As long as one believes in the necessity of an explanation of reality, as long as one believes that a failed paradigm must be replaced by an improved paradigm and yet another paradigm and yet another and another, indeed, as long as one believes in the utility of paradigms, one will not understand m-valued logics.
An implicate historiography addresses the why of what happened, not only the what and how. What interests me is the metahistoriography of the implicate: what and how of the why (not of what happened). Contemporary historians, of course, have no interest in such matters -- which is one reason why another global war is inevitable.
Most people believe that life, unlike computers, has no “halting problem”. There are no non-terminating lives. Anyone who thinks, and therefore “ams”, does not recursively compute inferences of a proposition forever. Even if such a person can never make up his mind and gives not the slightest indication of being consistent, still, on the day of reckoning, there are no undecidable propositions within the arithmetic of his existence. The trouble with this understanding of most people is that the notion of a non-terminating infinite sequence is inseparable from the idea of linear time. Where this kind of time is not a reference, not only is there “no halting problem”, there is no “halting problem”: no such issue prevails. Currently funded approaches to quantum computing display no insight into this matter.
Being an impudent military brat, throughout my youth I was always told not to criticize unless I had a better idea. But I always had a better idea, and statement thereof always ended the conversation. Better ideas were the last thing anyone was interested in. As far as I can tell, this has not changed.
I walk so-deep through brilliantly composed photographs each attentive waking instant: freeze-frame, freeze-frame. All parallel-distance alleys converge on their points stacked on my me, framing a gestalt and altering depth in feeling-space. Far away out-there is too, too close in-here: inhere-ing multivalue. Such walking is what Plato termed “effect of reversed intellectual vision”. (See: Robert S. Brumbaugh, Plato's Mathematical Imagination, Indiana University Press, 1954.) “Effect of oblique intellectual vision” is more difficult to attain; one must become psychologically “nude, descending a staircase”. This is not analytic representation, but direct portrait of the percept immediately given to the descender: increased baud rate of consciousness in time slowdown fractions motion. The “fractioned method” of hypnotic induction was developed by Johannes Schultz as the basis for Autogenic Training just after Duchamp painted his painting. “Effect of inverted intellectual vision” is more difficult, yet: consciousness must be “the bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even” on the large Plexiglas wall reflecting the involutive descending staircase of m-valued stepwise decomposition. Finding objects as Readymade by enculturation is but one small step along the path leading to the m-valued bare-object. (For an alternative interpretation, in terms of sister lust and father fleeing, see: Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, University of Minnesota Press, 1991.)
The basic problem I have with all Western psychology, including Jungian psychology, is that what is called consciousness I regard as nescience, and what is called the unconscious I regard as consciousness. Awareness of separate-self existence is nescience, a falsification in all cases, a falsification learned through enculturation which begins prenatally in the womb. Enculturation has not always functioned to imprint nescience. Nescience is not an archetype, not a meme, not genetically transmitted. It has to be learned with each new generation. But, nonetheless, every attempt will be made to clone it.
Archetypes are not “empty forms” or “perfect ideas”. This is a perspective elaborated from point of view of the time-bound ego-complex employing only a 2-valued logic to lecture in Philosophy 101. An archetype is an m-logically-valued relation-FUNCTION containing in its form all possible contents, from which, under the requisite conditions, particular patterns are stepwise DECOMPOSED by operator-time into functions of form in process, such that behavioral event-gradients (call these gradients “curvature”, if you will) appear as relation-STRUCTURES in consentuated ponderable space and enculturated linear time. Deautomatization and automatization: contents are not put into archetypes by conscious experience; immediate conscious experience (i.e., nescience in Plato's amnesis) is decomposition of archetypes seen in “plane view”, in “section”, by virtue of enculturation, which is to say, in plain view of the pedestrian, not seen fractioned (by involutive descent into prime factors of the involved Gödel numbers).
There is absolutely no possibility that Jung discovered archetypes by empirical studies of his patients. Anyone who read Goethe as a boy, who immersed himself in German literature, who knew anything of Wagner's music and German myth, who had heard of Kant was steeped in awareness of the basics of the Platonic perspective long before entering university to study, say, medicine. Jung followed his intuitions, sought his data accordingly, and wrote his scientific papers as all scientific papers are written: in accordance with the black propaganda line extolling the scientific method, a method which no creative scientist has ever used, or ever will.
Over and over, I've been asked to write on a more popular level -- even to write a children's book about these ideas. I've found that I've learned little from such books, except bits and pieces of information. I learn through struggling with material I can't understand, pouring over it, going back to it, imagining ways I might be able to understand it, cursing it, creating inner Musculpt models of the relations between the unknowns I can't understand, walking away from it, finding it follows me wherever I might try to hide. Why would someone who learns in this manner decide to write a formula book?
At this historical juncture, no amount of clarity, no amount of detail, no amount of simple explanation by analogy regarding m-valued modes of comprehension will produce understanding. There is a collective mental block that will be removed only by the neurogenic trauma of an extraordinary collective shock.
You are the most secretive person I have ever known!
You have no vanity!
You never give up, do you?
You are relentless!
You are insufferable!
You're still in the Army!
You approach each day as if you were a fighter pilot!
Nothing stays simple long in your presence!
You don't even know the meaning of the word “jealousy”!
You don't have much contact with this world, do you?
You don't need this; you're always high.
You live only to research!
You're crazy!
I don't know what to tell people when they ask me what you do!
You have no discipline!
You're a workaholic!
You're so emotional!… for an intellectual.
You don't know the power of your own mind!
Your intensity is so extreme it is difficult to be in the same room with you!
You never react! It's like trying to relate to a zombie!
You're so cold, like a psychological assassin!
You are the most incredible romantic idealist, always off in some dream world.
Ideas, you are nothing but your stupid ideas!
I doubt you EVER felt a feeling!
You are TOO responsible!
You are a loner, a complete utter loner!
Just like a Gemini, you are emotionally dependent on others -- to a fault!
You have no sense of social responsibility!
You have no self-control!
You never finish anything!
You don't have ANY idea who you are!
You are the most impulsive person! Who makes major life decisions like you do?
Such statements don't mean much coming from a natural athlete.
You are so out of touch with your body!
I think you are numb! Maybe you never heard the word “sensation”.
Yes, I know your body “knows where it is”; I just didn't know you studied jujitsu and swordsmanship as a 10-year-old in Japan.
You really know how to use a shovel!
You are like no other officer's son I have ever trained!
You think like you grew up in a barracks! That is not a leadership quality.
I must admit, soldier, you have an uncanny sense of what you can get away with.
By the time I'm finished with you, you will not only have gotten rid of that smirk, you won't even be thinking in smirks.
Black-and-blue is the color of the route of entry you have chosen into adulthood, soldier. Your choice, not mine.
And you, soldier, that passive insolence will become physical aggressiveness in spite of yourself.
That little bounce on your toes is a form of mockery I will not tolerate!
You make standing straight look painful!
You will stand there until you can at least simulate a posture of respect!
Your knee-jerk reaction against any exercise of authority means you will never be an effective leader.
Yep, I knew it, a military brat.
How many times did you jump out of an airplane?
You are so hard to resolve, sometimes I think you don't even exist.
You are a non-American American!
You didn't learn some of the most basic things!
What crack did you fall through?
Every interpersonal step you take is a tactic in some far-flung strategy!
My God! you wreck relationships today to achieve purposes in a tomorrow which will never come. That's how you think!
How can you live like this?
No one lives so far away from himself as you do!
You are worse than a writer!
Your very presence makes me nervous!
It takes a while to see it, but you clearly are absolutely devoid of respect!
You must certainly be a charlatan!
You do not appear aware of the degree to which your cunning puts you at risk.
You are unbelievably calculating for someone who says he believes in spontaneous directedness.
You are so manipulative!
You scare me; you have no fear. You don't care what happens!
You are oblivious!
It's as if you don't even know what time is!
You literally make me sick!
Time-lapse “Photographs”
& History of Realreality
(which is non-Selfsame,
not Virtual)
Anything is Nothing,
and Nothing Something;
never This, and always More.
My second-grade year just before going off to live in Midori Gawoka (verdant hills), a tiny hamlet in rural Japan, was spent in the small Pennsylvania town both parents grew up in: Greencastle. I dwelled only one early-1950s childhood year in this parental farming town, but that year occasioned a bizarre synchronisity informing echoes which have reverberated across five decades. In the back alleys and over farm-building rooftops, my cousin and I played with a kid known as Muckle. We three were as close as eight-year-olds can be, but the daily play session inevitably ended in a fist fight, forgotten by the following morning. On the deepest levels these boys were bound together by a common trait -- and a common fate. All three were preadolescent sleepwalkers, periodically found wandering the town in wee hours of the night, somnolent. Each, unbeknownst to the others, eventually went through U.S. Army Special Forces training, but none of them served in Vietnam with the Green Berets: Muckle discorporated into a clandestine capacity; my cousin subsequently became an officer and was assigned as a Forward Observer; I went over initially into Technical Intelligence Detachment. Learning details of the other two personal histories well after the fact, I became fascinated with the long-forgotten common “abnormality”: somnambulism.
Gurdjieff regarded the corpus of human beings as a species asleep, walking about in a state of hypnosis wherein each is unable to remember his or her self. Having once been a somnambulator, upon encountering this assessment by Gurdjieff, I had not the slightest inclination to take it as mere metaphor; I immediately knew it was intended as a direct phenomenological portrait, and was an accurate characterization. One would think that sleepwalkers are off in some other subjective space and/or time, unaware of their objective physical surroundings. The contrary is closer to the actual case. Somnamulation is a walkabout without retention of the sequence of inner states, so that, if the sleepwalker is found and asked where he has been, how he got there, and what his purpose is, he is unable to answer, not because he did not see where he was going and kept running into things, but because he cannot associate inner with outer in a meaningful fashion. That this condition is the actual normative state of the human species is demonstrated by historians, who maintain that history is only a chronicle of external events, not also of inner states: an apt definition of normotic illness. The ability to remember oneself involves not only retention of the sequence of inner states, but development through long practice of the ability to “stack” those retained states in simultaneous awareness as a “time-lapse photograph”. The long and the short of it is in time, not space. The physicists, however, conspire with the historians, in their shared inability to retain inner states, and thus insure us that each interval of time does not contain all the time of the total sequence which contains it: time intervals, according to their incapacity, are not “stackable” in some simultaneity. Intervals of time, they maintain, are absolutely separable; selfsame, thus simply-identifiable; not multiply-connected (except possibly under extreme circumstances of gravitational collapse of celestial objects); and certainly not non-orientable.
But physics was almost really something back there between the mid-Fifties and the early-Seventies, promising anything but more of the usual -- before the back-reaction on the social metric set in. Issuing from the School of Advanced Studies at Princeton were proclamations like: Any thing is nothing-given-shape, which meant matter might merely be manifestation of multiply-connected strange loops of empty spacetime. Blackholes and other holes, macro and mini, hairless and hairy, were named, while theories of the shape of form in process, Nature’s own topology, became intellectual corn for Hamlet’s mill to grind into conceptual grist -- the ingredients of the recipe being charm, color, and Cantorian sets, Platonic archetypes, Vedic idealism, and Caliban’s rebirth. Ultra-dense textbooks on gravitation quoted the Vedas and Upanishads, and it appeared the task T. S. Eliot failed to perform at turn-of-20th-century Harvard -- that task being topological transformation of the half-object -- might be accomplished seventy-five years later by psychospiritually empowered physicists, unaided by squirrelly Orientalists like Eliot. Alas, such was not to be.
Gurdjieff said that warfare of sleepwalking humans results from being eaten by the moon. In theme-selected time-lapse photographs of my personal history, combat images overlay inner states associated with three boy sleepwalkers who most often went out on full-moon nights. We, therefore, by contrast, chose to name our novel of war THE MOON OF PEACE (hoa binh means peace in Vietnamese). Also in this particular time-lapse stack of inner states are those associated with my best writing, my most important conceptual insights -- which always come late at night around time of the full moon. Sang Deuane, “light of the moon”; Madoka, “full moon”: female names in Thai and Japanese, and also part of this specific personal-history time-lapse stack. The tympanum of a bronze drum, its “moon”, is feminine, and when polished with salt reflects my image as a mirror, as my anima, indeed, as my anima mundi.
The base-state of Realreality is a superconductant mirror. Not a sky-high silver-mine glass mirror. Not a StarWars HAARP magnetic mirror. But a time-logic mirror. A mirror that reflects anything projected upon it with perfect efficiency. This mirror has been called many things, Tzog-Chen, for instance -- even Jerusalem.
But THIS MIRROR, this time-logic mirror, this Large Glass, being non-selfsame, can never be controlled. What is there to grasp? Anything is nothing, and nothing something; never this, and always more. For simplicity’s sake, imagine the plane of this temporal mirror reduced to one of the infinite number of lines which compose it. The instants constituting any interval of linear-time, which we can “cut” as small as we like, may be put into one-to-one correspondence with those comprising the whole infinite extension of linear-time. Therefore, all of linear-time is contained in any part thereof, and any smaller part contains as much time as any larger part which contains it: zero equals infinity, in time. But say we reject this discrete instant-notion of linear-time, and adopt instead the stream-of-consciousness view of linear-time as a continuum. As Cantor has taught us, and Gödel has proved not inconsistent (and Paul Cohen, in 1963, proved consistent, but not necessarily decidable), which, therefore, has been demonstrated neither true nor false, and, as is implied by elements of Cantor's continuum hypothesis, if we remove a countable infinity from a continuum infinity, the continuum is undiminished. Indeed, if we remove a countable infinity of countable infinities, the continuum remains undiminished. What does this tell us about the continuum infinity which linear-time is? It is non-selfsame.
Pick any interval of linear-time from last year you found particularly pleasing. Regard it, however you wish, as either a discrete selection of instants, which can be “cut” as small as we like, or as a continuum. ((The notion that there is a fixed minimum duration to the present moment is based on a number of false assumptions, one of which is that there is a fixed baud rate of consciousness, invariable from one state to another, and that, therefore, information overload, as in “pilot fixation syndrome”, is state independent.)) One is likely to encounter grave difficulties in convincing oneself beyond the shadow of a doubt that this infinitude from last year has not yet completed itself and entered the class of actual infinities, as opposed to infinite sequences approaching limits never reached. If actual infinities existed last year, what is there to make us believe that they do not exist at this very instant? A hyper-efficient reflector superposing itself according to whatever is projected upon it, Realreality is non-selfsame, not virtual.
i understood that i have no free will long before the emotional impact of this understanding slammed fully into my me. It was this emotional impact that was the source of my inner awakening: i came to experience that there is only one Real-I. Later, i/I came to accept the fact that i/I have a grave responsibility to fulfill: i/I must keep the floor down! Kazantzakis had a similar recognition: Man must save God! “Effect of inverted intellectual vision”!
People who pander to low levels of cognitive function generally function on the level pandered to.
In arriving at his famous proof, Gödel falsely assumed that: (1) “language A” is orientable, i.e., that “in language A” can be absolutely distinguished from “not-in language A”; (2) infinite regress is linear in nature, i.e., that regresses are not self-reentrant marches; (3) description reduces to truth tables, i.e., that there is nothing in logic more fundamental than truth-value; (4) logical calculi are limited to only one order of logical-value, i.e., the 2-valued variety; (5) single-valued propositions are the only legitimate propositions, i.e., that self-contradiction is a violation of the rules of all logics; (6) completeness is an absolutely meaningful notion, i.e., that there are no languages for which completeness is undefinable -- which is not the case for languages involving use of logical calculi with orders of logical value greater than two and propositions with logical values greater than one. I wonder, What is the Gödel number of this 6-fold proposition?
For a good popular treatment of Jung and Gödel under the same cover, please read Robin Robertson's book Jungian Archetypes: Jung, Gödel, and the History of Archetypes (Nicolas-Hays, 1995, distributed by my old friend, Samuel Wiser). But I must warn you, though there is some mild criticism offered here, this is a benign treatment of some extraordinary psychopathology.
What is most interesting to us about Gödel's work is that he chose to ignore Emil Post's m-valued logics, which were on the scene for over a decade when Gödel published his famous proof. This choice on the part of Gödel is roughly on a par with the performance of G. Birkhoff and J. von Neumann at about the same time, i.e., three years prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland, the home ground of m-valued logics. (See: “The Logic of Quantum Mechanics”, Annals of Mathematics, 37, 1936.) One truly must wonder at the extraordinary lengths the mind is willing to go in order to avoid looking the multivalue straight in the face. Here, Birkhoff and von Neumann recognized that quantum logic has some relation to projective geometry, but where is the Riemann surface stack? Though some doubt is cast on the utility of Hilbert space, where is the recognition that every point in the referencing phase-space is multivalued, that translation across a single-valued sheet is projected as a static lattice to the multivalued referencing function-space? How strange that they should invoke the concept of a logical “lattice”, but not view it as a true point-set topology! These logical lattices of Birkhoff and von Neumann, of course, are of the essence of Post's mTm logics (1921). Standard Aristotelean-Baconian-Boolean logic is a 1T2 logic. Two values are available, one of which is permitted per proposition. This is logic reduced to truth-value and all the standard syllogistic rules. Post generalized this to the mTm case, where all logical values available are permitted per proposition. On the Riemann surface stack of single-valued sheets, there are 1, 2, 3… values available on successive sheets, but only one permitted per proposition (represented by a given logical lattice of connected points). All the values on equivalent points on each such sheet are stacked on their equivalent point on the multivalued reference space (most-dense sheet), where there are m-values available and m-values permitted per proposition. Gödel numbering of these m-valued logical lattices necessarily involves expanding the universe of discourse which has grown up around the famed Riemann Hypothesis on distribution of prime numbers (which are factors of Gödel numbers). With similarly inexplicable myopia, Birkhoff and von Neumann used involutory relations and the concept of skew-fields, but the multivalue screaming in the background, without which skew-fields are impossible, was completely ignored (along with the whole notion of skew-parallelism, qua skew-perpendicularity, underlying skew-fields, with its profound implications for Riemann's thesis on the origins of charge, Heisenberg's indeterminacy, and resultant non-conservation of energy and virtual phonon exchange underlying mechanisms of high temperature superconductivity, such as that of DNA). Dropping distributive laws for 2-valued propositions, indeed! Can laughter be suppressed? B and vN knew of Post's logics, just as did G. These missing recognitions by Birkhoff and von Neumann are not ignorance speaking; they are expressions of psychological dread. And this paper, summarizing at the very least a decade of collective psychoneurotic posturing, was published a mere three years before the inevitable avalanche of consequences!
Gödel numbers need to be plotted, not calculated! More accurately stated: factors of m-valued Gödelized propositions need to be plotted on the Riemann surface sheet stack composing the Musculpt manifold, not calculated to supposed single definite values which non-self-identical numbers do not authentically possess. The collapsed-value of a superposed number (such as a Gödel number), localized on the Cartesian grid, is not the full measure of this number. Single-valued Gödelized propositions are a special case (likely a trivial case, cosmologically speaking) of all the m-valued Gödelized propositions there are in this world. Non-self-identical superposed numbers are not numerical values! They are FORMS of Musculpt, i.e., archetypes. Arithmetic operations involving such numbers are carried out by operator-time. Non-self-identical superposed numbers are “dreamtime” configurations of “songlines” (like Riemann's “critical line”). How are such arithmetic operations represented? Let us look at Derek's Journals, circa 1972-5 (pp. 528-9 and p. 613, Vol. 2, THE MOON OF HOA BINH):
An interesting discovery from self-observation. It has been sometime since I learned that a subliminal imagery process underlies all of my verbal thought. Since then, this imagery has become progressively more conscious and hence, I think, more flexible. But now I discover another aspect of all this: whenever I approach an area of study for the first time, I always use a certain method of learning without being quite conscious of it. In literature that concerns this new area, there are a great number of concepts, words, expressions, symbols which I do not understand. I do not make a definite effort to understand these terms on a one-to-one basis as I come to them. As long as there is a general feeling for the gist of the discussion, I always use the following method: I just accept the new terms, concepts, symbols as unknowns -- which I visualize or hear to myself as circles, squares, greens, reds, high or low tones, a moving in, a moving out, a twisting over, a twisting under, and et cetera, as appropriate to what is being represented -- and, as I read along, just visualize and/or hear the differing contexts in which these unknowns recur. The continued recurrence in differing contexts adds more and more information (thus changing, for instance, the shade of green, the manner of the twist, the quality of the tone) to the growing concept of the unknown until, eventually, as my general knowledge of the whole area increases, the unknown progressively becomes a known. I make an area of concrete knowledge content into a personal abstract set of symbols and relations.
Homogeneous low illumination dissolves the object and brings the “dust” of visual space to the forefront as Ganzfeld. But time-slow-down in self-observation-induced deautomatization of visual perception achieves the same thing even in high illumination environments. The ideoretinal rheostat is modulated by operator-time, thus creating “bright light states” and accompanying spaces. Each light has its own time-created space. The spaces are not homeomorphic. Is light simply a “reflection” of some chronotopological invariant?
The afterimage is one entry into time-slow-down. Fix the gaze. Go negative on the extra-ocular muscles and defocus the visual image. It freezes. Hold it and attend to the periphery of the frozen frame. A sepia wash will bleed into the bright areas. Active imagination in the slow-down state can brush in colored washes at will. One can manipulate the image freely, just as if it were in a darkroom. Sound gestalts can be after-heard in a similar fashion. I have not yet managed colored-hearing of after-heard-afterimages, though I know this is possible as ponderable process in time-slow-down. Ah, Goethe! has anyone introspected on color perception so deeply since your passing? They have analyzed, of course, but have they introspected?
I just ran across some interesting statements attributed to Beethoven: “I always have a picture in my mind when composing, and follow its lines.” (though we are told not to take this too literally) and “… my symphonies, in which the confluence of many-sided forms sings along in one bed to its destination.” (J. W. N. Sullivan, Beethoven, His Spiritual Development, Knopf, 1927.) Did Beethoven quite literally have in his mind the image of an abstract form which he transliterated into musical notation? If so, this would go a long way to explaining Mozart's incredible abilities at transcribing from memory complex and lengthy pieces of music after only one hearing. The total structure of the piece is given to awareness as an abstract static form; the linear progression of the piece in time is viewed by the mind as a set of logically connected transformations of the given form. All Mozart would have had to have remembered was the form and the transformational sequence; then, at leisure, he could simply have sat down sometime and transcribed it into notation. This reverses Goethe's famous observation that “architecture is frozen music”. (Here we have a more plausible account of Martin Gardner's “The Amazing Code” described in Gotcha [W. H. Freeman, 1982] and used by Robin Robertson to explain Gödel numbers in Jungian Archetypes: Jung, Gödel, and the History of Archetypes [Nicolas-Hays, 1995].)
Justifications for Musculpt becoming a notational system for mathematics: If we start using multivalued logics, it then becomes possible for an element to be both itself and some other element simultaneously. The property of being itself-not-itself is a necessary prerequisite for the fully integrated functioning of a hierarchically ordered process. This is the case in the study of the physics of collective, cooperative, and critical phenomena, for instance. Now, in order to symbolize an element that is simultaneously itself and other elements, a multidimensional symbol is required. (And we must never forget that the “itself” of a multivalued element is relative to the position of the observer in the hierarchy, or, equivalently, relative to the observer's partitioning of the hierarchy.) Say x is the root symbol for the element in question. In order for x to capture the multiformity of the element, other qualities must be attached to x. A written notational system can attach exponents or subscripts or, in complex cases, can expand discursively across the page -- which mathematicians do not read lineally, but rather “register the form of”. But the mathematician, in this case, is working against the notation. In Musculpt as mathematical notation, this does not occur; the mathematician works with the notation. Musculpt is a nonlinear language because meaning in symbol, being stacked synaesthetically, is not length-limited by constraints of visual scanning gestalts. Color and sound can be superposed qualities of x. A green x that always appears with the sound of a certain pitch is the root symbol x with two superposed values. In Musculpt, the x would become a simple form with associated sounds and colors, thus allowing a maximum amount of information to be attached to a simple symbol. This is not a puerile attempt to go back to visualization when higher mathematics has long since left realms of consideration that are visualizable. It is an attempt to evolve a notational system more appropriate to higher mathematics. Written symbols are static; contemporary mathematics needs dynamic and transformable symbols. When multivalued elements are being dealt with, the need is to have one symbol with many facets -- each facet being individually alterable.
With intense concentration -- particularly within RESONANT conceptual, musical, or art-related conversations -- a Belson-esque sounded-form spontaneously appears in awareness. Its shape, color, and associated musical tone capture in their overall gestalt the total semantic import of the subject matter of the conversation yet to unfold (decompose). As a line of argument begins, the form-color-tone alters. This alteration captures, in its form, the meaning of the given line of argument relative to all other related lines of argument. Attending to the form and its transformations, one runs many steps beyond the verbal level of the conversation. One gets sick of the words! which are too slow. One can see-hear all the levels of meaning simultaneously. The content of the total subject matter of discourse is not represented by the sounded-form, only the meaning. Meaning is paramount; content, derivative. This is not “Montague's grammar” (universal generative grammar as topology), but Montague's semantics! The meaning import of the sounded-form is conveyed in feeling-tone. Meaning DECOMPOSES from the form! as feeling-tone. Meaning is not recursively generated via logical atomism or via transformational accumulation of emergent properties. One experiences a feeling-toned response to the overall gestalt of the sounded-form spontaneously apprehended. The meaning of the overall gestalt of the sounded-form is a feeling-toned complex. This feeling is not affect. Affect is feeling-toned contents. This feeling has no contents; it is what Kandinsky called “pure feeling”: affect stripped of all concrete contents. The feeling-toned complex of the sounded-form is a gestalt of pure feeling: raw meaning, not cooked meaning. This is what Kandinsky painted: meaning in the raw. This is what Schoenberg heard as he composed: meaning in the raw. This is whale song. This is dolphin-speak. This is Bushman sound. This is Hottentot click-talk. This is Aboriginal songline congealed in dreamtime. This is 1/f-noise punching holes in the tropopause boundary for ozone drawdown during severe storm genesis. This is infrasound signatures of local landforms used in bird navigation. This is coherent wave generation by superconductant intra-neuronal DNA. Whale song is the basso ostinato of the biosphere. Shut off this basso ostinato and the biosphere dies -- or some new agent of the life giving “cantus firmus” must have evolved as local analog of the multivalued reference space.
Just as in the superconductant DNA model, all of chemistry could be rewritten in terms of sound waves, in terms of the sounded-forms of universal semantic sung by whales, spoke by dolphins. Stereochemistry is chemistry focused on mass and viewed through single-valued logic. But there is a whole universe of m-valued chemistries in coherent waves (i.e., infrasound, suprasound, second-sound, and so on) not representable in single-logically-valued mass dynamics. They tell us that quantum computers will be based on the fact that the electron can be both “up” and “down” simultaneously. But the electron always is in m-states simultaneously superposed, not just two. They speak only of two because of the psychological and political implications of m-states. A pox on their psychopolitics! Gödelized propositions need to be plotted on the Riemann surface sheet stack composing the Musculpt manifold, not calculated to supposed single definite values which non-self-identical numbers do not authentically possess. Factors of m-valued Gödelized propositions are plotable, even if their multiplied “values” are Turing uncomputable. The resultant plotted lattices are Regge lattices, which are transformable into skew-field curvature configurations by the Regge calculus -- which transforms Einstein's field equations into n-dimensional lattices, and vice versa. Where do these lattices underlying the semantic sounded-forms of Musculpt fall? Not on the real line. Not on the complex plane. The s (a complex number) of the Euler and Riemann zeta functions is logically 2-valued. Its 1/2 + it does not conform to the requirements of mTm as t ranges. The zeta function's s, like the nk landscape of complexity theory, is formulated in terms of ordinary binary logic. The nk landscape is actually a 2nk landscape (for a fuller account of this see: “M-Valuation in a Generalized Currency Basket” in The Saigon Papers on this website) where the elements in question must be either on or off. This is a highly relevant comparison because k indicates the number of correlations between the involved elements or factors, n, and, also, because non-self-identical numbers under m-valued logics are numbers in superposition (i.e., correlated) stacked on a point in the reference space. Generalizing the landscape under mTm yields an Mnk landscape. Were the elements or factors arrayed on this landscape prime factors of Gödel numbers of m-valued propositions, the s of the zeta function would become sM. Now, the power set (set of all subsets of the original set) in Cantor's continuum hypothesis has 2n members, just like the nk landscape of complexity theory has 2n elements or factors. This is a statement about cardinality: the power set has cardinality n. The power set of non-self-identical numbers of cardinality n, however, is 2nk -- correlations being involved in the non-self-identical. But this is an incomplete statement, because we are not talking about only the relationships between members of the set (i.e., the many ways in which they can be arrayed into subsets), but about their changing animistic identity transparency under increasing orders of logical-value, m. The power set under m-valued logics is not identical to the power set under 2-valued logic. The m-logically-valued power set of non-self-identical numbers of cardinality n, is actually Mnk, where M is the order of logical-value and k the number of correlation factors (of the involved logical lattice with n bifurcation points). Under such considerations, however, Riemann's zeta s could not be merely a complex number; it would have to be a hypercomplex number, because the complex plane is a 1T2 logical construct. Constructs of order mTm are beyond the complex plane. sM is the order of hypercomplexity of s. The m-logically-valued power set of non-self-identical numbers, sM, of cardinality n, is 
. On this power-set continuum, not Cantor's, can we begin to plot the Gödel number factors of the m-valued logical lattices underlying the sounded-forms of Musculpt semantics.
It is only non-self-identical numbers that make the notion of “cardinality of the continuum” plausible. Degrees of identity transparency, of order m, between the discrete and the continuous, dictated by mTm orders of logic, is the fundamental modification of Peano's axioms required. It can be seen that under Post's logics there is no limit to the number of infinities between that of the natural numbers and that of the continuum, such that, for instance, the “critical line” of Riemann's hypothesis has a unique shadow line under each order of logical-value greater than 1T2.
I enjoyed reading your exchange about the term “Vietcong”. I think I heard a variant of that conversation every day I worked at the Combined Intelligence Center and Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-HQ. The fact that that conversation is still going on speaks to the brilliance of German Communist and Lenin associate, Willi Muenzenberg, who developed the theory of double-stacking in mass associations and the “minimum-maximum program” that goes along with it.
As you know, I don't read Vietnamese, but in 1968 I spent an enormous amount of time with the translators at Combined Document Exploitation Center driving them crazy with questions. I think close study of the documents on archive in the William Joiner Center and/or Suitland, Maryland, (I suppose that, as was the case at CICV and CDEC in Saigon, there will often be included with the English language translation of the given document at least the Vietnamese language cover sheet) will clearly demonstrate that the NFLSVN did not exist in anything like what the general discourse in the history books has it: e.g., “Communist-dominated NLF”.
The kinds of documents that must be studied in order to understand how Willi Muenzenberg's program of double-stacking worked in Viet Nam are the bureaucratic nuts-and-bolts documents, not the policy-statement documents generally relied upon by historians (which policy documents were largely internal kiem thao, a kind of party-chapter-level equivalent of the intracellular phe binh criticism/self-criticism, and, having functions other than simple communication, in significant measure functioned as a form of self-propaganda in the process of consensus building).
As a for-instance for nuts-and-bolts documents: “Effective April 14, 1966, Sau Dan is transferred from Chau Thanh District Finance and Economy Section to the Farmers' Proselytizing Section of Long An Province Committee.” On the original cover sheet of this personnel transfer order in Vietnamese, all the main elements of information will be given in alphanumeric code: Sau Dan is an AKA cover name; the district, the F & E section, the province, the proselytizing section will all be given in one of their half a dozen or so codes, which change periodically. This is a party document. A party member is being transferred from one party chapter to another at the same time he is being moved from one party committee to another and assigned within the committee to one of its functional element subsections. But, nowhere in the document, is the Peoples' Revolutionary Party mentioned. The document is printed on NFLSVN stationary (by stamp). In fact, I know of no evidence there ever was PRP letterhead anywhere in Viet Nam, ever. So, one of the practical day-to-day aspects of double-stacking is a matter of what goes on paper, and what does not.
There were a few crazy people out there (about a dozen I have known personally, and not many more than that in the history of the war) like Sam Adams who immersed themselves in detailed comparative analysis of these nuts-and-bolts documents. Once you have ascertained what alphanumeric codes go with what functional elements during a given historical window, say November-December 1967, in, say, Military Region 4, and you have, say, 10,000 captured documents like the above relative to the full range of bureaucratic variables (personnel transfers, change of job description, creation of new functional elements, boundary changes, new letter box number codes, reorganization of agencies within an echelon, creation of new echelons, institution of reverse representation in a given area, and so on) during the period of consideration, then you can seriously map out information flow channels and chains of command.
When you do this in detail, and it was done with hundreds of thousands of documents between late-1966 and mid-1970 (involving a large number of people, when you consider all the steps involved in document capture, sorting, translation, de-coding, and so on), one striking thing becomes apparent in relation to the discussion you recently had of the term “Vietcong”. At district, province, and military region echelons there was a permanent standing committee of the echelon NFLSVN committee that actually had real people associated with it. As far as I know, no one ever saw any document, however, that passed between the NFLSVN permanent standing committees at these echelons. No one ever saw any document pass between the given permanent standing committee and any of its supposed subordinate voluntary associations. In fact, the NFLSVN committees did not actually exist at these echelons, given that they had no membership at these echelons, which was seen in captured attendance rosters of national proselytizing conferences held under the auspicies of COSVN, the Central Office for South Viet Nam. The executive committee of the NFLSVN committee at these echelons did not actually exist either. Only the very small permanent standing committee existed and held very rare meetings in relation to public ritual.
Where the people of South Viet Nam met the NFLSVN was through the village NFLSVN committee, which actually sent paperwork to its subordinate voluntary associations. Where the people of the world met the NFLSVN was via the national Central Committee of the NFLSVN. But no paper ever passed from that central committee to any of it subordinate village committees.
Now, remember that every paper used throughout the resistance has the NFLSVN stamp on it. So, every personnel transfer order (or any other directive related to any other bureaucratic variable) is as if it were an NFLSVN directive, but no such directive ever originated from an alphanumeric code for any NFLSVN committee. All such directives originated from alphanumeric codes for party committee functional elements. At the district, province, and military region echelons, the only people associated with the NFLSVN were those few people who sat on the permanent standing committee (about a dozen at each echelon) of the non-existent echelon NFLSVN Committee and its internally-nested, but non-existent, executive committee. So, to say “Communist-dominated NLF” is very far from what was actually the case within the organization.
The captured primary nuts-and-bolts documentation is lavish on the evolution of this organization back to the early 1950s, with considerable descriptive content in those documents relative to the period 1945 thru the early 1950s. Many of the large document stores captured during the late 1960s (particularly post-Tet '68, when the biggest finds occurred) contained considerable historical memory in the form of many old documents.
I have seen no evidence of serious historian interest in this nuts-and-bolts material, however -- as was the case during the war, when only a few crazy people like Sam Adams were into it. Your statement that you wrote about “the variety of ideological commitments and post-war visions within the southern resistance” is extremely well taken. What is less well known is the variety of ideological commitments and visions of post-war Viet Nam within the Peoples' Revolutionary Party itself, and how profoundly these have played themselves out in post-war Viet Nam.
It has been forever since I attempted to find anything on “Montague's grammar”, so when you mentioned it, I did a web search and came up with the following very interesting site. Please see http://www.thymos.com/mind/g.html when you have a chance.
This site contains a collection of short book summaries. There are some brief mentions of Montague's grammar. More interesting to me is vindication of Pensinger's Law, i.e., “Whenever you think you have had an original thought, it is not long before you discover a book has already been written on the subject.” The title of this particular book is TEMPORAL LOGICS (1987) by Anthony Galton. It is interesting (and thought provoking) to discover that “temporal operators” are now being used in linguistic theory in a way directly analogous to how we have used the notion of operator-time in relation to physics. (I am sure there is no knowledge of our physics usage on part of the involved linguists.) Temporal operators (as herein described) are essential aspects of the performatives of a proposition. Linguistic temporal operators are related to verb tenses. Such operators are studied in the field called “temporal logics”.
The following comes from the summary of a book entitled THE ORGANIZATION OF ACTION, (1980) by C. R. Gallistel: “No movement in nature is random, it always serves the purpose of 'adapting' the state of the system to the external conditions. No matter how intelligent a living being's action appears to be, that action satisfies the same general principle.” On basis of this idea, correspondence between temporal operators in physics and in linguistics does not seem so strange. This makes the program of treating logical lattices as Regge lattices of spacetime curvature configuration all the more plausible. (There is a section in MOON where this very idea is discussed in relation to Jung's concept of how the complex is to be conceived relative to the archetype, wherein Boscovitch's “point-centers-of-action” are used, as was discussed by L. L. Whyte in his book THE UNCONSCIOUS BEFORE FREUD.) The notion that these lattices should be mapped on a multi-sheeted Riemann surface (as analogue of Sakharov's “multi-sheet model of the universe”) and plotted in Gödel numbers (composed of the prime number factors that the Riemann Hypothesis addresses) seems to me the most direct bridge between, not only linguistics and physics, but psychology and physics. Temporal operators and their logics appear to be the primary bridging concept (as Maria Louise von Franz very very nearly knew, particularly so during her discussions of the I-CHING in NUMBER AND TIME).
Also on this website is summarized another book I obviously must study -- READINGS IN NONMONOTONIC LOGIC (1987) by Matthew Ginsberg -- which appears (to me) a survey of the various explorations (such as modal logic) of the consequences of existence of m-valued logics for thought in 2-values (without explicit acknowledgement of m-valued logics). As I believe I stated before, this is how I have come to think of approaches like Saul Kripke's modal logic. I fixed on the following statement: “Ginsberg argues that a variety of approaches to nonmonotonic reasoning can be unified by resorting to multi-valued logics.” I certainly will have to see what he means by this.
There is also a collection of papers on Leibniz's “universal alphabet of thought” that is probably very interesting: SEMANTIC AND LEXICAL UNIVERSALS (1994) by Goddard Cliff and Wierzbicka Anna.
Actually, I do not regard consistency an inherent attribute of any “possible world semantic”, except those world semantics of the 1T2 variety. But, then, I do not regard any possible world semantic as merely possible, for the “possible” 1T2-variety world semantics are actually treatments of the variety of mTm world semantics as if they were merely possible -- merely possible, that is, because consistency is mistakenly considered an inalienable right of world semantics qua world semantics. I must, however, protest that this is no small, purely theoretical, matter in an esoteric corner of one of the myriad fields of logic. If, as regards the 1/2 + it of the Riemann zeta function, the t º a Hermitian operator on Hilbert space, as some have suggested (including Hilbert himself), the “semantic” (import of the involved quantum logic, that is) of some “possible” (in consensus quantum theory, “probable”, however improbable) world is subject to interpretation under mTm such that it becomes iTM, where T would be an m-logically-valued Hermitian operator on an m-logically-sheeted Hilbert space. In such a Hilbert space under such a Hermitian operator, the idea of consistency one can entertain becomes a very peculiar notion, indeed. The orders of truth table multiply without bound. Moreover, the double-exponentials associated with such truth-tables indicate they literally turn an imaginary corner (truth table deposed in hyperdimensions) in propositional space, meaning that the i of iTM indicates, not only that the involved numbers have an imaginary component as Riemann's zeta function indicates, but, when given any interpretation whatsoever, so must their resultant contextual meanings have imaginary components: when 1T2 goes to 2Tm to 3Tm to 4Tm and so on, the imaginary semantic dimensions of the involved worlds multiply hand over foot, as consideration of G. Spencer Brown's calculus of indications would indicate.
In face of unbounded and exponentiated orders of truth table, I personally prefer superposed “actual”, as opposed to separate “possible”, world semantics. Just as Everett-Wheeler-Graham (EWG) argued on basis of linear-time-bound thermodynamic considerations that their multiple universes (mapped in a 1T2-logic-constructed Hilbert space) are incommunicado, in solitary confinement, so Saul Kripke, in constructing world semantics on basis of possibilities, rather than actualities, treats, by direct implication, any meaning-intersections between worlds-of-meaning as tantamount to trivial: worlds of horse-sense, pig-sense, dirty-rat-sense, and so on are overwhelmingly 1T2 worlds unto themselves. Both the EWG and Kripke cases so transparently justify the individualistic mode of ego-sphere-identity, caught in inherent alienation and anomie of Existential “separatism”, one is inclined, on that basis alone, to reject them.
Saul Kripke has long been committed to this notion of identity as the only possible world semantic of identity (as a Kantian category). In 1976, if memory serves, Kripke delivered a lecture at Cornell University mistitled in campus promotion as “Time and Eternity”. He began the public lecture by informing his audience that the correct title was “Time and Identity”. Everyone had a good laugh, as all knew no reputable philosopher would be caught these days lecturing on eternity. Some of the more informed in the audience, however, would have been the more happy had the logician lectured on eternity as opposed to identity in relation to linear-time, or more happily yet on eternity in relation to identity, as the monotonic notion of identity he derived (implicitly as a Kantian category) from linear-time-only so thoroughly neglected the variety of identity constructs experienced historically by the human species, one had to wonder whether or not the promotional snafu was a possible cosmic joke. This possible joke, if it was indeed actual and cosmic, was all the more poignant in that the imaginary corner inevitably turned in propositional truth-table space through double-exponentials is an imaginary turn away from truth-value toward animistic identity transparency, which imaginary turn Kripke's derivation of monotonic identity from linear-time-only implicitly rejected -- which rejection, of course, is a foundational assumption of his "possible world semantics", i.e., configurations of meaning arrived at through nonmonotonic reasoning about monotonic identity.
Dear Nguyen Quynh: I very much enjoyed reading your paper on quantum logic. Thank you for sending it to me. It is interesting you have gotten this deeply into the subject. Thinking about that fact, it occurs to me that you may be uniquely situated to make a real breakthrough in the field for three reasons: (1) You are an exceptionally talented artist; (2) You are studying the relationship between modern art and logic and between logic and quantum physics; (3) You have Asian origins and have not rejected traditional Asian perspectives in acquiring a Western education.
Let me try to explain why I think these three factors are so important to the task of achieving such a real breakthrough. Everything I will say about this will, of course, at minimum, be open to question, but this “everything” is the perspective I have arrived at, and the easiest way to explain importance of the three factors is simply to state that perspective.
In the mid-70s, while at Cornell, I read to some depth in quantum logic and came to the conclusion that the bulk of what has been written about it is essentially out-to-lunch, if not competely meaningless. I felt then, and continue to feel now, that no viable quantum logic will be developed so long as: (1) the logic elaborated is rooted in the notion of truth-value; (2) the interpretation of quantum theory, that the logic is used to explicate, is based on probability amplitudes; (3) a written notation is used to formalize the logic employed; (4) explication of the principles of quantum logic begins with the definitions of classical logic and proceeds on the view that the resultant quantum logic is the accumulated variances from those classical definitions.
Issues of consistency are not paramount issues relative to a quantum logic. Consistency issues are truth-value issues, issues plotable in truth tables (two dimensional or hyperdimensional) and/or logical “lattices”. Paramount issues relative to quantum mechanics are those of identity. In classical logic, “no A is not-A” is a definition treated as a truth-value issue: violate this principle in proposition, syllogism, or expression and one has committed a fallacy, which is a violation of permissible truth-value relations or logical consistency. The same applies to “the case is either A or not-A”. But these are not only classical definitions concerning principles related to consistency or truth-value, they are also definitions concerning permissible-identity: states of identity which do not conform to these definitions are impermissible. “No A is not-A” states that the only entites worthy of logical consideration are entities which are selfsame, i.e., in the specific case, the entity considered must be an entity which is the same as itself, an entity, that is, which is itself and only itself -- not simultaneously something not-itself. “The case is either A or not-A”, similarly, prescriptively specifies only entities possessing simple-identity as being worthy of logical consideration, i.e., entities possessing multi-identity are not permissible.
Schrödinger's “cat”-paradox was a simile before it was a logical paradox. The essential features of the simile have to do with identity, whereas the consistency, qua truth-value, predicates of the simile, deemed paradoxical, are derivative. The “cat” is not selfsame and it does not possess simple-identity. Dead-and/or-alive was chosen for the simile, rather than here-and/or-not-here (i.e., issue of nonlocality) because of the emotional impact (in simile of life-and-death issues) upon those human entities taking themselves to be selfsame and in possession of simple-identity.
Okay, so a quantum logic could be constructed wherein the classical fallacies of contradiction (violating “no A is not-A”) and undistributed middle (violating “the case is either A or not-A”) were no longer regarded as fallacies: logical consistency would thus be maintained in presence of nonselfsameness and nonsimple-identity. Truth tables and logical “lattices” could be appropriately constructed, and so on. One could remove distributive laws. One could modify the definition of complement. One could arrive at new definitions of equivalence. Would the resultant accumulated variances from the definitions of classical logic constitute a significant quantum logic? I say no. Why?
Consideration of the basic reason many-valued logics have been proposed as equivalent to quantum logic is illustrative of why. The first 3-valued logic was created by Jan Lukasiewicz in 1921 (see his English language account: ARISTOTLE'S SYLLOGISTIC, Oxford U. Press, 1928). The general m-valued (i.e., infinite-valued) logic case was explicated the same year by Emil Post (“Introduction to a general theory of elementary propositions”, AMERICAN JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICS, 43, 1921). Dead-and/or-alive, as in Schrödinger's “cat”, is a 3-valued expression: dead, dead/alive, alive. The same can be said for here-and/or-not-here (i.e., there): here, here/there, there. So, it is not surprising that Paulette Février in the late-30s should have chosen a 3-valued logic as the appropriate logic of quantum “objects”. The involved truth tables are similar to those of Reichenbach given in your article. Was Février and Reichenbach's choice appropriate? Of course not. As you point out, Bohr and Heisenberg regarded the intermediate logical-value as meaningless. But Bohr and Heisenberg were as much wrong as they were right in this judgment about the middle term. Schödringer's “cat” is not merely dead-and/or-alive. As with all similes, this simile has its limitations: the state function in Schrödinger's wave equation is not limited to merely 3-simultaneous-states. N-states are permitted: the involved eigenstates and eigenfunctions incorporate fully multivalued variables. The simile aspect of Schrödinger's “cat” that logically precedes the consistency (i.e., truth-value related) predicate, deemed paradoxical, is an identity conundrum of far greater complexity than can be resolved by simply slipping a third term between “A” and “not-A”.
There are an infinite number (what order of infinitude has yet to be determined) of identity states between “no A is not-A” and “A is absolutely not-A” -- and the “cat” can be in any number or all of them simultaneously. (Please note that I have here made a classical logic definition and its antithesis into terms of a logical expression, which, under Tarski's rules of logical semantics, means the logical expression given is not really an expression in logic, but a metalogical expression about logic.) Nonlocality signifies exactly what has just been stated regarding the “cat”: being in all those states-places simultaneously, by virtue of nonselfsameness and nonsimple-identity. There are no probability amplitudes about it! “It” being nonselfsame, nonsimple-identity. Probability amplitudes arise only in regards to the predicate of the simile, deemed paradoxical under the notion of truth-value. Hold to truth-value (as did Bohr and Heisenberg) and one encounters paradox; fixate on paradox and resolution comes with the notion of probability amplitudes. But the simile, in actuality, has no truth-value predicate. Truth-value is a mere subjective attribution, indeed, even a culture-bound subjective attribution. Bohr and Heisenberg held to truth-value because of their psychological identification with attributes of identity characteristic only of the ego-complex. (Similarly, current definitions of q-bits and currently funded approaches to quantum computing are arbitrarily, and mistakenly, based on the up-up/down-down 3-valued truncation of any actual quantum logic. This trucation is undertaken because current approaches to quantum computing are not designed to create a quantum computer but to create a faster binary computer. Lack of intention to create a quantum computer is rooted in subliminal fear of the identity state a quantum computer would represent and force upon the user. Calling a faster binary computer a “quantum computer” is a pedestrian subterfuge of psychological projection: calling the thing by the name of its opposite.)
So, in the mid-70s, I stopped reading into discourse on logic related to truth-value and consistency issues -- which I find irrelevant. My interest is in the logics of identity transparency (and the involved temporal-operators), which will be the foundation of any authentic quantum logic. Such logics cannot be derived from classical logic; classical logic must be arrived at as a special limiting case of these logics of identity transparency (of which classical logic is a mere predicate). The human-experience equivalent of identity transparency is animistic “participation mystique” -- which was the foundation of pre-Confucian and pre-Brahmanic Asian cultures (which foundation persisted into recent times as the rural low-life under-culture of matri-system-influenced peasant and tribal life throughout Asia, i.e., the implicit central theme of Nha Trang's academic investigations). Your Vietnamese origins potentially give you ease of access to the involved psychological states, and, hence, may give you an advantage with regards to thinking in the logics of identity transparency.
Written notation and devices like truth-tables are utterly incapable of representing the identity states considered by infinite-valued logics. I do not believe that these identity states are ineffable and unrepresentable, however. I believe that a holographic synesthetic (e.g., colored-hearing) notational system (which I use the term “Musculpt” to designate) can signify these states without undue reductionism. Creating this “notational medium” is as much an aesthetic and artistic/musical problem as a problem in linguistics, mathematics and physics. Your painterly capabilities give you privileged access to the required visualization and representation processes. Indeed, your paintings rooted in practice of Husserl's reductive phenomenology already strongly display movement in the required direction, and can be regarded as studies for Musculpt notation of the quantum logics of identity transparency. Logical lattices, treated as actual point-set topologies, and manipulated with the Regge calculus, which uses n-dimensional lattice-equivalents to Einstein's field equations, is the route of entry. Such actual point-set topologies, particularly if numbered with Gödel-number plots, could constitute the machine-language basis of a holographic notational system. The logical “lattices” invoked by Birkhoff and von Neumann [see: “The logic of quantum mechanics”, ANNALS OF MATHEMATICS, 37, 1936], however, being referenced to truth-value relations and not identity states, indubitably are not such actual point-set topologies.
I would observe, concerning the Newsweek article (May 7, 200l) on “neurotheology”, that University of Adelaide psychologist, Michael Thalbourne, put his finger on the fundamental issue by stating that dissociation is “the single strongest predictor of such [mystical] experiences”. Robin Robinson, in Jungian Archetypes (page 259), quotes Jung similarly: “… [union with unus mundus] presupposes a dissociated consciousness.” This is because the natural world is not organized on basis of the sort of identity-construct derivable from a single-valued logic. The author of the article, Anne Underwood, however, “misattributes” inner speech as something “you know you generate yourself.” This “knowing” is not only learned in childhood, it is a CTD, a culturally-transmitted disease. Long practice in childhood is needed to “internalize”, i.e., localize, the voice as if self-generated. This internalization is part and parcel of CREATING and sustaining attribution of an ego-sphere -- which animistic peoples do not so attribute. Derek's journals in MOON describe a process by which the “post-central gyrus” was identified as the “orientation area”, by “rasa” (i.e., “inner taste”). The paresthesia flood originates there and sensation of an egg breaking over the skull also begins there. What is not mentioned in the article (other than alluding to staring at candles) is that “eye-movement reprogramming” is an integral part of shutting down the “orientation area”, because residual tension patterns in the extra-ocular muscles keep the “orientation area” innervated. Go to zero-action potential on those small muscles (an enormous accomplishment in the modern world) and not only will the “roof-brain chatter” cease, but the “orientation area” will go quiet. Edmund Jacobson, M.D., demonstrated this over and over with simultaneous electromyographic measurements and reports of autosensory observation in the late-1920s and early-1930s, with many many subjects. But, if one is able to “go negative” sufficiently on the extra-ocular muscles, not only will the inner voice not speak and the “orientation area” go quiet, there will also inevitably be a lot of “autogenic discharge activity” over some period of time, until adequate neuronal electro-chemical unloading has transpired. Highly accomplished meditators are well beyond that abreactive stage, of course.
I do not, however, understand that there is merely a “softening of the boundaries of the SELF.” Nor is it a mere matter of the “brain's sense of SELF” or of “body IMAGE”. As I stated in the “Roof-Brain Chatter” discussion of Shigehisa Kuriyama's book, The Expressiveness of the Body, the real question is whether IBEs (in-the-body experiences) have been the norm for human beings. I do not believe so; such has only recently been the norm outside the West. Body is learned behavior! Moreover, functional localization in a holographic brain is due to enculturation of the ANATOMICAL CONCEPT. Through transmission of enculturation over generation after generation, functional memes become automatized as anatomical structures. This is how, say, an “orientation area” becomes localized in a brain. Anyone who has had the opportunity to observe mamacat disciplining tabbycat should suspect that this process is operative in species other than the human species. It would not be a mis-characterization to state that integral yoga must very much concern deautomatizing functional localization in the brain. This would only initially involve quieting electrical activity of a given area of the brain; subsequently, the brain would re-holographicize itself through autogenic discharges (thus ridding itself of the structuralization imposed through generational patterns of enculturation).
Evidence abounds that body is learned behavior. I see it in clinical medicine every day. People who are not educated in the Western medical model, whose origins are in the “Third World”, frequently do not properly report anatomically-referenced symptoms. The more (Western) educated the person, the more their symptoms reflect anatomy. A poorly educated person, an illiterate laborer for instance, may report tenderness over the left plantar fascia and complain of pain in the left heel radiating to the right side of the face. Such radiation of foot pain to the face has no anatomical basis (though it may have a basis in traditional Chinese medicine). A person reporting such symptoms in a Workers' Compensation case is inevitably said to be “enlarging on severity of symptoms” and is deemed a malingerer. In many cases, this may not be so. And, not exactly parenthetically, as self/not-self distinction is an essential aspect of immune competency (according to the prevailing medical model which is based on application of single-valued logic and resultant notion of identity), pouring millions and millions of dollars into teaching animistic peoples of, say, North Thailand, with high AIDS risk, the germ-theory of disease is almost certainly a factor in how fast they succumb to that disease.
Now the newspapers inform us that for the first time nuclear-family households are less than 25% of households in America. Given that we Americans regard relationship as criminal, as a form of economic corruption, this is not really surprising. I guess we must begin discussing “normotic illness”, not so much in relation to one-mother mothering, but relative to no-mother mothering. This is a theme of Ilse in MOON, you know: capitalism and the family system are mutually exclusive, despite what ever trickles down from the supply side. Mobility of labor, and all that. Is there no solution? Capitalism + family values = m-valued exchange units!
I must disagree with you, sir, in the most forceful of terms. The Vietnam war, with its Cambodian holocaust aftermath, was not about communism; it was about animism. There is no discontinuity in this “Roof-Brain Chatter”, because higher mathematics in the 19th century and physics in the 20th century were both falsified due to fear of animism: animism and nothing but animism. The psychopathology behind the mathematics, behind the physics, behind the politics, behind the warfare is the same psychopathology. This core Magna-Carta, post-Renaissance, rule-ridden psychopathology gave rise to derivative relationship-clinging psychopathologies: pastoral utopian socialism became national communism in a regressed attempt to sustain deeply empathic spiritualistic modes of cognition into a modern world created in assault on animism; German Erdgeist-Einfuhlung-Heimat sensibility became national socialism in a regressed attempt to sustain the spiritistic cultural residue of the pre-Prussian German tribes into a modern world set deeply against animism; “primitive” Shinto animism became industrialized state-Shinto in a regressed attempt to sustain the uji-gami, the yama-no-kami, and kami-oroshi into a modern world intent on destruction of animism. Fear of “each against all” is the cornerstone of social contract theory. Animism is regarded by Anglo-Saxon theorists of constitutional political systems as “each against all”: this is the mistaken foundational belief underlying all justifications of Leviathan, the modern state, massed force supposedly split against itself. The sacred Christian mission to rid the world of animism is, of course, inseparable from this profane political dimension.
In the Vietnamese case, according to Phan Huy Le, a Hanoi University authority on the subject, of ancient days there was no privately owned village land. Through various not so well understood processes, by end of the 11th century there was sufficient quantity of privately owned land to warrant record keeping in official Land Books. By the 13th century, village communal lands had been deemed state land belonging to the emperor who had the right to grant it to mandarins. By the 15th century, those farming village communal lands had to pay for the privilege in corvee labor and/or a stint in the emperor's armies. As settlement moved south, the ratio of communal to privately-owned village lands dropped off precipitously. That there had always been only a relatively small percentage of communal land versus that privately held in southern villages partially explains the relative ease with which the rural south adapted to commodification and monetarization of the subsistence economy. This difference between the north, the middle, and the south also, surely, in part explains the universally acknowledged temperamental differences of people from these three regions. Why? Because this transition from modes of life in ancient days to more recent modes of life significantly set by impositions of an international economy was not only an economic transition: social structures changed, patterns of sexual intercourse changed, sense of self-identity changed, the percepts directly given to awareness by the senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing changed as self-other-object relations were re-defined by forceful imposition from above and by intervention of outside forces -- political, economic, military. A separated unified I-ness, selfsame and enduring, is culturally imposed as learned behavior; a boundaried body, physical and anatomical, is culturally imposed as learned behavior. This was the stage upon which 19th and 20th century events played themselves out.
Wars; holocausts; forced indoctrination; social engineering; political make-overs; puppy-dog political potty-training programs of Occupation authorities; economic forcing; technological uniformization; criminalization of the very existence of relationship; rules, standards, modules applied more forcefully to people than to building materials and architecture: none of it has rid the world of animism. Because animism literally is in the genes! Bacteria probably put it there. Dirty communist Asian-tribal-animist-African bacteria! In this 21st century we develop cloning in an attempt to purge the species of the animistic impulse (for the evolutionist, residue of an ancient ancestor common to bacteria and humans; for those sympathetic to the Christian fundamentalist persuasion, put there more recently by lateral genetic transfer from bacteria to humans, probably from bacteria originally symbiotic with monkeys, maybe even the same African monkey bacteria that carried the virus responsible for AIDS!). This is a scientification of the Nazi breeding program to achieve a mirror image of the purpose for Nazification. Regression is never quite logical, never quite cause-and-effect, never really makes sense; it is, after all, regression. Cloning is the new “Yellow Peril” hysteria -- an unconscious attempt in psychological projection to rid the Western mind of what has infected it: Eastern metaphysics, tribal animism, quantum craziness. Cloning is institutionalized mass hysteria. An attempt to vomit self, a psychological graft-rejection autoimmune reaction. It is well neigh upon us. Count your days! It is unstoppable because it is driven by a mass psychology of projective identification. Hold up a green circle and people see a blue square! It will set the terms of the next holocaust just as the Nazi breeding fantasy set the terms of the WWII holocaust -- only the coming holocaust will be global in geographic extent and applied multi-ethnically, not just to chosen peoples.
Thanks a lot for sending me the piece on Mitchison and Jozsa's counterfactual-computation interpretation of quantum computers (Mitchison, G. and Jozsa, R. “Counterfactual Computation”, Proceedings of the Royal Society, A, 457, pp. 1175-1193, 2001). It is interesting to see how physicists struggle with it. I, of course, would disagree when they say a superposition cannot be seen. It most definitely can be seen, and that is what African-sculpture-inspired Cubism (not to directly mention animism) was all about. It cannot be seen by a mind wed (emotionally, compulsively, conceptually) to 1T2 logic. An authentic quantum computer will not, to my understanding, be “massively parallel”. This is a quantum computer as viewed by a mind wed to 1T2 logic, i.e., many, many simultaneous 1T2 logic calculation streams, and to the EWG interpretation, which was suborned to the needs of Dr. Jason's Cornell research program and the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, the Pentagon. The nature of things clearly is very very different from what they imagine -- once reality of the infinitude of simultaneous INTERFUSED mTm logics starts to sink in, especially with regard to ramifications concerning the nature of identity. The notions of alternative worlds, multiple universes, virtual realities become laughable (and utterly tragic, in view of what they surely will loose upon this planet) cognitive security blankets, by comparison to the actual mTm case. The chaos/complexity-theory view of Nature is similarly a result of struggling unsuccessfully to encompass her in 1T2 logic conceptualization, when she just won't stay so put. I see little reason to believe the human species will turn the 1T2 to mTm corner: more likely, survivors of the First Planetary War (“defensive” ABM-HAARP “projection of power from space”, ya know) will try to clone mTm properties out of biospheric genomes, creating a dead planet in the process. I must point out that counterfactual computation is not, of course, mTm computation in counterspace. Please see the appendix to “Some Preliminary Considerations toward Development of a Mathematical Model of the Autogenic Brain Discharge as Spontaneous Localization in Quantum Measurement”. This appendix, entitled “A Mathematical Model of a Psychosomatic System Presented in the Cross-Notation of G. Spencer Brown's Calculus of Indications”, provides a model of DNA-mediated “relative-state” (i.e., the EWG concept reinterpreted under operator-time and a nonlinear wave-function) activation of the brain. In my mind, I see physicists and biologists hysterically stamping around on a fire-ant hill, fruitlessly flailing, trying to purge their very anatomically-conceptualized monotheistic flesh, their enculturated selfhood, their separated unified I-ness, selfsame and enduring, of a stinging self-alien presence: ant-swarm self-antigen, animism. This is a recipe for mass induction of acquired autoimmue disease if I've ever seen one.
I am seeing more and more indications that the youngest generation of physicists is increasingly writing as if Hugh Everett's interpretation were the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics. I feel this could increase receptivity to our perspectives, because, once having gone part of the distance, it is less of a leap up to Post's logics and operator-time. It does seem, however, that embracing EWG is far less psychologically threatening than it would be to embrace the other two. Of course, it doesn't seem too likely President Bush and Secretary Powell soon will be innovating relative to the global monetary system based on our ideas concerning m-valued exchange units. We'll probably have to wait until next year for that.
Why should people in this society bother having what elsewhere is regarded as relationships when rules determine every aspect of their interactions?
Amidst the prevailing institutionalization there is, overwhelmingly, a negative correlation between intelligence and success, courage and success, competency and success, moral integrity and success, creativity and success.
Please, sir, I am not talking about the history of fully conscious thoughts in minds of individual physicists and mathematicians over the past 150 years. In the young individual there is a fleeting awareness, an electrical shock which slams into the soles of the feet, an inner inaudible gasp when implications of the truth of the matter at issue are, for an instant, held fully conscious in the individual mind. But the psychological threat of this truth is so great, the fear so great, this instant of comprehension is immediately suppressed and never again allowed to surface in the conscious mind of the individual involved. Not only are such events contributory factors in pathogenesis of degenerative disease, when this happens to virtually every professional in the involved fields as part of his higher enculturation, as an initiation rite in passage through the induction funnel leading to professional competency, an event gradient is congealed in the collective unconscious. This, sir, what I have just described, is the most surface level of the archetypal processes governing collective violence of the 20th and 21st centuries. There is no such thing as an innocent civilian.
At the present juncture in the institutional history of this planet it is very easy to regard any authentic contribution to human knowledge as an evil act.
Where rules reign and principle prevails the person is sacrificed woefully.
I am sorry to inform you, sir, that I do not make a display of everything I do. I have definitely made maximal efforts over a considerable period of time to place these ideas concerning m-valued monetary exchange units in the hands of individuals with the resources required to develop and apply them. Unfortunately, given the presiding institutionalization, such individuals are not what one would hope, nor do they have much familiarity with details of the intellectual history of the human species. Whatever the verbiage, the pony show, the tax deductible contributions, whatever the publicized philanthropic agenda, the human interest is not an interest or in the interests of these lame ideologues. There will be no happy developments in this area of human affairs.
A very interesting juxtaposition of quotations you have made: Satprem and Mae-Wan Ho. Satprem clearly describes the “satin flow essence which I breathe” (see, for instance, MOON, Vol. II, p. 671), the, as he says, “dense air” which is “nourishing”. This is the Greek “ambrosia”, the “food of the gods”, and likely also the Greek “ichor”, the ethereal fluid taking the place of blood in veins of the gods. “Ambrosia” and “ichor” are terms from pre-Hellenistic Greece, from the period -- as Shigehisa Kuriyama has recently so convincingly argued (see THE EXPRESSIVENESS OF THE BODY and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine) -- before anatomical dissection, before in-the-body habitation-identification was the norm of human experience, before energy-flow veins were regarded as blood vessels or nerve fibers, before personal identity was vested in voluntary musculature and revered in Greek and Roman sculpture. I invite you to consider medical definition of the word “syzygy”: the conjunction and fusion of organs without loss of identity (DORLAND'S MEDICAL DICTIONARY). Progressive loss of normative access to ambrosia and ichor arose with advent of verbal language. The non-syzygiological personal ego/I-ness identity investiture in musculature is important relative to your juxtaposition of quotations, because Mae-Wan Ho of Chinese origins, a highly trained scientist, in THE RAINBOW AND THE WORM, prefaces her discussions of quantum biochemistry
-- from which the ideas in her quotation derive -- with an account of the amazing thermodynamic and biochemical complexity involved in an athlete's use of voluntary muscles, thus illustrating how muscle-identification has been carried even into interpretation of quantum principles (giving rise, for instance, to the notion that the wave-function simply MUST collapse). This is doubly important in the present context because experience of what Satprem describes is dependent upon dissociating from identification with the voluntary muscle system. By making these statements, I in no way impugn the work of Mae-Wan Ho, who has defined the cutting edge of scientific thought in several areas. I simply point out the prevailing scientific climate and how it acts upon thought even of the most creative researchers. And, of course, creative acts in the present institutional environment inevitably lead to tactical modulations. To refrain from such tactical modulation is a very poor strategy, indeed.
In the inset to Volume I, if memory serves, of the raw-silk-bound edition of Aurobindo’s COLLECTED WORKS (and also in the folio edition of THE LIFE DIVINE), there is a photo of Aurobindo as an old man sitting in his chair. In late 1968, I had a discussion of this photo with the philosopher, Jack Waldron, the person who brought Aurobino’s writings to my attention (and who had played an important role in organizing Mayer Baba’s trip to America in the late-50s). Jack found the photo haunting, but could not give a good explanation of why. Every time after that discussion I picked up THE LIFE DIVINE, I found myself studying the photo. One of the things I was doing during this period was two hours per day of figure drawing from the nude. Observing myself in process of executing contour drawings, I discovered many things about tension patterns in the tiny extra-ocular muscles and their connection with breathing (see Derek’s Journals, MOON, Vol. I, pp. 702-3). I was then practicing Edmund Jacobson’s progressive relaxation technique one hour each evening, but I had not taken the time to find a copy of Jacobson’s original book on the subject. For some reason, at this point I went to the National Library of Medicine and found a copy of the original 1929 edition of PROGRESSIVE RELAXATION. There was a photograph in this book of Edmund Jacobson demonstrating differential relaxation. Jacobson was middle-aged in 1929. Seeing this photo of him, I immediately understood what was to Jack Waldron so haunting about the picture of Aurobindo as an old man. The flesh on Aurobindo’s face was hanging completely loose over the facial bones, to a degree far more than is normally the case simply due to old age. The flesh of Jacobson’s face, in the 1929 photograph, was the same: so free of normal tension as to appear like it could simply drip off the bones. The text explained that the electromyograph sits just barely above zero action-potential with this degree of relaxation. Discovering the common feature in these two photographs led inexorably to experience of the “satin flow” fluid in the air: shutting down the post-central gyrus is a necessary pre-requisite.
Aurobindo, in his LETTERS ON YOGA, repeatedly states that one must STOP THOUGHT if one wants to experience what it is he is talking about. The “roof-brain chatter” must simply just cease. In one letter, he becomes irritated with a chela and tells the person just to do whatever is required to have their first experience of Nirvana, and then it will be possible to talk about doing Integral Yoga. Integral Yoga, he continued, starts after the first experience of Nirvana, which requires cessation of thought. In his youth, Edmund Jacobson, M.D., was a student of William James. Later, he became the leading American practitioner of Titchner’s approach to the study of neuropsychology, which put him full into turn-of-the-century debates in academic philosophy and psychology concerning whether or not contentless awareness was possible. Contentless awareness was the very thing Aurobindo advocated by telling his chelas to cease the roof-brain chatter. By 1911, Jacobson was publishing ground-breaking research on autosensory observation, the pre-requisite to his profound later contributions to study of the electrophysiology of consciousness. He was a co-inventor of the EEG. During the 1930s, he published a flood of papers in American physiology and psychology journals describing research which demonstrated that “residual tension” patterns in the extra-ocular muscles around the eyes and the laryngeal muscles of the throat are correlated on a one-to-one basis with mental associations. Zero action-potential in these muscle groups, therefore, must be associated with contentless awareness (and is also a pre-requisite for shutting down the orientation area in the brain). Jacobson did not extrapolate in these research papers concerning contentless awareness, which was anathema to the American experimental and behavioral psychologists editing the journals, but anyone familiar with the debates surrounding Titchnerian perspectives could not have escaped drawing the obvious conclusion. As far as I have been able to determine, this body of experimental research has been completely ignored. It, however, along with some aspects of autogenic discharges, provides the rhyme and reason of the success “eye movement reprogramming” has had in treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder -- though its practitioners give little evidence of familiarity with either of these areas of relevant thought and research. (There are many reflections on the involved issues scattered throughout MOON, arrived at in the ten years following return from the Vietnam war in 1968 by a person trained as a Special Forces medic, which decade was long before eye movement reprogramming existed as a therapeutic method in treatment of PTSD
-- given in exactly the manner in which they arose -- which, six years ago, I pulled together as a piece and submitted to a psychology journal. I was informed that the piece did not subscribe to the style guidelines of the American Psychological Association, and, therefore, could not be published. I wrote back and told them I was familiar with those guidelines, as I had written papers on Autogenic Therapy following them. I also said I would not rewrite the present piece because it was written in the style most appropriate to convey the subject matter, and that if their guidelines were more important than understanding eye movement reprogramming it was no surprise the articles they had published on the subject were so ill-informed. That is where it stands, because, obviously, as is a commonplace in this society, their rules take precedence over their understanding.) Given that everyday life in the modern world is little more than an acute stress disorder, the sorts of processes Satprem discusses must in large measure be regarded as post-traumatic treatment of acute and chronic stress. It is not surprising that Satprem, a survivor of the World War Two death camps, should have found his way to the heart of such a post-traumatic treatment.
By whatever means, relax the extra-ocular and laryngeal muscles to zero action-potential and the roof-brain chatter will cease. What Jacobson called “residual tension” is itself very near zero action-potential. An untrained person living in the modern world never relaxes to the degree of residual tension which carries mental associations, let alone to zero action-potential. A relaxation technique is necessary to accomplish this, though not sufficient -- be it Jacobson’s progressive relaxation, Autogenic Training, some form of Hatha yoga, meditation, or whatever. The higher the affect-charge (emotion) associated with a given pattern of mental associations, the more habituated will be the associated residual tension patterns in the extra-ocular and laryngeal muscles, and the more difficulty will there be in deautomatizing the involved residual tension patterns in process of progressive relaxation: painful cramping, burning of the eyes, and so on will be encountered at thresholds of relaxation. Reducing the affect-charge driving mental associations is, therefore, a necessary preliminary psychological cleansing activity, if relaxation to zero action-potential is to be successful. Projective identification, on all of its various levels, is the foremost amplifier of affect-charge. Drawing from the nude is a practice extremely well adapted to working through the mechanisms involved in projective identification, particularly on the man-woman and subject-(physical)object perception levels (see Studies for Liana, MOON, Vol. I, pp. 374-75). But, if, by whatever means, as Aurobindo said in irritation to his chela, one gets to zero action-potential in the two critical muscle groups, then things like Satprem’s “nourishing dense air” begin to happen.
With attainment of zero action-potential in the extra-ocular and laryngeal muscles, identification with voluntary muscles is, obviously, broken. Ones consciousness, ones mental associations, ones identity, quite literally, is no longer vested in ones muscles. If these two muscle groups -- coupling in reciprocal activation, mental associations one with the next by energetically linking in a self-reinforcing feedback loop through long-range phase-correlation and bleed-over of habituated cortical firing patterns accompanying the repetitious themes of mental association, the “functionally localized” area of motor cortex “controlling” the two muscle groups “controlling” the cortical “controller” -- are differentially relaxed, while other voluntary muscle groups retain residual tension, it is possible to maintain states of contentless awareness for considerable periods of time without lapsing into a vegetative state. Residual tension patterns of voluntary muscles are clearly not voluntary, because one cannot simply decide to not have residual tension. Residual tension patterns are not removed by changes in phasic activation of the brain, but by progressive reduction of the baseline of tonic activation. Residual tension patterns correlating with mental associations may, indeed, be minute fluctuations in the tonic baseline, rather than low-amplitude phasic fluctuations. One who has become adept at differential relaxation has learned to reduce the tonic baseline of the involved areas of motor cortex and muscle group while leaving that of others unmodified.
Thank you very much for drawing my attention to the work of the physicist, E. J. Post, who is not the deceased logician Emil Post, given at:
I have skimmed the selections connected to by the links and have closely read into the articles at various points. Yes, indeed, there clearly are interesting similarities to the material displayed on our website and written into our novel, THE MOON OF HOA BINH. I will make a few comments.
An aspect of all this is that once one questions the Copenhagen interpretation, any alternative ideas one might come up with can be simultaneously regarded as “classicizing” and “fantasizing”. Dr. Post clearly regards his orientation as a re-capturing of classical origins, whereas most working physicists, I am sure, would regard my ideas as “fantasizing”. Nonetheless, I can see some of my ideas as hiding behind those of Dr. Post. This is not too surprising because the ideas about applicability of Emil Post's mTm logics to interpretation of Schrödinger's wave equation arose in study of what is until this day widely considered a problem of purely classical physics: the genesis of tornadoes in the Earth's atmosphere.
E. J. Post's account of the Hall effect is very close to our account of phase transitions leading to tornado genesis. This goes down to details when you consider our derivation of the atmospheric analogue to Maxwell's equations and the role this plays in the computer model's initialization and generation of forecast products, which role is focused almost exclusively on phase and orientation of ensembles of harmonic oscillators (in this case, air parcels, not photons) in a turbulent system. Our notion of nested “limited spacetime domains” of the atmosphere speaks directly to his discussion of the “single system” issue relative to the Copenhagen interpretation. An energy/angular-momentum cascade and reverse-cascade (involving vertically-propagating acoustically-modified gravity wave modes or infrasound) between limited spacetime domains of the atmospheric subsystem-system-supersystem composite is modeled as carrying out critical phase transitions between “plateau” and “normal” states in just the way Post discusses. Planck's derivation of his radiation law is reformulated as scaled to atmospheric dimensions and applied to air parcels in order to give a full account of the cascade and reverse-cascade. One way to characterize this account of tornado genesis is to say that it represents the opposite of what Post proposes. Instead of re-capturing the classical origins of quantum processes, as his approach describes, our model of tornado genesis captures the quantum properties of a classical process. It seems to us that, at this point, the latter may be much easier to study in detail and to pursue implications then are elementary particle processes.
In working over the years with the details and problems of the cascade computer model of tornado genesis we found ourselves gravitating toward an understanding which seemed to demand application of Emil Post's m-valued logics.
The “Copenhagen one system thesis” is analogous to treating the atmosphere as not decomposable into “limited spacetime domains” understood as subsystem-system-supersystem composite (in the full David Bohm sense). But once the one-system asssumption is overcome, then oscillation between plateau and normal states, mediated by zero-point energy disorder is unmistakable. Emil Post's m-valued logics come into consideration when one looks closely at QED infinities of vacuum; the notion of charge creation; asks how, precisely, “quantum uncertainty becomes a basic trademark of phase and orientation disordered ensembles”; and asks whether high temperature superconductivity has anything to do with the order/disorder attribute of zero-point energy (it is our feeling that this distinction has a great deal to do with orders of mTm logics). While thinking about such issues, we came to embrace “operator-time”, “skew-perpendicularity”, and application of Emil Post's mTm logics to interpretation of Schrödinger's wave equation.
Please. Indeed, sir, please, please, please! I am not in the least confused as to what I intend to say. “Post Vietnam Syndrome” predated the Vietnam War -- and was one of its causes. Complaints and findings of the syndrome were mischaracterized; etiology, incorrectly identified; course, misconstrued; treatment, mishandled. And this syndrome has persisted into the post-Reagan era, evermore setting terms of American foreign policy.
Consider, for instance, that that imposed initial scene in the film, SAVIOR, makes a statement about the origins (initial equals origins) of war in general, not only about the raison d'être of an individual participant's ruthlessness and impetus to commit atrocities. One crime committed by individuals begets another crime committed by individuals seeking revenge: a Biblical account of the origins of war. There is a resonance between this theory of the origins of warfare and the frequent use of the telephoto lens: the removed psychological isolation of the sniper, requiring a technological aid to get up close. Snipers, by the nature of their work, perform alone. The job attracts a certain personality type. Choice by the writer or film maker of the sniper as representing the characteristic quality of war is the expression of a theory of war. War is isolation; it is opposed by love. The two are absolute opposites. The ways of the Old Testament (revenge the murder committed by the brother) can be overcome only by appearance of the Savior, in the guise of a child (the prostitute, Mary Magdalene, receiving her just deserts).
Did you, sir, ever know a real live master sniper? Well enough to get into his head, into his experience? I do not think so. Not if you accept the above as a true-to-life portrait. The supposed psychological isolation is simply not there. Quite the contrary, there is animistic participation mystique: with the victim, as well as the somewhat removed comrade. There is fusion of sense modalities with those of the others in the psychosocial ambience, friend and foe alike. There is empathic fish-eye fusion with the collapsing-in physical surround, not telephoto-compensated remove in the immediate psychological and perceptual givens -- even if spending the day looking through a scope. Absent this fused state, the sniper never becomes that good; he is killed. Sure, some participants in war are taken there by personal tragedy and thirst for revenge -- but their numbers are few. Collective psychological factors play the dominant inductive role. The glaze-eyed post-traumatic schizoid-separation (like a “Plexiglas wall”) sucks inexorably into the transparent-collective so characteristic of the frenzy of battle. The actual causes of war lie overwhelmingly with such factors -- factors requiring appropriate aesthetic forms, if they are to be communicated, understood, and thereby transcended. Creative prefiguration in cinema requires formal innovation, no less than in other arts. Your aesthetic lack of interest in formal innovation undermines your insight into the real, and hence your ability to make a significant impact on human affairs.
Access to identity transparency, access to participation mystique, access to that near-divine fusion of the sense modalities, and to fusion of the fused senses with the sense modalities of the “other” is what carries the master sniper repeatedly back to the battlefield. Is not this fused state what is sought in love? Why is the master sniper unable to apprehend in such a manner absent the combat circumstance? What are the norms of everyday life preventing synaesthetic fusion of the senses -- thus denying to the average person what the master sniper finds in combat? Are not the conventions of linear organization of experience -- reinforced by New Realism, by old Realism -- part of the conditioning apparatus, part of the social structure of attention, that is, which denies to the average person access to intense fusion of the sense modalities, this denial driving impulse to war where such fusion may be experienced by master snipers? The very linear organization of SAVIOR reinforces the social structure of attention responsible for the origins of war. Prevailing formal features of the social structure of attention must progressively change if the psychological need for war is to be overcome. Cinema is presently the most powerful medium for facilitating such change -- but you are missing your opportunity to have such an impact.
I have all along been saying what I intend to say. The disease of the master sniper giving him a psychological need for return to the battlefield -- be that battlefield Granada, Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, the Balkans, Serbia, Colombia -- is misdiagnosed “Post-Vietnam Syndrome”, which was a contributing factor to onset of the Vietnam War. Because of the imposed social structure of attention, which Hollywood cinematic linear realism has a small but potent responsibility for, the master sniper in everyday life must take himself to be absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct (to employ the term used by Hubert Benoit) -- which is to say that the imposed social structure of attention in turn imposes a certain structure of identity. The master sniper, in everyday life, has no real choice in this matter; he must posit this claim -- or altogether disengage from the social structure. On the path of war, however, he has via direct experience learned of circumstances wherein he can transcend the dictates of this imposed claim. Paradoxically, he can attain fleeting fusion -- a fusion that is not enduring, that must repeatedly be renewed -- by killing that with which he ostensibly becomes fused. That which he kills is the agent of existential denial, which is simultaneously the object of potential fusion. (For further elaboration, see abstract to “VR, vitamin K, ETs, and the pathogenesis of end-stage AMD syndrome”, in the abstracts to The Saigon Papers.) In act of killing the threat, the master sniper achieves momentary fusion through projective identification. By such means does the master sniper escape the normotic illness induced by the imposed social structure of attention. The moments of escape are moments of entry into infantile, regressed animism -- not pure, unsullied, mature, healthy animism. But such is the allure of war.
This, however, is not only an illness of individuals and groups of individuals; it is also a collective illness with collective signs and symptoms, collective pathofunctional potency. A world view construct carried by a society can come under severe existential threat by sustaining repeated existential denials related to fundamental propositions of the construct. A sequence of mathematical and scientific discoveries, for instance, can bring the fundamental propositions into serious question. When this happens, existential anxiety becomes the persistent state of the population corpus constituting the society carrying the threatened world view construct. The psychological débaissement and paralysis of the will, mistakenly identified as the essence of “Post Vietnam Syndrome”, was induced by fundamental propositions of a belief system being shattered by experience. But this shattering was just one special case of a much longer running experience of belief-system shattering going back into the mid-19th century, a shattering of beliefs about the nature of reality the American world view construct in the post-WWI era increasingly came to exemplify to the world: the 17th and 18th centuries Cartesian-Newtonian synthesis upon which the institutional base of constitutional democracy and capitalism is based. With each discovery in mathematics, in physics, in chemistry that has undermined the Cartesian-Newtonian construct, the metaphysical shores supporting the ship of state have required more elaborate sophistry to keep them pegged in place. Each such discovery is an existential denial that must be countered -- otherwise, the prevailing structure of social identity cannot be maintained. It is very difficult to successfully counter a veritable avalanche of discoveries; it is almost impossible to convince oneself that one has authentically countered the reality to which they refer: the cognitive dissonance is just too jarring, too stark, too much full of glaring contradiction. Nonetheless, attempts have been made. But as these attempts have become ever more difficult, ever more clearly failed, it has become more and more necessary to impose on the imagined foe, the potential existential threat, the oh-so-convenient likely source of the existential denials. Impose on the “other” the very view one knows has failed, but denies has failed: this becomes the governing impulse of governed and governor alike. Indeed, the more thorough the failure, the more absolute the triumph proclaimed to all! In course of this collective illness, the society itself becomes the master sniper.
I cannot deny that using the symbolic formalism of finite set theory (which is essentially what the three chosen formalistic examples from Paul Thagard and Cameron Shelly's account of “visual abduction” illustrate) is likely to produce valuable insights into what I have been calling Musculpt (for me, often including a musical-tone dimension), but I cannot help thinking that such an approach, if it is the primary approach, will in essential respects become self-defeating. Perhaps it is a necessary first step -- until someone makes the requisite technology of Musculpt available to a group studying visual abduction.
The most economical way for me to explain why I hold this opinion is to draw to your attention two dream images I once had which are reproduced in MOON. These are in the “Dream Scene” (p. 770 and p. 774, Vol. I) which strings together in a time-lapse photograph accounts of my most significant dreams recorded during the 1970s. Both of these images -- which are about as concrete as my “visual abduction” (a new term for me) ever gets -- came in the months prior to my realizing that the Regge calculus (I am by no means adept at this formalism), which uniquely represents a given spacetime curvature configuration with a given n-dimensional lattice, is essential to: (1) making more rigorous Maria Louise von Franz's attempts to fuse Jungian archetypes with modern physics; (2) explaining the relationship of the synoptic architectonics of the cerebral cortex -- based on hexagonal and equilateral triangular networks, as given by Szentagothai and Eccles -- to instantaneous point-sets of neuronal firing patterns and curvature configurations of global neural holograms; (3) explaining how the inner images, sounds, and colors, which I experience as aids to abstract thought, carry meaning.
The first dream-image was composed of two sets of square lattices with an oval drawn over them and two small circles placed to make the whole appear similar to a face. The second dream-image was composed of opposed fish bowls stacked in an hourglass shape, each bowl containing a given variety of fish: one variety, white; the other, black. The two dream images came a couple of months apart, but were immediately connected in my awareness. At the time, I was explicitly looking for some sort of “lattice logic” to relate J. G. Bennett's “pencils of skew-parallels” to Emil Post's “orders of m-valued propositions”. Soon after these two dream images came, I ran across references to the Regge calculus.
The first image, I recognized as a reference to the neo-Platonic effort to square the circle with compass and straight edge. The message was that this Pythagorean practice of the Middle Ages was an alchemical struggle with the problem of relating the continuous to the discrete, the dynamic to the static, the curved non-linear to the rectilinear linear. The initial dream image prefigured the second. The second image, being in the shape of an hourglass, was clearly about the role of time. During the period in which the dream came, I was intensely working on the concept of operator-time. The inverted bowls are something like the opposed Pascal triangles of the ontological involution-evolution of Indic, esoteric, and alchemical thought, suggesting that this was the proper context for investigations of the function of operator-time. But what of the meaning of the fish? The first dream image suggested the answer. Compass and straight edge; curved and rectilinear. Fish? Nets. INDRA'S NET! Indra's net is generated recursively from the inverted triangles of the involution-evolution (which, when one is inverted and superposed, form Solomon's Seal). And, given the color of the fish contained within this Seal, suggested to me was mini whiteholes and blackholes as topological expressions of operator-time. But more directly related to the OPERATIONS performed with a compass and straight edge is PETER'S NET! Christ walking on the water (the unconscious) of Galilee and His parable of the fishes from deep in the sea. Gematria! That parable, in the original Greek, I knew from studies years earlier, was regarded by neo-Platonist adepts to be a set of instructions for operations performed with compass and straight edge. Two intersecting arcs form the fish image of early Christianity: the Vesica Piscis. This is also the Vessel of Christ, the “boat” Peter and the other Disciples sailed on the Sea of Galilee, before being asked to become fishers of men. The instructions contained in the parable, via gematria, describe a series of arc intersections identifying points to be connected by straight edge to form an equilateral triangular net beside the “boat”, then to draw the “fish” into the net, and finally, to move by arc-translation the fish-filled net into the boat, the Body of Christ. The whole image -- the fish-filled net in the boat, or the Holy Tetractys inscribed within the Vesica Piscis -- represents a model of the cosmos. So, I understood the two associated dream images, when their meanings were conjoined, as providing instruction on the ontological “steps” by which operator-time generates a cosmos. It was soon after reaching this interpretation that I ran across the references to the Regge calculus and immediately recognized its importance to rigorously elaborating the topological operations of the temporal curl on the multivalued reference space, which generate the multi-sheeted laminate (“net”) known as ponderable spacetime. It goes without saying, that this is very far from current consensus physics applications of the Regge calculus.
From these sorts of experiences with visual abduction, I have drawn some tentative conclusions. Meaning is in the whole image (and associated sound gestalt, if present) and cannot be built-up from analyzed-down separate parts. “Graph grammars” (a new term for me), which in the exposition by Paul Thagard and Cameron Shelley are related to structural properties, cannot be “graph semantics“, any more than the grammar of a spoken language is its semantics. Generative linguists attempted to use recursive grammatical operations to generate semantics. This was unsuccessful because, in actuality, semantics decomposes into grammar; grammar does not recursively generate semantics. This is the case because MATHEMATICAL METAPHORS, rather than structural-property grammars, are the repositories of meaning. In spite of criticizing contemporary AI theories of mind based on analogy with the binary-logic computer, Roger Penrose, in The Emperor's New Mind, still ties his star to recursive processes and a notion of calculability based on Church's Hypothesis (“Calculable if and only if recursive”). This may be the case for lower order thought (a function of what Gurdjieff called “lower parts of centers”), but it is very unlikely to be the case for any form of creative thought. In my personal experience, the intensity of the “shock” and the elaboration of the “photism” that comes with a new idea is the greater the greater the generality of the idea that comes. The greater the generality, the more mathematical metaphor is involved in capturing meaning. The more specific the application, the more concrete the image (and the more figurative the tonal gestalt, if present). Neither of these need be images which carry meanings that are recursively generative. Another reason to entertain limited hopes for use of the formalism of finite set theory to attain much insight into visual abduction is that, if these images are direct awareness of neural holograms, as I believe they are, then one would expect the involved “graph semantics” to exhibit the properties of holograms, properties like part-whole identity transparency, which only Cantorian transfinite set theory permits. Synaesthesia is also involved (which is why I resonate strongly with Thagard and Shelley's notion of an “olfactory logic”, indeed, logics for each sense modality): sounds and colors in association with shapes represent meanings. It would appear that with elaborate synaesthetic constellation, other cross-modal propriocepts surely must carry abductive meaning and become consciously available.
Thank you for your observations regarding the “Tank Proposal” which is posted on the MOON website in the Kyoto Papers. “Non-salt” relative to a flotation medium was not used in the technical sense, but rather to mean free of the abrasive quality of sodium chloride or magnesium sulfate. Inquiries were made of a number of people in seeking ideas as to how such a flotation medium might be developed. No ideas elaborate enough to pursue were forthcoming. Intuitively, I thought of colloidal substances in relation to the problem, because not only was the idea to overcome the abrasiveness of the flotation medium, but to have a flotation medium which could simultaneously be used as a through-the-skin detox substance and/or nutrient-uptake enhancer. Such a medium with detox/uptake properties would have to be capable of undergoing osmosis-type filtration and recirculation to be of practical use (particularly in a commercial spa setting) -- which is problematic for high salt concentrations.
Then I ran across the work of chemist, Gilbert Ling, ((see: http://www.gilbertling.org/ )) on the nature of cell water or protoplasm, which he characterizes as similar to gelatin or agar-agar (this is contrary to the consensus view in cell biology). His “Polarized Multilayer Theory of Cell Water” -- water with a dynamic structure different from normal water, i.e., structured-water with some of the properties of ice while remaining liquid at physiological temperatures -- seems to me to suggest a possible avenue of research and development for a non-abrasive colloidal flotation medium with the electrolytic detox/uptake properties sought. Research on structured-water began in the 1950s with two-time Nobel Prize winner (vitamin C and muscle contraction) Albert Szent-Györgyi, and appears to involve some pretty sophisticated quantum chemistry. Possible detox uses of ozone relative to the flotation tank are also at issue in development of a colloidal flotation medium. Research on such a medium would also be relevant to development of liquid quantum computers.
Yes, I am aware that my “Tank Proposal” came five years before the new generation of computerized and video-equipped flotation tanks. Actually, I first sought money for application of many of the ideas incorporated into the “Tank Proposal” in the mid- to late-1970s. This came after discussions with Joseph Bridger, who, to my knowledge, was the first person to practice Autogenic Training meditative exercises in a flotation tank. In 1981, at the 6th Congress of the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine in Montreal, he presented a paper summarizing his discoveries as a result of this practice. I talked to many, many people between the 1970s and the present about financing a research and development effort. The ideas in the “Tank Proposal“ have consistently been treated by such people as a harebrained scheme. My long-term objective was development of the hardware and software required for Musculpt. I felt that developing a multimedia flotation tank would be a cost-effective entry into such a development effort, as there would be many generations of such a tank leading to full-blown Musculpt -- each generation being commercially exploitable. Nonetheless, the whole idea has been considered ridiculous -- for going on 25 years now.
It was not my idea to watch Belson's films and listen to Bach in the tank. I have nothing against this, as I am not a sensory isolation purist. But this was not my idea. I wanted to get video into the tank as a visual read-out of biofeedback modalities, and underwater stereophonic sound into the tank as an audio readout of biofeedback modalities. ((I note that recently a paper has been published by the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Hokuriku, Japan, entitled “A Study of Polysomnographic Observations and Subjective Experiences under Sensory Deprivation”, co-authored by Kazuki Iwata, Mitsuaki Yamamoto, Mitsuyuki Nakao, and Masayuki Kimura, which describes use of biofeedback modalities in the flotation tank. This means that many of the technical problems associated with use of the EEG and EMG in the tank have been solved. See: http://www.yamamoto.ecei.tohoku.ac.jp/~iwata/publication/pcn98.html which displays an English language version of the paper.)) Once this was practically accomplished, according to my harebrained scheme, attempts would be made to develop a holographic biofeedback display in a dome in place of the CRT screen. Thence onto development of the hardware and software for full-blown Musculpt.
There were many aspects to this group of flotation tank ideas. It was clear to me that Musculpt was needed to fully represent multivalued variables (such as those seen in the simultaneous solutions to the sets of nonlinear differential equations in the multiscale, nested-grid, cascade computer model of tornado genesis, or in any mathematical model based upon a non-probabilistic interpretation of Schrödinger's wave equation). I felt that applications of Post's m-valued logics, understood in relation to identity transparency, not truth-value, could not be elaborate without Musculpt as an aid to thought and as mathematical notation. It was my belief that understanding of a “universal semantics” (“universal” in the sense of Chomsky's “universal grammar”) would not be possible in absence of Musculpt. I soon realized that Musculpt was required for full utilization of m-logically-valued monetary exchange units, and that Musculpt display systems would be used to publicly post the relations between such currencies. I knew that m-valued logics could not be applied to urban and regional planning methodologies without Musculpt as a medium for the planner to work with. And if a person were to learn to think comfortably in m-valued logics, he or she would have to become accustomed to different states of consciousness than those associated with habituation to traditional 2-valued logic. The flotation tank described in the “Tank Proposal“ seemed to me the perfect environment to facilitate such a cognitive transition.
Yes, the article in The Economist about the Oxford computer simulation model of stock market behavior does illustrate some of my points (“Predicting the Unpredictable: Some Physicists Think They Can See Into the Future of Markets”, 05/31/01). According to their analysis, the market remains stable as long as the ensemble of market actors engages in what sums to random behavior. When these actors start acting in concert, for whatever reason, onset of market instability follows soon thereafter. This is essentially the same conclusion reached in complexity theory, where the models demonstrate that as the number of correlation factors increase there is greater likelihood of chaotic behavior. Self-organized criticality is established, according to this account, only when the number of correlation factors is small. So, in the Oxford market forecast computer model, we have another instance of physicists and mathematicians advocating the positive values of randomness, the positive values of an absence of relationship, the destructiveness of cooperative activities, the destructiveness of consensus, the destructiveness of coherent collective behavior. This is, of course, contrary to the quantum physics account of critical collective and cooperative behaviors in natural systems, wherein high levels of correlation are characteristic of great efficiency in self-organization (i.e., correlation lengths go to infinity, such that long-range phase correlation can even tunnel through barriers). It is my argument that complexity theory sees randomness as responsible for self-organized criticality because it views what actually are m-logically-valued systems through the lens of only a 2-valued logic (while physical origins of basins of attraction remain shrouded in a metaphysical haze). Using such a distorting logic-lens, complexity theorists explicitly define the elements in their ensembles as absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct and selfsame, when, in fact, this is not the actual case in any natural system. Similarly, the Oxford market forecasters treat the market as equivalent to a natural system, when, in fact, the low level of self-organizational competency of the market -- compared to actual natural systems -- is due to the fact that the economic exchange unit determining many aspects of market behavior has been created as logically
2-valued. The behaviors discovered in the market were put there by the logical framework through which the market was established. Complexity theory and the Oxford market simulation both illustrate that the desired conclusions determine model parameters and data selection algorithms. One reason the physicists, mathematicians, and complexity theorists are not looking for ways to improve self-organizational competency of the market is that the ways in which this can be done violate their psychological, metaphysical, political, and sociological commitments. That a patent application was submitted relative to the Oxford computer model suggests another reason: low levels of market self-organizational competency are a prerequisite for maintaining extreme disparities of income and wealth.
According to a front-page article in the LA Times (06/12/01), being normal has become the in-thing on campus these days. This is regarded as a "product of social norms marketing". Somewhere in the last nine months of "Roof-Brain Chatter", I have posited the thesis that mass induction of normotic illness is a collective psychological pre-requisite for holocaust.
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