Friday, May 30, 2025

Logical notes

In this post we place brief sketches of some ideas to be developed.  The criticism of the concept of 'possible world'. Our knowledge of the 'world' is approximative, incomplete, local and relative.  Thus it makes little sense to speak of an 'alternative world' or of a certainty that such is even 'possible'.  Rather there are local restricted domains and aspects of the world, coming from different spatio-temporal regions of the actual world, which we loosen and group together and inappropriately call 'worlds'.  For instance possible gardens are based on the collection of actual (present or historical) gardens in the actual world (which depend, in this case, on human agency and choice), and these may or not contain roses. It is absurd to speak of an alternative global world in which the red roses in this garden are white.  Possible worlds are an undue reification of aspects of imagination and consciousness. Criticism of statistical and probabilistic concepts: cannot judgments involving such concepts all be transformed into judgments without them, based on spatial-temporal events ? Is not the statistical and probabilistic inherently eliminable and reducible to mere arithmetic judgments regarding a collection of evidence from a set of spatio-temporal regions  ? And are not such concepts based on partial, artificial, approximative abstractions which totally ignore the underlying epistemically open-ended structure of reality ?  One cannot enter into a relation to something without entering into a relation with the relation and so forth. Logic is an a posteriori useful descriptive tool, not a foundation. There is a large amount of evidence that consciousness can subsist independently from the physical brain and that consciousness is not generated from the brain nor in particular are different psychological faculties determined by specialized functional regions of the brain. A philosophy which ignores this evidence is not philosophy but propaganda. Consciousness does not supervene on the brain or physical matter.  

If linguistic utterances were a soup then Wittgenstein would hold that the meaning of 'soup' is reduced to the movements of the spoon (such movements could indeed serve as a non-verbal sign indicating 'soup').  One cannot abstract any symbol from meaning, nor use from mention (which is a misuse of the term 'mention' anyhow).  When attempting to grasp an empty purely syntactic meaning-free entity one is actually trying to grasp an ideal type and structure with an unlimited number of possible perceptual variants and instances, an extension which may indeed by vague (for instance in the case of poor sight when we are not sure of a certain letter). Thus 'the letter 'b'' is an abstract concept with an extension and hence with a meaning.  Frege and Husserl pointed out again and again that the meaning and reference  of terms or propositions certainly cannot be exhausted by the accompanying 'mental images' which need not coincide for different people and cannot provide thus a foundation for a so-called objectivity of meaning. True. Yet digging deeper  and applying the right introspective-descriptive method we may discover that intuitive mental content of a different order can be disclosed to consciousness which does indeed furnish a ground for inter-subjective, objective agreement. Yet this need not be naively taken to be some kind of identical extra-mental ghostly entity, and even less some kind of external sociological structure and dynamics,  rather it is a directly accessible aspect of consciousness which while sharing the same type for the same meaning across different minds also allows room for  individual variation. For instance if the common mental image is like the adornments that may adorn a statue (and there may be none at all), the statue representing a god, say for instance Athena, can be different one for different minds and yet be clearly isomorphic in a suitable sense across different minds for the same term or proposition. The fact that human beings must have hearts with the same structure does not imply that there is a common objective heart outside each body.  The objectivity of meaning can be understood in a way similar to the isomorphic structure of our bodies, rooted in what we are,  in the things themselves.  If incomplete and having errors, few western philosophers have ever probed consciousness like Hume and Kant and laid bare the deep forces underlying it, including the nature and constitutive role of 'ego' and the construction of 'naive realism'.  To these we add the powerful contributions of the fathers of introspective psychology (Brentano, the William James of 'The Principles of Psychology').  And see the work of K.N. Jayatilleke and the early Carnap (and also Rosado Haddock's on Carnap). Carnap uses the suggestive term : autopsychological.

After the autopsychological was chosen as basic domain, thus, the processes of consciousness or experiences of consciousness of the I, it must still be determined which formations of this region are going to serve as basic elements. One could, let us say, consider taking as basic elements the ultimate constituent parts obtained by means of psychological and phenomenological analysis of the experiences of consciousness, thus, let us say, the simplest sensory sensations (as Mach), or more generally: psychic elements of different sorts, from which the experiences of consciousness are formed. On a closer examination, however, we must acknowledge that in this case not the given itself, but abstractions from it, thus something epistemologically secondary, has been taken as basic elements…. Since we, however, wanted also to require from our constitutional system the consideration of the epistemological order of the objects, we shall, thus, start from what is epistemologically primary to everything else, from “[the] given”, and those are the experiences of consciousness themselves in their totality and closed unity…. To the chosen basic elements, those experiences of consciousness of the I as unities … we refer as “elementary experiences of consciousness. [Der logische Aufbau der Welt, pp. 91–2].

Is not the concept of vagueness itself rather vague ? Many natural language predicates admit more-and-less (in the terminology of Aristotle's Topics) but our adverbial resources are often clumsy or insufficient to express the underlying linear order of the corresponding 'semantic space'. Language is discrete but consciousness and the world are continuous.   Thus all difficulties involving vagueness and ambiguity can be resolved by introducing a fine enough (though finite) linear scale: this in practice is what is used in many sorts of questionnaires.  Baldness is a predicate capable of more-or-less hence with an underlying linearly graded semantic space.  It is absurd to believe that you can split a continuous linear segment into a binary classification. 

Language  - together with the orientation found in the Pali texts - is the antechamber and the initial map for entry into philosophical psychology, into the domain of  pure consciousness.  Thus read the Logical Investigations and then Sowa's Conceptual Structures for an a posteriori formal elaboration (but discarding the erroneous neuroscience found in the otherwise phenomenologically and logically interesting book). 

In the Logical Investigations, Husserl is very frank about the intricacies, problems, confusions, pitfalls and puzzles of his project.  The desire to separate mental experience, the actual lived experience in the process of consciousness,  from some kind of ideal 'other' (meaning, the thing itself) which nevertheless, and most paradoxically, is also the object of pure, direct, intuition and hence just as much a part of lived conscious experience as the perception of an apple.  Sowa holds that concepts cannot be directly intuited and pertain to some kind of underlying neural substrate - and yet they can be translated into inner verbal discourse and imagination.  Husserl naturalizes psychology (misrepresents it) too much in order to contrast  it with his method without presuppositions (already expressed in the Logical Investigations) and yet, I think, any philosophical psychology does not engage in this kind of naivety.  The psychologist is concerned with consciousness and how consciousness comes to constitute or construct a representation of the world. Its building blocks are not naturalistic presuppositions but such things as sense icons, percepts, atomic sense data (which Husserl himself brings back in a very Kantian way into his noesis-noema scheme),  or basic categories or whatever. But the fundamental principle (found already in the Pali texts) involves developing a pure detached awareness of the stream of consciousness as it is in itself (as distinguished for what is constructs and the exterior projections taken to be real) and in this way to obtain definite direct knowledge of (and even power over) consciousness itself - but without any necessity of denying an exterior world in itself, only the naive mental imaginative way in which the mind takes itself to be relating to it.  If  'the world is my representation' it does not follow that there is no world, only that - in our mental life - we actually live and interact with a dream and projection immeasurably more than with the world itself in a strict causal sense.  While we radically reject Sowa's neuro-reductionism, there is a similarity in that transcending consciousness there is likewise a physical world which can causally affect consciousness. We need to learn how to observe and see the meaning of words in our own minds.  Rather than speak of mental experience, meaning, intention, meaning-fulfillment, or the complex structure of noema and noesis,  we ask: what is the mental content associated to concepts (for the moment abstracting how such content can differ at different instances of the concept being thought or with context) ? For all their shortcoming, the older philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Mill where very much more profound and radical than those influence by rationalism and scholasticism - and we hope to view their theories in a novel profound and consistent way (including the fundamental issue of the relationship between self and consciousness).  The concept 'triangle'  does not correspond to any hidden neural 'conceptual graph' nor social behavioral or pragmatic pattern nor to a mysterious eidetic form, purified meaning, etc. Rather (thanks to the right method of introspection) to a directly perceptible complex dynamic structure  (an open-ended proliferation or papanca) in consciousness which is linked to the life-history of the mind  (and to feelings and emotions, as Sowa discusses) and involves 'genetic epistemology'. All concepts have an 'original baptism' in the mind. Concepts are somewhat like living entities. Perhaps Hegel's logic (which brings to life the genetics and internal life, turmoil, psychology and complexes and politics of concepts) offers us an interesting template which is distinct both from the elusive intuitive transcendence of Husserl and from the crude and contrived decompositions and definitions of modern symbolic logic.  It is the childish simplicity and unabashed naivety as a way to embracing concepts that is the key to wisdom, not artificial sophistication and abstraction.  How do we explain that certain people can have the concept of 'triangle' and yet not know that the heights intersect at a single point ? Or that the sum of the internal angles is two right angles ?  The difference is like someone who has read David Copperfield and someone who only has heard a vague outline of the plot (mathematical proofs are like stories). In fact concepts are learned in a context and as part of a theory and a system (in a loose sense). Like leaves and branches they cannot be totally separated and abstracted from their tree and root. We see this is the way formalizations of mathematical theories are carried out (for instance in Coq or Agda). Concepts are very fine grained and the mode or presentation and the enveloping theory and context are everything, logical equivalence is a posteriori and comes later. The ancients had a good insight into this in their theory of genera and species but their theory was never fully developed and remained mostly simplistic and artificial. But consider just how we possess concepts of extensive complex objects, like a novel. We have a concept of the novel 'David Copperfield': what are the mental contents associated with this expression ? We can survey them as a unified whole at once from a distance, without detail, much like surveying a landscape,  or traverse according to a certain order the actual contents of the book in detail. It is this seeing as a whole, from afar, that needs to be phenomenologically elucidated.  The perception from afar of a complex concept might need to evolve a choice of salient features and markers (cf. Sowa's discussion on the difference between recollection and recognition).  If we can understand this we might be able to understand 'abstract' concepts as well. The concept of 'triangle'  is associate to a spontaneous mental content which is a pair (T,D) in which T is an actual imagined triangle and D is a set of permissible deformations of T, for instance changing the length of the basis and changing the position of the upper vertex. Husserl's eidetic variation as a process is itself the expression of the mental content of the concept. More precisely we are given a space X and a figure FX together with n-parametric groups of diffeomorphisms D1,D2,... acting on X. Also recall our previous discussions about the refinement of concepts.  We can also say that when we consider a concept we are implicitly considering the process whereby that concept comes to be as a species in its proximate genus and at the same time the its own internal process whereby it may be further divided into further species: heteroeidogenesis and autoeidogenesis. Or we may take the cue from object oriented programming (and Sowa) and consider the the mental content corresponding to a concept is like that of a code of a class (or interface).  Another point is that feeling, volition, certain subtle physiological connections to the body and the constitution-energy of a 'self'  (see Schulting's books on Kant) are entangled and bound up with conceptual thinking, though this has been traditionally discarded.

Another overlooked point about Husserl. There is a strong and hidden scholastic strain in Husserl. But what is scholasticism ? Medieval scholasticism is often presented as a continuation of the philosophy of Augustine (which in turn borrowed heavily from Plotinus) and other neoplatonic texts. But in reality this continuation of certain currents of Islamic Aristotelianism is quite different and is not compatible with  original neoplatonism or the more neoplatonic aspects of Augustine (it is only in so-called 'mystical theology' that genuine neoplatonic themes make an appearance). Much of medieval scholasticism looks forward to modern rationalism, empiricism and nominalism and as thus has very little relation to neoplatonism (Scotus, Ockham, Buridan, the 'Oxford Calculators').   With the scholastic revival of the 19th century we have a yet further estrangement from neoplatonism, we have radically altered version of medieval scholasticism (neothomism) which rejects even further core augustinian and neoplatonic epistemological and psychological elements (this is related with the Roman Church's rejection of Ontologism). Thus it appears that Husserl latches on to some of the ideals of neoscholasticism (in particular via Brentano and Bolzano) and many of the problems involved may well stem from a confusion between a theory in its pure neoplatonic (or even Augustinean) form and its scholastic and neoscholastic distortions.  Husserl's theory of pure intuition of eidetic forms and so forth is not original, if found in a certain form in Schopenhauer and Goethe, its true origin is in neoplatonism and its theory of the logoi and the nous. The subtext of the later Husserl is precisely the development of a unusual (supernatural one might say)  mode of spiritual contemplation and intuition which presupposes a profound spiritual transformation of the subject. Recall also our criticism of Husserl in the context of interpretation of the allegory of the cave.  It is the the silencing and emptying of the proliferations of mental thought-content (and its feeling, volition, mine and self - making, etc) which is the condition to obtain pure vision and wisdom. The maze of concepts (and the enigma of meaning) is only solved and overcome by discarding the whole thing (maybe as in Sextus) and gazing at it from the outside. Theory of knowledge aside, it is wonderful to understand how the mind works, how consciousness works - and if this understanding appears itself paradoxically part of the mind (and as yet unfounded) we say that it is made possible by something coming from without and truth is shown in power.

The Logical Investigations are based on there being something beyond psychic experience, something pointed to by signification acts,  an intended objectivity beyond any concrete lived psychic experience. Thus the Logical Investigations might be construed as an essay in neoscholastic epistemology and psychology in sharp contrast to the more philosophical psychologist approaches of Meinong and Twardowski ( On the Content and Object of Presentations: A Psychological Investigation, 1894). Indeed we do not find here yet 'the enigma of transcendence' of the object (how can mental content refer to something beyond itself, just as in the incompleteness theorem a sentence seems to jump out of the system and engage in meta-talk)  or even an awareness of Kantian questioning - all which will appear later in the Cartesian Meditiations.  This intentionality and its transcendent objectivity is yet still something completely immanent in consciousness expressesing fundamental categories of the mind.  The idea of objectivity itself  (or intersubjectivity, it is based on the previous idea of another self) is mere necessary categorical mental content accompanying the more immediate mental experience: for instance when we think and make the judgment '7 + 5 = 12' . And this accompanying idea of objectivity is related to the self.

The Pali abhidhamma literature is of great interest (this type of sophisticated philosophical-psychological literature was found in different schools of early Buddhism, many of which are now extinct).  The abhidhamma concerns the fundamental elements (or factors) of consciousness (the cetasikas which come together to form mental states or cities) and their combinations and dynamic causal structure.  The lucidity and insight of this philosophy is a wholesome antidote to much of western mental conditioning and allows one to know what to look for in a detached neutralized global introspective psychology (or phenomenology).

One must not try to conceptualize the process of pure introspection and insight into consciousness, rather one must let it manifest spontaneously 'by itself'.  The principle for obtaining this insight and following the right method is the awareness of temporality in its universal transcendental sense permeating and constituting the totality of the immanent flux of consciousness. It is from a firm and clear insight into temporality that insight-analysis-decontruction of thought and self arises and thus the necessary 'conversion' or 'revulsion'. The self is a tendency to reify vortices and thought is  lost  in a maze and tangled forest.  Understand anicca, anatta and dukkha (there is also a connection between anatta and a certain tradition of love poetry). Yet one must not hastily conceptualize one's liberating insight such as in the atomism of the later abhidhamma.

And there still remains the open problem regarding how all this is to be integrated with our considerations on the Platonic dialectic. One could for instance put forward the hypothesis: most of ordinary mental life is too dim, weak and vague to effect a self-intuition and self-unveiling of consciousness: but the practice of Platonic dialectic and its cyclic refining concentration of pure concepts and their network energizes and illumines consciousness rendering it vast and powerful, self-transparent and self-luminous, the necessary qualities required to carry out higher phenomenology.

Or rather it should be seen as follows: we must start with concentrating on the highest ideals of objectivity and truth which are also the highest ideals of knowledge and science: the chief position is occupied by logic and mathematics.  Then we must investigate the claims of objectivity and truth phenomenologically, unveiling the essence of their  formalism, ideality, and a priority with the corresponding lived subjective psychological intentionality and meaning acts. By a special act of reflection we cognize the ideas presupposed or which necessarily accompany certain types of mental act, for instance those pertaining to logic, mathematics or the sciences. But what precisely is the nature of this reflection and how does it cognize ?

Consider Masefield's book: Divine Revelation in Pali Buddhism.  There is much to be elucidated in the Pali texts. For instance, the nature of pañña,  what is going on precisely when the dharma is being listened to (cf. 'shravakas'),  what is the function of their structure and repetition, what the dharma itself is and how it is cognized. Is the dharma itself made of the 5 khandas and how could the khandas contain in themselves knowledge leading to their own overcoming ? We may consider the thesis that in the Pali texts there is postulated a process of 'ideation', 'abstraction' and 'luminous evidence'  entirely analogous to the one discussed in the Logical Investigations. Pañña is a kind of evidence that cannot be reduced to the ordinary psychological experience of an ego.   Jayatilleke, p.428:

The Buddhist theory of truth (v. supra, 596) also makes it clear that truth and therefore knowledge is objective, as telling us the nature of'things as they are' (yathâbhûtam). The knowledge of things as they are consists in knowing 'what exists as "existing" and what does not exist as "not existing" ' (santam vâ atthl ti nassati asantam vâ natthi ti nassati, A. V.36). 'Knowing things as they are', it is said, 'wherever they are, is the highest knowledge' (etad anuttariyam . . . nânânam yadidam tattha tattha yathäbhütanänam, A. V.37). What is taught by the Buddha is claimed to be objectively valid: 'Whether the Tathâgata preaches the dhamma to his disciples or does not preach it, the dhamma remains the same' (desento pi Tathâgato sâvakânam dhammam tâdiso va adesento pi hi dhammo tâdiso va, M. L331).

Brentano, Meinong,  Mally,  Marty, Twardowski, Stumpf, von Ehrenfels are clearly closer to buddhist epistemology than Husserl (or Bolzano, Lotze, Frege, Natorp). The delicate and subtitle interaction between the subjective and the objective in Husserl renders his writings an excellent propadeutic to a whole lost content of philosophy (when philosophy took a wrong turn after the first quarter of the 20th-century). We must investigate the relationship between psychological introspection, phenomenological reflection and satipatthana and vipassana. Indeed the true sati and vipassana of the content of consciousness goes beyond the ordinary Erlebnis of sense-perception and inner sensual imagination and feeling - it involves also a clear awareness of the inseparable 'deep structure'  khandas: samkhara and viññana. Also we must investigate the terms close to that of 'object', 'intentionality', 'signs' and the arupa jhanas. It is the Buddhist theory of knowledge that requires further detailed investigation.

For all the richness and historical references found in the Logical Investigations, this work still does not address directly the fundamental problems of the theory of knowledge, and thus remains a kind of elegant (even if Kantian-like) scholasticism combining previous logical-objectivist and psychological-descriptive currents.

Later we shall analyse poetry and the phenomenology of poetry as a means of access to the truth as well as a path of spiritual development.

Thursday, May 22, 2025

A new philosophy of science and technology

What are vague monster concepts ? They might be described as having a huge comprehension which hinders them being grasped as an intelligible whole so that one is inevitably lead to form a subconcept of which important aspects are missing (we could call such concepts 'quantum' or even 'fractal' in the Baudrillardian sense). This allows a rhetoric of the concept which can pragmatically justify opposing statements according to circumstance (in the theory of Thom, it is almost if it were alive and had developed a sort of self-defense mechanism).  It also invites the questioning of whether the concept as a whole represents anything consistent and intelligible  beyond being merely a cloud, a manipulate veil for power and control.  Western culture abounds in monster concepts. We mentioned 'religion'. Another concept is 'intelligence' though this is also a the same time a pseudo-concept (as is the concept 'socio-economic class').  We do not of course mean here the sense of 'intelligence' which pertains to the essence, structure and dynamics of human reason, of the human mind, of consciousness...the subject of the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, nor the problems with learning difficulties in children and adolescents (and how tests can be use to diagnose specific difficulties).   No, what we address here is the pseudo-concept of 'intelligence' in which  in certain cultures individual A is said to be 'smarter', 'more intelligent', 'brighter', etc. than individual B. 'Intelligence' not as a common essence of a (biologically) normal human being, but as some kind  of alleged extra virtue or special attribute. There are universal valid concepts of being  'intelligent'  : i) knowledge of the moral law, or, knowledge of what should or should not be done,  knowledge of how one should treat other human beings and animals.  The organ of intelligence is empathy and compassion (durch Mitleid wissend...). Without empathy and compassion, without a firm knowledge of the absolute universality and inviolability of human and animal rights there is no way a human being could ever be considered 'intelligent', but rather  in this instance should be considered some kind of aberration and monster, a case of stunted development. ii) insight-wisdom in the practice of self-reflection into the nature of consciousness (and this includes suitably philosophically illumined formal and theoretical disciplines). iii) possession of skills which contribute to the common good and alleviation of suffering of human beings, animals and the environment. iv) artistic genius. What we call 'anti-intelligence' is the loathsome  set of  (predominantly verbal) 'skills'  concerned with deceiving, manipulating, controlling, exploiting and harming other people (generally for the aim of wealth, prestige and power). 

That mathematics and science progress is automatic and in itself not meaningful. It is in the nature of things that playing around with logical consequence or performing experiments (specially with government and or military funding) new 'knowledge' will be produced (and tragically it is also frequently about performing faulty experiments and using faulty statistical methods to produce ad hoc justification for previously endorsed  theories).  There is nothing special or praiseworthy here. There are no grounds to boast of 'superiority' or 'genius'.   It is only in light of higher philosophical, metamathematical, metalogical,  interdisciplinary, pedagogical, humanistic and artistic knowledge and principles that math and science production can be assessed.  A simple example: in mathematics what matters is the style, intuitive clarity and structure of the system of definitions and concepts, the elegance, simplicity and transparency of the proofs, and the relevance of the entire theory to philosophy and other branches of both math and science.  Mathematics needs to philosophically reflect upon itself and return to its essence in  Euclid, Descartes, Leibniz, Frege,  Peano, Brouwer,  Hilbert, Russell, Gentzen, Martin-Löf and  the recent contributions of Voevodsky. The state of physics is shameful. Quantum mechanics is an 'intellectual scandal'  of our times, in the words of René Thom.   Where are the physicists working on rectifying and extending and lending logical coherence to this hodgepodge  mess of a theory ? It is really time for physics to make progress and to stop the nonsense about 'brilliant' physicists and 'geniuses' taking about 'theories of everything' and the 'end of physics'. And also it would be nice to have a direct answer to the following question: for the majority of commonly used modern technology what part of contemporary physics is actually necessary ? 

There is a large amount of evidence that consciousness can subsist independently from the physical brain and that consciousness is not generated from the brain nor in particular are different psychological faculties determined by specialized functional regions of the brain. A philosophy which ignores this evidence is not philosophy but propaganda. Consciousness does not supervene on the brain or physical matter.  Even the determination of the structure of a protein from the corresponding gene is an open problem.  If there is a 'genetic determinism' for some 'traits' above the simple constitution of biomolecules then this is evidently the delicate outcome of a non-linear complex feedback system of multiple  interacting genes and environmental factors. And since consciousness does not supervene on the brain it is evident and conclusive that the vast majority of complex human traits (which is an open problem even to define) have no corresponding 'genetic' cause - although it is now known that the underlying biochemical factors in the process of inheritance greatly transcend mere nucleotide sequences. It is an urgent task to vigorously expose and debunk growing cults revolving around pseudoscientific concepts of 'intelligence' and 'race' , specially 'evolutionary psychology' and 'social darwinism'.   For a good introduction to the kind 'science'  and worldview involved see David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Errors of Heredity, Selfish Genes and other Fables of Evolution together with J.Fodor and M. Palmattelli, What Darwin Got Wrong. Brute force and vile cunning  do not 'explain' anything about human biology, psychology or culture, and are not a source of value or scientific understanding. See our previous post for some perspectives on anthropology.

Is human culture and human history there have been and still are 'super-powers'. Power-structures (whether military, economic or religious) which are so vast, so pervasive, so entrenched, whose tentacles are so embedded in the psychological and cultural being of humanity...that their very nature and history is already a monster concept, very difficult for the mind to grasp at once without a high degree of selectivity and filtering.  Super-powers expressing the essence of monster concepts (the monster myth) in history are highly resilient: no amount of factual evidence and investigation detailing present and  past centuries of fraud, deceit, forgery,  self-contradiction, incoherence, falsity,  absurdity,  betrayal, hypocrisy, immorality, oppression, abuse, murder, torture, genocide - can touch them. The ordinary person filters and selects and only sees what they want to see or have been programed to see.  The ordinary person cannot grasp this monster at once in their own mind and they are happy to swallow the bait and live in a fantasy bubble afforded by the pleasure and illusion the super-power offers.  Super-powers are stupor-powers, they are in a way 'the opium of the masses'.  So insidious is this monstrous power, this hideous strength, that one does not want to speak out against them less one offend one's friends.  And the human mind can only focus on the here and now, on the so-called 'news' and is immediately drawn to mythic constructions of good guys vs. bad guys and historical forgetfulness.

What we call 'social media' or the 'news'  is a kind of poison that is constantly pumped into the mind in order to maintain  negative psychological states which hinder the the attainment of insight, peace and freedom.

Superpowers become familiar, socially accepted, long-standing, ingrained in our social fabric - and thereby shielded from inquiry and criticism under an aura of venerability and respectability. 

If we make it our daily exercise to constantly recall and expose the evil deeds and lies and kept secrets of super-powers, it is not out of some kind of personal bitterness. It it in the order of things, it is the required medicine for the human mind that 'cannot bear too much reality' and is so easily  lost in the filtering and wish-fulfillment offered by the thousand head hydra of monster concepts.

One of the numerous flaws which render the Large Language Models in vogue today of so little value and  of so much harm to the human mind and to human society is the precisely the quality and character of the initial data. The monster data sets generally used (internet junk, cyber-propaganda and fake anonymous encyclopedias) are imbued with the biases and ideology  of reigning superpowers which exert a distorting tyrannical influence over their respective 'semantic' territories (without LLMs having to worry about any conceptual or logical coherence).  Such a monster garbage heap is also subsequently filtered and processed (sanitized) according to further contingent ideological directives. Equally toxic aspects are the crude focus (employing a bag of tricks) on bare linguistic 'tokens' (betraying a questionable Anglo-linguistic supremacy - though it seems there are Chinese versions too) rather than conceptual semantic structure,  logical queries and authentic reasoning , the static nature of the resulting trained model,  etc. Paraphrasing Nietzsche: that people generally use this kind of AI will ruin not only writing but also thinking. This AI is the 'death of language' , or worse, a kind of animated corpse of human thought, a  kind of linguistic Frankenstein. See also Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI by Karen Hao.(2025). We can say that genuine philosophy starts not so much with 'amazement' in itself but with compassion and horror at the malice and suffering of mankind and the desire to redress this state of affairs, and this includes understanding its causes. And the most important aspect of the philosophy of language is precisely that in which it is inseparably integrated into the science of consciousness.

 What we discuss in this post is the western monster concept of  'science'. 

In a nutshell: there are really only two species of authentic  'science': the science of consciousness, the philosophical psychology we have discussed previously,  and  the 'science'  (which we call welfare engineering, a primary example being medicine) whose primary goal is lessening the suffering and improving the lives not only of human beings but of all life (ethically guided medicine, engineering, history and other human sciences).   Human beings love to explore and travel and discover new worlds, and science can furnish the tools and vehicles for doing this but this tendency and activity in itself is not science, it is what science can serve.   Now purely theoretical and formal 'science' that abstracts from the conditions and needs of human beings and other living beings on this planet - and which is not concerned with the phenomenology of consciousness and psychotherapy -  has been vastly overrated, over-prized, overvalued as have the so-called abilities and achievements in it (the myth of the theoretical 'genius' who in reality is just an individual  payed and idolized by society to engage in games, hobbies and obsessions, often involving an amount of plagiarism,  with no true human, social or environmental value).  In ancient Greece beyond medicine and Thucydides welfare engineering was largely non-existent (before Archimedes and the Hellenistic era; however in an interesting passage Aristotle envisions the idea of tools which work by themselves).  And more importantly theoretical science,  the idea that man obtains fulfillment through an external knowledge which has no bearing on the welfare and life of living beings or any connection to the direct  phenomenological self-knowledge of consciousness aiming at personal liberation, clearly has its template in medieval scholasticism and the particular kind of historical, organized and revealed religion it served.  A whole new paradigm for the development of welfare engineering needs to be developed which emphasizes  collaboration and purges research from ulterior motives based on financial, social and personal gain as well as the poisonous ideology of competition and struggle or glorification of the  'entrepreneur'. There is also a vast new field of the archaeology of welfare engineering with regards to its presence in various historical cultures (even if not in a conscious conceptual form).

However we must make a very important exception for certain branches of pure mathematics which have not only intrinsic beauty but also an important role to play in the philosophy of Platonic dialectics we discussed in a previous post.  However this is explicitly acknowledging that certain branches of pure mathematics and mathematical logic are fundamental to the science of consciousness ! 

Perhaps welfare engineering is not the best term as we include under it also history and many of the human and social sciences. In fact historical analysis and research is the most important of all alongside medicine.  There are no 'sacred' or 'taboo' historical narratives, no narratives which cannot be questioned and concerning which documents, evidence and a rational reconstruction cannot and should not be demanded, no matter how much they are upheld and imposed by power and fear.  False narratives, myths in the service of power, domination, control and psychological oppression,  this is what Jung did not take into account.  Only through honest, objective and scientific historical research can human beings achieve psychological freedom and impartial justice be served.

Heidegger wrote much about truth and historicity yet according to Wolin's  'Heidegger in Ruins'  Heidegger engaged in deliberate falsification of his own manuscripts and uttered falsehoods regarding them. A liar and denialist of biographical history wrote about truth, human existence, historicity and forgetfulness !  We find the Heidegger-Husserl correspondence very depressing and the dreary pettiness of the corresponding academic milieu is striking ( itself a strong argument against academic philosophy), specially considering that these thinkers claimed to address huge transcendent questions about human history and existence.  Heidegger seems to have been rather duplicitous and ungrateful towards Husserl.  Heidegger was never a man to speak truth to power and defend the oppressed, rather for him power was truth and truth was power.  Someone has to say it: i) there is a lot of Nietzsche, Darwin and  racist pseudoscience in Heidegger, ii)  his philosophy is a secularized atheist variant of medieval scholasticism cloaked in the language of phenomenology. iii) it seems doubtful that there is any Heideggerian 'category' or 'analytics' that is not already found in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic.  

The categories and analytics Heidegger sets up in Sein und Zeit in order to allegedly deconstruct metaphysics are precisely themselves those one learns to deconstruct in Buddhist philosophy and meditation.  Ontological pluralism and morality (compassion, non-harm, restraint) on the other hand cannot be deconstructed.  The way Heidegger approaches 'the question of being' is designed to invoke cosmic and existential anguish. But his 'question of being' is itself a  naturalistic opaque veil which can be viewed as hiding something else,  something  marvelous and wonderful. Even T.S. Eliot had a higher glimpse of this with his 'man cannot take too much reality'.  And: 'why is there something rather than nothing ?'  can be seen from a different perspective in light of the Mahâyâna doctrina of shûnyatâ. 

There is a structural analogy between philosophical psychology and welfare engineering; the Pali suttas abound with Indian medical terms and there is likewise a connection between ancient Greek medicine (where experimental and empirical methodology was present) and both Pyrrhonism and Stoicism.

Now there are two objections that easily present themselves:

i) cannot engineering and even medical research be used equally for immoral ends and for great harm ? How about advances in medicine which involve experimentation of animals ?  Or in general what about the misuse of engineering for the power and profit of a human group causing great harm to other human beings, animals and the environment ? So  why use the term 'welfare engineering' ?  

ii) does not progress in applied science, in engineering and medicine depend crucially on theoretical science and even on mathematics ?

iii) are you not espousing a kind of pragmatism for natural science which contradicts what Aristotle wrote in the beginning of the Metaphysics: all men have by nature the desire to know ? 

We will address i) in a future post (the pragmatism of engineering makes manifest its essential link to ethics and human consciousness, contrary to the cold hypocrisy of purely theoretical science).  We can also observe that there is a connection to the theory of magic and sacrifice in antiquity where, according to some, the gods were originally conceived as impersonal forces (either of nature, of consciousness, of both) which are governed likewise by fixed impersonal laws.  The magician or shaman or medicine man would then apply a corresponding technique in order to harness and direct these powers to obtain a certain goal.  The huge problem is when such techniques (ceremonial magic) were believed (in the most degenerate and barbaric cultures) to have to involve causing suffering or death to living beings (sacrifice) - something which can drastically contrast to the 'path of power'  found in the Pali texts, wherein  'magic'  powers are a direct result of personal spiritual attainment and have nothing do so with causing suffering to other beings.  We can certainly draw a parallel between the heinous presence of experimentation on animals in modern science  (whose justification often verges on sacrificial rhetoric) and such sacrificial magic.

   ii) is easy to answer. The fact of the matter is that the extent and depth of the purely theoretical and mathematical underpinnings of much of medicine and engineering have been grossly and drastically exaggerated.  Rather the legitimate and modest theoretical and formal apparatuses emerge naturally through the context of experimental feedback. It is as if somehow nature needed to say something and she somehow manages to say it in the most succinct and practical form, contrary to the shadowy, artificial and sickly proliferations of the theoreticians. The legitimate theoretical should be a tool for a tool, or rather a tool that should be designed to best operate on the tools of engineering.  As for iii) this ideal of pure knowledge is found in philosophical psychology. And Aristotle can be considered (despite the presence in his work of material of a different nature such as the De Anima) the founder of the monster of a purely theoretical and formal science divorced from engineering and welfare and divorced from a science of consciousness and phenomenology.  His theoretical science held back progress in applied and experimental science for centuries and helped justify misogyny, racism and colonialism. 

We have seen how core logic, arithmetic, computability, games and combinatorics form a closed interdependent circle (thus there is no reason to postulate the primacy of the 'logic' component, i.e. the one based on language) and how authentic logics come in families, the members of which mirror each other.  We have also seen how philosophical psychology espouses ontological pluralism and thus, without sacrificing the deep truths of phenomenism, phenomenology and the self-reflection and self-introspection of consciousness,  freely postulates the existence of a physical universe as well as a multitude of poles of conscious experience. Thus we can speak of an implicit 'order of the world' which encompasses both domains of consciousness experience and domains of physical existence as well as their relationship.  Logic is about bringing to light  the implicit unconscious order (which is also the order of the world and thus linked to praxis) of aspects of conscious thought, and as thus its task is always incomplete, its achievements partial. Logic in an extended sense is revealed in the structure and dynamics of the living activity of authentic science, there is no a priori armchair logic (a comparison might be made with some aspects of Adorno. Also we can address the issues Habermas raised regarding the focus on consciousness and the subject.).

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Our philosophical methodology

It is a tendency for a structure which has found some partial practical use in a given context and situation to be extrapolated and applied to other situations and regions as well. In fact such a structure can become a preconceived category and part of a projected ontological system with claims of furnishing a more general  understanding of reality.  Contrary to what we have suggested previously it is extremely dubious that  common formal systems can have much direct relevance to our project of a philosophical psychology, that is, the project of recovering the first-person introspective science that had many remarkable developments in the 19th century (many of which appear in Husserl's Logical Investigations) and which later was tragically and wrongfully rejected or neglected. We have discussed some important aspect of the project in previous posts, for instance how it should not be confused with subjective idealism and also the view adopted on the subject, the body and the physical world. The method pertaining to formal abstract research is completely distinct from that of such a philosophical psychology. The method required actually has more similarity with that of experimental science (cf. Hume's 'experimental method of reasoning') though obviously should not be confused with it.  Abstract formal concepts and methods should only come in after substantial progress has been made in philosophical psychology.  After pure introspective insight and knowledge has been gained (as explained before, it involves the detached awareness of the stream of inner verbal discourse and imagination, divided into its sensual species and their web,  perceived in its conceptual dimension as well and as proceeding from a fundamental process of identification), then through reminiscence the philosopher may be able to return and attempt to articulate this knowledge in the language of abstract formal computable systems (maybe the systems of consciousness has some similarity to the design of operating systems, themselves based on human social structure). Until then, natural language remains an imperfect but still amazingly flexible and serviceable tool. An analogy might be used from software development: first we must have a global systems theoretic intuition and idea of how the program is to be structured and work and then can be begin its concrete coding in a given language and platform. Or rather: first we must explore and view and know the mind first-hand and only afterwards can we use  known concrete systems  as tools or language to present an approximative model of the mind.  All this of course is quite distinct from the perspective of the Logical Investigations -  or Platonic dialectics - in which the phenomenological reflection on formal and logic knowledge itself is a starting point.

It might be a very good thing to dissipate misunderstandings and distortions which would confuse this first-personal introspective methodology with that of psychoanalysis (i.e. Jung's analytic psychology), its theory of the unconscious and its proposed methods of exploration of the latter,  or with the method of the later of Husserl (we have in fact already discussed this in previous posts).  The problem with Jung revolves around the term 'religion'.  This is a large 'monster' vague concept which is incapable of definition and many partial, idealized and artificial aspects have been historically abstracted (or sanitized) to suit particular scientific, historical and philosophical theories. A question is: do we find in Jung the strange idea that religious beliefs, practices and narratives should be regarded as potentially psychological beneficial and therapeutic regardless of their objective historical, scientific, ethical and even social value and consequence ? Can we say that Jung diagnosed the modern age with 'lack of religion' and that he proposed a suitably adapted 'religion' as a cure  ? (the problem with Noll's famous book is that is mixes important factual material with more-or-less obvious intrusions of their author's own anthropological and historical views).  Or is the concept of 'religion' used by Jung a rather artificial idealized one that would lump together fundamentally heterogeneous things ? If the lover, the poet and all art involving creative imagination are interpreted as 'religious'  then this is clearly a very different sense of the term than the usual 'theological' and 'ecclesiastic' one (even if we take into account Hegel's lucubrations about the  'religion of art' of the Greeks and the similar Hellenism in the writings of Heidegger).  And what about 'initiatic' societies like Freemasonry ? And Jung's practice of analytic psychology itself ? For now we will pull out from the huge vague term 'religion' a single negative aspect (which links it strongly to the term 'cult') : that of passivity, surrender and dependence on a leader or group - in which is involved passivity with regards to aspects and manifestations of one's own psyche which cause lack of cognitive clarity and calm.  Passivity is of course a very difficult and complex term when applied to consciousness and in Pali buddhism 'passive' (in the sense usually translated as 'letting go' or 'detachment')  and 'active' aspects are combined in subtle and powerful ways.  Jung is  wrong in making an analogy between an alleged western 'extrovert' tendency to dominate the world and an eastern 'introvert'  tendency to dominate the psyche.  There is very little analogy between western material domination and the goal of original Buddhism which is ultimately not any kind of  'control' and 'domination': rather its mottos are know thyself and cure thyself.  An obvious difference between our philosophical psychology and Jung is that imagination, dreams, symbols. images, myths etc. play a central role for Jung (and note the questionable importance allocated to 'gender' in  Jungian myths,  why cannot the sun be considered feminine as in ancient Japan, ancient Germanic and many other cultures ? ).  And such things are indeed found both in the original Pali texts and in Platonism - but what is really important is their function and attitude that is displayed towards them therein - and such function and attitude is quite different in Tibetan Buddhism (Jung was a keen reader of the Bardö Thodöl, though his personal library also included the editions of the Pali text society). Jung's interesting remarks on the salvation of the gods in Buddhism applies to Tibetan Buddhism. 

A questionable aspect of Jung (and Noll certainly identified this)  is that his ideas appear bound up with a kind of religious, cultural and even 'racial' traditionalism which Noll amply elaborates on in function of  'völkisch'  blood-and-soil ideologies.  We find this aspect of Jung  mistaken and  harmful, as is the theory of 'psychological types' applied to individuals and a fortiori to human groups such as the division between East and West or a theory races or cultures that could be 'aryan' and 'semitic',  terms only having meaning as linguistic classifications. Was Jung somehow ignorant that the ancestors of the most of the population of the Germany of his times consisted in a great portion of speakers of  Latin, Baltic, West Slavonic and Celtic alongside Germanic languages ?

Contrary to Jung we claim that cultural material that is factually erroneous, immoral and which causes psychological harm to oneself and to others,  does not deserve the slightest reverence or respect just for being 'tradition'  or being associated with one's ancestors or country. And that this certainly cannot be a positive basis for psychological and spiritual progress or self-knowledge. At worst it can be represent a kind of generational trauma - the 'collective unconscious' should be viewed as containing very negative things as well, things that were imprinted through the ages by  reigning authorities .  Even on the historical plane so-called 'traditions' reveal themselves not to be continuous traditions at all, but materially triumphing aspects of a rugged process of  ideological conflict with other equally historically legitimate 'traditions' which happen to have lost through many disparate circumstances and factors.

 What is truly rooted in our essence and represents our spiritual continuity, is the spirit of questioning, criticism, evaluation and potential liberation from what is bad and wrong in 'tradition', both the social-cultural structure of  the waking world and from contingent  negative unconscious influence (which Jung would essentialize). Foucault, Guattari and Deleuze correctly hold that the true revolutionary spirit is as much about self-transformation as social transformation, but fall into error in not acknowledging that this spirit is itself a continuous and ancient tradition.

Maybe the 'collective unconscious'   of a given social group does not emerge according some dubious speculation about man's prehistory,  but is rather largely the product of the conscious creative power of special individuals.  Jung himself made a curious remark that India was not up to what the Buddha wanted to reveal and teach. 

Not only does Jung seem to have a mistaken and uncritical account of gender and  the gendering of imaginary, mythical and religious figures but we question if in Jung we find a good theory of the numinous object of consciousness at all, and in particular in the context of the whole process of the experience of eros and beauty.  Does Jung offer us a phenomenology of the modes of presentation and functions of an 'object-person' of imaginative consciousness which yet is perceived to 'be'  a known real being  or else a person of religious narratives - and the phenomenology of why particular object-image-persons are chosen, preferred, come to dominate consciousness in a numinous revelatory manner, and how these can become (including through certain spiritual practices) the initiatic vehicles for achieving higher states of consciousness and spiritual realization ?

Contrary to Jung, we have argued extensively for the profound affinity - even almost identity - between the philosophy and spirit of original Pali Buddhism and that of ancient Greek philosophy, and this correspondence and affinity certainly extends to later Buddhist philosophy and later modern Western philosophy as well. Thus we can say that original Pali Buddhism represents to lost soul, essence and root of what is best in Western humanity, provided we pay special attention to its knowledge of the universality and unconditionality of the duty of compassion and non-harm with regards to all human beings and animals. The collective unconscious of Western humanity itself needs to be healed and regenerated in the pure life-giving waters of the critical and revolutionary spirit at once new and ancient.  A very important aspect involves the study and investigations of ancient Europe (and its links to Druidism, ancient Greece and the regions in which original Buddhism developed) and the dispelling once and for all of the harmful myths or partial truths regarding our ancestors which are patent in Jung . The furor Teutonicus, the cult of *Wōðanaz  are unoriginal foreign elements borrowed from the warlike tribal gods of the Eurasian steppe nomads as patent from Beckwith's extensive book on the Silk Road; on the other hand the seeresses and prophetesses of some Germanic tribes as recounted by Roman historians were actually Druidic. Without going into this subject, we remark that the Old Turkic script and the Futhark are strikingly similar.  We attach great importance to the proof of the historical, cultural and philosophical affinity and continuity between Greco-Roman antiquity and ancient Celtic speakers (and perhaps even the culture of the Megalithic monuments). Many of the Germanic speaking tribes seem to have been at the cross-roads between the Buddhist-Greco-Roman-Celtic light of humanity and civilization and the shamanic war-god and war-retinue culture of the Eurasian steppes (which is associated to Mongolian and Turkic speaking peoples and is not in any way a specifically  'Indo-European'  religion). In the territory of what is now Germany there is a powerful substrate of Western Slavs and Balts alongside the older Celtic component which may be associated to manifestations of higher philosophy and spirituality in Germany (and similar considerations can be made for Great Britain).   The Celtic genetic and cultural influence in Iceland is very large and we can speculate that likewise the genetic and cultural influence of the Sámi on historical Scandinavia has been extensive, though in what can be reconstructed of  'Viking culture' (the object of distortions and fantasies in popular culture) we find a strong presence of the Nietzschean war-and-conquest-based values and culture of the Eurasian Mongolian and Turkic  steppe nomads (cf. the ancient interactions of the Goths and the Huns).

The reason we focused on original Buddhism is because of its philosophical nature (it is not a 'religion' in the common sense of this term)  and its close correspondence to much of what is best in ancient and modern western philosophy and philosophical psychology (thus refuting  again the idea of an essential distinction between east and west).  Nor do we wish to suggest that original Buddhism exhausts ancient wisdom and valid spiritual practices (one need but glance at the Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali, the works of Plato or Plotinus to see their variety and complementarity). Also note that the speculations above on ancient peoples (a topic which deserves many books) should be taken as based primarily on ethical, religious, cultural and linguistic divisions without implying any kind of genetic or 'racial'  reductionism or essentialism.  In a future post we will address all the standard criticism concerning 'cultural appropriation' and allegedly taking the artificial restricted secular view of western scholarship regarding the Pali texts, ignoring the actual living traditions of the Theravada, etc.

We need not only a typology but a systematic pathology of spiritual traditions, religions and cultures.  Not simply a linear scale between the poles of purity, spirituality, interiority, morality, universality,  'philosophicality', humanism and all their opposites, but an understanding of how pathological religions and cultures branch into many different and apparently distinct forms while preserving the same underlying negative essence.  Thus we need to understand better what a tribalist, sacrifice-based, violent, colonialist, genocidal,  fear-based culture and religion is and not be mislead by classifications like patriarchal and matriarchal or confuse  corrupted forms of certain cultures and religions with traces of or naturalistic disfigurements of something more ancient and pure.  Pure religion pertains to the science of consciousness (either solitary or through the transfiguring/manifesting path of spiritual love and communion) and morality and not to the natural world other than as an object of love and compassion and aesthetic numinous transfiguration. It is inconceivable that concepts like 'caste' or 'race'  should have any validity or role therein. 

In other words,  any 'higher' or 'pure' religion (if we can even use this term)  is essentially and solely about i) the science of consciousness, about self-analysis and self-awareness of consciousness ultimately achieving  a liberated super-consciousness, and ii) the transcendental unfolding of the possibility of human love.  Its foundation is intelligence of the moral law and empathy and compassion.  It has absolutely nothing to do with 'gods' (beyond an imaginative-symbolic function or as representing possible states of human consciousness).   Although we can certainly conceive of other beings analogous to humans or even in some sense 'superior' beings existing in other worlds or planes of existence,  attaching a religious significance to a relationship (worship, faith, sacrifice, prayer, rites, etc) to such beings (the number being immaterial) is a serious aberration. 

We hope to prove that the history of cultures and religions does not exhibit anything like a linear progress from so-called 'primitive' (animistic, naturalistic, war and fertility based,  etc.) to so-called 'advanced' religions (as if any religion that can justify cruelty to human beings and animals, bloodshed and genocide could ever deserve the designation 'advanced'....) but rather a complex multi-cyclic decay from higher to lower followed by partial restorations of the higher. 

Evidence can be adduced from the history of India in which many traditions which exhibit certain key 'higher' non-theistic traits are very ancient - Yoga (to a certain extent), Nyâya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Pali Buddhism, Jainism,....  Note that in ancient Greece we have already have as far back as  the 5th century Leucippus and the ethics of  Democritus (said to have traveled extensively and learnt from various now lost traditions) and Plato's critique of religion in books 2 and 3 of the Republic and concept of the transcendent good, which surely is just a transmission of Pythagorean philosophy which, according to Ovid, completely rejected animal sacrifice. And of extraordinary interest is Confucionism and the literature of Ch'an and Zen as well as the earlier highly sophisticated Mahâyâna philosophical texts: all these appears to contain powerful and complex articulations of a pure science of consciousness and well as a more-or-less explicit rejection of 'religion' in the common sense (cf. Hui Hai: the sage seeks the Mind not the Buddha, etc.). Maybe some mysterious ancient people, with some connection to Manicheism and Zoroasterianism, is behind both Mahâyâna and ancient Chinese culture.  

There are also some special 'divinities' which express something higher, older and non-theistic, the union between the science of consciousness and the moral and cosmic order of the world: such are certain ancient luminous feminine figures incarnating divine wisdom, light, life, compassion and cosmic order (which also feature prominently in Mahâyâna and Vajrayâna): for instance the ancient figured of Aredvi Sura Anahita and Daena for the Persians,  Nut for the ancient Egyptians,  Athena for the ancient Greeks and  to a certain extent Sophia and Barbelo of the so-called 'gnostic literature (the origin of the Hag Nammadi library is completely obscure, but it very likely includes  transmissions of now lost later Egyptian, Phoenician, Syrian and Chaldean traditions alongside other type of material).

It can furthermore be speculated  that many ancient 'theogonies'  (as well as perhaps emanationist and gnostic-type cosmologies) were initially symbolic-mythic expressions of pure philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness (like the paticcasamupadda and the system of samkhya, specially as interpreted by the excellent book by Mikel Burley, 2007) which in themselves had no more 'religious' significance than the categories of Kant. It is tragic that so much of the science and philosophy of the ancient world has been lost (Thracians, Chaldeans, Syrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Berbers, Druids,...or lost civilizations like Tartessos.).

All this again shows a most profound difference from Jung. It is laughable and displays a colonialist hubris to say that modern western man is on the average more 'rational' or 'logical' than other parts of humanity (historical and present). The machines modern man uses are products of controlled 'rational' thought, but modern western man per se ,  with all his capitalist fetishes and commodities,  is likely far less 'rational' and 'logical' (forgetting for a moment the problem of clarification of such monster concepts) than the average for this planet (historical and present). The smartphone is a product of the  'rational', the mental life of the personal buying and using it,  mostly not. Also there is not the slightest evidence that human beings at any period in time did not have naturally a form of consciousness containing what Jung calls the 'ego'. Another profound difference regards  Jung's theory of the 'libido' which is a grotesque distortion of the platonic and neoplatonic theory of the erôs, a primordial substance and power (prior and more vast than biological sexuality)  which allows spiritual realization through a mediating and transfiguring spiritual communion with another person - that erôs and its pure independent religion and creative imagination (the love story as the the pleroma and cycle of archetypes)  has  been degraded (naturalized, biologized and sexualized), concealed,  slandered, appropriated, inappropriately gendered,  imprisoned by historical power structures and their myths and narratives.  

Following Hegel we can see the development of art, literature and drama in ancient Greece as having (through the self-discovery of the freedom of the creative imagination dissolving religion and prefiguring the science of consciousness, which Jung did not seem to understand )  a parallel significance to that of the spiritual culture of philosophy.  This is what inspired Shelley to write Prometheus Unbound.  Indeed this development in ancient Greek literature manifests the spiritual interpretation and transfiguration of nature  which is irreconcilable with corrupt religious cults.

The modern and post-modern world seems heavily based on 'false forks', pairs of linked vague concepts which function like twin semantic whirlpools forcing the mind into two of equally false and harmful options. Forked concepts contain two components which appear opposed and even unconnected while in reality sharing the same life-blood, function and essence.  Forked concepts are 'false flag concepts' and correspond to 'every accusation is a confession',  one side accuses the other of the exact same thing that that side in reality is guilty of. Each side presents the other side as being the only possible alternative.  It is a strawmanning of the negation.  Forked concepts are standard parts of the apologetic arsenal of organized religions and cults. 

The considerations set forth in in the post do not claim to completely illuminated the multi-headed hydra of the monster concept 'religion'.   What we need is a pure a priori system of axioms, universal principles which demarcate 'pure religion' from a religion that is both false and harmful (historically, socially, culturally, scientifically, philosophically, psychologically, spiritually) and which perverts, appropriates and hijacks ethics and morality: ones steeped in bloodshed, cruelty, ignorance, racism and deceit, in making pacts for worldly ends through blood and sacrifice to one or more capricious immoral beings (whose activity is limited to war, sex,  quarreling, food and enjoying sacrifices).

In cultures dominated by a corrupt religion often a kind of semi-science of consciousness develops (which in some cultures and historical epochs is designated by the (universal) religion of love, the science of love, science of the heart)   -  although compromised by the enveloping religion and its  psychological conditioning.   Note that we have discussed the science of consciousness both in its pure solid form and in a more problematic  'relational' form based on a platonic theory of love. 

The fork: bad religion is a human cultural construction, the product of the worst instincts, impulses and ideas mankind has to offer (or in which one small social group has used to control, terrorize and exploit others).  But exactly the same instincts, impulses and ideas can be given apparently non-religious and equally bad materialistic and pseudo-scientific form. This is the key to understanding the history of the last three hundred years.

Addendum on the 'religion of love' in the West. The domination of a religious organization throughout the centuries is a complex affair. The substratum, the oppressed and hidden essence, will have its voice.  Under the tragic tyranny of a thousand years there were yet some manifestations of covert yet very powerful and significant revolution and rebellion, which we can inner spiritual  'transfigurations' and 'transformations' which while retaining the veil and semblance of submission to the reigning religious power and literalist dogma concealed something  of an entirely different philosophical and spiritual nature (though conveniently couched in a theological language in a way that would be interesting to compare to the treatment of revealed religion in Hegel's phenomenology of spirit).  The signs of such manifestations are everything which concerns the art, culture and poetry of 'spiritual', 'mystical', 'platonic' or 'neoplatonic' love (and is found in the Middle Ages, in the renaissance and specially in the baroque). Deification of the human, humanization of the divine, spiritual love as the supreme and principle sacrament and path described in the language and concepts of the reigning theology. Furthermore this religion of love involved a sophisticated and highly developed (based on concrete spiritual experience) philosophy of the soul and  of the self  and the overcoming of the self and of rebirth which is both complementary and compatible with the philosophy of Buddhism and which furthermore purifies, builds and improves upon the doctrines of the  'Christian mystics'. The symbol of a rose upon the cross is very apt, showing the unity between Buddhist anatta and the 'amor' of divine union.  See the article about Sor Violante do Céu in this collection.

Monday, May 19, 2025

Tossing Algebraic Flowers down the Great Divide (contains extensive bibliography of the papers of Joseph Goguen)

 https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/tcs97.pdf

We are working on a github repo with the collected papers of Goguen (just as has already been done for Lawvere).

In the 21st century among the 'algebraic flowers'  (in Goguen's sense of post-structuralist structuralism embodied in the applications of category theoretic and algebraic models in computer science to cognitive science, concept analysis,  cognitive linguistics  and other human sciences) we can include also  topos theory (see Olivia Caramello, Ontologies, knowledge representations and Grothendieck toposes, joint talk with Laurent Lafforgue) , homotopy theory (and higher category theory in general) and homotopy type theory.  Voevodsky constructed a model for dependent type theory based on simplicial sets. William Troiani wrote a master's thesis about 'Simplicial Sets are Algorithms'.

We took a look at the slides of Olivia Caramello's talk Ontologies, knowledge representations and Grothendieck toposes. The very interesting philosophical interpretation given to classifying toposes is good reason to investigate her work more closely. Along the way there occurred some research ideas:

i) Does the correspondence between geometric theories and classifying toposes form an institution (in the sense of Joseph Goguen) ?
ii) Can the concept of the classifying topos of a theory be extended to theories with models in non-grothendieck toposes such as the realizability topos ?
iii) Can we characterize theories whose syntactic toposes have a (non-trivial) structure of a triangulated category and more generally can we say more about the relevance of cohomology to logic ?

On the philosophical side: Consider our paper on the concept of continuity in Aristotle. Aristotle does not view space as being constituted by points, rather his notion is closer to that of a locale or a site. In an unpublished note we suggested that Aristotle's theory of the dependence between space, time and motion could be modeled with functors between sites and that the 'continuity' of motion is expressed by these functors preserving covers. We think it is fascinating that cover preserving functors appear also in the treatment of categorical logic.

On the mutual interpretation between category theory and Hegel's science of logic (which is inspired by, but also distinct from, that of Lawvere and the material available on this subject on nlab).   For the section on Essence (Wesen) we have some considerations on modern physics, specially relativity and gauge transformations,  but we find that this philosophy of classifying toposes as bridges provides to be the best interpretation of Essence vs. Appearance and the idea of a unifying conceptual system.

Saturday, May 10, 2025

From cognitive science through category theory to philosophy and psychotherapy

We seek a satisfactory philosophy of mind based fundamentally on first-person introspection (on consciousness itself) which includes likewise a theory of concepts and language based on meaning and consciousness (but which nevertheless is an open ontological pluralism, rather than a strict subjective idealism).  The organization of semantic memory will play an important role.  We find that there is much valuable material found for this project to be found in the selection from work in cognitive psychology (with an important component of Gestalt psychology) expounded by John Sowa in his book Conceptual Structures. This work extends and consolidates many important past philosophical traditions.

However such a philosophy of mind has much to gain (methodologically) from the framework of general systems theory and specially from its embodiment in computer science - all this without emplying per se any kind of (neuro)physicalist reductionism/parallelism/functionalism.  But category theoretic methods should play a central role in a truly scientific and philosophical general systems theory and computer science based approach to cognitive psychology and specially a theory of concepts and language.  Foundational to this project is the work of Joseph Goguen and William Lawvere. Thus for example we attach great importance to categorical approaches to type theory, to institutions and Goguen's systems theoretic applications of sheaf theory (and hence topos theory).  It is also interesting to explore the applicability of higher category theory and monoidal categories (which has an elegant application to quantum security protocols).  Higher category theory and homotopy theory emerge naturally from ordinary category theory (cf. there is a canonical model structure on the category of small categories: the homotopy category makes equivalences of categories actual category theoretic isomorphisms, that is, we are considering the category of structures).  A vital aspect of category theory is that it allows to capture simultaneously the bottom up and top down aspects of complex concurrent systems - important both in the study of consciousness and in computer systems (machine code vs. high-level languages). A problem with category theory is its dependency on the category of sets, something that is not really overcome in enriched category theory, higher category theory, internal category theory, etc.

But this categorical systems theoretic approach based on cognitive science is essentially a first-person intuitive introspective approach to psychology and the philosophy of mind and a continuation of a rich philosophical heritage.  Its ultimate aim is soteriological (or psychotherapeutical)  and identical in spirit and goal to original Buddhism:  it is by direct scientific knowledge of consciousness that we are led to be able to let go and be free.  However the psychology which can be found in the earliest substrate of the Pali canon which has been meticulously studied by Sue Hamilton in her 1995 book Identity and Experience is difficult to grasp due to its laconic incompleteness and many fundamental terms are used in different ways depending on context.  It is clear that it is the spirit and meaning which was essential and that a more complete and thorough first-person based psychology was achieved  by practitioners of the various buddhist traditions throughout the centuries and by the best insights and work of the western tradition of philosophy and psychology. 

Raga and dvesha are grouped together in the Pali texts according to the profoundest insight: the greatest danger involves engaging in ardent detachment from things attached to, loved, which cause suffering - and not being equally careful to avoid the subtle cultivation of hate, aversion, resentment, anger, etc. towards the same object (cf. eros and thanatos linked together in a circle). Both desire and aversion must be overcome at once in regards to the object and replaced with equanimity and joyful pure detachment.

The expressions 'living in the moment', 'mindfulness' and those involving the 'now' have made their way into popular discourse. However these are very superficial and distorted ways of looking at some profound philosophical and scientific truths regarding consciousness: that the flow of consciousness includes the concurrency and interrelated streams of inner verbal discourse and inner visual imagination together with associated feelings and desire, all in complex feedback. This flow of consciousness is at the same time a kind of directed dynamic deployment of the storehouse of our network of concepts. Becoming progressively aware of this flux as it is nakedly in itself and observing it in a progressively detached manner - leads to its eventual cessation or transfiguration (inner silence, inner emptyness) into a timeless beautiful present.  This awareness extends to a deeper level, to the fundamental structure and dynamics behind the whole process of consciousness - and it is this that is to be the primary object (this shows the subtle but profound difference from standard phenomenology).  The whole process and field of consciousness is perceived to be the result of a certain direction and distortion at this fundamental level - something which is also reversible by focused attention and practice.

The nature of this detached and happy consciousness is not necessarily either that of a 'subject'  or a 'soul' in the rationalist and scholastic sense (which, be it noted, is quite a distinct conception from neoplatonic and even original aristotelian theory). The power over one's own mind is completely heterodox and is incommensurable with social power dynamics, in fact, this power is precisely the renunciation of all will of domination over others.

Our project employs a methodological neutrality or epokhê (cf. the ontological pluralism) and aims to be essentially a science of consciousness as  it appears and is in itself and not a form of subjective or absolute idealism, philosophy of nature, metaphysics or theology.  However we are radically opposed to and dedicated to the refutation of any form of psychology or philosophy of mind that rejects the foundational role of first-person conscious experience and any linguistic theory or philosophy of language which rejects the fundamental role of consciously apprehended meaning and its connection to concepts (see A. Wierzbicka's Semantic Primes and Universals for an account of the situation of much of 20th century linguistics); like Sowa we understand that there can be complex conceptual yet non-linguistic thought. It is precisely the rejection of consciousness or its essential nature or innate dimensions which is the true foundation of historical oppression, domination and totalitarianism.

Later on we will discuss the deep connection to ethics and how our approach involves a knowledge of the unity of consciousness and thus of physically separated /individuated consciousnesses.

We will discuss later how are approach relates to theories of symbolism and dream interpretation. 

And the unethical and deceptive character of those who write mathematics books which are not dedicated to clarity, precision and respect for the reader.

There are Mahâyâna sutras which suggest a higher 'physics' of consciousness analogous to modern 'unified theories' such as quantum gravity, supersymmetry, string theory, etc. but we are unable to say more about this at the moment. And indeed the natural (non-conscious) universe may be analogous to the conscious experience of some 'cosmic mind'  which in turn may be associated to some unknown super-natural universe. The kind of idealism this involves might be thought of the 'greater mysteries' and we are not concerned with it in this blog.

The truth of phenomenism and subjective idealism does not contradict the existence of a physical realm, only that this realm, the more it is considered in its pure objectivity, as it is in itself independent and distinct from our psychological (mis)representations, the less it can be considered a cause of suffering: what causes suffering is the naive realism of the projections and ontology of our own mental life (its fabrications and drama it stirs up  and constructs out of impersonal mathematically discrete non-sensual sense data). Likewise the existence of other poles of psychological experience outside ourselves is not rejected. Though consciousness and the physical can influence each other, each is what it is in itself and no other, the alleged physical in and by and of the mental is really just the mental, nothing more: the mental is in reality just the mental, not a world, and the physical is just the physical, not what the mental takes it to be (later on we shall touch upon how this relates to the problem of truth, certainty and a priori knowledge).

In desire there is both the constituted desiring subject as well as the constituted desired object. It is a great mistake to only concentrate on the constitution of the object and thereby to falsely hypostatize the desiring subject as a kind of substrate. Rather the two are bound up and raveled together; to entangle oneself from one means entangling oneself from the other.

Let us recapitulate on some important points:

i) We do not have direct access to things of the world but only to presentations of and in the mind. This is an unconscious illusion.

ii) Point i) does not however entail in any way that extra-mental beings do not exist.

iii) Mental contents are also imbued with a sense of self and of being mine when in reality they are just as self-less and impersonal as our conception of the natural world.

Monday, May 5, 2025

List of my papers and writings (published or available online)

Category Theory  


M. Clarence Protin, Pedro Resende, Quantales of open groupoids. J. Noncommut. Geom. 6 (2012), no. 2, pp. 199–247


Logic and Type Theory


M. Clarence Protin, Type inhabitation of atomic polymorphism is undecidable, Journal of Logic and Computation, Volume 31, Issue 2, March 2021, Pages 416–425, https://doi.org/10.1093/logcom/exaa090

M. Clarence Protin ; Gilda Ferreira - Typability and Type Inference in Atomic Polymorphism, lmcs:7417 - Logical Methods in Computer Science, August 12, 2022, Volume 18, Issue 3 - https://doi.org/10.46298/lmcs-18(3:22)2022

Combinatory Intensional Logic: Formal foundations

 
On the Various Translations between Classical, Intuitionistic and Linear Logic (with P. Oliva e G. Ferreira), Ann. Pure and App. Logic (2025)

Introduction to Pylog

 

Philosophy of Logic and Language

 (This is one of my main interests: see most posts in the present blog Philosophical Monologues)

On proper names, sense and self-reference. Constructivist Foundations 20(2): 82–84. https://constructivist.info/20/2/082

On Analyticity and the A Priori

Inquiry into the nature of Kant's Logic in the CPR

Aristotle's Organon 


Protin, C. L. (2022). A Logic for Aristotle’s Modal Syllogistic. History and Philosophy of Logic, 44(3), 225–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/01445340.2022.2107382

Modern Definition and Ancient Definition

Aristotle's Second-Order Logic


History and Philosophy of Topology


Clarence Lewis Protin, Modern incarnations of the Aristotelian concepts of Continuum and Topos, in Intentio Nº 4 (2024), ISSN : 2679–4462, ISBN : 978–2–494988–03–3.

Hegel and Modern Topology


Stoicism


Commentary on Bobzien and Shogry's Stoic Logic and Multiple Generality

Stoic Logic and Dependent Type Theory

Philosophy of Epictetus 

Pali Buddhism and Western philosophy


Aristotle's Analysis of Consciousness and Pali Buddhism

Hegel

Commentary on the section on Verstellung in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Philosophical General Systems Theory

What is a System ?

Systems Theory

Some topics in the philosophy of nature (draft for the article below)

Differential models, computability and beyond

Ethics, political philosophy, history and anthropology

Prop. 1 of Proclus' Elements of Theology and Brouwer's intuitionism

The proof of the first proposition of Proclus' Elements of theology is among the most difficult to understand from a formal point of vie...