The importance of the Stability Problem in neurocomputing is discussed, as well as the need for the study of infinite networks. Stability must be the key ingredient in the solution of a problem by a neural network without external intervention. Infinite discrete networks seem to be the proper objects of study for a theory of neural computability which aims at characterizing problems solvable, in principle, by a neural network. Precise definitions of such problems and their solutions (...) are given. Some consequences are explored, in particular, the neural unsolvability of the Stability Problem for neural networks. (shrink)

Infinite machines (IMs) can do supertasks. A supertask is an infinite series of operations done in some finite time. Whether or not our universe contains any IMs, they are worthy of study as upper bounds on finite machines. We introduce IMs and describe some of their physical and psychological aspects. An accelerating Turing machine (an ATM) is a Turing machine that performs every next operation twice as fast. It can carry out infinitely many operations in finite time. Many (...) ATMs can be connected together to form networks of infinitely powerful agents. A network of ATMs can also be thought of as the control system for an infinitely complex robot. We describe a robot with a dense network of ATMs for its retinas, its brain, and its motor controllers. Such a robot can perform psychological supertasks - it can perceive infinitely detailed objects in all their detail; it can formulate infinite plans; it can make infinitely precise movements. An endless hierarchy of IMs might realize a deep notion of intelligent computing everywhere. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that contemporary media technologies push individuals into collective action on an industrial scale, without them necessarily being aware of it. Yet what if the problem is not that we are all synchronized to the same affective networks and moments, but rather dispersed into countless different networks and moments? What if the effect of so-called social media is to calibrate the interactive spectacle so that we never fully feel the same way as other potential allies (...) at the same moment? While one person is fuming about economic injustice or climate change denial, another is giggling at a cute cat video, and, two hours late, vice versa. The nebulous indignation which constitutes the very fuel of true social change can be redirected safely around the network, avoiding any dangerous surges of radical activity In this short and provocative book Dominic Pettman examines the deliberate deployment of what he calls ‘asynchronous hypermodulation’, as a key strategy encoded into the contemporary media environment. By focusing on ‘we, the mediated’, this radical intervention challenges the narratives that portray the new media environment as a monolithic media apparatus, rendering us all into the same libidinal grey glue, subsequently channelled at will through the pleasure palace of the internet. The unprecedented power of the Internet requires us to rethink the potential for infinite distractions that accompany it. (shrink)

Many cosmological arguments for the existence of a first cause or a necessary being rely on a premise which denies the possibility of an infinite regress ofsome particular sort. Adequate and satisfying support for this premise, however, is not always provided. In this paper I attempt to address this gap in the literature. After discussing the notion of a causal explanation (section I), I formulate three principles which govern any successful causal explanation (section II). I then introduce the notions (...) of a caused being, a causal network, and a causal chain, and argue that (roughly) an infinite causal chain cannot be explained merely by reference to the causal activities of the members of that chain (section III). In a sequel to the present paper, I employ this result to construct two closely related arguments for the existence of a necessary being. (shrink)

The representations of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are formed from generalizing similarities and abstracting from differences in the manner of the empiricist theory of abstraction (Buckner, Synthese 195:5339–5372, 2018). The empiricist theory of abstraction is well understood to entail infinite regress and circularity in content constitution (Husserl, Logical Investigations. Routledge, 2001). This paper argues these entailments hold a fortiori for deep CNNs. Two theses result: deep CNNs require supplementation by Quine’s “apparatus of identity and quantification” in order (...) to (1) achieve concepts, and (2) represent objects, as opposed to “half-entities” corresponding to similarity amalgams (Quine, Quintessence, Cambridge, 2004, p. 107). Similarity amalgams are also called “approximate meaning[s]” (Marcus & Davis, Rebooting AI, Pantheon, 2019, p. 132). Although Husserl inferred the “complete abandonment of the empiricist theory of abstraction” (a fortiori deep CNNs) due to the infinite regress and circularity arguments examined in this paper, I argue that the statistical learning of deep CNNs may be incorporated into a Fodorian hybrid account that supports Quine’s “sortal predicates, negation, plurals, identity, pronouns, and quantifiers” which are representationally necessary to overcome the regress/circularity in content constitution and achieve objective (as opposed to similarity-subjective) representation (Burge, Origins of Objectivity. Oxford, 2010, p. 238). I base myself initially on Yoshimi’s (New Frontiers in Psychology, 2011) attempt to explain Husserlian phenomenology with neural networks but depart from him due to the arguments and consequently propose a two-system view which converges with Weiskopf’s proposal (“Observational Concepts.” The Conceptual Mind. MIT, 2015. 223–248). (shrink)

Neural networks are widely used in systems of artificial intelligence, but due to their black box nature, they have so far evaded formal analysis to certify that they satisfy desirable properties, mainly when they perform critical tasks. In this work, we introduce methods for the formal analysis of reachability and robustness of neural networks that are modeled as rational McNaughton functions by, first, stating such properties in the language of Łukasiewicz infinitely-valued logic and, then, using the reasoning techniques (...) of such logical system. We also present a case study where we employ the proposed techniques in an actual neural network that we trained to predict whether it will rain tomorrow in Australia. (shrink)

Chaos in nervous system is a fascinating but controversial field of investigation. To approach the role of chaos in the real brain, we theoretically and numerically investigate the occurrence of chaos inartificial neural networks. Most of the time, recurrent networks (with feedbacks) are fully connected. This architecture being not biologically plausible, the occurrence of chaos is studied here for a randomly diluted architecture. By normalizing the variance of synaptic weights, we produce a bifurcation parameter, dependent on this variance (...) and on the slope of the transfer function, that allows a sustained activity and the occurrence of chaos when reaching a critical value. Even for weak connectivity and small size, we find numerical results in accordance with the theoretical ones previously established for fully connected infinite sized networks. The route towards chaos is numerically checked to be a quasi-periodic one, whatever the type of the first bifurcation is. Our results suggest that such high-dimensional networks behave like low-dimensional dynamical systems. (shrink)

Internet services, such as review sites, FAQ sites, online auction sites, online flea markets, and social networking services, are essential to our daily lives. Each Internet service aims to promote information exchange among people who share common interests, activities, or goods. Internet service providers aim to have users of their services actively communicate through their services. Without active interaction, the service falls into disuse. In this study, we consider that an Internet service has a network externality as its main feature, (...) and we model user behavior in the Internet service with network externality as a dynamic game. In particular, we model the diffusion process of users of an ISNE as an infinite-horizon extensive-form game of complete information in which: each user can choose whether or not to use the ISNE in her/his turn and the network effect of the ISNE depends on the history of each player’s actions. We then apply Markov perfect equilibrium to analyze how to increase the number of active users. We derive the necessary and sufficient condition under which the state in which every player is an active user is the unique Markov perfect equilibrium outcome. Moreover, we propose an incentive mechanism that enables the number of active users to increase steadily. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 257-259 [Access article in PDF] Jesus through Buddhist Eyes: 3rd Conference of European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies, Archabbey St. Ottilien, Germany, February 26-March 1, 1999 John D'Arcy MayIrish School of Ecumenics, DublinThis ambitious conference, attended by well over 100 participants including a number of practitioners of Buddhist meditation from southern Germany and Austria, has put the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies firmly on its feet. (...) Intended mainly for academics working in the field and held entirely in English, the conference, on "Buddhist Perceptions of Jesus," traced various paths from the polemics which characterized relations between Buddhists and Christians well into the century now ending to the remarkable progress made by Buddhist-Christian dialogue in recent decades. The Archabbey of St. Ottilien has itself been the scene of intermonastic exchanges between the Benedictine monks and their Japanese Zen counterparts.The architecture of the conference brought out clearly the distance that has been traveled. Iso Kern (Berne) examined the missionary methodology of the Jesuits in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China. He showed how they preferred to rely on arguments from reason rather than affront the Chinese with the full implications of Christian revelation, treading a thin line between absorption into harmony with Chinese religion as "a special type of Buddhism" and controversy about the uniqueness of Jesus and his redemptive death on the cross. The Christian idea of a Creator who redeems a sinful world by the substitutionary sacrifice of his own Son was so repugnant to Confucian sensibility that the Jesuits chose a different route, though Professor Kern defended them against Pascal's accusation that they 'hid' the scandal of the cross. Heinz Murmel (Leipzig, in a paper read in his absence) sketched the sterile polemics which characterized early Buddhist-Christian encounters in Ceylon/Sri Lanka, while Frank Usarski (São Paulo) analyzed the equally bitter exchanges between early German converts to Buddhism and their Christian opponents. We were to find not only that these controversies are still remembered in Southeast Asia, but that the obstacles to understanding encountered by the Jesuits in China and Japan still cause problems in Buddhist-Christian relations today. [End Page 257]Of fundamental importance to the development of the conference was a difficult paper by Shizuteru Ueda (Kyoto) on "Jesus in Contemporary Japanese Zen." Starting with his teacher Nishitani's presentation on "Nietzsche and Eckhart" to Heidegger's seminar in 1938, Professor Ueda set out to show how both European nihilism and Christian absolutism can be overcome by Nishitani's understanding of s´unyata: "The last ground of 'I am‚' is without ground and groundless." S´unyata is itself subject to s´unyata: nihilism can only be surmounted through nihilism itself. This dynamic relationship between Into-Nothingness and Out-of-Nothingness is Zen's point of access to Paul's characterization of Christian life-out-of death: "I live no more, Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). Confronted by the question "Who said this?" as Nishitani confronted his Christian friend Muto, the Christian is challenged to ask whether he or she can actually say it, thereby bearing true witness. Ueda's problem is not with this witness, but with the Christian claim that Jesus is unique, for God is not only infinite Person but infinite Openness (basho).Some of these themes were echoed by two speakers who based themselves on experience rather than philosophy: Karl Schmied, a lay associate of Thich Nhat Hanh, and Than Santikharo Bhikkhu, an American monk at Suan Mokkh and Buddhadasa's translator in the last eight years of his life. Without repudiating his Catholic roots, Schmied said that he had simply found more joy in Buddhism. If Jesus is Son of Man and Son of God non-dualistically, could not the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity be one of non-duality, despite obvious differences (rebirth/ historical uniqueness; no-self/person; emptiness/being). Cannot Jesus be seen as a universal Bodhisattva whose 'center,' is everywhere rather than as God's 'only' son?Santikharo Bhikkhu, who still visits... (shrink)

Based on proposition 28 of Part I of Spinoza's Ethics, I argue that the idea of interdetermination set out there is formed by excluding indetermination and finalism. Spinoza conceives reality as an infinite network of singular interdeterminations without hierarchies or outside. From interdetermination itself the problem arises of what it means to be a finite mode of God. This problem, however, is more fully resolved through the notion of 'absolute necessity of relation'. Once we have these conceptual tools, we (...) can understand the way in which finitude and absoluteness merge in singular things, making them cognizable with objectivity. But just because all things are knowable, it does not mean that we can know them all. For the power of our understanding is also limited. Affirming the knowability of all things and the limitation of our capacity to know, Spinoza challenged both irrationalistic scepticism and the mistake of human thought for the infinite understanding of God. (shrink)

The ontology of Bohmian mechanics includes both the universal wave function and particles. Proposals for understanding the physical significance of the wave function in this theory have included the idea of regarding it as a physically-real field in its 3N-dimensional space, as well as the idea of regarding it as a law of nature. Here we introduce and explore a third possibility in which the configuration space wave function is simply eliminated—replaced by a set of single-particle pilot-wave fields living in (...) ordinary physical space. Such a re-formulation of the Bohmian pilot-wave theory can exactly reproduce the statistical predictions of ordinary quantum theory. But this comes at the rather high ontological price of introducing an infinite network of interacting potential fields which influence the particles’ motion through the pilot-wave fields. We thus introduce an alternative approach which aims at achieving empirical adequacy with a more modest ontological complexity, and provide some preliminary evidence for optimism regarding the program of trying to replace the configuration space wave function with a set of fields in ordinary physical space. (shrink)

This article shows that Rabbi Pinchas Elijah Hurwitz, a major eighteenth-century kabbalist, Orthodox rabbi and Enlightenment thinker, who merged Lurianic Kabbalah with Kantian philosophy, attempted to describe God and the world in terms of formal grammars and abstract information processes. He resolves a number of Kant's dualistic views by introducing prophecy as a tool that allows a mystic's mind to perform transfinite hypercomputation and to obtain a priori knowledge about things usually known only a posteriori. According to Hurwitz, the reality (...) consists of Divine names, which generate an infinite network of recursive string rewriting systems, some of which are identical to what is known today as Lindenmayer systems. Hurwitz is also one of the first thinkers, who raised questions about non-human and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

The essay takes its point of departure from Monod's reading of dialectical materialism in Chance and Necessity. A passage of Engels's Dialectics of Nature, which identifies Spinoza's concept of causa sui with the Hegelian concept of interaction [Wechselwirkung], provides the opportunity to examine the consequences of Monod's claims more closely. Using Spinoza's philosophy as a litmus test, the essay attempts to demonstrate the debt of Engels's materialism to Hegel's Science of Logic by tracing the development of the concept of Wechselwirkung (...) in classical German philosophy. A profound difference between the Spinozan and Hegelian concepts becomes apparent: while the concept of Wechselwirkung implies a totality present to itself as simultaneity, permitting the flow of a linear, homogenous and empty time upon which stages of development can be inscribed, the concept of causa sui implies a totality without closure, a totality whose eternity is identified with the necessary and infinite network of modal durations. The essay concludes by suggesting that Spinoza's concept of causa sui allows us to rethink the relation between freedom and necessity in the Marxist tradition in conjunctural and aleatory terms. (shrink)

We examine two connectionist networks—a fractal learning neural network (FLNN) and a Simple Recurrent Network (SRN)—that are trained to process center-embedded symbol sequences. Previous work provides evidence that connectionist networks trained on infinite-state languages tend to form fractal encodings. Most such work focuses on simple counting recursion cases (e.g., anbn), which are not comparable to the complex recursive patterns seen in natural language syntax. Here, we consider exponential state growth cases (including mirror recursion), describe a new training (...) scheme that seems to facilitate learning, and note that the connectionist learning of these cases has a continuous metamorphosis property that looks very different from what is achievable with symbolic encodings. We identify a property—ragged progressive generalization—which helps make this difference clearer. We suggest two conclusions. First, the fractal analysis of these more complex learning cases reveals the possibility of comparing connectionist networks and symbolic models of grammatical structure in a principled way—this helps remove the black box character of connectionist networks and indicates how the theory they support is different from symbolic approaches. Second, the findings indicate the value of future, linked mathematical and empirical work on these models—something that is more possible now than it was 10 years ago. (shrink)

A biologically unavoidable sequence is an infinite gender sequence which occurs in every gendered, infinite genealogical network satisfying certain tame conditions. We show that every eventually periodic sequence is biologically unavoidable (this generalizes König's Lemma), and we exhibit some biologically avoidable sequences. Finally we give an application of unavoidable sequences to cellular automata.

Philosophers and social scientists have recently turned to Lewis sender–receiver games to provide an account of how lexical terms can acquire meaning through an evolutionary process. However, the evolution of meaning is contingent on both the particular sender–receiver game played and the choice of evolutionary dynamic. In this paper I explore some differences between models that presume an infinitely large and randomly mixed population and models in which a finite number of agents communicate with their neighbors in a social network. (...) My results show that communication with neighbors is more conducive to the evolution of meaning than communication with strangers. Additionally, I show that the behavior of the system is highly dependent on the topological structure of the social network. I argue that a specific class of networks—small world graphs—is especially conducive to the evolution of meaning. This is because small world graphs have a short characteristic path length while still maintaining a high degree of correlation between neighbors. Since many actual social networks, such as friendship networks and nervous systems, are conjectured to be small world structures, these results indicate that these networks are quite hospitable to the efficient evolution of meaning. (shrink)

A virtually infinite array of new discoveries are bringing increasingly evident transformations to all that we do, how we live, how all of us relate to each other, ourselves and the world. To think about this new time, it is necessary to experience the vertigo of placing our mind at risk. We are immersed in a comparatively new context of existence. A new humanity is being built, and it will thus represent a new society and a unique conception of (...) what a person is. We have established ourselves as the cities we pass through daily, as sets of flows, relations of power and strengths. Like a city, we are also information networks; power fields constantly brought into play, as we connect with spaces in an imbricated and interdependent way. We are a kind of species that, in face of its desire, is capable of putting this very existence at risk; of suicidal artists, kamikazes, who risk themselves and the planet. What is the specificity of this species? What is the possible (psycho)analysis? The aim of this article is to present and articulate the current changes and the absolute artificialism of our species in the transformation of its corporeity that devours and appropriates whatever presents itself, and which produces means and prostheses for the compulsive realization of our fantasies; new realities that increasingly appear on the horizon and affect our daily lives. The mind at risk is the state that enables the craziness of any act of creation. (shrink)

We introduce the notion of complexity, first at an intuitive level and then in relatively more concrete terms, explaining the various characteristic features of complex systems with examples. There exists a vast literature on complexity, and our exposition is intended to be an elementary introduction, meant for a broad audience. -/- Briefly, a complex system is one whose description involves a hierarchy of levels, where each level is made of a large number of components interacting among themselves. The time evolution (...) of such a system is of a complex nature, depending on the interactions among subsystems in the next level below the one under consideration and, at the same time, conditioned by the level above, where the latter sets the context for the evolution. Generally speaking, the interactions among the constituents of the various levels lead to a dynamics characterized by numerous characteristic scales, each level having its own set of scales. What is more, a level commonly exhibits ‘emergent properties’ that cannot be derived from considerations relating to its component systems taken in isolation or to those in a different contextual setting. In the dynamic evolution of some particular level, there occurs a self-organized emergence of a higher level and the process is repeated at still higher levels. -/- The interaction and self-organization of the components of a complex system follow the principle commonly expressed by saying that the ‘whole is different from the sum of the parts’. In the case of systems whose behavior can be expressed mathematically in terms of differential equations this means that the interactions are nonlinear in nature. -/- While all of the above features are not universally exhibited by complex systems, these are nevertheless indicative of a broad commonness relative to which individual systems can be described and analyzed. There exist measures of complexity which, once again, are not of universal applicability, being more heuristic than exact. The present state of knowledge and understanding of complex systems is itself an emerging one. Still, a large number of results on various systems can be related to their complex character, making complexity an immensely fertile concept in the study of natural, biological, and social phenomena. -/- All this puts a very definite limitation on the complete description of a complex system as a whole since such a system can be precisely described only contextually, relative to some particular level, where emergent properties rule out an exact description of more than one levels within a common framework. -/- We discuss the implications of these observations in the context of our conception of the so-called noumenal reality that has a mind-independent existence and is perceived by us in the form of the phenomenal reality. The latter is derived from the former by means of our perceptions and interpretations, and our efforts at sorting out and making sense of the bewildering complexity of reality takes the form of incessant processes of inference that lead to theories. Strictly speaking, theories apply to models that are constructed as idealized versions of parts of reality, within which inferences and abstractions can be carried out meaningfully, enabling us to construct the theories. -/- There exists a correspondence between the phenomenal and the noumenal realities in terms of events and their correlations, where these are experienced as the complex behavior of systems or entities of various descriptions. The infinite diversity of behavior of systems in the phenomenal world are explained within specified contexts by theories. The latter are constructs generated in our ceaseless attempts at interpreting the world, and the question arises as to whether these are reflections of `laws of nature' residing in the noumenal world. This is a fundamental concern of scientific realism, within the fold of which there exists a trend towards the assumption that theories express truths about the noumenal reality. We examine this assumption (referred to as a ‘point of view’ in the present essay) closely and indicate that an alternative point of view is also consistent within the broad framework of scientific realism. This is the view that theories are domain-specific and contextual, and that these are arrived at by independent processes of inference and abstractions in the various domains of experience. Theories in contiguous domains of experience dovetail and interpenetrate with one another, and bear the responsibility of correctly explaining our observations within these domains. -/- With accumulating experience, theories get revised and the network of our theories of the world acquires a complex structure, exhibiting a complex evolution. There exists a tendency within the fold of scientific realism of interpreting this complex evolution in rather simple terms, where one assumes (this, again, is a point of view) that theories tend more and more closely to truths about Nature and, what is more, progress towards an all-embracing ‘ultimate theory’ -- a foundational one in respect of all our inquiries into nature. We examine this point of view closely and outline the alternative view -- one broadly consistent with scientific realism -- that there is no ‘ultimate’ law of nature, that theories do not correspond to truths inherent in reality, and that successive revisions in theory do not lead monotonically to some ultimate truth. Instead, the theories generated in succession are incommensurate with each other, testifying to the fact that a theory gives us a perspective view of some part of reality, arrived at contextually. Instead of resembling a monotonically converging series successive theories are analogous to asymptotic series. -/- Before we summarize all the above considerations, we briefly address the issue of the complexity of the {\it human mind} -- one as pervasive as the complexity of Nature at large. The complexity of the mind is related to the complexity of the underlying neuronal organization in the brain, which operates within a larger biological context, its activities being modulated by other physiological systems, notably the one involving a host of chemical messengers. The mind, with no materiality of its own, is nevertheless emergent from the activity of interacting neuronal assemblies in the brain. As in the case of reality at large, there can be no ultimate theory of the mind, from which one can explain and predict the entire spectrum of human behavior, which is an infinitely rich and diverse one. (shrink)

We live in a universe infinitely more complex than that which is evoked by the word reality. Only the desire for pragmatic knowledge allows us to believe that things are simply that which they are: the bearers of material qualities by which we distinguish or manipulate them. We give them names, which designate their genre, and make use of them according to our fancy. They are tools or means which refer us to other things to which they have a relation. (...) When knowledge is elevated to a science, in doing away with appearances we discover their structure, and new types of relations, expressed in the language of figures and numbers, beyond which there is only the possibility of other structures and other numbers. The object is explained either by the finiteness of human needs or by the network of scientific relations. It is what it is, nothing more. (shrink)

»Anhänglichkeiten« gehören nicht zum Vokabular der Handlungstheorie. Sie sind zugleich unbestimmte und fesselnde Fäden in Bünden, die alle irgendetwas bewirken, aber als einzelne nicht selbstgenügsam, nicht unabhängig sind. Anstatt eindeutig zwischen bestimmenden und abhängigen Dingen zu unterscheiden, geht der Beitrag zu einer weniger scharfen, aber unendlich produktiveren Ansatz über, der bestimmende Handlungen als ein in Netzwerken disseminiertes faire faire ([jemanden etwas] tun machen) auffasst. Wesentlich wäre dann nicht, sich von »Anhänglichkeiten« zu befreien, sondern die guten von den schlechten zu trennen, (...) nicht indem man auf großartige Prinzipien zurückgreift, sondern indem man sich der immanenten Gerechtigkeit der Dinge überlässt. Aber wie wäre die Qualität einer »Anhänglichkeit« zu beurteilen? Der Beitrag sucht anhand von Beispiel-fällen von Sportlern, Drogensüchtigen und Musikliebhabern eine Art »anhänglicher« Moral zu entwickeln, die aus dem Gewebe unhintergehbarer Bindungen gemacht wäre. »Attachments« do not belong to the vocabulary of action. Incommensurable and situational, they are at once constraining and indeterminate, deployed in bonds that all do something, but among which none is independent for itself. Instead of distinguishing clearly between dependent and determining things, the paper passes to a less trenchant but infinitely more productive approach to distributed action, conceived as a (make [someone] do [something]) disseminated in networks. The essential, then, is not to liberate oneself from the attachments, but to sort the good ones from the bad, by leaning not on grand overarching principles but on the immanent justice in things. But how can we judge the quality of an »attachment«? Drawing on cases of sportsmen, drug addicts, and music lovers, this contribution aims to clarify what an »attached« morality could look like, a morality which would be made of the fabric of uncircumventable ties. (shrink)

In the Thirties, European personalism was an inspirational philosophical movement, with its birthplace in France, but with proponents and sympathizers in many other countries as well. Following the Second World War, Christian-Democratic politicians translated personalistic ideas into a political doctrine. Sometimes they still refer to personalism, but most often this reference is little more than a nostalgic salute. In the mainstream of Anglo-Saxon political philosophy, there are practically no references to personalistic philosophers. Is personalism exhausted as a philosophy or political (...) ideology? Yes and no. Paul Ricoeur, writing in Esprit , summed up the situation like this: “personalism is dead”, but he was careful to mention a “return of the person”. Indeed, no tradition or movement can simply perpetuate itself. It must, in order to continue making history, always abolish itself as a `system' so as to make room for the unsaid and the unthought in its tradition, an idea that Mounier also fervently believed in.To better situate the current discussion of personalism, however, it is necessary to look back to the original characteristics of personalism in the Thirties. As a response to the crisis provoked by the economic depression, failing democracy and existential uncertainty, there arose in France a number of `non-conformist movements' who labelled themselves personalistic. They did not constitute a unified movement with a commonly shared theory. It was rather a collection of `personalisms'. The article by the historian Christian Roy about the ecological personalism of Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul sheds interesting light on the multiple origins of French personalism, which is all too easily identified with the work of Maritain and Mounier alone. The work of Jacques Maritain, and the network of writers and artists surrounding him, undoubtedly remains a significant historical reference point when speaking of personalism.Another group was formed around Alexandre Marc who, along with Raymond Aron, Arnaud Dandieu, Daniel-Rops and Denis de Rougemont, kept the journal Ordre Nouveau alive for five years . They elaborated the idea of federalism as a way out of liberalism and totalitarianism. The most important and durable group, however, was formed by the movement and journal Esprit, founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier and George Izard. In order to stress the historical importance of Esprit, we are including here a testimony from 1982, written by Paulette Mounier, the founder's wife, in which she looks back on 50 years of Esprit. After the war, some new and related groups formed, such as Economy and Humanism around Louis-Joseph Lebret. An historical survey of the dissemination of personalistic centres and movements, not only in France but over all of Europe, would be material for a stimulating historical research project. In this issue, there will also be mention of, among others, the Prague personalism of Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel, the Leuven personalism of Louis Janssens, and the Polish personalism of Tadeusz Mazowiecki and others. But this list is far from exhaustive.What unites these various branches of the personalistic tree? It is a certain conception — or better perhaps: a certain attitude to the human person. Personalists were not seeking in the first instance a new academic theory about the person, but rather a practical philosophy of engagement. In the Thirties, quite a few personalists finished their university studies and chose not for an academic career but for non-conformist, demanding and vulnerable commitments with limited financial means. What motivated them? Primarily a strong sense that the time in which they were living was a turning point, one which was being ignored by the academic world. They interpreted the diverse economic, political and cultural crisis phenomena as symptoms of a more global crisis of civilization which demanded a response through radical change.Hence a certain rhetoric of a `new order', `spiritual revolution', `radical reform' and `rebirth'. But the rhetoric was supported by innovative ideas regarding political federalism, the third way economy and human alienation. The motivation for all this derived from a strong commitment to defend the concrete human person against the arrogance of systems, bureaucracies and ideologies, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of individualism — the reason why some personalists always qualified personalism as `communitarian'.In fact, much of what presents itself as communitarian philosophy today is a retrieval of personalistic themes from the Thirties applied to the current situation, a situation which is also interpreted by communitarians as a global cultural crisis. One should not forget, however, that alongside and sometimes opposed to the communitarian theme with its call to bring people back to their communitarian roots, personalists underscored the priority of metaphysics over politics, a theme that can likewise be found in the writings of personalistic dissidents in Eastern Europe. In the words of Mounier in Qu'est-ce que le personnalisme : “personalism combines faith in a certain human absolute with a progressive historical experience”.To what extent is personalistic thinking still relevant today? Its current relevance will be examined in three ways. In the first section, a number of articles are presented which illustrate the active presence of personalistic thought in the domains of politics and applied ethics. Vaclav Havel sent one of his recent addresses in which he links the theme of human rights with that of a world spirituality. His article is preceded by an introduction by Guido Van Heeswijck, situating Prague personalism.The need for an orientational philosophy of the person is not only manifest today in the political arena. Developments in economics, ecology, health care, the media, technology and in the world of the professions have had an extraordinarily large impact on the human person's lifeworld. The whole area of applied ethics requires a dynamic and orientational concept of the person. The contributions by Paul Schotsmans and Luk Bouckaert are seeking a personalistic point of departure for applied ethics. The more historical article by Christian Roy on ecological personalism has been included in the first section because it can be inspiring for an environmental ethics.The second section is more philosophical. To what extent does the `personalistic' conception of the person put forward in the Thirties still have any relevance today, following the waves of structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodernism? Paul Ricoeur's article, Approaching the Human Person — originally published in Esprit in 1990 and now translated for the first time — can be seen as a reference text. Ricoeur shows in what sense the concept of the person must be broadened in order to continue functioning. The person as `narrative identity' can only write history through the medium of language and institutions. Starting from very different assumptions, the articles by Louis Janssens & Joseph Selling and the analysis of Roland Breeur also explore the idea that a person is what he is only when his identity is opened up, touched by an exteriority or conceived as a focal point . It is this radical openness and vulnerability that gives the person its historical and transcendent dynamic, and prevents us from encapsulating it in existing systems, theories and power relations. The connection with Emmanuel Levinas and his hermeneutic of the idea of the infinite is an obvious one to draw.The third section contains a historical survey in which a number of active `personalistic' centres and journals are presented.Various European centres that appeal explicitly to some form of personalistic thinking were posed the following questions: What is the main historical reference to personalism at your centre? and How do you implement, today, a personalist credo in your work? John Dick organized the responses to these questions under a number of headings. This survey aims to provide not so much an exhaustive but a representative picture of the ways in which European personalism lives on as a mosaic of centres engaged in everyday history. (shrink)

What is life? Is it just the biologically familiar--birds, trees, snails, people--or is it an infinitely complex set of patterns that a computer could simulate? What role does intelligence play in separating the organic from the inorganic, the living from the inert? Does life evolve along a predestined path, or does it suddenly emerge from what appeared lifeless and programmatic? In this easily accessible and wide-ranging survey, Claus Emmeche outlines many of the challenges and controversies involved in the dynamic and (...) curious science of artificial life. Emmeche describes the work being done by an international network of biologists, computer scientists, and physicists who are using computers to study life as it could be, or as it might evolve under conditions different from those on earth. Many artificial-life researchers believe that they can create new life in the computer by simulating the processes observed in traditional, biological life-forms. The flight of a flock of birds, for example, can be reproduced faithfully and in all its complexity by a relatively simple computer program that is designed to generate electronic "boids." Are these "boids" then alive? The central problem, Emmeche notes, lies in defining the salient differences between biological life and computer simulations of its processes. And yet, if we can breathe life into a computer, what might this mean for our other assumptions about what it means to be alive? The Garden in the Machine touches on every aspect of this complex and rapidly developing discipline, including its connections to artificial intelligence, chaos theory, computational theory, and studies of emergence. Drawing on the most current work in the field, this book is a major overview of artificial life. Professionals and nonscientists alike will find it an invaluable guide to concepts and technologies that may forever change our definition of life. (shrink)

We present a metapopulation dynamic model for the diffusively-coupled rock-paper-scissors game with mutation in scale-free hierarchical networks. We investigate how the RPS game changes by mutation in scale-free networks. Only the mutation from rock to scissors occurs with rate μ. In the network, a node represents a patch where the RPS game is performed. RPS individuals migrate among nodes by diffusion. The dynamics are represented by the reaction-diffusion equations with the recursion formula. We study where and how species (...) coexist or go extinct in the scale-free network. We numerically obtained the solutions for the metapopulation dynamics and derived the transition points. The results show that, with increasing mutation rate μ, the extinction of P species occurs and then the extinction of R species occurs, and finally only S species survives. Thus, the first and second dynamical phase transitions occur in the scale-free hierarchical network. We also show that the scaling law holds for the population dynamics which suggests that the transition points approach zero in the limit of infinite size. (shrink)

I BEGIN WITH A PUZZLE of sorts. Time is one; space is two—at least two. Time comes always already unified, one time. Thus we say “What time is it now?” and not “Which time is it now?” We do not ask, “What space is it?” Yet we might ask: “Which space are we in?”. Any supposed symmetry of time and space is skewed from the start. If time is self-consolidating—constantly gathering itself together in coherent units such as years or hours (...) or semesters or seasons— space is self-proliferating. Take, for example, the dimensionality of space. One dimension in space is represented by a point or a line, whose radically reduced format mocks the extensiveness of cosmic space. Two dimensions, as in a plane figure, also falls far short of our sense that space spreads out indefinitely far beyond the perceiving subject. Only with three dimensions do we begin to approach an adequation between the structure and the sense of space. For then the subject is surrounded by something sufficiently roomy in which to live and move. Indeed, as Aristotle, Kant, and Merleau-Ponty all remark, the three-dimensionality of space directly reflects our bodily state, that is, the fact that as upright beings three perpendicular planes implicitly meet and intersect in us. Even here, proliferation abounds: our bilateral symmetry means that each dimension is doubled: one vertical plane bifurcates into “up” and “down,” the other vertical plane into “front” and “back,” and the horizontal plane into “right” and “left.” Thus subject-centered space is triple, only to be redoubled. Further, if we think of spatiality not as body-based but as locatory—as determined by landmarks and other locales in the environment—the proliferation is more striking still. There are the four cardinal directions, which themselves split easily into the thirty two points of a compass. Nor need we be so arithmetically well-rounded. Even apart from fancy mathematical models of n –dimensional space, and recent technological instantiations of virtual space, there is no end to the number or ways in which we can be oriented in space—in accordance with what Deleuze and Guattari call “the variability, the polyvocity of directions” by which we can move in any given spatial scene. Beyond direction, however, is place. Heidegger remarks that “space has been split up into places.” The fact is that we continually find ourselves immersed in a multiplex spatial network whose nodal points are supplied by particular places. If space is infinitely large, place is indefinitely many. (shrink)

Adaptive phenotypic plasticity allows organisms to cope with environmental variability, and yet, despite its adaptive significance, phenotypic plasticity is neither ubiquitous nor infinite. In this review, we merge developmental and population genetic perspectives to explore costs and limits on the evolution of plasticity. Specifically, we focus on the role of modularity in developmental genetic networks as a mechanism underlying phenotypic plasticity, and apply to it lessons learned from population genetic theory on the interplay between relaxed selection and mutation (...) accumulation. We argue that the environmental specificity of gene expression and the associated reduction in pleiotropic constraints drive a fundamental tradeoff between the range of plasticity that can be accommodated and mutation accumulation in alternative developmental networks. This tradeoff has broad implications for understanding the origin and maintenance of plasticity and may contribute to a better understanding of the role of plasticity in the origin, diversification, and loss of phenotypic diversity. (shrink)

In traditional societies, knowledge is organized in hierarchical chains through which authority is legitimated by custom. Because the majority of the population is illiterate, sacred knowledge is conveyed orally and ritualistically, but the ultimate source of religious authority is typically invested in the Book. The hadith are a good example of traditional practice. These chains of Islamic knowledge were also characteristically local, consensual and lay, unlike in Christianity, with its emergent ecclesiastical bureaucracies, episcopal structures and ordained priests. In one sense, (...) Islam has no church. While there are important institutional differences between the world religions, network society opens up significant challenges to traditional authority, rapidly increasing the flow of religious knowledge and commodities. With global flows of knowledge on the Internet, power is no longer embodied and the person is simply a switchpoint in the information flow. The logic of networking is that control cannot be concentrated for long at any single point in the system; knowledge, which is by definition only temporary, is democratically produced at an infinite number of sites. In this Andy Warhol world, every human can, in principle, have their own site. While the Chinese Communist Party and several Middle Eastern states attempt to control this flow, their efforts are only partially successful. The result is that traditional forms of religious authority are constantly disrupted and challenged, but at the same time the Internet creates new opportunities for evangelism, religious instruction and piety. The outcome of these processes is, however, unknown and unknowable. There is a need, therefore, to invent a new theory of authority that is post-Weberian in reconstructing the conventional format of charisma, tradition and legal rationalism. (shrink)

In this essay we focus on our vast web of beliefs that serves us as a rough and ready map of reality, generated more to give us comfort and confidence in an intimidating world than to be accurate. Maps of reality can never be accurate in any ultimate sense since reality itself is a convoluted entity that can only be accessed in never- ending layers. Our repertoire of beliefs, generated compulsively in the mind, span a huge spectrum in respect of (...) ties to affect and emotions on the one hand and of their credibility in depicting reality on the other. The interaction between our affect-based psychological needs, our need for having a sound comprehension of reality, and the infinitely tangled reality itself, leads to the generation of a large diversity of types of beliefs, where these get revised under the impact of reality by overcoming the restrain- ing effect of emotions in diverse ways and over diverse time scales—interestingly, the ‘reality’ includes the complex repertoire of affect and emotions itself that may, in cer- tain cases, generate the impact for our beliefs to change. Beliefs represented by small clusters in our belief network (see below) are commonly prone to frequent revision in a more or less random manner, though there are beliefs acquired in early life that are intransigent to change because of overriding ties to emotions. Beliefs represented by larger clusters are comparatively durable, and their revision has a systematic aspect to it because of a greater role of evidence-based factors—however,the evidence may, once again, be tied with emotions and beliefs oriented away from reason. Finally, there are prepotent beliefs that are resistant to change even over a lifetime. Often, these beliefs get revised only if we engage with our own selves, looking at conflicting forces within ourselves. In this context, we refer to narratives that are self-reinforcing and exercise almost a mesmerizing influence on us. In all this, there is a dual role of ‘rationality’ that needs being attended to in describing and explaining belief revision—rationality is not exclusively based on evidence and reason, but includes the implicit operation of affect and emotions too. (shrink)

J. G. Taylor advances an empirically testable local neural network model to understand the neural correlates of phenomenal experience. Taylor's model is better able to explain the presence and unity of phenomenal consciousness which support the idea that consciousness is coherent, undivided, and centered. However, Taylor fails to offer a satisfactory explanation of the nonlinear relationship between local and global neural systems. In addition, the ontological assumptions that PE is immediate, intrinsic, and incorrigible limit an understanding of the different experiential (...) forms consciousness takes during neurobehavioral development. Recent studies suggest that neurobehavioral development is discontinuous and that judgment emerges under conditions of uncertainty to render feeling and perception in equivalent terms of energy and behavior. Approaching the problem of phenomenal experience from a developmental perspective may help resolve the paradox of feeling infinitely close as well as distant from one's self. (shrink)

For the past thirty years or so we have witnessed the greatest period—at least for France—in the history of thinking about literature; I want first of all to stress this point, adding, however, that despite this fact problems of fundamental significance still seem to me to have been poorly raised.Among these is the problem of how to read a work. And yet, it is not as though reading has not been the object of continual attention, from the American fascination after (...) the war with “close reading” to the work of the deconstructionists: a revolution has taken place that has made reading the very center of its concern. Indeed, today, we think we can recognize in the structure of a text, in the relation between its words, a reality that is much more reliable and tangible than the meaning that runs along the surface, or than the author’s intention, or even than the author’s very being, the idea of which has been rendered problematical to the point of dissolution by the ambiguities inherent in his simplest utterances. It is not the writer who is real, it is his language—which is neither true nor false, signifying only itself. What is more, it is infinite; its forms and effects are disseminated everywhere in a book without ever being able to be totalized: and because of this, reading has a more clearly creative function than ever before—that is, of course, if readers make themselves attentive to all the levels in the depths of the text and bring them as much as they can into the various networks of their analyses. Reading has become a responsibility, a contribution, equal in its way to writing, and moreover it has now become an end in itself, since those who read need not judge themselves more real, more present in their relation to themselves, than the writer. And so, from this point of view, it would seem difficult to say that the problem of reading has been neglected by contemporary criticism. Yves Bonnefoy is professor of comparative poetics at the Collège de France in Paris. He is the author of five books of poetry, including the recent Ce qui fut sans lumière . Bonnefoy is also a distinguished translator of English poets, such as Donne and Shakespeare, Keats and Yeats. His books of criticism include Rimbaud par lui-même ; Rome 1630: l’horizon du premier baroque ; Le Nuage rouge ; L’Improbable et autres essays ; La Verité de parole . He is the editor of the Dictionnaire des Mythologies et des Religions des sociétés traditionelles et du monde antique and of the forthcoming Dictionnaire des poétiques. He received the French Prix Goncourt for poetry in 1987 and the Bennett Award in 1988. John Naughton is associate professor of romance literatures at Colgate University. He is the author of a critical study of Yves Bonnefoy called The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy and the editor of a volume of Bonnefoy’s essays in translation entitled The Act and the Place of Poetry . His translation of Bonnefoy’s Ce qui fut sons lumière and his book on Louis-René des Forêts will appear in 1991. (shrink)

A. N. Turing’s 1936 concept of computability, computing machines, and computable binary digital sequences, is subject to Turing’s Cardinality Paradox. The paradox conjoins two opposed but comparably powerful lines of argument, supporting the propositions that the cardinality of dedicated Turing machines outputting all and only the computable binary digital sequences can only be denumerable, and yet must also be nondenumerable. Turing’s objections to a similar kind of diagonalization are answered, and the implications of the paradox for the concept of a (...) Turing machine, computability, computable sequences, and Turing’s effort to prove the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem, are explained in light of the paradox. A solution to Turing’s Cardinality Paradox is proposed, positing a higher geometrical dimensionality of machine symbol-editing information processing and storage media than is available to canonical Turing machine tapes. The suggestion is to add volume to Turing’s discrete two-dimensional machine tape squares, considering them instead as similarly ideally connected massive three-dimensional machine information cells. Three-dimensional computing machine symbol-editing information processing cells, as opposed to Turing’s two-dimensional machine tape squares, can take advantage of a denumerably infinite potential for parallel digital sequence computing, by which to accommodate denumerably infinitely many computable diagonalizations. A three-dimensional model of machine information storage and processing cells is recommended on independent grounds as better representing the biological realities of digital information processing isomorphisms in the three-dimensional neural networks of living computers. (shrink)

The connections between forms of code and coding and the many crises that currently afflict the contemporary world run deep. Code and crisis in our time mutually define, and seemingly prolong, each other in ‘infinite branching graphs’ of decision problems. There is a growing academic literature that investigates digital code and software from a wide range of perspectives –power, subjectivity, governmentality, urban life, surveillance and control, biopolitics or neoliberal capitalism. The various strands in this literature are reflected in the (...) papers that comprise this special issue. They address topics ranging from social networks, mass media, financial markets and academic plagiarism to highway engineering in relation to the dynamics and diversity of crises. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this essay is to highlight and explore some of the underlying themes connecting codes and codings and the production and apprehension of ‘crisis’. We analyse how the ever-increasing intermediation of contemporary life by codes of various kinds has been closely shadowed by a proliferation of crises. We discuss three related aspects of the coupling of code and crisis (signification, performativity and excess) running across these seemingly diverse topics. We and the other contributors in this special issue seek to go beyond the restricted (and often restricting) understanding of code as the language of machines. Rather, we view code qua programs and algorithms as epitomizing a much broader phenomenon. The codes that we live, and that we live by, also tell us about the ways in which the ‘will to power’ and the 'will to knowledge' tend to be enacted in the contemporary world. (shrink)

Computationalism, a specie of functionalism, posits that a mental state like pain is realized by a ‘core’ computational state within a particular causal network of such states. This entails that what is realized by the core state is contingent on events remote in space and time, which puts computationalism at odds with the locality principle of physics. If computationalism is amended to respect locality, then it posits that a type of phenomenal experience is determined by a single type of computational (...) state. But a computational state, considered by itself, is of no determinate type—it has no particular symbolic content, since it could be embedded in any of an infinite number of algorithms. Hence, if locality is respected, then the type of experience that is realized by a computational state, or whether any experience at all is realized, is under-determined by the computational nature of the state. Accordingly, Block’s absent and inverted qualia arguments against functionalism find support in the locality principle of physics. If computationalism denies locality to avoid this problem, then it cannot be considered a physicalist theory since it would entail a commitment to phenomena, like teleological causation and action-at-a-distance, that have long been rejected by modern science. The remaining theoretical alternative is to accept the locality principle for macro events and deny that formal, computational operations are sufficient to realize a phenomenal mental state. (shrink)

This paper uses famous problems from philosophy of science and philosophical psychology—underdetermination of theory by evidence, Nelson Goodman’s new riddle of induction, theory-ladenness of observation, and “Kripkenstein’s” rule-following paradox—to show that it is empirically impossible to reliably interpret which functions a large language model (LLM) AI has learned, and thus, that reliably aligning LLM behavior with human values is provably impossible. Sections 2 and 3 show that because of how complex LLMs are, researchers must interpret their learned functions largely in (...) terms of empirical observations of their outputs and network behavior. Sections 4–7 then show that for every “aligned” function that might appear to be confirmed by empirical observation, there is always an infinitely larger number of “misaligned”, arbitrarily time-limited functions equally consistent with the same data. Section 8 shows that, from an empirical perspective, we can thus never reliably infer that an LLM or subcomponent of one has learned any particular function at all before any of an uncountably large number of unpredictable future conditions obtain. Finally, Section 9 concludes that the probability of LLM “misalignment” is—at every point in time, given any arbitrarily large body of empirical evidence—always vastly greater than the probability of “alignment.”. (shrink)

Thomas Reid's Essays on the Active Powers presents what is probably the most thoroughly developed version of agent-causal libertarianism in the modern canon. While commentators today often acknowledge Reid's contribution, they typically focus on what appears to be a serious problem for the view: Reid appears to commit himself to a position according to which acting freely would require an agent to engage in an infinite number of exertions of active power. In this essay, we maintain that, properly understood, (...) Reid's version of agent-causal libertarianism generates no regress of exertion. Our discussion begins by presenting Reid's account of free action and why it appears vulnerable to a worrisome regress. We then consider three attempts to address the regress in the contemporary literature offered by William Rowe, Gideon Yaffe, and James Van Cleve, which we find unsatisfactory. We then develop a solution to the worry—one that takes very seriously both what Reid means by an ‘efficient’ cause and his appeal to normative features when explaining action. We call it the ‘networked capacity’ view. (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The Darker (...) Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 85-102 [Access article in PDF] Culture in the Disk Drive Computationalism, Memetics, and the Rise of Posthumanism Stephen Dougherty Ever since Descartes argued that there are striking similarities between a man and a clock, humanism has been in a state of crisis. To put it more pointedly, humanism has always been in a state of crisis, ever since it emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (...) as a constellation of beliefs that made man rather than God the measure of all things. Thus, since we are arguably witnesses now to the eclipse of the humanist tradition, we might take some comfort (if any is desired) in considering that if we have failed the ideal of humanism, it has also failed us. From the beginning its borders were too porous, its boundaries too ill defined. For even as man turned himself into a god, he increasingly began to resemble a machine.In terms of bodily representation, our machinic evolution through the last four centuries culminates in the figure of the cyborg; and if we have already become posthuman, as N. Katherine Hayles suggests, then the cyborg stands as the iconic pop culture figure of our epochal transformation. But you don't need electronic prosthetic devices attached to your body or silicon chips implanted in your head to be posthuman. As Hayles argues, "[w]hether or not interventions have been made on the body, new models of subjectivity emerging from such fields as cognitive science and artificial life imply that even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman" [4]. What counts especially, according to Hayles, is not the body/machine interface but how we conceptualize the workings of the mind/brain.In the humanist tradition signalled by Descartes, the subject is an I, an ego that is master of itself, a unified consciousness thinking itself. Before it is anything else, the Cartesian subject is a function of thought—ineffable and immaterial, and partaking in its nature of the divine and ineffable spirit that guarantees its communication with the material world. Thus, even though God has always been in the process of disappearing through the centuries since the Renaissance, spirit hasn't. Humanism never abandoned the concept of a spiritualized man, registering at the least a dissatisfaction with science's conventional claim to the possession of special and superior knowledge, and until quite recently dualism of one variety or another has been the normative philosophical attitude.But in posthumanism matters are different. To begin with, as Hayles puts it, "computation rather than possessive individualism is taken as the ground of being" [34]. Human consciousness is no longer that which thinks itself into its own unity, a mysterious phenomenon of infinite reflexivity that would become the central subject of, and the central problem for, modern philosophy. In fact, in the posthumanist regime human consciousness is no longer primarily a matter for philosophy, since questions regarding ontology and epistemology are displaced by the question of functionality. Cognitive processes are turned into syntactical operations similar to those that computers perform, 1 [End Page 85] and consciousness is reduced to mere epiphenomena of those machinic operations. 2Further, the cognitive functions of posthuman subjectivity are dispersed among a complex network of interrelated systems and subsystems (modules) responsible for receiving and interpreting data. 3 Consciousness thus loses the holistic unity it had possessed with a considerable degree of consensus from Descartes up to the behavioralists. Just as significantly, it loses its ineffability. The computationalists do not interrogate the mind as something beyond the grasp of scientific rationality because they do not approach thought as immaterial. Insofar as the brain has become a machine, mind is reduced to matter. In the new posthuman dispensation, then, philosophical dualism gives way to monism.Such an outcome would seem to suggest that the onset of posthumanism represents the ultimate victory for positivism and scientific rationalism in explaining human behavior. As Francis Crick explains in The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, "the aim of science is to explain all aspects of the behavior of our brains, including... (shrink)

One of Leibniz’s most original ideas is his conception of the living individual as a hierarchical network of living beings whose relationships are essential to the proper functioning of its organic body. This idea is also valid to explain any existing order in nature that depends on the set of relationships of living beings that inhabit it. Both ideas are present in the conception of the natural world that Leibniz presents in his Monadology through his idea of biological infinitism. According (...) to this idea, nature consists of infinite theatres where living beings unfold their vital functions. Through this idea Leibniz defines both the biological complexity of nature and the living individual, which is in turn a portion of nature that unfolds from an infinite set of inferior living beings. The thesis that I defend in this work is that this Leibnizian understanding of the living individual and the natural complexity that includes infinite hierarchical levels of individuality has a marked ecological sense, as we would say today. This Leibnizian metaphysics of individuality that we could call biological is also interesting in light of the recent studies in the philosophy of biology. (shrink)

This text includes a series of considerations which were detailed during the event1 organized in 2006 by Emanuel Dimas Pimenta, on the subject of The Spirit of Discovery. These considerations relate to the present situation of contemporary architecture, which has gradually been marked first by the phenomenon of digital information and, more recently, by a biotechnological vision. Although the influence of the former has been firmly established, the latter serves as the inspiration for a mutant generative architecture, and leads us (...) to consider the interface between body, technology and space. Initially this text points out the cultural interference and spatial resonance of the well-established Information Society, reflecting the current life of an urban-architectural space marked by the omnipresence of networks and informational-digital phenomena. Subsequently, the minute scale of the interface and the interaction between the body and technological space become critical questions. On a larger scale, complex, self-organizational dynamics will come to dominate our understanding of the meta-territory of the future. Therefore, the contemporary condition suggests the need for a dialogue between the infinitely large and the infinitely small, within a spirit of discovery regulated by the incompleteness of knowledge within a Godelian consciousness. (shrink)

: When we look at the research done on the history of education, it is possible to come across different ideas about personality-education relation, approaches and theories. Human feelings, thoughts, behaviours, material structure and personality characteristics that are evolving making it necessary to handle him in multi-dimensions. As a result of this situation both in Islamic geography and in the West, many thinkers elaborate the affecting factors on personality development and education, they evaluate the physcial environment and the conditions that (...) change depending on it as an active element influencing personality education. In this our study, we try to put out the ideas that point to the place of physcial environment in personality education of Muhammad Iqbal who has a distinct place in the tradition of Islamic thought with unique ideas about man. In this context, the starting points of our research will be determination the conceptual framework of the personality word and to recognize the physcial environment that Iqbal brings to the agenda in personality education and pointing to the move of the school and the teacher in the personality education process instead of Ikbal's views in connection with the physical environment and to determine the role give place by Iqbal in the physcial environment in terms of its impact on the development of human personality will be the starting points of our research. Summary: The education aims to develop the human being as a whole by the mental characteristics, emotions, personality and spiritual structure. Man is in a network of dialectical relationships with an environment that surrounds him from physical, social and cultural aspects constantly. Personality forms the center of human structure. Therefore throughout history, the way of thinkers, writers, systems and theorists who have developed ideas about education has intersected the concept of personality at some point in the efforts to understand people. The word "personality", which is a infinitive derived from the root of "şhs" which means "ascending, seeing, growing, growing" in Arabic, comes to mean "individuality". The concept of personality, "the structure of a person's whole attributes, attitudes, abilities, appearance and appearance of adaptation to the environment"; "Consistent patterns of behaviors stemming from the individual and intrapersonal processes", "a person's view of other people and their behavior as a whole" etc. differently defined. According to this, it’s possible to say that there is no common definition of the concept of personality, which is the subject of modern psychology and pedagogy. What is the element that has the primary influence in shaping and training the personality is discussed; in this sense, various factors such as "environment, inheritance and cultural values" are emphasized. The history of research on personality education in the West does not go very far. Whereas in the Islamic thought tradition, the examination of laws related to personality is much older and rooted than in the West, and the starting point of these examinations is accepted as the beginning of the analysis of the nafs. Eventually, the reality is that it is a being that can transform the material periphery of a person be accepted. Muhammad Iqbal, a Pakistani thinker, is one of the Islamic thinkers who stand out with their own ideas about personality development and education. Iqbal prefers "human" in education and deals with all these determinative elements in human education because human beings do not live in a space and in general have the characteristics of the material circumstance, culture, understanding and system in which the personality is developed and shaped. To make the people conscious, to prepare actions, to make them equipped; to make arrangements for its change, development and transformation is the common point of education philosophies and understandings in general terms. Accordingly, thinkers have historically dealt with humanity in their approach to education throughout history and moved from its reality. Muhammad Iqbal's view of humanity and imagination is nourished from this point. While putting forth his ideas about humanity, Iqbal has put concepts such as "personality, individuality, self, what is human being ie matter-spirit relation, person-society relation" and his understanding of education has built on this basis. According to Iqbal, education should give individual personality and should show ways of using mind and constructing personality. Iqbal sees personality as the center of the organization of human life and sees the most important goal of education as developing personality. Although individual basis takes, education should not isolate it from the concrete environment. Iqbal strongly opposes the educational attitude which removes the person from the concrete environment. Because human personality has a tendency to invade and dominate the environment. According to Iqbal, this direction must be used in person's personal education. "Concrete environmental knowledge" for personality development is an undeniable reality. The only way to obtain the knowledge of the concrete environment is through the struggle from confrontation to confront with his powers freely. According to İqbal, the most important thing that is indispensable for human beings is to be able to communicate with the concrete environment freely in this process. However, this freedom is not limitless freedom but also includes a certain discipline. It is a concrete environmental relationship that can pass on these principles for human should be seen as an area of activity that allows for a series of observations and experiments in order to build personality According to İqbal, the main thing for the human being is not to adapt to the environment but to dominate it. The constant change in the material world forces the person to rebuild and renew his personality continuously. The most important task to be undertaken human to research material world because nature is created in accordance with human nature. The mind, the senses, the imagination, the desires, the aesthetic values are the most important motivation sources of man in observing and realizing the material world. By observing nature, human beings embrace both the reality of their personality and the divine qualities of its founding elements. In addition, the mental and aesthetic values to be achieved through the discovery of the material circle should be seen as very valuable and important for personality education. The concrete environment, which renews itself again and again with each creation, inspires man to constantly renew himself and to have an active, dynamic personality. Discussing the effects of the school on the personality education perspective, Iqbal takes a stand against an independent, individualized school building. The most important characteristic of Iqbal's dream school is that it can be trained in material and spiritual education. Iqbal recommends implementation in schoools methods such as "project method, learning method by doing, active method" and liken the teacher a skillful gardener who raises children delicately as a delicate flower. According to him, the teacher is a soul architecture that guiding students, removing obstacles in front of their personality development, and not locking their freedoms. Through such teachers, dynamic individuals and perfect people who will discover the secrets of nature, obtain personality integrity and create a new world will surely exist at all times. (shrink)

The prefix “trans-” surrounds “animal” with a pluralizing effect: tranimals. This portmanteau word describes creatures at once real and imagined who traverse taxonomic categories. This essay considers two of many threads of trananimality: the transgenic and the prosthetic. Artist Jodi Clark imagines the Menagerie à Trois as a space for carnal humanimality, where sexual entanglements commingle with chimeric forms. This menagerie à tranimals extends Clark’s ever-expanding Menagerie à Trois by articulating a framework for contemplating and indexing humanimal networks of (...) engineered organisms while simultaneously attending to the agency-in-captivity experienced by prosthetic and transgenic tranimals. The results of genetic interventions, transgenic tranimals have been engineered to serve a range of roles in biomedical research. Prosthetic tranimals are not always born with their modifications, but are instead engaged by other human and non-human animals by way of mechanical devices and symbiotic systems. These physical bonds destabilize concepts of part and whole: synecdoche becomes an important way of conceptualizing the labour performed by tranimals. Tranimals signal entangled relations, framing potentially infinite configurations of cooperation and adaptation. Visitors to this menagerie are encouraged to rethink the ethical and moral space created by becoming with tranimals. (shrink)

Technology is not only an object of philosophical reflection but also something that can change this reflection. This paper discusses the potential of computer-supported argument visualization tools for coping with the complexity of philosophical arguments. I will show, in particular, how the interactive and web-based argument mapping software “AGORA-net” can change the practice of philosophical reflection, communication, and collaboration. AGORA-net allows the graphical representation of complex argumentations in logical form and the synchronous and asynchronous collaboration on those “argument maps” on (...) the internet. Web-based argument mapping can overcome limits of space, time, and access, and it can empower users from all over the world to clarify their reasoning and to participate in deliberation and debate. Collaborative and web-based argument mapping tools such as AGORA-net can change the practice of arguing in two dimensions. First, arguing on web-based argument maps in both collaborative and adversarial form can lead to a fundamental shift in the way arguments are produced and debated. It can provide an alternative to the traditional four-step process of writing, publishing, debating, and responding in new writing with its clear distinction between individual and social activities by a process in which these four steps happen virtually simultaneously, and individual and social activities become more closely intertwined. Second, by replacing the linear form of arguments through graphical representations of networks of inferential relations which can grow over time in an infinite space, these tools do not only allow a clear visualization of structures and relations, but also forms of collaboration in which, for example, participants work on different “construction zones” of larger argument maps, or debates are performed at specific points of disagreement on those maps. I introduce the term synergetic logosymphysis to describe a practice that combines these two dimensions of collaborative- and web-based argument mapping. (shrink)

Lecture Notes On Eric Schmid's "Prospectus to a Homotopic Metatheory of Language" Presented at the Book Release Event at Triest Gallery (NYC) on January 19, 2024 -/- Prospectus to a Homotopic Metatheory of Language by Eric Schmid proposes that mathematics does not involve the discovery of a synthetic a priori. In other words, mathematics is not a stable transcendent object of knowledge. Instead, Schmid defines math as a language that depends on an infinitely large network topology of inferences. Importantly, this (...) metatheory can be applied not just to the disciplinary specific languages of computer & natural science, but also ordinary & public languages. Mathematics is not the discovery of transcendent concepts, but a dynamic evolving language of inquiry. (shrink)

The paper considers main features of two groups of logics for biological devices, called Physarum Chips, based on the plasmodium. Let us recall that the plasmodium is a single cell with many diploid nuclei. It propagates networks by growing pseudopodia to connect scattered nutrients. As a result, we deal with a kind of computing. The first group of logics for Physarum Chips formalizes the plasmodium behaviour under conditions of nutrient-poor substrate. This group can be defined as standard storage modification (...) machines. The second group of logics for Physarum Chips covers the plasmodium computing under conditions of nutrient-rich substrate. In this case the plasmodium behaves in a massively parallel manner and propagates in all possible directions. The logics of the second group are unconventional and deal with non-well-founded data such as infinite streams. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics by Claire CarlisleSanja SärmanCARLISLE, Claire. Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021. 288 pp. Cloth, $29.95; paper, $22.95Spinoza has variously been read as presenting a fully naturalized theology (Steven Nadler), as a secretive Marrano philosopher of immanence cleverly hiding his true allegiances in plain sight (Yirmiyahu Yovel, see also Leo Strauss) and as (...) a God-intoxicated man (Novalis). Rarely have the assessments of a man's religion been so varied and conflicted. In an exemplarily searching spirit, Claire Carlisle explores the issue while keeping the question of what religion is an open one. The book comprises nine chapters—essayistic in form but scholarly in content—devoted to examining the issue from different angles.The leitmotif of Spinoza's religiosity is, for Carlisle, being-in-God, a term of art that denotes at once a metaphysical reality and a spiritual project. We are inevitably in God: This is an ontological as well as a conceptual dependence-relation. Being-in-God is participatory dependence on God's own being. In illuminating the relation between God and non-God, Carlisle draws on the rich Catholic tradition. For example, being in-God means being in another (God) without ever being the other of God, to whom all being belongs. This asymmetrical take on the otherness-relation clearly echoes Nicholaus of Cusa's thoughts about God as non-aliud, and Carlisle cites him, not as an ancestor of Spinozism but as a cotraveler along a certain pathway for understanding God.Although being-in-God is an indisputable reality, it is also a spiritual challenge. Since we are by necessity in-God, the spiritual task will paradoxically consist in becoming what we already are, and thereby gaining freedom-in-necessity.In my view, Carlisle's reading reaps rich fruit from its assumption that ontology and normativity are not, indeed cannot be, sequestrated within Spinoza's thought. Moreover, its study of the affectivity—the qualia, even—of being-in-God presents us with a welcome counterweight to descriptions of Spinoza's system from without. Differently put, for Carlisle, the question "What is it like?" can sensibly be asked about being-in-God. Inspired by Spinoza's earliest work, Carlisle sketches a philosophical diagnosis of the devout person who is compelled ("necessitated") by the work she has to do and therefore enjoys an enviable singularity of purpose: Following Latour and Foucault, Carlisle sees a distinctively spiritual quality in certain modes of attention. Attending to oneself and others as they are in-God instills calm; in other words, on Carlisle's reading, the affective aspect of being-in-God is characterized by being at rest with oneself and others (quies is Latin for "rest"). Her careful reading of the Latin text exposes a network of acquiescentia (and cognate terms) in Spinoza's work, somewhat obfuscated through Curley's English translation, which variously renders the word as "esteem" and "satisfaction": What the text gains in stylistic points, it may lose in spiritual significance. In the Ethics, acquiescentia in se ipso is a kind of self-esteem or self-confidence that becomes religiously poignant when mediated through the insight that one is in God: [End Page 347] Through the realization of being in-God, one's calm yet affective appreciation of oneself becomes indistinguishable both from one's love of God and from God's love of oneself. This is an interesting phenomenal perspective on Spinoza's doctrine of the third kind of knowledge.At times, one could perhaps wish for a more systematic discussion of core concepts, such as that of infinity. For example, Carlisle cites Spinoza's idea that we cannot bridge the infinite distance which separates us from God but does not explicitly discuss how this infinite distance is to be reconciled with ontological intimacy; while we sense the proper response, it is not demonstrated.In the end, Carlisle's work successfully shows that we cannot understand Spinoza's religiosity if we model it after our late-modern concept of religion—a construct that, as the historian Peter Harrison has argued, was... (shrink)

: The article analyzes the features of the doctrine of the church of the outstandingProtestant theologian of the early XXI century Miroslav Volf. Volf's understanding of the church as a reality that preceded the emergence of the individual as a Christian means a radical break with liberal Protestant ideas of the church community as created by the voluntary decision of individuals. But Volf does not share the collectivist idea of ​​the church as an organism in which the individual is completely (...) subjugated to the whole. It is established that Volf creates a communitarian model of the church, in which the church community is understood as the unity of diversity. Unity itself has the character of interpersonal relations. Individuals with different charisms in the community interact with each other like the fellowship of the Three in God. Communitarianism in Volf's ecclesiology as a "middle way" between liberal individualism and total collectivism has all the hallmarks of postliberal theological theory. It is proved that Volf's communitarianism became a creative development of Christian personalism of the XX century with its emphasis on the existential freedom of the individual and the importance of interpersonal relations. Volf succeeded in building ecclesiological communitarianism not so much because of his many specific speculations about the organization of church communities, but because of his vision of personalism. Namely, as we noted above, Volf combines the idea of ​​personality as dependent on its relations with other personalities with the vision of personality as an apophatic secret that is higher than all its properties and charisma. Accordingly, a personality that exists in absolute openness to the influences of other personalities on the one hand, and is absolutely unique on the other, makes possible the existence of a communitarian church community. Volf emphasizes that the catholicity of the individual Christian personality is as necessary as the catholicity of the whole church community. The characterization of the individual as a conciliar presupposes not only the traditional ideal of the integrity of all faculties and the charisma of the individual in his intention to communicate with God, but also the vision of the legitimacy of the inner diversity of the individual. The possible complexity of the identity of the individual is almost infinite, and the willingness to accept it in the community - the main feature of Volf's communitarianism. Similarly, every ecclesial community must be ready to accept as Christian all other ecclesial communities, whatever the peculiarities of their identity. It is clear that such an understanding of catholicity is possible only in Protestantism. As Volf rightly points out, Catholicism presupposes that the ecclesial community must be the local embodiment of the common ecclesial identity of the whole structure, and Orthodoxy emphasizes that a separate community is necessarily identical in identity to the common identity of the church through the Eucharist. Volf's communitarianism allows us to describe church communities and their associations as network structures in which all individuals are active actors whose abilities and charisms are important for the constitution of communities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 153-174 [Access article in PDF] LSDNA: Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence of Biotechnology Richard Doyle I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. —Albert Hofmann on his self-experiment with LSD-25 Finding a place to start is of utmost importance. Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audio tape on the floor of the car in the dark. —Kary Mullis on (...) the invention of Polymerase Chain Reaction 1. Undoing life What happened is this: Once upon a time there was a narrative of vitality. Ok, not a narrative, but an apprehension, a fear, a vision. It didn't have a beginning, middle, or end. It was. Its contours were no more determinable than those of consciousness. Indeed, our consciousness, as humans, was our sole alleged difference from it. From something called "life." We were more than life, but were also, tragically, confined to it. You know the story all too well. Some of its major authors were Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Bichat. Even Shelley.Just because this sudden transformation happened on paper doesn't mean it was easy to endure. Enormous numbers of humans went on tranquilizers just to deal with the effects. Others, elsewhere, knew nothing but rumors. Nonetheless, they became increasingly implicated in its effects, the effects of understanding and experiencing both "life" and "consciousness" as informatic events. Suddenly—and it is sudden, a real surprise—both our vitality and our thought were distributed, scattered across a network and nowhere in particular. Timothy Leary and Francis Crick were speaking the same language, the language of information where the organic and the machinic enfold each other helically and, sometimes, the capacity for replication goes through the ceiling. This new language of information would [End Page 153] introduce a novel response and abyss: the pleasures and hells of eternal replication. The distribution of both life and consciousness enabled a dream of immortality from which we have not yet awakened, as the mere specter of infinite clonal replicants provokes entropies of identity even as it preserves the self from onslaughts of decay. 1In at least one of its characteristics this shift toward an informatic understanding of life is perhaps not really so novel. The seductions of control are hardly, historians of science tell us, foreign to the practices and effects of technoscience. Evelyn Fox Keller makes this point concisely and precisely in her not-quite eponymous essay, "From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death," itself a self-professed sequel to her 1986 "Making Gender Visible." Here the scientific "impulse" is underwritten by a perennial motif that underlies much of scientific creativity, namely, the urge to fathom the secrets of nature and the collateral hope that, in fathoming the secrets of nature, we will fathom (and hence gain control of) our own mortality (Secrets, 29).Surely Keller is correct that the nascent practices of molecular biology were cryptographic in character, an espionage project unknowingly launched by Erwin Schrodinger during the Second World War. Surely it is crucial to this moment that while Schrodinger's 1943 Dublin lectures were introducing audiences to the concept of the code-script, Alan Turing again brilliantly decrypted a modified U-boat code, giving the Allies code superiority for the remainder of the war. 2 But in this segment on that strange growth called "biotechnology," I want to focus on what Keller has called the "collateral" of hope in this cryptographic impulse, namely the collateral equation between inquiry and control, specifically the control of mortality.For is "fathoming" a secret identical to the exercise of control? The very cadence and rhetorical encryption of Keller's formulation here, a general parenthetical syllogistic conclusion within and alongside a hyphenated invocation of particularity, suggest that concepts and practices of secrecy are more unstable than Keller implies with her invocation of Feynman's "disease" of lock picking: "One of my diseases, one of my things in life, is that anything that is secret, I try to undo" (40).For Keller, Feynman's confession is emblematic of a desire to control life and death... (shrink)

One of the great challenges of the modern world is the control and management of complexity. After the infinitely large and the infinitely small, we once again find ourselves confronting an unfathomable infinite?the infinitely complex. With its capability for simulation, the computer has become a macroscope. It helps us understand complexity and act on it more effectively to build and manage the large systems of which we are the cells?companies, cities, economies, societies, ecosystems. Thanks to this macroscope, a new (...) vision of the world is emerging, based on a unified approach to the self-organization and evolution of complex systems. On the basis of this comprehensive vision, it becomes possible to describe the origin of a new form of life on Earth, a planetary macro-organism made up of human beings and machines, networks, and nations?a still-embryonic macro-organism that is trying to live in symbiosis with the planetary ecosystem. This new vision of the world brings together two complementary modes of analysis and action: the analytic method and the systemic approach. It can be called the unified theory of the self-organization and dynamics of complex systems. More concisely, one can propose the term symbionomics to describe the range of phenomena covered by this unified theory. Symbionomics can be defined as the study of the emergence of complex systems through self-organization, self-selection, coevolution, and symbiosis. Symbiotic relationships form through coevolution with other organisms or organizations, and collective properties emerge. This information is transmitted to succeeding generations through the memorization of structures and reproductive and evolutionary mechanisms by means of chemical or electronic coding or by the culture. A complex organization is born. From a symbionomic perspective, it is then possible to trace the essential phases of the emergence of a new form of life on Earth, a macrolife, of which humanity, this time, is not the evolutionary end point, but the starting point and catalyst. (shrink)

June 2022 A Revolutionary New Metaphysics, Based on Consciousness, and a Call to All Philosophers We are in a unique moment of our history unlike any previous moment ever. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. As I write, the planet is in deep trouble, heat, fires, great storms, and record flooding, (...) weather patterns drastic everywhere. Capitalism has been so successful in supplying us with an endless array of consumer items, that we have never noticed there is a cost. But there is a cost, the cost is the very life of the Earth herself, and now the day of reckoning is here. Days of reckoning are most often days of rath. But I am hoping that this is a day of major Awakening over the entire planet. We have caused a crisis so great for the Earth we can hardly get our minds around it. But I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis are ideas, about who and what the Earth is, Ourselves, and what we are here for. I am proposing that this is a call to all philosophy and philosophers to rethink ourselves from the ground up. The human race has never gotten the Earth right and now we must, for the Earth is the true foundation for civilization. We are in deep trouble with the Earth, and it owes to the fact that the great male thinkers never got the Earth right, they could never make the connection between the life of mind and the life of the Earth. I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis we are in are ideas. And that in fact the planet is in the grip of a false metaphysics, and scientific image of nature that really comes most recently from Descartes. His conviction that matter, and with it the Earth, are simply the weighable, the measurable the extended in space and time, utterly devoid of any inner life of mind thoughts or Consciousness. This view of matter and the Earth goes back to the very dawn of thought, Descartes is just its most recent and comprehensive version of things. This view of matter is really a false metaphysics that dominates most of the modern world and underpins the whole scientific image of nature itself. I am proposing this is a false metaphysics and offering a new version of things based on Consciousness. If there is a single idea fueling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something without Consciousness. When you intend to ravage and savage the planet, turn it into consumer items to be converted into money in the bank, first pretend that all of the bright beings in the natural world are devoid of Consciousness, just “things” you do not have to have any conscious about destroying them. I am proposing that this term Consciousness, that has appeared as term and a problem for modern science, is the key to getting ourselves right with the Earth. I propose this new theory for science will ramify into every other disciplines as well, and the ways we think just about everything. This old paradigm based on a false theory of matter, has run its course, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction. We need new ideas, and we need them now. You will find my recent work in the Scientific God Journal under the title: Consciousness as the Organizing Principle, and a very complete version of my arguments for this term Consciousness, along with radical reinterpretation of modern science itself, on the Galileo Commission site. It is a radical moment for all of the thinkers among us, take this as my small contribution to rethinking ourselves in new terms, based on my understanding that the true basis for the whole of Being, the Universe, the Cosmos, and with them Ourselves, is this term Consciousness. And unpack it. And I predict that with this term Consciousness every intractable human problem in both science and the modern world will go down like a line of dominos before it. And so, here are a few new ideas I would offer you. These are the times of the Reappearance of the Feminine, a great Awakening as of Springtime after a long dark and lonely Winter. We are leaving behind us an old civilization based on male dominance, fear lies and control, now in decay, disease, and death disintegrating all around us. We are moving into a whole new civilization based on Love and Truth. A new civilization requires new basic terms values and first principles. And so, I return to Descartes. 1. Just over 300 years ago a young man travelling with the army found himself stranded in a foreign town in a bare room lit by a candle with nothing to do but think. And in a couple of nights Descartes laid the entire thought foundations for modern science and most of the modern world. It isn’t clear that modern philosophers with their funding sources of grants, their graduate students, their reputation and all the perks and privileges of academia can do any better. Descartes claimed there are just two principles in the Universe, Matter and Mind. God was pure mind; human beings were mind and matter. And we are the only ones on the planet with mind. Everything else all of the bright array of beings who share the planet with us are simply matter. And matter? The weighable the measurable the extended in space and time utterly devoid of any inner life of thoughts, feelings, or Consciousness This classification was a boon for developing science. Scientists did not have to worry about any inner life in nature, ideas or Consciousness, they could just set about weighing and measuring, as they have until the present day. But it was a disaster for the Earth. Earth was once worshiped as a Goddess. With Descartes she became almost overnight “things.” Simply commodities and resources, an endless of supply of consumer items, to be turned into money in the bank. And now Descartes concept of matter is up for us. If there is a single idea that is enabling and driving the destruction of the Earth, it is the conviction that Earth is something without Consciousness. This whole scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is driving the destruction of the Earth, and driving us all insane, and it needs to change. Ever since Descartes formulated Dualism, scientists and philosophers have been trying to get rid of it. They have done this by attempting to make matter the fundamental term of reality, and to explain mind or Consciousness in terms of matter. And now, Consciousness has emerged as term and a problem for modern science. 2. The prevailing Universe picture has been mainly based on the belief that Consciousness appears only at the end of evolution in ourselves and some of the higher animals when matter attains “a certain state of complexity” and it is produced by neurons in the brain. But Consciousness is nothing real in itself, the neurons are doing the work, Consciousness is simply a byproduct of neural activity. As William James summed up this position, not his: Consciousness is to the brain as a shadow to the runner, it runs beside him but never influences his stride. And so, the great problem of neuroscience: How do neurons produce Consciousness? So far, no one has been able to say how. All we have is parallelism. Two processes are running in parallel a train of neural events and a train of Consciousness events. And so, which one is primary? The face of neuroscience and much of the modern world is that the neural events are what is really real, Consciousness is secondary. The conviction that Consciousness is something produced by neurons is so deeply held and has been so for so long, that it seems like an obvious fact. It is in fact an assumption and a theory, and it could all well be the other way around. The scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is now up for us. It has enabled the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a unique place in our own evolution where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, there are the best reasons for rethinking Descartes concepts of matter. Scientists and philosophers have been trying to escape dualism by making matter the fundamental term. And now, this has not worked. In a nutshell: The mind body problem, the “hard problem of Consciousness” ---how do neurons in the brain, atoms and molecules give rise to ideas thoughts and feelings and who what and where is the “I” who sees them? And then, the near-death experience. I remind you of the truth of the near-death experience. The body in the bed is brain dead eeg flat, but the patient, pure Consciousness is hovering at the ceiling watching the doctors work over the body below, able to read dials he could not have seen from the bed, sometimes able to events in the corridor beyond the room, all subsequently confirmed by the doctors. Evidence as good as it gets that the patient really was out of his body. And so, the patient is able to see without eyes, hear without ears and to think and remember without a brain. There is not a single scientific principle that can account for this. And I am proposing that the near-death experience is a threshold and a key for a much deeper understanding of the Universe. These three problems are so hard they cannot be solved by present scientific principles and therefore call all present principles and ways of thought into question. When your axioms cannot account for the data, it is time to drop them and find better fundamental terms. We have not been able to solve the problems of Consciousness with the assumption that matter is the most basic and fundamental term. And so, if Cartesian dualism is to be overcome at all, we need to try it the other way around. 3. We are in the position of Copernicus. Remember Copernicus? He was making his calculations on the assumption that the Earth was the center of the Universe until they became so unwieldy that he decided to try it all the other way around. To make the sun the center, the Earth revolving around it. And lo, all of his data fell neatly into place. I am proposing a whole new Universe picture. Evolution makes us continuous with every other being, Consciousness would not be in us if it were not in them also, and then, in the atoms and molecules and cells that make up living beings. I propose to make Consciousness the most basic term and see what follows. I am in fact, proposing a new Copernican Revolution, that Consciousness is the true basis for the Universe and the right fundamental term, for science itself all other disciplines as well, and the whole of the modern world. And I predict that every intractable problem in science or the modern world, will go down like a line of dominos before it. In a nutshell: Consciousness and not matter is “first and fundamental” in the Universe, it is there from the very “Beginning” everything has it and all of the true causalities, the explanatory principles belong to it. Not to matter. What then is matter? All matter is an Appearance of something much more real, Consciousness. All matter is an expression of Consciousness, even the least little bit of matter contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. And so, we revise the scientific image of nature. Science at present is two termed, matter/energy. It needs to become three termed: Matter/energy/Consciousness, with the recognition that all of the basic principles, the true causalities of events, and of the Universe belong to Consciousness. And now physics. To accommodate this new Universe picture physics needs to alter just one term, energy. All energy contains Consciousness, that idea alone will change our world forever. The animals the trees the plants are just as conscious as we are, as is the Earth herself, a continuum of many forms of Consciousness of which our own is one. The Earth consists of interacting and intersecting forms of Consciousness, Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness. A remarkable work has just appeared entitled “Beyond Words What Animals Feel and Think.” Describing in detail how like ourselves all of the animals are. And the more we can see how like us everything else really is, the harder it will be for us to do them all in, in the interest of turning them into consumer items. And so, here is a new principle of understanding, that entails completely new forms of explanation, and a whole new Universe picture to be spelled out in terms of Consciousness and its various properties. This is a Universe that is aware awake and Enspirited throughout. And so, there is only one principle, not two. And so, how does Consciousness work? There is “no mind/body problem.” My Consciousness is aligning the Consciousness of neurons in the brain, that aligns the Consciousness of all other cells in the body, that aligns the Consciousness of molecules and atoms themselves. Mainly from the top down, but also interactive, and not reduction to the purely physical forces. 4. And so, here is a radical new Universe picture, and with it a new way to think about the Universe itself, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. It requires a complete revision of both of the terms of modern science itself. The problem of the modern world owes in deep measure to Descartes concept of matter as something devoid of interior life. But he is only the most powerful and simple expression of a whole tradition of thought that predates him, that goes back to the very dawn of thought itself. It owes to the conviction of both Plato and Aristotle that the Earth was something devoid of reason, or mind, and therefore something to be held in complete contempt. We are emerging from a civilization based on contempt for the Earth, and down the road, it will become contempt for the body, sex, women, the Native people, and people of color everywhere. And so, this entire tradition is now up for us, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction, and we need to get beyond it. I am proposing that this term Consciousness is the way out. The missing piece of the puzzle and the idea whose time has come. And it will enable us to move into a completely new civilization based on respect for the Earth, women, sex, people of color, that honors everyone and has a place for all. Revolutions in science occur when new data show up that cannot be accounted for by existing paradigms (Thomas Kuhns: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Consciousness, and all the properties and problems of Consciousness are just such data, and they compel a new scientific revolution. But we are a scientific age. A new Copernican revolution in science is such as revolution everywhere. And Consciousness is the key to getting every other reality at all levels and depths right as well. It will enable us finally to get the Earth right, get ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. Archimedes: Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. I am proposing a new synthesis among our fundamental terms in which this term Consciousness is the new lynchpin. And so, I return once more to Descartes. Descartes in the Mediations was a dualist, they were two realities interacting in the pineal gland mind and body. But Descartes age was high on “Cartesianisms,” on Descartes concept of matter. Animals were simply cleverly wired machines (Hobbes called them automata). Rumor had it that Descartes followers went about kicking dogs reasoning that their howls were not due to any feelings of pain, but simply the wiring of the machine. We have been doing this to the Earth ever since, and now the Earth is not going to stand for it any longer. It is time we all woke up. There is no matter in Descartes sense of it, or in Plato and Aristotle’s sense of it. This old concept of matter is embedded in all of the crisis and catastrophes---fires, drought, pandemics, over population, the disintegrating economies, our ways of life, capitalism and consumerism themselves. All matter is Enspirited, contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. Now I tell you something about Descartes you may not know. In the Mediations was a dualist, there are minds and bodies. But by the end of his life, he knew the truth. Descartes guided his whole life by these vivid dreams, and toward the end of his life he had this dream: He saw the Universe as a giant machine and in the heart of the machine propelling the whole, was Consciousness. And so, out of the shades and shadows and into the light of day. Here is a renewed and a new science, a new cosmology. And with it, a revolutionary new metaphysics. The whole of the modern world is in the grip of a false metaphysics, based on Descartes theory of matter. Here is a new, and finally true metaphysics based on the single term, Consciousness. 5. And in all my works, I spell out this new metaphysics based on Consciousness, and what it means for how we think about virtually everything: The Universe, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. Of who, what and where Spirit is, that we may connect with Spirit everywhere. There is only one term for the Universe, and not two, this single term Consciousness, that manifests itself in two modes: Consciousness in Form, Consciousness Formless. And so, here is a sketch of what this new term Consciousness really means. For four great aspects of the real, four new cornerstones for a whole new civilization on Earth, based on Love and Truth. A. For the Universe: New causalities, all matter is an expression of Consciousness, awake and aware, Enspirited throughout, which has a place for the causalities of love ideas intent plan and purpose, what Aristotle called final causality, that for the sake of which. And it has a place for subjectivity, the greatest mystery in the whole of the Universe, knowable only in ourselves, but there in everything else as well, bedrock in the chain of causalities. The buck stops here. Here are two very different Universe pictures. The Cartesian Universe consists of things, pushed, and pulled around by the physical forces that function blind. The true Universe consists of selves and not things. Selves at least in ourselves, are organized and focused about an I, an I am, or a sense of self in everything, ever other being dear to itself. Just one aspect of subjectivity. And so, it is Consciousness all the way down, and subjectivity all the way down. Science proceeds on the basis of the negligible of what it can leave out as unimportant. Subjectivity is the ultimate animating principle of the Universe. What Descartes really did was to strip from nature what is most essential about it, its animating principle Consciousness. And so, we come out of a long history of “clunk.” The great male thinkers have killed creation. First in concepts and now in the lived life. And so, after centuries of fruitless search, not all of it in vain, finally, and just in time the true basic principle for the Universe has shown up in virtually all disciplines, this term Consciousness. B. And so, the Earth: What does this term Consciousness really mean for the Earth? It means that all of the bright array of beings around us have Consciousness. And the more we can realize how like us they are, the harder it will be to do them all in. Is this what it really means to be “made in the image of Spirit?” To destroy ever other living being? The god of Genesis is a creator god who has created billions and billions of living forms. Man, taking himself to be made in the image of Spirit has destroyed virtually all of it. The Earth is not things, not commodities and resources, not an endless array of consumer goods. The Earth consists of conscious living spiritual beings like ourselves, who need to be honored and respected, nurtured and cared for, to be Loved. And if the human race can finally pull it off and bring Love here and start helping the Earth rather than destroying her, even our vast numbers now at 8 billion, may not matter. Deeply embedded in the modern world is a false cosmology based on the hitherto useful but ultimately false metaphysics of Descartes. In particular it owes to Descartes concepts of matter, and of the Earth, as something devoid of Consciousness. And now this concept is up for us. If there is a single idea enabling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something devoid of Consciousness. And we all have a vested interest in keeping this false concept in place. When you intend to ravage and savage the Earth, to turn it into consumer items, and money in the bank, first pretend she has no Consciousness that way we need not have any conscious about it. We are in deep trouble with the planet. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, here are a few new guiding principles for the planet, based on Consciousness. Consciousness has field properties. The Earth is Consciousness throughout, connected and interconnected throughout, intersecting and interacting fields of Consciousness of which our own is one. To harm one is to harm all. Only this understanding of the Earth can set our destructive technologies, and capitalism, their goals, and their limits. The real problem with capitalism, and with civilization itself is it has no true understanding of the Earth, all the exquisite networks and webworks that connect all beings with one another. Nor it is about to admit that the Earth is our “life support system,” reason gone insane in the modern world. We are destroying our life support system, capitalism is the full expression of the human death wish in the modern world, and it needs to change. And now, let the barriers between ourselves and all other beings go down. C. And so, Ourselves. This new Universe picture based on Consciousness opens into and has a place for new concepts of human identity. In particular, it has a place for reincarnation, a process whereby one Consciousness dons’ bodies again and again and lays them down. This is a process wholly impossible on materialistic theories. This new view of things puts a higher perspective on Freudian determinism, which is a partial knowing in a greater account. We are something more than the victims of genes drives and childhood. We are immortally eternal evolving spiritual beings who take on a cycle of earthly lives in order to achieve certain goals and abilities, and then, our earthly cycle complete, we depart the Earth plane for other areas of the Universe physical or purely spiritual, to continue our evolution elsewhere. The scientific evidence for reincarnation is increasing on all sides, see for example the work of Michael Newton, a mainstream scientist forced to confront the fact of reincarnation. A completely new reincarnational picture is now emerging everywhere. We choose our parents for abilities we could acquire through them. We all come here with reasons for being here, and we all have free will, an original property of Consciousness, and we work out our issues accordingly. We all come here with the same reason for being here. It is to experience the Earth plane and human society at all levels and depths, in every social role, every climate, both sexes male and female and in all races. We are all here to acquire a deep understanding of the Earth plane with all its challenges and all of its present problems. We are not here to devour and consume the Earth, but to honor her for the learning experience she makes available for us. And so, reincarnation is the great equalizer, the fundamental basis for any bill of rights. Many of the problems of the modern world owe to the fact that reincarnation has not been taught in the West. Reincarnation was the center piece of Jesus teachings. It was banned by a fourth century council that decided the populous could best be controlled through fear. They edited all mention of reincarnation from the scriptures, and inserted fear terms instead, a judgmental god, and so on. If reincarnation had been taught, there would have been no suppression of women, but the gift of both sexes would have been honored and developed. And there would have been no reason for contempt for people of color because who they are, we have been or will be. There is no reason to look down on anyone when we know that our own identity includes membership in theirs. The truth of reincarnation needs to be the foundation for getting ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. D. And so, Spirit. This new Universe picture, based on Consciousness, has a place for Spirit as simply Infinite Consciousness. All universes all worlds are formed out of this Consciousness, divine and sacred throughout. And Spirit is everywhere in the Earth and can be connected everywhere. And the Native North American people had things right. Everything has its own Spirit, and without contradiction is also an expression of Spirit. And what I am really doing in terms of concepts of modern science is presenting the Native North American version of the Real. And this new Universe picture has a place for the essential insight of all religions almost smothered by church tradition: Love. Not an emotion but a great Oneness, that can be found everywhere, even in a busy city street. But especially in the Earth, that is levels and depths of Oneness everywhere. And so, for the first time in their long and bitter antagonistic history, science and religion now share a common base with this term Spirit, the lynchpin in a new conceptual framework. And I offer an interpretation of where we are in our history, this present moment of historical grace, and these tumultuous times in which we live, the return of the Goddess and the Divine Feminine, the Reappearance of the Feminine in history, the Advent of Women, this great Awakening, as of Springtime after a long dark Winter, the Awakening, the Second Coming. And so, stay tuned! (shrink)