organizing processes; it being another example of violations of the “classical limit”; as factual contravention of the erroneous notion that organization accomplishes nothing, this idea being a typical by-product/conceit of brains subject to lateral mental cleavage; as illustration of macroscopic fractality and complex bureaucratic mappings over boundary-without-boundary in materiel allocations at self-organized criticality over far-from-equilibrium phase transition -- possibly the last hope the human species has to ADEQUATELY self-organize in response to the gathering multidimensional global crisis. Full-blown autogenic shift, autogenic neutralization, and synoptic intersystemic prohomeostatic phase transition by autogenic brain discharge comes in a massive abreaction of electrochemical unloading, trophotropic brain-vomiting. Large-scale cellular detoxification by consistent practice of high-potassium menu and fasting-colonics sustained over a decade and more comes in one or a few massive dumps of mucoid plaque, plaque not stored in lining of the colon, but hugely dumped into the colon during the critical period of fasting once the prerequisites for unloading have been met. Similar observations could be made concerning therapeutic healing crisis in acupuncture, homeopathy, ozone therapy, Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine. “It” being what the 1968 Tet offensive actually signified. And if you are discombobulated by these juxtapositions, regarding them as word salad, à tort et à travers, then you remain identified with concrete particulars to an extent precluding form-in-process-level insight. Not my problem. And not far to look for illustrations as to why The Sting executed by AQ&A on 9/11 elicited the desired U.S. response: the Afghanistan invasion, which facilitated global self-organizational phase transition by AQ&A, just as AQ&A knew it would. Quoting Colin Powell's sorry psychological self-portrait, My American Journey (Random House, 1995, pp. 119-20):
Judged in cold military terms, the Tet offensive was a massive defeat for the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. Their troops were driven out of every town they had attacked, and with horrific losses, estimated at 45,000 of the 84,000 men committed. But 137 years before, Clausewitz had said something still relevant: “If you want to overcome your enemy, you must match your effort against his power of resistance, which can be expressed as the product of two inseparable factors… the total means at his disposal and the strength of his will.” It did not matter how many of the enemy we killed. The Viet Cong and North Vietnam had all the bodies needed to fling into this conflict and the will to do so. The North simply started sending in its regular army units to counter the losses.
This is a re-statement of the command position taught ad nauseam at the Army War College and the National War College, virtually from within days of the offensive. Not only is this re-statement a whitewash of the stab-in-the-back myth significantly, if not exclusively, informing the Powell Doctrine, but, having been written retroflexively decades later, is extraordinarily ill-informed -- and the statement of just the sort of person ripe to fall for the 9/11 AQ&A sting. Army War College instructor, Harry G. Summers, presented to the public the official position on Clausewitz and the Viet Nam war (On Strategy, Presidio, 1982). A career soldier insightfully interpreting a professional soldier? Not likely. Being a military brat growing up immediate post-WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, I never much believed in the military family. Not to mention, never having liked the child side of the transference, probably wouldn't like the parent side any better: psychological bedrock of holocaust, genocide, totalitarianism, over-population… So, when I had it explained to me in early-1966, nose-to-nose and chin-to-chin in formation, by an old SF master sergeant who'd just learned I was an officer's kid, I immediately understood what he was saying about risk aversion and much else. “The best soldier is the professional soldier; next best, the citizen soldier (no draft deferments of course); the worst possible soldier is the career soldier. Any married soldier is by definition either a citizen soldier or a career soldier.” Others took this discourse to heart greater than I: there was more than one D-boy on Desert One who believed those helicopters were sabotaged. No career second chance, fine; no first chance, even better: love to watch them shove close combat hand tools in their own gullets all the while certain they are getting over. And maybe they are. But what about their “Children's children's children”? For a deeper reading of Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Einstein, and Tet-'68 than that offered by Summers see “VirFut Q-Pro” and The Moon of Hoa Binh for point-by-point critique of Summers, and for substance of many discussions which occurred at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-J2, of the country-wide pre-Tet, repeat pre-Tet, synoptic self-organizational phase transition which won the war for the Vietnamese communists and set precedent for the 9/11 AQ&A sting and knee-jerked-Afghanistan-invasion-facilitated global self-organizational phase transition of AQ&A. The VC phase transition began in 1965 with the U.S. troop invasion of SVN and culminated in late-1967 several months before the Tet offensive. Insist upon winning every battle in order to lose the war! Not incidentally, what caused LBJ not to seek re-election was not what happened in Viet Nam, but what happened at Ft. Knox because of what happened in Viet Nam at Tet-'68. Within a matter of days, LBJ responded to the Tet offensive by institution of currency controls -- not in Viet Nam, in the US of A! The stone cast by David. Then AQ&A picked up the same stone and cast it again. The first casting of the stone brought down the Bretton-Woods gold-exchange mechanism. In due course, the second casting of the same stone will be a major factor ending dollar dominance. Like Goliath, the U.S. will never recover from the stonings. In all likelihood, it will…
I'm sorry, but “terrorist networks” are not networks; much less, global “insurgent infrastructures”, infrastructures. The spatial metaphors -- nets, structures -- are Cartesian-Newtonian pattern imposition, not recognition. Line-and-block-chart it all you want. Not hydra-headed; not erector-setted, greater-maze Buckyballed, legoed, tinker-toyed, space-invadered/time-evadered, franchised/out-sourced/flat-managed. And no gobbling Pac-Man gameboy/D-boy will resolve it, VR or no VR. Cultures of adolescent adults, gandering and goosing, “convert” and “displace” adolescent fixations: e.g., the masturbatory keyboarding of those in sociosexual-restraint jackets undergoing sex-hormone flood. Can't even skateboard in public anymore, let alone… To “draw a distinction” between the hormone flood and the “myself” is to enter a dissociative infinite regress adolescent adults simply have lost the equipment required to handle: five sessions of glutamatergic neuronal etching by memetime of induced onset of 1T2-logic thought (and if that doesn't do it, Ms. Twackumchild's classroom knucklebeating with the ruler, or its cognitive surrogate, will help it along). Pattern imposition = projection. Organization is necessarily by spatial-structural metaphor only to minds Hellenistically derivative: Greco-Roman cognitive modality, Umwelt identified with musculature. Organization can be primarily requisite-function and time-order, space and structure being phase-transitional throwaways. Insurgents win by imposing function over structure, time over space: successfully denying imputed initial conditions, dissolving coerced-onto boundary values. How? As Clausewitz said, and almost understood: “…time by a dynamic analogy as a factor of forces” (look it up, On War, “Ends in War More Precisely Defined”: one of the last things Clausewitz wrote on the nature of warfare, ignored by AWC and NWC, but noted by me in Summer of 1963, dinner table, Instructor of Military History and ROTC, U. of Kentucky, childhood friend of my mother and father; ironically -- as he should, by direct experience, have known better -- scoffed at two decades later, Georgetown dinner table, author of Run Silent, Run Deep). Time as force-factor is not reference-frame (a spatial metaphor) time. Quark symmetries do not tunnel time; operator-time funnels cone-sectioning m-lattices of quarks: look to Regge-bone people for “authenticity” in scale-relativity. Form follows function. Not quite like powerplay underlings info-funnel/gatekeep their departmental bureaucrats, corporate moguls, central committee cadres, ecclesiastic patriarchs, military paladins… Being an obviously great operator/manipulator of an utterly failed system is not a particularly good recommendation -- at least by cosmic considerations, even by needs of this planet. Those whatauttabe universally deee-spised: bottom of the barrel, breaken bones, feldapart, raisen ta float in top of the human toilet boweeeel. Universally reee-verred by the grievously brain-impaired. If the CEO of Ford, maybe even Coca-Cola, the President of U. of SoandSo can run da naaaa-tional Daa-fence, then there must be some correlation between the physics of money and the econophysics of deadly quarrels, don't ya think? Muddling-thru-the-mire, a-hole-coddling, force-divided-a-gainst-itself, pork-fat governance: not nature's way -- whatever John Locke thought. Only dum-dums (dominance of the dumbest) assume leadership posts in bad wars, failing nation-states, dysfunctional monetary systems, discorporating institutional paradigms, self-extincting species: not good for the m-logically-valued reincarnational profile. Petty existential games between small Umwelts so smug surveying their walls of office courage: exchanges of deee-nials and confirmations. Gaining membership in something irrecoverably, in principle, fundamentally… flawed… to put it extremely over mildly… is far from an inspired aspiration, whatever the perspectives chosen, excepting those most limited and limiting. Better to do absolutely nothing than contribute to the foremost human enterprise: destruction of life on Earth. Active time as topological operator on m-logically-valued scale-relativistic smooth-noodle manifold (relative-state role-superposition/function-articulation hyperspace, the spatial referent being mere metaphor, a cribbing to help out brains glutamatergically etched to Greco-Roman cognitive modality, hence locked upon visual dominance and locked out of direct, non-referential time-apprehension). Show me the fourth dimension! I can't see it. Not exactly a recipe for right use of a planet. Successful insurgents reject not only specific structures imposed, but the very notion of structural dominance. End the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state system and replace it with… a land-to-the-peasants global village, a bordered-without-borders sheikdom? They may get co-opted, by infractionated communist Hierarchs-Priests-Patriarchs-Confucians-Mullahs-Gurus, say, but, if successful insurgents, the co-opting transpires only after the ebb-tiding ocean in which they swim turns to neap tide turns to flood. Transits, phases, MoonWater insurgents -- not exactly borderless-world corporate monoliths.
Look, they don't even know what the problem is. How they gunna solve it? Like headless chickens, stoned cops having lost their keys, they be chasing after symptoms without the understanding there be a disease. “Aetiology” ain't a word in their vocabulary, let alone indicative of something in their preverbal cognition (which they largely deny existence of). The still-living person, in my judgment, most knowledgeable in realms of this aetiology is Roger Penrose, but he clearly does not regard what he knows as a disease -- even though he knows something is critically wrong. Until that something is identified, studied, and worked into atmospheric models, understanding of DNA and genetics and morphogenesis, insight into superstates of matter, and so on, “the problem” will not be known and its solution will not be possible. They will be solving all sorts of problems that aren't actually even components of the problem to be solved. And just watch how much free-energy, how much of the global GDP, is thrown into these non-solution-set solvings!
I did enjoy the article by Serge Latouche (“The World Downscaled”, Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2003), in so far as I sympathize with his assessment that there is abysmally poor quality of life in affluent societies, and his aspiration to change that overwhelming fact -- overwhelming the integrity of the natural world, as it does. Absent quality, there is the obsession to metabolize more and more quantity as a poor substitute: the eating disorder in its general form. Regarding Latouche's ideas about possible solutions, however, I saw little of inspirational value. As we can see from the corporate example, downsizing does not necessarily replace, or even modify, the impetus for growth. Clearly, as Latouche points out, even the suspicion of the possibility for reduction in the rate of growth leads immediately to a deterioration of organization -- not only economic, but also political and social. Where is his idea for how to separate organization from growth? Just mandate such a separation? He maintains there needs to be a change of values. There is recourse to moral suasion in absence of an actual answer to the problem: the typical activist stratagem (raised to an apotheosis by Noam Chomsky: see page 74 of the December 2003 issue of Harper's Magazine). But even if the sort of change in values Latouche envisions were to transpire, would this separate organization from growth? The fact that we cannot have organization without growth means that all of contemporary economics, and all of the political and social institutions associated therewith, are indentured to the thermodynamic model of self-organization. So long as this remains the case, organization will never be sustainable absent growth. Natural systems self-organize on every scale, so the solution cannot be a mere matter of taking everything to small scales. Galactic activities take place on the galactic scale; planetary activities take place on the planetary scale; atomic activities take place on the atomic scale. And, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, all these activities can transpire only as a result of the next larger scale level losing order, ultimately as a result of the universe itself, the grandest scale level of all, running down into heat death. If Small is Beautiful, according to contemporary thermodynamic physics, that is so only because the small is a thief: it robs order from the not so small. The universe is a hierarchy of thievery legalized by the cosmic physicist's heat-engine. The prevailing institutionalization of human systems is inextricably tied to this model. So, one should not waste too much time wondering over the magnitude and universality of corporate and governmental corruption: stealing is the basic notion informing the model.
What is important is appropriate scale, multiple scales, and adequate exchange between scales: this is the thermodynamic model. And derivative of it is “the theory of organizational adaptation by resource exchange across boundaries”. Cascade theories in the atmospheric sciences, in oceanography, in metabolic pathway theory, in theories of the ecologies of syntonic responses: all of these and much more are applications in the theory of multiscale dynamical systems. Downscaling will in no way change the fundamental principles by which such systems function, nor remove the necessity of growth for sustained organizational integrity -- as given in the prevailing general model. The necessity of growth for maintenance of organizational integrity is a scale-independent principle; therefore, downscaling does nothing to decouple growth and organization. “Sustainable development” may not be a full-blown oxymoron, but it is certainly time dependent. Sustainable relative to what scale level and for how long? The more scale levels, the more sustainable, because the heat death can be put off for longer and longer periods the more scale levels there are to steal from. The more downscaling one engages in, the more, that is, one removes scale levels by localizing or globalizing, the two in many respects being isomorphic topological transformations viewed from the perspective of scale independent variables, from the perspective of self-similarity, that is, the less sustainable is “sustainable development” -- as given in the prevailing general model.
What are the variables in multiscale dynamical systems that could decouple organization from growth? What kind of person might be able to answer this question? An economist? Not likely. Someone who studies multiscale dynamical systems? There's a possibility. If organizational adaptation is modulated by resource (free energy) exchange across boundaries, what are the variables involved? Organization, resources, boundaries. Where is growth in this conjunction? Obviously, it's in resources: ever increasing free-energy throughput. So, if ever increasing free-energy throughput is required to maintain a given regime (quality?) of organizational competency, that fact must have something to do with the third term in the conjunction: boundaries. Beyond doubt, nature knows something about this we don't: children eventually stop growing; cells know how not to be cancerous until they forget something. Appropriate growth versus inappropriate growth. You want to decouple organization from growth, do something to the nature of boundaries! A boundary is a line drawn in the sand. A closed circle, or its equivalent. Inside is absolutely distinguishable from outside. It's a wall like the Great Wall or like the cell wall. Or is it? Is that necessarily so? Fractal boundaries are not such boundaries. The closer you look at fractal boundaries, the more they are nothing but “Cantor dust”: gaps within gaps within gaps. Not a line; more like a transparent series of holes. Where are fractal boundaries to be found? Everywhere in the natural world! They are evident in the fractal dimensions of all “features”, all morphologies. The universe is a Cantor universe, a universe of transfinite sets. This is a universe not contemplated in the field of thermodynamics, a field which considers only finite sets of scale levels, finite sets of nested systems. Any segment of any line has aleph-1 cardinality! No matter how large; no matter how small. As thermodynamic theory matured during the 19th century, you did not find many thermodynamicists strong advocates of Cantorian transfinite set theory. Nor many economists, up unto the present day. Nor many biologists. Cellular biologist Gilbert Ning Ling, however, whose theoretical ideas about the nature of cell walls and structured intracellular water gave rise to creation of the first MRI machine, maintains that cell walls are not the solid opaque things we once thought they were, but mere “phase boundaries” as immaterial as the difference between normal water and structured water: the “wall” is all in the pattern of electrons and holes. Quantum holes. It is this pattern of holes that controls resource exchange -- osmosis -- across the “wall”, which is so very important to maintenance of cellular organization. The best technical account of the complete history of these findings is provided in Ling's unpublished book-length manuscript “Life at the Cell and Below-Cell Level: The Hidden History of a Fundamental Revolution in Biology” (Damadian Foundation, c/o Fonar Corporation, 110 Marcus Drive, Melville, NY 11747). And, to quote our 1981 paper on autogenic brain discharges, “…the coherent waves [generated by superconductant DNA] exercise a direct 'bias' control over the cell membrane potential and, hence, play an indirect timing role in ionic diffusion processes by rate-limiting the flow of free electrons in the membrane’s active transport system… the coherent waves could stabilize (as in Bosè condensation by providing energy exceeding a critical value) some vibratory mode of dipole oscillation of electric waves in the cell which, in turn, would control the variations of membrane potential.” DNA superconductivity is not in the sugar-phosphate backbone, not in the nucleotide-pair ladder rungs; it's in the free-electron gas environment of the molecule's core interfaced with the structured intracellular water! Just as the mathematical model presented in the 1979 superconductant DNA paper described. The coherent waves engage in “unidirectional stirring” of the intracellular water between the DNA molecule and the plasmahaut, the cell “wall” phase boundary. The way to do this in economics is to define m-logically-valued monetary units -- their indices tagged to externalities -- on fractal boundaries between currency areas existing on multiple nested scale levels. This is the way to decouple organization from growth. But Noam Chomsky will not like this; nor will Harper's Magazine. The general principles involved smack of Cabalistic modes of thought, which Chomsky's recursively generative linguistics oppose; and they contravene 17th and 18th century political economy, which Harper's is deeply committed to. This is why there is recourse to moral suasion: the answer to the problem is psychologically unacceptable. The very notion of identity as a metaphysical category would have to change: one would have to go through the little trap door in becoming and Being John Malkovich. Ah, Alice, the psychological dread behind fear of the unacceptable drives the violence of the contemporary world those exhibiting the dread decry. Change in the fundamental defining properties of political, economic, and social boundaries will transpire, if not non-violently, then violently. The collective unconscious is climbing all over this issue. Doubt that? Look about you. Look at what is happening to boundaries all over the planet at this very moment.
No, I can't see myself going through this series of posted responses, or MOON for that matter, and pointing out This is the Heart Sutra, This is pure Cabala, This is the Gnostic Gospels, This is the Diamond Sutra, This is the Agama Sastra, This is the Lotus Sutra, This is the Sermon on the Mount, This is Gurdjieff Sufism, This is Sabud, This is Advaita Vedanta, This is… Though a strong believer in the reality of intertextuality, I am didactically irreverent because I do not believe in the institutionalizability of insight. Insight institutionalized is no longer insight. Genuine insight could not be incapable of expressing itself in contemporary terms. The terminology of those who have passed before is not the terminology of genuine insight. If the universal applies to every case, then it should be expressible in the terms of each. Use of the terminology of those who have gone before may not be “regression in the service of the ego”, but it certainly is regression in the service of the institution.
I do appreciate your practical personal advise, but the fact of the matter is, contrary to appearances, I have never truly sought resources to implement these ideas. If an occasion comes along, I generally go with it to see where it leads, but there is really no possibility that any such occasion will lead anywhere worth getting to: none of the collective prerequisites have been fulfilled. Nonetheless, one goes along simply because that is the path one has chosen to walk down. Nice scenery, on occasion. Interpersonal street theater, not withstanding. I started arguing these perspectives 35 years ago and this situation with regard to prerequisites has not improved in the least over the full length of that period. How could it have? The range of subjective experience required for insight has progressively constricted one decade after the next. It does not matter how much exposure people have, they simply don't get it because the subjective experience required is not there. That experience is deemed pathological and most people avoid it like the bird flu. Recently, someone I barely know, and whom has never read a word I have written, came up to me on the street and proclaimed that all his thoughts are beamed to him from outer space. He asked me how I thought he should deal with that circumstance. I replied that I really didn't have an answer for him. He told me to continue my walk, that he didn't want to get alien with me, but that he knew I had the right answer. At some point later on I checked the time and discovered that the battery to my watch had gone dead. I took the watch off when I got home from my session of walking meditation, but the next morning noticed that it was running fine, only behind time. Calculating the reset, it was clear that the battery had shut down during the conversation about dissociation from mental functions. The watch has been running fine ever since. Make of this what you will. As regards my own take concerning this and many similar occasions, it is clear that the human species is not capable of dealing with m-logically-valued modes of cognition and their implications regarding the nature of what is regarded the physical world. That species is going to take a very dark “night sea journey” before there is any improvement in its condition. Not only is that what is going to happen, that is what by all rights should happen. No, my role has not been, and never will be, that of an implementer. My role has been that of a Cassandra, a gadfly, and a purveyor of well-deserved ridicule, contempt, and parody. By nine years of age, as a military brat child in Japan, I was already developing the inclination toward contempt; by twelve, it was quite elaborate; when I quite college at age 20, it was developed sufficiently that I had difficulty being in the same room with a member of the leadership elite. Being there concealing my reaction to the body language of their very manner of rising from the chair taxed all my will power and meager acting skills. This contempt has not diminished in the least over the last 40 years; hence, even if there were something that actually could be done, clearly this “attitude” precludes me from doing it. I could not abide being so constantly in their presence, being so continuously assaulted by their persistent state of consciousness and its inductive impositions.
Think about it. Even were the collective subjective factors sufficiently sophisticated, what could actually be done with a pile of resources? Yessir, can do! Don't kid yourself. No outsider to the financial milieu, whatever the resources, could possibly move the myriad chess pieces in place such that something real could be accomplished. We are talking about a fundamental transformation of the global financial non-system system, a transformation into actual system status, something that has never before existed. Very detailed practical knowledge, which comes only from intimate acquaintance with the milieu, would be required. Money is not enough, no matter how much. And the involved transformation cannot, almost by definition, be done by top-down mandate. No decision, however high the deciders, can bring it about. Because the transformation has to be done bottom-up, even if requiring permission-from-above -- at least from the next-above at any given stage. But there is no one in that financial milieu with the capacity to develop genuine insight into m-logically-valued modes of cognition. Not only is there no indication of that, there is virtually no possibility that someone who has devoted his or her life to pursuing goals derivative of the values dominant in that milieu could have developed the faculties required. Money motivated! I'm looking for someone money motivated. Here, the glad hand. Here, the power of positive thought. Here, the lateral mental cleavage. Few, if any, have actually cognitively and psychologically entered the 19th century, let alone the 21st. No, nothing can be done to prevent the enormity that is going to transpire. Maybe, just maybe, it is possible to influence the trajectory coming out of that enormity. Maybe, but a rapidly diminishing maybe.
Take George Soros, for instance, the most forward looking of the moguls. If he can't do it, who can? Now that he has stopped writing primarily about international financial and trade institutions and focused upon politics and warfare, more of his actual orientation has been revealed. Given content of the second half of Soros' recent book, The Bubble of American Supremacy (Public Affairs, 2004), the “constructive vision” part, the part where his proposed program of action is described, what is the real difference between what the two Georges (B. and S.) believe in? The only significant difference I can find is a matter of tactics: B. advocates and uses hard coercion, while S. advocates and uses less-hard coercion. Gun for the one, money for the other. But the objective is the same: impose Anglo-American states of consciousness, values, objectives, ways of doing things, even how to take a bath (as in the case of Japan) on every last person on the planet. Global monoculture: hard sell and soft sell. Bush's approach is the way of the Comfort Woman system: gun to the head. Soros' approach is the way of the R & R prostitution system: money to the hand. But the objectives are exactly the same: coercive implementation of global monoculture. Both are missionary positions. Soros, too, endorses military intervention (approved the invasion of Afghanistan, for instance, and regrets instances of no invasions and of late invasions), and even preventive military intervention if and only if it is called preventive, not preemptive, and has the endorsement of a league of democratic nation-states, which hopefully will become a PAC at the UN so that the conundrum of dealing with Security Council politics can be sidestepped. Personally, I could care less whether the person who kills me wears a blue uniform or one green, whether he carries a legally traded weapon or one illegally traded. The watchdog groups have made a great discovery: regulation, control. They all advocate the use of state-sponsored force to enforce laws that make people free. And you WILL be free! Whether you choose to be or not. To insure that you will be free, we have made a law to that effect, and, be assured, we will see that it is enforced. People's sovereignty. That sovereignty which endorses Anglo-American states of consciousness and values -- and fundamental assumptions about identity as a metaphysical category. That sovereignty which does not so endorse, of course, is not actual sovereignty, it is the oppression dished out by one or another peripheral comprador in service to interests of those at the center who have not yet become independently sufficiently hyperwealthy. This is a Leninism, a Maoism, a Theosophical trope if I've ever seen one. But I don't want to indulge here my penchant for ridicule, contempt, and parody. All the books cited in Soros' notes on collective and cooperative behaviors describe action-based sociologies, sociologies assuming Newtonian simple-identity, books written to trash attempts to generalize quantum theory into the social sciences. Which, of course, cannot be done because natural processes function independently of human thought, and social systems do not: that is why there has been total agreement amongst all debaters during the last hundred years of controversy over the quantum theory of measurement. Out of the many possible, Soros chose those books most specifically devoted to this effort of interdiction -- not, I am sure, because he is aware of all the academic back-knifings involved, but because his cognitive space resonates with these treatments. Soros believes that “democracy and open society” are values universal to the human species, when, in fact, the 17th and 18th century Anglo-Saxon states of consciousness spawning “countervailing forces” and all the rest of the involved kitschy Newtonianisms are among the most oppressively constrictive the human species has ever had imposed upon it.
George Soros does not realize that his conceptual framework (see, for instance, the appendix to Supremacy) is no less a fundamentalist back-reaction than is Bush's Christian fundamentalism and the neocon's market fundamentalism. All three are part and parcel of the intense collective recoil from the degree to which higher mathematics, quantum and relativity theory have shattered the metaphysical foundations of the 17th and 18th century political economy upon which democratic, capitalist, and open society institutions are built. Karl Popper's philosophy of science in general, to which Soros frequently refers, and Popper's interpretation of quantum mechanics in particular, as well as his ideas about historiography, are failed attempts to dissimulate the impact of the new mathematics and physics on the Cartesian-Newtonian world construct. Hitler, Pol Pot, the physicist who produced the probability amplitude interpretation of Schrödinger's m-valued wave-function: who was most responsible for mass death? Were the first two derivative of the third? Soros' notion of “reflexivity”, for instance, is an attempt to depotentiate m-valued logics (which he briefly encountered while a student of Popper) as an agent of social, political, and economic change. His reductionistic interpretation is a virtual parody of, for instance, what John A. Wheeler applied the term “self-reference” to in relativity physics. In apparent complete lack of awareness of all the evidence concerning the fluid genome emerging from the work of Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock and rise of the field of sociobiology, Soros quotes Time Magazine in casting aspersions on the work of Trofim Lysenko (p. 163, Supremacy) concerning genetic transmission of acquired characteristics. All mutations are acquired and many transmitted; the issue is whether or not they are randomly acquired. Imagine reaction to the notion -- derived from a mathematical model of the quantum wave properties of DNA -- of m-logically-valued monetary units! Truth is, whether the market clears or not, whether equilibrium is reached or not, the market will organize no more or no less externalities. Superconductant DNA, however, has found a way to acquire the characteristics of externalities: that's why biological superconductivity has been so intensely denied. Clan, caste and club would each have hidden dimensions. I've written so much about this back-reaction in general, I will say no more about it in specific here. Soros maintains (p. 89, Supremacy) that there is no fundamental difference between the transportation revolution during the 19th century and the information technology revolution in the 20th century. This is so ludicrous a claim -- given that one was produced by applications of the old physics and the other by applications of the new physics, the two sets of principles being radically incommensurate -- as to be a completely “in denial” sort of statement. What all three -- Soros, Bush, the neocons -- are in denial of is the fact that the collapse of communism was the beginning of the complete incindiary collapse of the whole institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian world construct. Marx may have lived in the 19th century, but he rejected all the 19th century aspects of Hegel's thought and spent his whole lifetime trying to cognitively burrow his way back into the 18th century -- much of this effort made in a library located in London. In many respects Marxism was more Newtonian than English Deism. This incendiary collapse of a belief system is of such magnitude that the arch-Christian-fundamentalist-conservative Pat Buchanan vehemently attacks the arch-Christian-fundamentalist conservative George Bush for consorting with arch-Jewish-fundamentalist neoconservatives. The penchant for placing Band-Aids on a system that is fundamentally flawed, not merely in application, but in basic conception, that, indeed, was conceived as a system of exploitation, is not a particularly good character reference. The prevailing Cartesian-Newtonian institutions Soros is so intent upon preserving by placing Band-Aids on the lacerations at the periphery have no positive role to play in institutionalizing what is commonly referred to as “the new paradigm”. Since the metaphysical principles involved in the two cases are incommensurate, the contribution of the Cartesian-Newtonian institutions can only be of a negative character, as is being displayed on a daily basis. The impetus to impose global monoculture compensates the state of denial of this fact -- be the imposition through hard coercion or less-hard coercion. Significant differences here between Soros, Bush, and the neocons are only matters of tactics. On pages 171-2 of Supremacy, Soros endorses intervention as a policy, just so long as the intervention is “legitimate”, i.e., meets his criteria, not someone else's. So, to me, there is nothing here to choose between.
There is no one in that financial milieu with the capacity to develop genuine insight into m-logically-valued modes of cognition. No, nothing can be done to prevent the enormity that is going to transpire. The human species is going to take a very dark “night sea journey” before there is any improvement in its condition. Not only is that what is going to happen, that is what by all rights should happen. Maybe, just maybe, it is possible to influence the trajectory coming out of that enormity. Maybe, but a rapidly diminishing maybe. You certainly can't say, however, that we haven't made a better five-cent cigar.
Starting with the notes, then working through the body of the text (A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Media, 2002), life being what it is, I've taken all this time to get to the last pages of the body of Wolfram's treatise. Given the generative focus of this whole cellular automata enterprise, I knew that somewhere along the way, in one form or another, animism would become an issue. I was almost wrong; address of the issue does not come until the next to the last page (p. 845) of the main text, where we are given an up-to-date definition: “…the idea of animism: that systems with complex behavior in nature must be driven by the same kind of essential spirit as humans.” Complex behavior like that exhibited by a sacred rock, for instance? Later, on the next to last page of the extensive and valuable notes (p. 1196), there is an alternative statement: “…the Principle of Computational Equivalence implies that many ordinary physical processes are computationally just as sophisticated as human thinking.” From this statement, it is easy to see why cellular automata advocates are at loggerheads with Roger Penrose, who affirms the anti-animistic Church's Hypothesis, i.e., calculable if and only if recursive, while insisting that human cognition is not thus calculable. Given the generative focus: what is the significance of that preparatory clause? Animism is fundamentally based on the notion of Cabalistic decomposition, not recursive Rabbinical generation. The elaborateness of Wolfram's generative enterprise is matched only by that of Noam Chomsky. Why would Wolfram offer us a false definition of animism, but less false than the spirit-in-the-rock version, thus enabling him to claim his work in some way affirms animism? Is the answer to this similar to why Chomsky interpreters claim that he is a Platonist simply because he hypothesizes a “universal grammar” is encoded in the genome, while his generative account of language is profoundly anti-Platonist, Platonism being the apotheosis of decompositional world models?
If you want to be a real animist, don't pierce your erogenous zones, don't get tattooed, don't caress your pet rock, don't sit there like your pet rock watching the grass grow, buy a copy of my Mathematica software: that seems to be the import of Wolfram's message. Is there substance to this? There would have to be for it to be correct, as animism is a form of metaphysical and historical Substantialism, which anti-Substantialists, like K. Popper and R. G. Collingwood, regard a mere matter of misplaced concreteness, a confusion of categories, a Homeric homily, the commission of a logical fallacy, and not even a fertile fallacy -- if not latent schizophrenia. You'd be wise to give odds that m-valued logics will enter this discussion in due course. So, what is the gist of Wolfram's argument?
A long, long time ago, I decided it was too great a sacrifice to cede my mental functions to an employer; I chose, therefore, to make my living with my body and use my mental functions for purposes of my own choosing. This decision was reached because of insight into what Stephen Wolfram regards “computational equivalence”. Consequently, I have never allowed myself to be fully employed by institutions not in the human interest (and what prevailing institutions are?). This is, of course, to my very great benefit (incarnationally speaking) and to my lesser debit (concerning immediate material circumstances). Why this should be so is a matter of what Wolfram regards computational equivalence. It's not just walls of ignorance we need here to speak of, given that half of us can urinate on sacred walls, as Mark Twain never tired of reminding us; it's willful ignorance, moving walls crushing all in their paths. Animism is so frightful because of the states of demonic possession implied: you might have to get exorcised by one means or another. Your thoughts might come from elsewhere, even from your pet rock. But there is one answer you won't receive from any doctor or priest, though maybe from an old monk or a Gurdieff. You have two options. You can say I to it, or you can give it a name and refer to it in the third person. If you say I to it, then, like everyone else, you believe thoughts come from yourself and thus “it” has complete power over you. If you name it, however, then your yourself is deeper than any of its manifestations and you have an opportunity few others have: you can explore how deep your yourself is. And at some point during this exploration you can safely abandon the personification that put you on the path. Without animism, there is no freedom at all; one is trapped into identification with oneself: the worst prison there is. Computational equivalence: an analogue, a like unto, a correspondence. Wasn't it Euler who first defined a mathematical function as a correspondence? And wasn't it ancient animistic Chinese Taoists who developed a medical practice on the basis of systems of correspondences, i.e., mathematical functions? Is equivalence a type of correspondence or is correspondence a type of equivalence? Class orders are involved, logical categories, that sort of thing: orders of logical-value, perhaps.
To one way of thinking, it is not that the spirit is in the rock, it is the spirit of the rock. Wolfram goes some of the distance between these two with his equivalence principle. The definition of computational equivalence Wolfram offers is (pp. 715-719):
…all processes, whether they are produced by human effort or occur spontaneously in nature, can be viewed as computations… all the computation does is generate the behavior of the system… it is possible to think of any process that follows definite rules as being a computation… viewed in computational terms there is a fundamental equivalence between many different processes… almost all processes that are not obviously simple can be viewed as computations of equivalent sophistication… the essence of this phenomenon is that it is possible to construct universal systems that can perform essentially any computation… in many kinds of systems particular rules can be found that achieve universality and thus show the same level of computational sophistication… knowing that a particular rule is universal just tells one that it is possible to set up initial conditions that will cause a sophisticated computation to occur… what this suggests is that a fundamental unity exists across a vast range of processes in nature and elsewhere…
All of these points are lavishly illustrated with graphic examples drawn from the corpus of cellular automata Wolfram has discovered. In the above-given series of quotations, one of the critical phrases is: “can be viewed”. That this is the process that establishes the case of equivalence is stated in so many words by Wolfram (p. 111):
It is usually much better, for example, to do a mindless search of a large number of possible cases than to do a carefully crafted search of a smaller number… what I have typically found is that if one manages to present this data in the form of pictures then it effectively becomes possible to analyze very quickly with one's eyes…
So, in accepting this ArtScience procedure (tantamount to the measurement problem in quantum theory -- an account of which is given by Wolfram but not applied to his own case), one also must accept that the properties of binocular visual space, the logical properties of the processor of the visual percepts received by the viewer, and the mindset (if not the state of consciousness) of the viewer play important roles in establishing the equivalence. Leaving this consideration aside for the moment, as Wolfram largely does throughout the approximately 1200 pages of his book, one can, with Wolfram, conclude that (pp. 717 and 719):
One might have assumed that among different processes there would be a vast range of different levels of computational sophistication. But the remarkable assertion that the Principle of Computational Equivalence makes is that in practice this is not the case, and that instead there is essentially just one highest level of computational sophistication, and this is achieved by almost all processes that do not seem obviously simple… therefore it does not matter how simple or complicated either the rules or initial conditions… despite all their detailed differences every process can be viewed as corresponding to a computation that is ultimately equivalent in its sophistication.
Animism, therefore, has a basis in fact. Well, being an animist, I have no desire to debunk the claim that animism is fact, but I would like to question the basis of the present claim and suggest that the notion of animism employed here is rather too limited -- and is, in fact, against animism as experienced animism actually is.
In experienced animism, one never directly experiences the spirit in the rock or the spirit of the rock, or even identity transparency (generative empathy) with the rock or its spirit. These are culturally transmitted attributions-after-the-fact: historical accretions based on processes of personification and the way in which those processes have been used to interpose various forms of coercion into the human life-world. One directly experiences identity transparency with all-that-is, which is the rock, which is one. Wolfram's principle of computational equivalence goes some distance toward capturing this animistic state, as stripped of processes of personification. The equivalence in cardinality between a denumerable transfinite set, Cantor's aleph-0, and any one of its proper subsets goes a greater distance in capturing this unencumbered animistic state. A greater distance, yet, is captured in properties of Cantor's aleph-1, the continuum. Stating that there are differences in distance here is to contravene Wolfram's computational equivalence claim. Wolfram's equivalence is developed by quick viewing with one's eyes of generative processes which require the setting up of initial conditions, which is a stipulation demonstrating linear-time dependence . The equivalence in cardinality exhibited by Aleph-0 is developed by a decompositional process: the set can be decomposed into its proper subsets, but no process in finite time can recompose it. Aleph-0, therefore, unlike Wolfram's equivalence, subscribes to no temporal precedence relations. The properties of aleph-1, the continuum, where taking away an infinity of infinitudes, or adding to it an infinity of infinitudes, does not change its cardinality, indicate that aleph-1 subscribes to no temporal or ontological precedence relations. Aleph-1 can neither be generated nor decomposed: it does not represent a state of becoming; it represents a state of being. And this is precisely the Cantorian mode of thought most objected to by the mathematicians: Why, one might start to have seizures like Cantor did! Seizures were they, or autogenic brain discharges as cognitive capacity for m-logically-valued modes of cognition re-established their electro-chemical basis in the brain? It is hard to “see” how such distinctions (which are not correspondences or equivalencies) could be recognized purely on a visual basis. Cantor's “diagonal proof”, for instance, relies only to a very small extent, if at all, on visual demonstration -- in the normal sense of the word “visual”.
What about non-normal senses of the word “visual”? Colored hearing, for instance. One of the characteristics of experienced animism is that it is synesthetic; there is a fusion of sense modalities in apprehending identity transparency with all-that-is, which is the rock, which is one -- at the very least relative to cardinality. Ontic significance. Wolfram makes no reference to the work of optical physicist Rudolph K. Luneburg on the nature of binocular visual space (see our paper entitled “For the Mirror is Not the Glass”). Luneburg's experimental work demonstrated localizability is not inherent to visual space, but the result of learned behaviors specifically related to a “psychometric distance function”. All the laws of Einstein's Special Relativity apply, including a limiting velocity and Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction in this non-Euclidian metrical space of binocular vision. Hence, pattern recognition is dependent upon this distance function's psychologically determined variability. Cross-modal correlations between sensory dimensions, as occurs in experienced animism, clearly involves modification of the psychometric distance function, and in some states maybe so much so that the horopter curves re-enter themselves. Quick visual scanning to distinguish what is simple from what is complex certainly is at the mercy of such variable factors. Linear perspective is based on Euclidian geometry. What does Luneburg's discovery that visual space is a non-Euclidian metrical space conforming to the rules of Special Relativity imply about Piaget's scheme of cognitive development, based as it is on Euclidian invariants? What does this tell us about enculturation of the conventions of post-Renaissance painting? What, even, does this tell us about learning of non-Goethean color perception and development of an ear for the modulatory schemata of diatonic harmony? Are the involved logics given in nature or learned?
Wolfram maintains that computational equivalence is based on universality, on universal computing machines, like the Turing machine, for instance. We have found that temporal and ontological precedence are not universally applicable. How about logical precedence? Computational equivalence, though to all appearances conforming to logic, yet, somehow goes some distance to undermining syllogistic accommodation of schemata. If the step function in degrees of complexity along the simple-complex “continuum” -- or is it a discrete ordinal transfinite set of states? -- suddenly disappears, and whatever state of complexity, no matter how complex, is computationally equivalent to every other such state that is not obviously simple as determined by quick visual scanning, then what has happened to logical precedence relations as applied to degrees of simpleness-complexity? It is absolutely impossible to distinguish between the more complex and the less complex on a computational basis. This impossibility goes some distance to undermining universal applicability of the rules of logic which mandate absolute distinguishability between A and not-A. The cardinality equivalence between part and whole in aleph-0 goes some distance further yet. The complete undefinableness of part and whole in aleph-1 goes, yet, some distance further yet. How can the notion of universality undermine the notion of universality? Is this a case of propositional self-reference?
Wolfram has very little to say about m-valued logics in his book, the logics of self-reference. He observes that they correspond to the “continuum” of states (numbers) arrayed between 0 and 1 on the real number line, and that they, “they” being orders of logical-value, in turn correspond to the probabilities of the given proposition being true. Wolfram needs this interpretation if his central themes are to stand uncorrected. There is the possibility (virtual certainty, likely), however, that the probability interpretation is a cop-out similarly motivated to the mass-mortality cop-out that is the probability amplitude interpretation of Schrödinger's wave-function. This is what Derek Dillon regards The Auschwitz Interpretation (the interpretation, paradoxically, presently preferred by Jewish neocons: which just goes to show the level of collective hysteria that has been universally obtained). First of all, the implied result, i.e., that the set of all possible probability amplitudes is equivalent to cardinality aleph-1, would be a revelatory finding, were it fully established, in that there would thereby have been demonstrated the proposition that the discrete set of quantum states corresponds to the continuum: this would go a long way to resolving the paradoxes associated with the principle of “complementarity”.
The however likely virtual certainty, though, is to be found elsewhere, in Derek Dillon's notion that orders of logical-value correspond to states of identity transparency which are incommensurate -- not probabilities of truthness. Truth-value superceded by the G. Spencer Brown's notion (not mentioned by Wolfram) of distinction superceded by the Derek Dillon's notion of orders of animistic identity transparency. I have written so much about this in the past, I will not go further into it here, other than to suggest that:
Wolfram's computational equivalence = any finite set of orders of logical-value (even though all his algorithmic engines are based on 1T2-logic, he has intuitively -- as mediated by his choice to rely on rapid visual scanning, which is a step toward Musculpt -- left the domain of 1T2-logic and more or less dismisses m-valued logics: what would happen if he not only went to 3-dimensions of generative recursion, but also went to m-logical values in decompositional process represented via colored-hearing-like synesthetic Musculpt? The right inversions of Mathematica would go some distance in this direction.)
Aleph-0 = a denumerable transfinite set of orders of logical-value.
Aleph-1 = a continuum of orders of logical-value.
These classes of classes (Russellian types) would correspond to different “groups” of laws of nature (as described in the latter sections of our 1977 paper “Toward a General Theory of Process”).
“Don't think you're going to get away from this without being damaged, boy. Look at these old hands. Look! Just because they're black don't mean they're different from what yours are going to be. You're in the cotton fields, boy. There is a price to be paid by all who do this work long enough. Just because you're a white boy don't mean you won't pay the price.” In several respects, I paid the price, and there was tribute due -- some of which was stylistically paid out in MOON; some of which, in theoretical orientations delineated.
During the '70s, I noted that regarding the m-values of m-valued logic as being fractionally arrayed between 1 and 0, treated as true and false, was to pre-interpret the possible meanings of those values before developing the interpretation. Leaving finite collections of values aside, I also noted that naming the values between 1 and 0 as fractional, was to choose the order of infinity of Lukasiewicz's n before the issue had been investigated. Is the order of n aleph-0 or aleph-1, or even higher orders of infinity? If aleph-1, which exists between 1 and 0, then the notion of a table of discrete values and their correspondents under definable operations is not applicable, as the set is not denumerable. This being the case, I felt certain that any most general interpretation of the meaning of logical value would involve revision of the very notion of the numerable. In this respect, I focused my attention on the Gödel number, as that is where logic and number theory most directly connect. Prime numbers, being the factors of Gödel numbers, were thus central.
I tried to imagine a context for Gödel numbers under m-valued logics, within which prime numbers necessarily would be embedded. I called this context the multivalued reference space (now, more clearly, I say the m-logically-valued reference space). In thinking about how to arrive at the properties of this space, I reached two conclusions: (1) the very notion of axioms becomes less and less meaningful as the order of logical value expands; (2) the utility of notation systems employing discrete sets of symbols with invariant meanings becomes less and less as the order of logical value expands. By introspecting more and more on what transpires in my awareness when I think in what I take to be m-logically-valued fashion, I increasing noted the presence of abstract colored forms and associated sounds, in some sense synesthetic (fusion of sense modalities). I decided to take this content of my awareness as the notational system for use in delineating properties of the multivalued reference space. I gave this notational system the name Musculpt, or music-sculpture. On that basis, I wrote the following (half serious, half poking fun at the only-partially-useful notion of an axiom), which was later incorporated into the text of my wife's and my novel.
If Rs, our universe of discourse, is the multivalued reference space and Ms a formalized language over Rs called musculpt, then we wish to ascertain the possibility, within the construct of a metatheory over Ms and Rs, of making precise the concept of validity of a semantic assertion of Ms in Rs. Is there a codifiable axiom system, A, such that the set of statements derivable from A by the rules of Post's m-valued truth systems, uTm, coincides with the set of valid statements over Rs?
We take seven undefined terms -- number, value, equal, zero, infinity, immediate successor to, hole -- and state five axioms.
THE MULTIVALUED REFERENCE SPACE AXIOMITIZED (from the point of view of two-valued logic):
-- A number is a value which is not in all cases equal to itself;
-- Zero and infinity are both numbers;
-- The immediate successor to a number is noot necessarily a number (it could be a hole, which is not zero or infinity);
-- One value of that immediate successor of a number which is a number is always zero or infinity or both;
-- Any property belonging to any number beloongs to some value of every number.
The set, sigma, of operational and functional symbols -- constant signs; numerical, sentential, and predicate variables -- is denumerable but not finite because Ms (by virtue of uTm) is a formalized language with a class of m supra-n configurations (c sub-m1, c sub-m2, c sub-m3 . . . c sub-mn). Each added configuration invokes additional operational and functional symbols by virtue of the changed value (identity status) signified by the audiovisual phonemes, morphemes, and functions of the Ms semiosis.
CODIFICATION OF THE MULTIVALUED REFERENCE SPACE AS AN “AS IF” RECURSIVE MAPPING REQUIRES DELINEATING THE STATES OF RELATIVE IDENTITY TRANSPARENCY:
I made a table here, but now present it in discursive form. 2-valued logic (no A is not-A) correlates with the Gödel number, which is a product of successive primes raised to the appropriate powers. 3-valued logic correlates with the product of two successive Gödel numbers raised to appropriate powers. 4-valued logic correlates with the product of 3 successive Gödel numbers raised to appropriate powers. DOT, DOT, DOT. m-valued logic correlates with m-1 successive Gödel numbers raised to appropriate powers.
The consistency and completeness of a 2-valued calculus can be absolutely demonstrated only with reference to a 3-valued logic; that of a 3-valued calculus, only with reference to a 4-valued logic, et cetera. What happens when the order of value of the logic is aleph-0 and aleph-1? Two distinct varieties of re-entry occur. Follows from aleph-0: absolute transparency of opposites (A is absolutely not-A). Follows from aleph-1: self-production of identity. Autopoiesis (self-production) is an essential property of the Cantor universe. The various properties of self-organization (which is more complex than self-production) follow from higher orders of infinity.
This is a framework, I believe, permissive of many interpretations. One interpretation of this has to do with quantum non-locality. An entity is in the place it is only with regard to its inertial reference frame; with regard to other reference frames, it is not in the place that it is. If it is not in the place that it is, then it is not WHAT it is. In this interpretation, the set of all reference frames, inertial and otherwise, is mapped by Lukasiewicz's n-valued logic. In this case, there would be many types of non-locality and identity transparency corresponding to valid semantic assertions of Ms in Rs. The types (Russellian?) of such assertions would have general properties related to orders of Gödel numbers and their factorial primes (“orders” corresponding to “different definitions of primes”).
Delineating and representing such valid semantic assertions seems more plausible now as the multimedia computing environment becomes a more and more elaborate potential aid to m-logically-valued thought. One wants to develop musculpt as notation from the general to the particular, as decomposition from the transfinite is clearly primary, given that recursive generation of the transfinite is more problematic. But perhaps working both ways simultaneously is the only real way to grasp it. Indeed, that may be in the nature of the case.
There are precedents for bottom-up innovation in rigidly top-down systems -- and these are inspirational relative to the task of implementing m-logically-valued monetary units, which can only be accomplished bottom-up. A small example was bottom-up creation of Political Order of Battle studies at the Combined Intelligence Center, Vietnam (later known as Strategic Research and Analysis, J2, MACV-HQ) where all the initiative came from below against command sentiment (thus yielding circumstances which ultimately led to the Westmoreland vs. CBS trial). Another, far more elaborate, example is summarized by William E. Burrows in his book By Any Means Necessary: America's Secret Air War (Arrow, 2001, pp. 225-6):
On October 4, 1957, incredulous Americans could look at the night sky and see a white dot named Sputnik moving across a background of stars. Unknown to most people in the West, and certainly to most Russians, a small team of dedicated scientists and engineers in the Soviet Union, some of them brilliant, had labored for years to get the world's first successful spacecraft into orbit. Led by Sergei Korolyov, later known as the legendary chief designer, the group created “bottom-up” rocket and space programs -- “bottom-up” in the sense that, far from being encouraged and nurtured by their government, they were actively opposed by Stalin and the military for wasting precious resources in a blatantly trivial attempt to explore other worlds… In the coming days, while Khrushchev boasted about an achievement he himself had not understood until it hit the Western press, rueful news media and many politicians turned their wrath on Eisenhower.
That Sputnik was created bottom-up against command sentiment is mind-boggling, something I have never before been aware of, and about which I would like to know a lot more. One can also observe that, if this story of Sputnik is true, it lends strong support to Derek's thesis in MOON that collapse of the USSR was not primarily driven by economic factors or the Soviet Afghan War, but had deep origins in the intellectual history of Soviet society, where, again, political opposition, like that of Solzhenitsyn, was only a minor contributor. Implications for future Russian behavior are not small.
Plans never work out. Things fall apart. Shit happens. The first shot fired… and all that. So forget plans -- but don't forget planning. The more planning, the more dry runs, the more contingencies projected, the more scenarios mapped, the more EEI identified, the more decision algorithms plotted, the more players and constituents exposed to planning exercises… the more instantaneous and the better the tactical improvisations and the overall gestalt of the disjointed incrementalism that emerges in the actual events. To get “a feeling for it” you've got to concentrate on it: planning activities develop concentration. The better the feeling for it, the better the tactical improvisation. Moreover, planning exercises reveal hidden information and develop consensus: two components of the Everett relative-state of a subsystem-system-supersystem composite without which high levels of self-organizational competency cannot manifest.
The more supervenient critics of anthropogenic climate change marshal gradualism, uniformitarianism, punctuationism, interactionism, adjustmentism, feedbackism arguments against far-from-equilibrium SHIFT, against, that is, saltation of Earth's climate, the more they demonstrate themselves ignorant of the last 150 years of human intellectual history. The very same people who uncritically embraced chaos theory's unwarranted invasion of atmospheric science (so as to keep out quantum and relativity theory), now argue (by logical extension) against chaotic implications of catastrophe theory's application to greenhouse gas frequency response regime anthropogenic SHIFT in solar-terrestrial interaction spectra. If a butterfly-wing flap can cause a hurricane, then anthropogenic flaps can cause dyscrasia in solar-terrestrial interactions (it's all about the itty-bitty increment and the cosmic camel). Dyscrasia means every extreme, not just extremely hot, but extremely cold, wet, dry, even extremely normal, during the period of deautomatization in non-equilibrium phase transition. James Lovelock is a recent convert to irreversible climate shift (recent, largely because, being very British, he still, in face of the last 150 years of human intellectual history, mistakenly understands atmospheric physics largely as a domain wherein the principles of classical physics reign). By the end of the 1970s, there were Cornell atmospheric physicists (biologically-oriented dynamical meteorologists) who had concluded SHIFT was then, and maybe much earlier, already irreversible. Once you KNOW it is irreversible, to what possible end further court the opprobrium of colleagues poorly informed about the last 150 years of human intellectual history? My experience at Cornell was self-similar to my experience at MACV-HQ: by the time you walk away from the paradigm conflict, the disgust is so elaborate well-wishing is no longer part of the personal equation, and this profoundly affects subsequent behavior. Ever see an Italian woman raise her fist? MAD might not be such a bad thing, given that what the Chinese would do would be no better than what the American's have done. Important speculation today involves locating probable zones of relatively good survival rates and, by contrast, probable loci of megadeath. Is the collective unconscious already reading this, giving behavioral indications? Lovelock thinks there will be a 20-percent human survival rate; my best WAG trailing out from the '70s (having in 1968 at MACV-HQ predicted a catastrophe if the spatial extent of the Viet Nam War was expanded, a catastrophe which a decade later was running as the Cambodian holocaust) has been that it would not be unreasonable to speculate as low as 10-percent: that's what I call an optimistic perspective, given that there are a whole lot of human factors involved in the meaning of the word “anthropogenic”, many such factors having absolutely nothing direct to do with climate-forcing functions, but very much to do with such things as panic, hysteria, collective psychosis, mass-murderous rage, purge, pogrom, holocaust, genocide, synoptic ecocide out of mass-rage-driven spite against nature (don't forget prefigurative Rome plows, dioxin, carpet bombs, and other technologies of anti-animism and the nature which supports it: weather modification will become climate-change modulation, and the Chinese Confucians are already into it!). Know something about REAL rage? Know something about ACTUAL lynch-mob hysteria? Not many survive to well-work-it enough to get some knowing.
Man, I dunno. Maybe S. Jobs did rip off the name “Apple” from Vietnam-War-era SIGINT, but he doesn't seem that smart to me. What I do know is that the ASA guys lodged directly across the road from MACV-HQ knew about Apple over the Tonkin Gulf, NVN, the HCM Trail, 'cause they hung in the bar at Club Nguyen Huu Bac -- the Vietnamese Air Force Officer's Club -- same as we did. We just laughed at them because we knew their sacred data, no matter how good, they couldn't actually interpret because all they didn't know. We weren't supposed to know about Apple and they weren't supposed to know what we knew. There it stood. Nobody up the line could put it together, either -- for they had no practical access to what we knew, even had they wanted to know it: real understanding was not transmissible by summary. Sweat of the brow, no royal road, all that. Just look at the strength-estimates controversy and testimony by the so-called experts in the Westy vs. CBS trial, what was said about infiltration.
I tell you people don't hire people smarter than them; you gotta act a little bit dumber. Acting a little bit dumber and a little bit dumber and a little bit dumber… as an up-the-organization strategy, how dumb at the top? Multiply that by several-hundred-million times the planet over and you understand one reason for the global crisis.
Watch the region! You will see. Tibet will become focal. Already is. The U.S. has been probing there ever since OSS-Kunming posted a Tibet-liaison office to Lijiang during WWII. By sea or by land? The Chinese know their acute vulnerabilities. Westward ho! They've been moving their critical heavy-industrial base toward the Islamic insurgents. Building vast interstate highways, hydroelectric dams, scoping out Burma as transshipment entrepot (thus avoiding the Straits of Malacca). But the collective unconscious thematics determining all such circumstantial occasions is that Tibetan Buddhism and Bon contain the most sophisticated codification of the cosmic implications of what presently is known as the m-valued Lukasiewicz logics of Everett relative-state animistic identity transparency. Not only is this anathema to the anti-pagan, tripartite Fertile Crescent religion, but also to obediential Confucianism in its millennial (not millenarian) conflict with animistic-spiritist Taoism. Confucianism will be MIA no less than three-fold Fertile Crescent religion. Just as the first invasion and massacres of WWII transpired in Poland, home of Lukasiewicz logics, so, you can bet your Nikes, will Tibet be a center of activity in WWIII as all-out hot, high-intensity war, the very war the U.S. military so assiduously prepares for, no matter how many low-intensity distractions it is subjected to.
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