α1 | preamble |
setting-out
After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. (And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation; For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.)
Each day the goal of my ramblings appears no closer than before. Overnight my thoughts slip the lines I tie them to, and although diagrams I've drawn along the way show the journey I've been on I was trying to get somewhere else. Words are illusory, maps not territories. And expression is recursive. This was my Red Pill.
Unable to see how culture could trip me up, I arrived in Finland from London, enchanted. I was falling in love. The country felt soft the people seemed kind, and unlike Greek or Chinese I could at least read Finnish. Yet when my love died the society I had been part of died too. Overnight I found I had become not only alone but also incomprehensible.
As a child I was lost. Searching for a world of black and white the simple logic of maths and science became my safe place, and seemed to be the perfect guide. Yet for navigating the everyday its straightforward appearance is misleading, as readily describing chaos as order.
Scientists imagine their facts change the world but only the stories told with them do that, while the investments we've made in the stories we know keep it the same. Facts are unhelpful in themselves. We've not dropped far from the trees. Leaders know bravado, gibberish and violence, sway us as much as reason or courage do — and often much more.
Stumbling over this "wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction", I have ploughed on with my story of stories — on being heard — inspired by the passing virus that killed the Wrath-of-god. Now, approaching its end I find I am changed. The story has rewritten me.
From the preface to: Philosophical Investigations, by its author: Ludwig Wittgenstein; Cambridge, January 1945, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Taking the Blue pill represents submission to psychological enslavement, a commitment to the delusion provided by a prevailing paradigm. The Red Pill represents commitment to engage with whatever is the overarching reality of that paradigm. While continuing to take the Blue Pill feels more comfortable, and safer, as the delusion it generates is ersatz it is ultimately less fulfilling than the reality revealed through taking the Red one.
writing recursions
Like speech, writing appears to be transparent. But meaning is not intrinsic to words, or to any sign; it must be deduced — imagined. For meaning to be established, a context for the signs is required, a conversation of some kind. Computers have no need for meaning, nor for understanding, and so have no need for discussion.
Writing engages both hemispheres of the brain. The conversation between them that then takes place stabilizes and develops a writer's perception — to fight the demons that visited them in the isolation of their cells, monks were advised to write journals.
In February 1941, T.S Eliot began work on his poem 'Little Gidding', but with every draft became increasingly dissatisfied. Despite his fluency, writing was a journey even for him. Realizing the problem was with himself not the poem, in September that year he stopped writing altogether. A year later he began again and completed it.
see: Left hemisphere speech: Parts of the brain involved in speech, healthline.com, May 2019, retrieved: 5 Jan 2022.
and: 'Writing with the right hemisphere', Steven, Rapcsak, Pelagie, Beeson, and Rubens, Nov 1991, in Brain and Language, Elsevier.
contents of n_A1pre_Chaos.php inserted into footnote 'Chaos' in e_Preface_Footnotes.php via PHP-include, - called from e_Preface.php#infoHum and A1-Footnotes.php#A14..
chaos
Chaos refers to the apparently random states of disorder and irregularity exhibited by complex, nonlinear, dynamical systems actually governed by interconnectedness, underlying patterns, and self-organization. While these systems are deterministic, their predictability is limited as it is is impossible to completely know their actual state at any point in time and the smallest difference in this from what has been assessed leads to behaviours that diverge exponentially over time from that foecasted —a characteristic often referred to as the Butterfly Effect.
the wrath of god
Timur, the last great nomadic emperor, known as the 'Wrath-of-God', invaded Baghdad in June 1401. After capturing the city, Timur ordered every soldier to present him with at least two severed human heads. When there were no more men to kill, many warriors killed prisoners captured earlier in the campaign, and when they ran out of prisoners many resorted to beheading their own wives; 20,000 citizens were massacred. Scholars estimate that Timur's military campaigns overall caused the deaths of 17 million people. Four years later, in the city that is modern-day Shahrisabz, as the 'Wrath-of-God' prepared to invade China he was killed by a virus.
biophysicality
If it is accepted that descriptions of the ineffable are unavoidably metaphorical, and creationist, and anthropocentric teleologies and their concepts of the soul are set aside, then BEINGS can be defined simply as 'vehicles' of life and LIFE inferred recursively.
Rather than being merely 'wet' physical entities, BEINGS are BIOPHYSICAL, organized and animated by the interpretations that their BIOSEMIOTIC systems render of their internal and external environments.
To choose actions that ensure its survival, every BIOPHYSICAL construct requires a psychological correlate, and in order to exist every psychological construct requires a BIOPHYSICAL correlate. In actuality, psychology refers to METABIOPHYSICAL systems.
Those attributes of BIOSEMIOTIC systems, which in humans are referred to as awareness, consciousness, EGO and mind, are PERCEPTIONS, generated from the information that the SENSES of a BEING provide of NOUMENA that it encounters — in the same way as the PERCEPTION of colour is.
wellness
In an individual, the development of wellness and illness, is a function of the interaction of their BIOPHYSICAL actuality with their environment. This system then is impacted as a whole by any medical or psychological interventions and any social support and care they receive or are privated of.
Research into cancer and other diseases has identified the existence and primacy of METABIOPHYSICAL systems and the need to address them as a whole; however, despite the work of the WHO, modern societies and their BROADCASTING systems appear obdurate, discounting 'holism' and increasingly promoting reductionist models.
MEANING, is that which a BEING PERCEIVES of an EXPRESSION. It is inherited, encoded and developed through the reference-frame of the individual's ONTOGENY. Different reference-frames then inevitably arise.
Those BEINGS less able to recognize and reconcile differing reference-frames are at greater risk in social groups of being misinformed and deceived.
Ultimately, short term success is an insufficient guide for future action. Locusts are successful but find themselves unable to escape developing from their peaceful co-existance as individuals into the cannibalistic wars of their swarms.
Bioemiosis proceeds through recognition — through current sense-data that a being perceives then being recognized by it as being the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something the being has sensed or perceived before. This then is a recursive process, its first iteration (or 'base case') generating meaning by matching current sense-data and perceptions to those that have previously been recognized, recorded, embodied, and inherited.
Here embodiment refers both to the biophysical expression of semiosis and to the semiosis that biophysical expression represents. EMBODIED COGNITION is then simply a description of biosemiosis.
A metatransition is a metasystem transition to EITHER a more complex OR a simpler structure, ultimately leading to a transitory OR a permanent evolutionary transition in individuality.
Here, metasystem refers to a general, rather than restricted, controlling or organizational system which maintains the homeostasis necessary for the functioning of a system and its subsystems.
functioning, disability and health
First drafted by the WHO in 1980, the International Classification of Functioning (the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health), is an holistic overview of wellness and illness. Despite its publication, and the fact that today biopsychosocial models are taught in medical schools, the significance and impact on social organization and its institutions of these models might appear to citizens to have been relatively minimal — perhaps because of the powerful lobbies that work to promote a fundamentalist belief in scientific reductionism.
When people originally believed that the earth was flat, if that had not been questioned, science wouldn't have advanced this far. ..saying the biopsychosocial model has no value, and that it is "woo", is very similar to that. Sandyshore - university researcher and wikipedian.
footnotes of n_Einstein_Translation.php included in entryNote.php, e_Einstein_HumanDelusion.php, and e_personalMeta.php.
my translation
Einstein wrote the above words, in ink (bold emphasis added), in a note now held in the Albert Einstein Archives, Jerusalem. The translation I have made of them, and quoted from, is made in light of the translation that appears underneath them on the note and written in another hand.
There seem to me several reasons to make another translation: to reflect the gender neutrality of the German more consistently; to echo Einstein's use of both the word delusion and illusion; and to better reflect the certitude of the note's opening argument — carried in the brevity of the original German yet somehow stunted in the translation on the note itself in English.
The translation I offer here then, supported by translations by Google on 6 March 2024, is based on that written in pencil on the original note:—
This translation, in pencil on the original note, became the text of the condolence letter sent from Einstein to Dr. Marcus on 12 February 1950. The first two sentences of it were then used to open the letter of condolence sent on the 4 March 1950 to Norman Salt.
delusions and illusions
Einstein spoke the refined German of the Bildungsbürgertum, a language characterized by its precision. It might the be reasonable to assume, as an inspection of Einstein's note also suggests, that his use of the word Täuschung (delusion) twice and Illusion once, was considered not careless.
Etymologically the word delusion implies an action, a deceiving, referring here to that suffered by human beings through our consciousness, through which we perceive a deceptive appearance, the illusion of being "separated from the rest".
Although I believe the translations that I have found are faithful, quotations, stripped of their context can lose much of their quality. Transliteration of punctuation, for instance, can result in an English that makes their authors sound coarse or uneducated; and 'grammatical transliterations' may substitute gender bias for the gender neutrality of an original.
Where I have edited translations it has been only in order to address issues of punctuation, prosody, and inference that I felt detracted from the content of the originals. The edits have been made with due diligence and, although I am not a professional translator or writer, I believe they are both faithful, and required to make the fluency, erudition, and sensibility of the originals explicit. Original texts are provided for readers to draw their own conclusions.
Footnote {delusion01a} of n_Einstein_Translation.php.
The prefix "meta-" is used here as in the term meta-language — metalanguage: a system of symbols or signs (a language) used to describe or contextualize another language.
The article, from which the above quote was taken, although apparently accessible in 2024, has now been taken down by Stanford Medicine. The new article (at https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2004/02/link-between-sleep-cancer-progression-explored-by-stanford-researcher.html) still refers to Spiegal's work, but the expurgated quote there now seems, intentionally or otherwise, to downplay the research and to distance Stanford from Spiegal and the view he expressed.
family inheritance
Life is the state of being. Being is the condition of BEINGS.
A BEING is a descendant of a BEING.
I am a BEING.
It is as correct or incorrect to say that hormones create love as it is to say that love creates hormones. Love is not definable in the way that hormones are; they are terms in different reference frames.
Noumenon, is a Greek word meaning "that which is perceived". It is used the word Kant used to identify the thing-in-itself, the underlying reality that is then recognized by an observer as a SIGN.
Kant referred to the recognition of the thing-in-itself as perception, but here PERCEPTION is used to label one of four stages bootstrapped by RECOGNITION in the process of BIOSEMIOSIS.
Communicate: to convey information through a system of arbitrary signals.
Language: a system of arbitrary signals used to communicate information.
Meaning: the sense or reference of an expression.
Recognize: to know something as the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something known before.
Semantic: of or relating to meaning.
Ruppert, Edward E.; Fox, Richard, S.; Barnes, Robert D. (2004). Invertebrate Zoology, 7th edition. Cengage Learning. pp. 148-174; cited in Jellyfish, Taxonomy (list item: Staurozoa), Wikipedia..
Fautin, Daphne G. and Sandra L. Romano. 1997. Cnidaria. Sea anemones, corals, jellyfish, sea pens, hydra. Version 24 April 1997. http://tolweb.org/Cnidaria/2461/1997.04.24 in The Tree of Life Web Project, http://tolweb.org/.
science
Science is an elementary practice. Scientism is a belief. Eugenics and the Holocaust it drove are among the brutal consequences and stark reminders of not recognizing this distinction.