From phenomenology to a philosophy of consciousness to spiritual science

Alas there is no clear definition of what phenomenology is (which should not to be confused with the specific philosophical work of Edmund Husserl) or even what phenomenism, empiricism, positivism and the theory of knowledge exactly are.  There is no clear definition of what the philosophy of consciousness is or how it could differ from the philosophy of mind. And there is no clear idea of what a spiritual science could be or a science of consciousness. We are in possession however of the bodies of knowledge encompassed by the various branches of psychology and cognitive science - and there is surely much of value there.

In our writings we have emphasized a few important points relevant to the entire interwoven enterprise of all these subjects. The centrality of first-person experience, its descriptive insight and analysis and most importantly:  there can be no genuine progress without a radical and thorough form of personal transformation aimed at at self-transparency and self-transcendence of consciousness. We attach importance to the first-person experience of the body and the various feedback mechanisms involved, specially those related to sensory systems and the peripheral nervous system.

Is there any relevance or legitimacy in the idea of mathematical (or formal) models of consciousness? 

This question, which we will not attempt to give any definite answer for now, seems related to the circumstance of there being two distinct paths (but not necessarily non-complementary or non-convergent)  passing through all the subjects mentioned above, whose ultimate aim is not only spiritual science but the attaining of ultimate spiritual knowledge. We might characterize these two paths as pertaining to the Buddhist and the (neo)Platonic philosophical and spiritual sciences - it being understood that these terms should be read in a very universal sense encompassing in particular a huge range of philosophical literature from antiquity to the present, both from the east and the west. Both their differences and their common core (we have written on the connection between the Platonic-Socratic dialogues, Pyrrhonism, Damaskios and the Pseudo-Dionysian literature) are important.

The differences manifest in the kind of mathematical or formal model of consciousness we could associated with each one of them. The (neo)Platonic path would seem to point to geometric and topological models of consciousness (due to its synthetic, global, anagogic methods) while the Buddhist path (analytic and actively illuminating through insight) would prefer event and process-oriented computational models. Its western embodiment has great luminaries such as Sextus Empiricus, Hume, Kant and Brentano. Dialectics is found in both paths but with different modes of employment and emphasis. For both thorough psycho-somatic peace, calm and relaxation is a precondition for any progress.The dichotomy between the paths is not meant to be universal and disjoint as it is easy to find traditions that sit somewhere in the middle or incorporate core elements of both approaches (Yoga, Samkhya, various schools in the Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita).

About the geometric-topological model of consciousness. This resolves around the ancient notion of topos (cf. Aristotle's Physics Book IV), the modern concepts of stratified space, and the granting legitimacy to traditional cartographical, architectural, horticultural and other metaphorical language regarding consciousness and the diverse faculties and regions of the soul (cf. the ars memoriae).  Its foundation is  the work of Plotinus (which integrates the best elements in the Platonic and Aristotelian texts). There are also interesting elements from neuroscience and psychology that can be integrated into such an account.

We can cautiously suggest that Plotinus' process of spiritual simplification, illumination and reversion (we would say rather 'involution' and 'inversion')  involves a radical shift in the self-perception of consciousness and at the same time a radical shift of perspective regarding what is perceived and conceived as spacetime and the laws of physics. We propose that this transformation, this shift of perspective, involves the Penrose transform of complexified (and compactified) Minkowski spacetime. The new reality is twistor space $\mathbb{P}^3$ and the previous Minkowski spacetime is something secondary and generated (its points correspond to lines in $\mathbb{P}^3$). As regard to the hyperboloid hypersurface which appears naturally in twistor theory (it corresponds to the image of real Minkowski space and stratifies twistor space), we can recall this verse by Alan Turing:

Hyperboloids of wondrous Light
Rolling for aye through Space and Time
Harbour those Waves which somehow might
Play out God's wondrous pantomime. 

 

The initial process of complexification and compactification can be likened to unveiling a more fundamental ontological domain, the intentions, meanings or processes of the world-soul at work in physics - which corrresponds to a parallel process in consciousness. Fiber bundles are perhaps a natural mode for the human mind to grasp high-dimensional spaces. The isomorphism of the fibers at different points represent their ubiquity and unity in the Plotinean sense.

 

Spiritual science will involve a geometry and cartography of  consciousness employing a stratification into spaces with their own dynamics and deformative processes which become aligned within a global anagogic process.  However we must begin with the most humble processes related to the psychosomatic domain and their geometry and dynamics. The geometry of biophysics furnishes the clues and can be transposed - through a process of variation, complexification and compactification -  into the domain of a geometry of consciousness. The branches of mathematics which offer a unification, fusion, of logic and geometry, are surely of great relevance here. 

 

There are several interrelated geometries of the mind. The geometry of the architecture of our cognitive-semantic spaces. The geometry of our personal narrative (our biography) and of narratives in general, specially the initiatic journey. The geometric physiology of the soul's powers and functions. An important aspect of such geometries is not only their stratification, multidimensionality, dynamic nature, relation to projective space,  but also their foliated nature, all forms manifest as a simultaneous united continuum of many different levels. An opposing view would see all this as a cultural inheritance of forms of illusion (prolongations of a standard naive pre-biochemical understanding of biology), of aggregation and identification and put in its stead Hume's sublime concurrent process vision of consciousness. We distinguish between objects and beliefs constituted by function (mistaken for essence) and true essence revealed in the reality of the underlying concurrent processes which do not reveal themselves necessarily as they are when they construct belief-objects subordinate to function.

 

But perhaps indeed the vision between the two paths is not so significant in comparison to what they have in common - the science of the subtle and spiritual bodies. Also recall also how Hegel and Husserl would hold that, as strange as it may seem, Plato, Sextus Empiricus and Hume  present complementary aspects of the one truth and are capable of unification at a higher level. But also postulating unity can be harmful at the level of spiritual paths, contrary to a common trend. Rather one must be lucky to find a path that is 'beautiful in the beginning, beautiful in the middle and beautiful in the end'.

 

Before the question "how can we gain higher knowledge of consciousness itself?" we should ask "what is the best knowledge for consciousness?"  It is the knowledge that lets it see through itself and liberate itself from itself. A central object of the best knowledge is the difference and unity between perception, feeling, volition, thought and the sense of self and awareness. Also of temporality and temporal intentions and the construction of objects and concepts. And is not logic the science of consciousness par excellence? And even more importantly: the best knowledge is not just knowledge of the highest object but the best knowledge is the knowledge of the best knowledge itself in its illuminating and transcending function. Consciousness must be unbounded light and its knowledge be knowledge of its own knowledge and of its own knowledge's illumination. Recursion and reflection-into-self permeate the Pali Canon and its path of spiritual development. Consciousness lives usually passively immersed in and hypnotized by its own self, forgetting its own power not only of freeing insight but its ability to act directly upon itself, dissolving the mistaken belief in the necessity of certain mental content.

 

And we can give a symbolic-anagogic formalization of consciousness properly understood, or at least partially mirror its self-clarifying, self-transcending, self-subsuming process. We have sketched some of this in our "Hegel and Modern Topology".  We could add thereto some considerations on monoidal categories (which furnish a common ground for linear logic,  concurrent processes, algebraic geometry, PDEs and quantum theory). What is important here is the internalization of their own "boxes" into wires (input and output) allowing the modelling of dynamic rewiring (closed monoidal categories).

 

About the coherence conditions in monoidal categories. The coherence condition can be viewed as the necessary amnesia which forgets the history of a process to look only at the final state and  conditions the connection isomorphism only on the final result (cf. Kant's example of surveying a house in the CPR). This is what allows objectivity to emerge: objectivity is the postulated forgetfulness of the plurality of different presentations and the postulate of their essential equivalence. As Aristotle wrote: the road from Athens to Thebes is the same road as that from Thebes to Athens. Coherence expresses the emergence of objectivity (hence order) by a voluntary forgetfulness of a system's memory via focusing only on the final state. The condition of (shallow) objectivity is that something is what it is independently of its process of coming to be.  If you start with a certain composition of $\otimes$-products X and switch them around using tensorings of ids and associators to obtain a new composition of $\otimes$-products Y then the resulting composed isomorphism linking X and Y will always be the same, no matter the intermediate route. Without a partial repulsion of memory one will be constantly becoming something different - this act is also that of the Understanding in Hegel's Logic that forgets, attempts to cancel,  its own process of coming to be.

Short philosophical considerations on AI

Hegel and Heidegger were thinkers about their own time, thinkers about historical events and happenings. Few have the insight and courage to fathom the full depth of the meaning of an historical event, the coming to be (coming of age?) of an historical process. Tragically,  it is only some time after the event (the time of monsters?) has hit humanity with full force that Hegel's famous owl can spread her wings. Is it not true that some of what the prophetic author of Sein und Zeit wrote about technology only makes full sense at the present?

This seems to us particularly true of the emergence of the age of the Internet and the age of generative AI which is its logical development.

And yet nothing could be further from our own philosophizing than any form of historicism or historical philosophy. As such both Hegel and Heidegger, for all their interest and insight, must be considered as having crafted systems based on an incorrigible error. 

Social progress is not a law of nature but a legitimate hope - even if at present it seems a distant one - and it is our moral duty to work towards it in the midst of uncertain outcomes.

The advent of the internet was the advent of connection between people. This connection carried rhetorically moral undertones and echoed enlightenment ideals about the desirability of sharing and making knowledge available.  In the present age of the generative AI based Internet powered and controlled by corporations and governments aligned to anti-enlightenment ideals, it may be that it is morally called upon us to practice instead the process of disconnection and the purification and preservation of knowledge(not obviously in the sense of the 'great simplification' of the Canticle of Leibowitz).   

The most basic step is ensuring locality of core information. That is, to be in possession of machines onto which have been downloaded significant portions of Internet Encyclopedias (despite their serious shortcomings) as well as some decently performing LLM. To this we add, it needs not be said, massive of digital preservation of human cultural artifacts, notably libraries.

One can use Kiwix and download for offline viewing the most recent English Wikipedia (50GB text-only 150GB with pictures).  With a AMD Ryzen 7 5825U processor with 16GB RAM and 2GB Radeon Graphics one can use Ollama and download and use some decently performing LLMs (gemma4 comes in E2B, E4B, 31B and 26B A4B). 

Most living beings alternative between states of being awake and of sleep. Can would we design a dynamic LLM which similarly alternates between states of user interaction and re-training based on this interaction? The most important being the correction and/or updating of knowledge or perhaps the removal of harmful and biased content and "thought patterns". If LLMs can improve then it is not only  a question of having the number of parameters equal to the number of neurons of the human brain.

Computers can enhance and aid human cognition as well as hinder and destroy it (there is a growing body of evidence concerning the disastrous effect of excessive or inappropriate generative AI use for individual mental health and cognitive development, not to mention for society as a whole). 

But the harms of generative AI have little to do with lesser-known extremely powerful and beneficial aspects of the computer for human cognition. We cannot go into this in detail here. Let it just be said that it involves using adequate software for the rigorous formalization of human scientific theories and concepts (specially logic and mathematics and formal methods in the sciences) and the vital feedback-loop between human thought and the software interface (IDE) which results in the simultaneous enhancement of human understanding and production and the quality of the software-based formalization and implementation. 

The software in question includes not only Rocq (formerly Coq), Agda and functional programming language but such languages as Python, Javascript and C/C++. Python is a multi-paradigm and highly versatile language with an elegant syntax. Python comes close to achieving the ideal of a universal language in the Leibnizian sense and is a wonderful tool for formalization, implementation,  verification and exploration in a variety of areas in mathematical logic and finite mathematics. 

We note also the importance of minimalism (using as few dependencies as possible) and building things from the ground up - this goes for scientific and philosophical projects, not of course for commercial and industrial ones.  We will address in the future the question of the possible role of machine learning in this process.

Philosophical updates

Heidegger's Being and Time must be considered a brilliant and profound work and if not a vast improvement over Husserl then at least a realization of what in Husserl was just reified meta-talk and illusive promise. Being and Time actually shows in a clear, concrete and beautiful way how phenomenology is possible and indeed phenomenology itself is rectified in several essential ways (by recovering the indisputable central importance of being and "existence") and set on solid and clear foundations which in fact are deeply rooted in Hellenic thought.

Being and Time also offers a section which might be described as the proto-topology of the Dasein's Umwelt which certainly echoes some of our previous work.

This work retains great value even if we consider the Dasein considered to be deluded and unenlightened Dasein (the essentially worldly Dasein). Also we can argue that Heidegger misread Hegel and that the Hegel-Heidegger connection might be a rich field of investigation.

Heidegger's approach to language, logic, thought and intellect is deep and illuminating and suggests (besides offering overwhelmingly powerful tools for the strangely non-embarked upon task of  destroying analytic philosophy once and for all)  some radical developments for our paper on Analyticity, Computability and the A Priori. What does it mean for us to learn something, to learn to do a thing, for instance, to learn to add, to learn to calculate, to learn the rules of game vs. to learn how to play the game? This is the principal question of our paper and Heidegger's method (combined perhaps with the work of Piaget) seems well worth pursuing. When we learn how to do something then when we do a thing, the thing itself becomes far from us having been close when we struggled to learn it. We have at present no clear understanding what it means for us to calculate or to play a game.  

Heidegger also offers some interesting insight to our spiritual and anthropological investigations: a shift of focus from early eastern traditions (like Pali Buddhism) to the overwhelming deep luminous source of Hellenic traditions - in which genuine questioning and freedom is found without the shadow of despotism and projected absolutism as in the typology of a 'lord of the world' (which was overcome somewhat in the purely philosophical Mahayana schools and more so in the sublime transformation in Chinese Buddhism grounded in Daoism: if you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him - could not have been easily uttered by an Indian Sage, only a Chinese or a Greek one).  A study of the mysteries, Orphism, Greek Drama, the pre-Socratics, the Platonic texts reveals more and more and shameful plagiarism and perversion which Hellenic thought and traditions (and their sources and influences) were subject to by certain later currents of Alexandrian and Mediterranean Hellenistic cultures (specially the so-called "gnostics").

We point out that Heidegger also has some very disappointing and serious anthropological blunders wherein he reveals himself to be a child of his own time blinded by typical German pseudoscientific racism and nationalism. In the Black Notebooks we find anti-universalist  anti-humanist   Blut und Boden type utterances which are unworthy of a philosopher. But at the same time the correction of these errors is of immense philosophical importance - and it seems it is up to us to engage in this.

There can be no authentic inquiry into being and into man unless the selfsame dignity of every single human being (and indeed animal) is acknowledged without exception (to reject the Dasein of another is to reject one's own Dasein).  All human beings are equal before Being though evidently not all human beings and cultures at a given time have the same purity and openness to Being. 

There can be no valid onto-theology without the fundamental doctrine of Apokatastasis. The eventual universal salvation of all beings can be taken as the fundamental ground of the very essence of divinity without which we have nothing but monstruosities and human calculation and construction.

Heidegger's reading of Eckhart suggests that Eckhart is deeply Hellenic and - if we allow some key clarification and rectification so as to leave no doubt about the unconditional adoption of Origen's doctrine of Apokatastasis - then Eckhart can indeed by considered an important spiritual guide providing a concrete practical complement to Plotinus. Happiness consists in dwelling peacefully in the clearing of Being. We must show in detail how Eckhart's thought is admirably compatible and suggestive of Origen's doctrine of Apokatastasis. Indeed in Wagner's Parsifal the redemption of all of nature is celebrated, even of the redeemer Himself. Spiritual love means liberation from the limitations of place, time and finite fixed embodiment and yields a measure of intemporality, omnipresence and multidimensional integration, reflection, flow and radiation.

And of course with regards to the philosophical understanding of technology it almost seems that Heidegger was a philosopher that was prophetically born not so much for his own time but for our present time. Heidegger is vastly relevant and important to understand the horrors of the contemporary technocratic dystopia and what is designated by the misnomer artificial intelligence. In fact generative AI, large language models, those electrically animated Frankenstein corpses of adulterated human language and instrumentality are the most perfect embodiment of everything Heidegger wrote about technology.

Another interesting anthropological-spiritual source concerns the Persian and Hermetic traditions understood through Henry Corbin's interesting Heideggerian hermeneutics.

Anatta

Anatta was indeed the central philosophy of early, authentic buddhism. But is was not fully understood and rapidly compromised and corrupted. Its recovery, preservation and further exposition and development is found nevertheless in various schools of the East and West, both ancient (and even pre-buddhist) and modern.

Our working hypothesis is that original Buddhism was strictly based on ethics, philosophical insight and meditation (bhavana) and had no religious component whatsoever. Metaphysical questions and questions regarding the afterlife were treated exactly as in Pyrrho or Kant's transcendental dialectics. The concepts of karma and rebirth were originally philosophical teachings whose meaning was lost, being corrupted into literal religious beliefs (wherein the bhikkhu ultimately replaced the brahmin). The original teaching on karma (which involves impersonal polarized psychological energies) did not depend in the least on a literal mythological understanding of rebirth. 

Thus for example we can think of human beings as receptors, generators and transmitters of certain psychological energies, and as being immersed in an environment in which such energies can also exist in a free form.  Negative energies and deeds not only rebound with unfortunate consequences in the life of the individual but also, conceivably, during the process of death the sum-total of such an individual's habitual and accumulated energies may be explosively released into the world and thus influence other beings in a positive, neutral or negative way (there might be an analogy with a supernova in astrophysics). Also during the process of death the individual may experience a kind of final dream in which that individual's life-history and sum-total of energies and habits is lived out in a final synthetic way. 

We hold that Anatta is the essence and culmination of TPC and TPP.  We have discussed and highlighted the importance of Pyrrho, Hume, Nagarjuna - and a certain approach to Hegel.

Let us just say that an entity or structure can be inherently not only fragmentary and incomplete but also inconsistent. A fragmented inconsistent being does not have within itself a representation of its own negation, non-being, of a state where it is not. That is to say, there is no true being without self-transcendence. The best that can happen for an entity is to see clearly the circularity of its own inescapable inner contradiction.

The core of TPP is the development of intentional habits and fundamental energies and forces, virtues of consciousness which counteract from a central source and in all dimensions  the limitations, delusions, inconsistencies and self-postulation and self-proliferation of the fragmentary being.

The categories of consciousness (including space, time, locality) are to be transcended.

We must find strong evidence for the presence and practice of this same TPC and TPP among the most diverse places and people in prehistoric, classical antiquity and subsequent history, all in complete agreement with regards to the only necessary central essential core (which in itself as virtually infinite inexhaustible content).

The primordial tradition is not some kind of primitive human culture, rather it is the ubiquitous and timeless presence of the power of complete transcendence of humanity.

 There is not great difference between logic and argumentation and games. These are the factors involved. One accepts a game  G as a game and holds that the game is interpersonally objective and follows publically agreed upon rules.  One fixes a side, a starting point, a choice X in G. Then X is processed by G (in a way which may involve deliberate choice and participation, or not) and eventually yields an element U from a predefined set of possible outcomes. Logic and argumentation involves furthermore that acceptance of a translation-representation between intentional mental-cognitive content and a choice X as well as the reverse translation from U back to meaningful mental content. Furthermore it is often the case that we postulate a principle of continuity in that the processing steps of G are transparent in their mental interpretability though such do not play any role in the processing itself.

The interpretation of Gödel's dialectica translation in terms of games is one of the most interesting developments in logic in the recent decades (a formula is turned into a game-like formula and proofs become winning strategies codified by closed terms in system T) - and should be compared not only with our reconstruction of the debate game in Aristotle's Topics but also with modern proposals for a logic of dialogue.

We observe that in original Buddhism we meet with many suttas which share a logical-argumentation template and dialectical method which is itself far more important than the contingent details. This method involves a combinatoric bringing to light and articulation of possibilities aiming a bringing about a catharsis and detachment (like the Pyrrhonic epokhe).

Thus Buddhist dialectics and Buddhist phenomenology rest both on a subtle hermeneutics of language, that is, language considered as the vehicle and dwelling place of the proliferation and self-reinforcement of the fragmentary entity. Hermeneutics asks the most fundamental questions which lead to the appearance of cracks and tears in the fabric of constructed reality.