diff options
| author | phoebe jenkins <pjenkins@tula-health.com> | 2024-08-21 23:48:18 -0400 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | phoebe jenkins <pjenkins@tula-health.com> | 2024-08-21 23:48:18 -0400 |
| commit | 9c0214b92acd6816b93ee4edca995257914630ae (patch) | |
| tree | a4a49cacd5e2b1b24b97a0d6216f1af2b2f78c5f | |
| parent | 488959552c345ba7686f499707f17756a6bb75b9 (diff) | |
| download | blueprint-9c0214b92acd6816b93ee4edca995257914630ae.tar.gz | |
confuse myself around some weird invisible characters
| -rw-r--r-- | anarchic/collectivafter.tex | 356 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | blueprint.tex | 10 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/dissociation_physics.tex | 49 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/propositional_vibration.tex | 15 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | extra/apprehension_of_plurality.tex | 1199 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | extra/personhood_ii.tex | 573 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | extra/repressed_content.tex | 526 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | extra/the_art_connection.tex | 409 |
8 files changed, 52 insertions, 3085 deletions
diff --git a/anarchic/collectivafter.tex b/anarchic/collectivafter.tex deleted file mode 100644 index 18ddf47..0000000 --- a/anarchic/collectivafter.tex +++ /dev/null @@ -1,356 +0,0 @@ - -\chapter{The Collectivity After the Abolition of the Universe and Time: Escaping from Social Science(1996)} -% CONTENTS -% A. Principles of Natural Sociography -% B. Community and Social Causation in Personhood Theory -% C. Inevitable Stages? -% D. Retroactive Signification -% E. Dissolution of Natural Society -% F. Recapitulation - -\section{Principles of Natural Sociography} - -Let me introduce a new term for the recounting of social phenomena: \textbf{sociography}. Then both Herodotus and Lefebre practiced sociography; but they practiced it in very different ways. We may call sociography before the time of David Hume (or whoever you want) \textbf{legendary sociography}. The modern sociography which Hume and his successors fought to establish we may call \textbf{natural sociography}. - -Here I am forced to interject a qualification which gets ahead of my exposition. Ultimately I propose to dissolve temporally rectilinear natural society. For that reason, I cannot ask for the historical references in this manuscript to be taken literally. These references should be understood as headed by the phrase: "as conventional wisdom affirms." - -The aim of this reflection is to escape from social science. But many modern intellectuals would say: "We never accepted social science as a real science to begin with. We already showed that social science cannot be a science." Such remarks are massively misdirective. The positivist and literary-irrationalist critics of social science in the universities are loyal to the social \emph{fact base}---and that fact base is one of modernity’s hardest-won achievements. Indeed, modernist relativists are more loyal to social naturalism than they are to physics, not less. As far as I know, there has never been a published challenge to natural sociography. (Aside from the implicit challenge by the rearguard, those who defend divine intervention, astrology, etc.) - -Let me ask a heuristic question. What are the conceptual boundaries–in discourse on social affairs–between -\begin{itemize} -\item the common-sense notion of the world -\item theoretical conceptualization? -\end{itemize} - -Social existence "already" involves conceptualization, even before philosophical thinking enters the picture. If we were to invoke ancient evidence (which I am not especially interested in doing), we would find striking examples of how social discourse is conceptualized over and above common sense. Ahistorically, notions of political legitimacy and of law transcend narrowly circumscribed common sense. Kinship. Family law. Property and contract as juridical concepts. Monetary measure of the value of goods. (Whether monetary capital is productive does not have a common-sense answer, as any student of capital theory will know.) The rest of this section will heed these considerations. - -Natural sociography adheres to the following principles. -\begin{enumerate}[label=\alph*.] -\item The social collective excludes souls of deceased relatives, not to mention superhuman beings. - -\item The social collective excludes animals. Animals enter sociography only as prey and as chattels. - -\item All miracles in social records (occurrences precluded by modern scientific laws) must be repudiated. - -\item All apocryphal occurrences in social records must be exposed and repudiated. - -\item Supernatural causes of human events must be repudiated. - -\item Reincarnation is not permissible as an explanation of individual "personality." That means that the Tibetan explanation of the Dalai Lama must be stripped from "real" sociography. - -\item Careers in the afterlife (Egypt, Tibet) must be repudiated. Thus the most obvious productive activity of ancient Egypt (and China), the building of furnished tombs for royalty, must be judged a societal insanity. - -\item All human needs and wants are posited as mundane, and involve opulence and pleasure. (Power and glory are also conceived as needs; but it is basically taboo to theorize about them.) - -\item The concept of destiny, the future as cause of the present, is invoked by some authors–but it is not proper science. -\end{itemize} - -All the while, there are certain immaterial ontologies which social science must embrace. Each of the multitude of individuals has a mind–notwithstanding that your mind is unobservable by me. Each individual engages in choice-making. (Various schools of psychology reject this as superstition; but to strip the subject-matter of mentation and choice-making would be intolerably reductionist.) - -Humans exist in a culture-saturated realm; which means a realm filled with evidence which can only be appreciated via interpretation. (Inscriptions; pictures and images; etc. etc.) A key issue at every turn in social existence is legitimacy: why, after all, should one cooperate with (or submit to) governmental authority; why should one consent to offered terms of livelihood; etc. etc.? All of this utterly transcends physics and biology; the latter sciences have no basis to investigate these dimensions. - -Sociology requires the crystallization and "evolution" of polities to be given a causal rationale which is not supernatural. Even though the individual is the atomic agent in society–a tenet at the foundation of bourgeois economics–his or her consciousness is causally insignificant in comparison to "conditions." Sociology is a phenomenology of political life which - -i) treats states as units, as systems; - -ii) attends to law; - -iii) attends (to a lesser extent) to coalescing and motivating mythologies and rituals. - -If sociology wanted to proceed like a natural science, it would have to abstract from concrete phenomena to obtain ideal elements which can have multiple instances. (That is what a scientific law presupposes.) However, history inherently finds its events to be individual. Abraham Lincoln was not an instance of an abstraction which can be repeated at will (as in a series of experiments). Nonactual possibility in history is extremely problematic. (Would Napoleon have commenced such-and-such a battle if he had not had a toothache?) Does sociology seek laws–on a timeline of unique events? - -Sociologists indeed require the polity to be a natural system which obeys "socio-natural" laws. For some, the polity is referred to physics and biology as primary realities. At the same time, sociology rests on a modern common-sense notion of the human collective, consisting of an awareness of people one never meets, and some notion of one’s connectedness to them. Again, such information cannot be provided by physics and biology, which do not recognize the existence of individual minds, choice-making, culture, or legitimacy. - -Some philosophers of science find a way for a unique human event to express laws. The event, although unique, belongs to a species for which an idealizing, quantifying, experimental science exists. If a great king dies from a heart attack, or from being thrown from a horse, heart attacks or injuries from mechanical shock are explicable in medical biology. [But to say that that is known to be the complete explanation is highly tendentious.] - -If, on the other hand, one wants a law which says that "African socialism" could not possibly have worked–because it is not possible for a polity to skip the capitalist stage–then the law would be specific to social process: and the above solution would not help. - -There is an opportunity to be far more trenchant here. Physics proposes to provide: an exhaustive account of what is not (nonactual possibility); combined with a voluntary "trifling with nature" called experiment. But concerning our lives and history, we do not want exhaustive accounts of what is not.–And the purpose of our choices is not to "trifle with nature" but to become this person. Actually, why wouldn’t existential self-actualization and scientific experiments have the same character–as choices? - -Moreover, if human affairs comprise a unique actual career, then inanimate nature should also comprise a unique actual career. - -How is it that modern thought conflates instrumental choice-making with The Order Of The Universe–and then turns around and segregates this package from existential choice-making? When it comes to summing the universe and human life–and to detecting nonactual possibility or not detecting it–modern thought is a shambles. - -The prevailing culture tells us over and over: physical science is in good order; whereas social science is suspect (or has not yet proved itself). But nothing requires us to accept this separation of a tractable problem from an intractable one. Like a mantra, they keep repeating "all of it is nature." But then "the problem of knowledge" ought to be a single topic. When, in the name of "nature," modern thought gives us realms which are incommensurate and unsummable, it totally discredits itself. - -• • • - -B. Community and Social Causation in Personhood Theory - -Our field of inquiry is posited to be collective human phenomena. These phenomena manifest intent; and involve meanings (in such a way that to overlook those meanings is intolerably reductionist). In other words, the phenomena involve intentions and interests and ideas. They involve how we conceive or apprehend, understand or appreciate. They involve the appearance of novelties in these respects. - -Such (collective human) phenomena are correlative to argumentative discourse. - -° - -Let us reprise "Personhood II." In the realm of ordinary personhood, other people and culture are palpable to me. Other people and culture jointly constitute the interpersonal arena–or community. - -Society is the aggregation which is hypothesized as subtending the (palpable) community. Society is the kingdom, the race, the nation. It is an abstraction, a matter of faith, to which allegiance is demanded by palpable specific people. - -So society is a "grandiose Other." A grandiose Other is advanced as the ultimate source of meaning, the ultimate source of my emotional gratification and judgmental self-consciousness. At the same time, the grandiose Other is primarily speculative, and outside "my ostensible world." - -The universe of physics (called Nature) must be mentioned in this connection as hypothetical, inferential, derived, and grandiose–as a modern god. The enshrining of Nature as a god is a precedent for the modern enshrining of society as a god. The physical universe is not claimed to be a source of meaning, however. - -In modern culture, the grandiose Objectivity which has priority is (to repeat) society. Society's claim on us as persons (even when we are treated as pawns) is far broader and more important than the physical universe's claim on us. Typically, the primary avowed loyalties in modern culture are to society. - -Extending from one's emotional involvement with other people, society becomes an object of one's passionate belief. The hypothesized abstraction seems to be a living presence: as when people march off to war for The Nation–or dramatically refuse to do so. "Attachment" makes society more compelling than the physical universe. Because society is an object of passionate belief, because it becomes a hallucinatory living presence, it cannot be sharply distinguished from community (which is palpable), even though it remains impalpable (a hypothesized abstraction). So society has a close and compelling connection to the palpable phenomena of other people and culture. - -At certain points, personhood theory passes to a higher level of credulity and integrates its analysis with one of the preexisting hypotheses which it has discerned. This is what happens in the case of culture. Personhood theory pictures my cultural competences (e.g. English orthography) as deriving from society. Namely: culture is that palpable aspect of society which is interior to me and at the same time is an externality broader than other people as individuals. - -Recognizing how close society is to community in belief, I propose to be flexible with regard to whether the person is conceived in a communal or a social context. - -The community confronts me with symbols and offices which imply an organized collective, legitimation, manifestations of a group will, etc. - -One cultural phase of community life includes the community's "tradition," symbolism, ritual, etc.–all of which are emotionally charged. This phase must be considered one source of my emotional sensitization or capacity. - -The community may force upon me a significance, and an assortment of privileges and disadvantages–so much so that I am forced to carry out this "imposed social role" or to grapple with it. The role may place me in competition or conflict with other people. I can also be gratified by the celebration in ritual of my imposed status (although I do not earn this gratification). - -I have a greater or lesser degree of autonomy, relative to the community, in respect to being supplied with pursuits and goals, and in respect to making judgments of every sort. - -I can obscure my choice-making by becoming a vassal of "society"–of a legitimated organization or institution. - -I may engage in a pursuit which I suspect to be dishonest or otherwise contemptible because the community approves of it. Of course I do so to gain tangible rewards, in analogy with knowingly deceiving another person to benefit myself. But something beyond my craftiness is involved here. I maintain a knowing self-deception and vassalage in which legitimacy means more to me than sincerity. - -The interpersonal arena is a source of meanings to me. My connections to the interpersonal arena in regard to praxis, emotional sensitization, indoctrination, etc. have an effect on my sense of sanity, my personal identity, my level of fulfillment, etc. Thus, the interpersonal arena can be a source of skills worthy to be sustained and regenerated. It can also be a source of acute dilemmas and destructiveness impinging upon me. In either case, the interpersonal arena is a source of problems and missions. - -Moreover, the problems and missions can appear in my consciousness as consequences of my skills. Having been indoctrinated with little choice in the matter, that indoctrination now surfaces in the guise of my skills, for one thing. (Examples at the level of the present discussion are language use, mathematics, music, profit-maximization.) If I do not consciously review my indoctrination, then I will carry it with me by default. Moreover, my private and idiosyncratic dilemmas with natural language, with mathematics, with art, with profit maximization, etc.–and my private and idiosyncratic ventures in these fields–can represent vital dilemmas and ventures for the interpersonal arena. - -But the community's destructiveness or bankruptcy may consist precisely in its inability to embark upon vital ventures–and in its fostering of individual pursuits which disregard and exacerbate its dilemmas. - -I can undertake a vital venture or address a vital problem; or I can avoid doing so. And I can belong to a community which wants such a task addressed; or to a community which discourages attention to such a task. The possible ramifications of the community attitude, for my judgment of myself, are complicated. Inner pride or lack of it can run counter to express community approval or contempt. - -° - -Social role can submerge a person. More accurately, the social role can be said to fixate the individual to mutilated perception. But I then say that the social role is a sort of ideology and skill which the individual is fixated to. The submergence of the person by a cumulating social role is an outcome in which the person is guaranteed to be traumatized, stigmatized, impaired, truncated. - -Certainly, in some cultures or communities, socially acclaimed and validated roles can also allow intrinsic splendor. Even so, we must not allow the doctoring of sociography (at the level of renowned individuals in history, for example) to obscure the fact that these socially approved achievements had great difficulty coming to the surface in the first place–and that they were subsequently dishonored by deteriorating communities. - -But to exist in fixation to a cumulating social role is always a depersonalized, mythified existence–even when it is producing useful output. Of course, being submerged in a social role is only one of a number of ways in which existence can be depersonalized and mythified. - -My formulations give social role–or thematic identity–or imminent character–the guise of a self-caused cause or looped cause. The circuit of attachment through the person-world is not a linear causal phenomenon; it is a phenomenon of scrambled or turbulent causation. It is a dynamically balanced confined turbulence. What is awful about being submerged by a social role, in the cases known to me, is precisely that such submergence is self-reinforcing. - -In "Personhood II," I had a reason for focusing on certain "ruinations" which individuals underwent. First, an ahistorical illustration. The culture may mutilate a child's faculties and inculcate him or her with debasement–without pushing the child to the point where he or she demands escape as a right or becomes a precocious social critic. - -We again encounter the social doctoring of sociography–this time at the level of individual longitudinal records. Children do express distress, they do demand escape as a right, they are precocious social critics until they are subjugated. Higher and higher tolerances for anguish, or compensating rewards, have to be developed. In due course, the child begins to perpetuate the stigmas in him or herself. At the least, he or she acquiesces; at the most, he or she may become a well-rewarded advocate of the community. - -A case at a different level is specific to America and the U.K. in the second half of the twentieth century. The Seventies saw the explosion of cults and ritualized degradation in America and the U.K. Then, in the Eighties, the American Establishment launched a campaign to win back the middle class; and it became fashionable to be a Yuppie. When the recession occurred at the end of the Eighties, the Yuppie role became tarnished. So social history is superficially changeable. These ebbs and flows are not the level I should address. What we should glean in this connection is that the cults and the ritualized degradation signal the long-term trend of techno-capitalist civilization. - -I include these remarks on the doctoring of sociography, and on the civilization’s trend, to illustrate how early personhood theory arrived at hypothecations about society. - -° - -The person submerged by a social role emerges as a person who is "done to." On the other hand, in a tiny minority of cases, we have the emergence of person who "does" or "does to." Why, then, is a given person one way or the other?–and can he or she be switched from one type to the other?–and does a person who is always one type nevertheless have a potential for the other type? - -Let us work through the notion of society’s imposition of the individual’s identity. Medieval serfs were illiterate and never saw money in their entire lives. Today their descendents in Western Europe all read, possess money, and spend money every day. The reason why serfs did not learn to read or to allocate money was that (in effect) they were not recruited and given cultivation to these ends. - -There is a view which would say that the serfs, as a multitude which had been assigned the same fate, became aware that they were being taken advantage of in a common way, and fought for the cultivation (schools, etc.) which they subsequently received. This is not false (the French Revolution); but it is misleading in the extent to which it makes the serfs into autonomously rational protagonists. It does not take into account that the descendents of the serfs remained outside the controlling class–that the "toilers" have never commanded the system. The collapse of the workers' paradises makes this observation all the more decisive. - -It is more realistic to say that advanced capitalism continually revolutionizes technology and continually erases and replaces social relationships. (Capitalism also spurs developments such as the dissolution of the nuclear family, and feminism, which the Establishment did not calculate.) So the aggregate displays a rationale which overrides the individual. - -That is why the achievements and satisfactions which are possible to people are seen as results of how much cultivation the Establishment gives them. - -But in personhood theory, the question of why people are what they are focuses in a different way. The topic was anticipated in sections of "Personhood II." The sociological perspective is tacitly dedicated to a doctrine of underprivilege and socially engineered redemption. Somehow that mind-set fails to engage our announced problem. Let me present a shock-question to clarify the issue. - -Would a Nobel-prizewinning physicist agree - -that he believes physics because his naivété - -was exploited by malicious elders, because he - -was crushed by his elders, because his elders - -did not give him enough cultivation? - -The sociological perspective–in the name of recognizing that the serf's backwardness was imposed from without–treats the serf's effects on other people as if they were imaginary or didn't matter. It treats the serf's choices and life as if they were tuberculosis–a fatal disease which a few pennies' worth of medication could have cured. - -Capitalist technology and centralization have created the possibility of imposing changed fates on entire populations. A member of the administrative class can regard all the choices and lives of a population as a reversible condition. Then people really are what the administrator chooses to make them by pushing this or that button. People are so thrilled by the prospect of human manipulation on this level–or by the prospect that the Establishment is due to give them cultivation–that they overlook that the sociological perspective makes all their choices and their lives chimerical (or revocable). "You did it because you were programmed improperly." How do you choose and act if you believe that your choices and actions have the ontological type of a disease, an error in past programming? And who says that the serf's life was "bad" or unnecessary? And yet people have learned to think in these terms–to want to be told that what their betters permit them is what they are. - -A novelty may arise in how we conceive or apprehend, understand or appreciate. That led me to the notion of an unprecedented fate–of a person upholding an authentic identity-theme coming from the future. Such a person emerges as a person who "does" or "does to." Section D is devoted to this topic. - -The ambition to transfer social engineering to seriousness and originality, by vaccinating people with seriousness and originality, is an ill-conceived ambition. Seriousness and originality are not "done to"; they "do (to)." They are not implanted. They appear unpredictably. (Of course, my attempt to assert my sincerity and to make the interpersonal arena conducive to it may reawaken seriousness and originality in another person.) I speculate about the authentic identity-theme which comes from the future: to show that one need not assume the social engineers' cause-and-effect. One does not even have to believe that "solutions" are fabricated from past to present. - -Given my speculation about unprecedented fates, can average people be said to have routine fates? My considered answer is no. That is because to say that a person fulfills a routine fate cannot be distinguished from saying that that person is determined by the past, by circumstances. - -Personhood theory refuses to acknowledge people as objectivities in a deterministic process. (Except to acknowledge that this conception itself is one of the characteristic nonsensical fantasies.) One who adopts the person-world outlook cannot consider his or her choices and life as a reversible mishap. Personhood theory cannot consider palpable choices and lives as chimeras or as revocable. - -The demand for a calculus of society is, in the light of personhood theory, an ill-conceived demand. The notion of the authentic identity-theme coming from the future is introduced to show that one need not assume the social engineers' cause-and-effect. We do not even have to believe that "solutions" are fabricated from past to present. - -Seriousness and originality cannot be thrust upon any given person by outside manipulation. Metaphorically, escape hatches are opened by the future, as coherent novelty, in conjunction with moments in which choice is forced–moments in which the arena of action might be reconceived, loyalty might be shifted, effectiveness and gratification might be reconceived, etc. - -• • • - -C. Inevitable Stages? - -Marxism proves more decisively and relentlessly than any other ideology that we are robots. It then goes on to say that those of us who are in bondage should be freed. But at the level of the cogency of the ideology, if the slaves are robots, then why must they be freed? (So that there can be an exponential expansion of production? But to what end?) What difference does it make to a robot? - -Before my turn to personhood theory, I indulged Marx’s historical materialism as a plausible explanation of the moral codes of past epoches. But this plausible contribution of Marxism has to be reconsidered. Perhaps the succession of stages in history (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) was necessary. But the person-world premise reconstitutes our understanding of what the stages comprised: - -realized choice alongside external conditions of the moment; - -realized choice and external conditions as equal constituents of a single "world." - -It should also reconstitute our understanding of their necessity. The pivotal ingredient in the transition from one stage to another is an imagination and its embrace which have no sociological explanation. - -The Marxist-Leftist tradition shares presuppositions of the modern Western culture of which it is a variant: blind faith in natural science; dogmatic materialism; the assumption that natural science and dogmatic materialism are allies of revolution; socio-idolatry. - -Marx wanted "revolution" to transform the economic class structure while remaining relentlessly loyal to the scientific world-view. Ironically, this program may be self-frustrating. It may not be possible for a movement which preaches loyalty to the scientific world-view to gain support in late capitalist society for an insulated overturn of the economic class structure. (As I often mention, bourgeois economics has long since rooted itself in physical science.) Capitalism may be able to assimilate to its own fabric any scheme of economic liberation which proclaims the equality of people as robots and commodities. - -• • • - -D. Retroactive Signification - -In rare cases, the individual may "steer" toward an identity which embodies coherent novelty–in that sense steering toward an authentic identity coming from the future. This depends on the earlier principle that the phenomena involve novelties in how we conceive or apprehend, understand or appreciate. - -(In the present discussion, I am omitting the analysis which differentiates coherent novelty from the successful individual–from the rewarded celebrity. Today, the case has come to the foreground of a "creative submission" which is a compensatory experience of license, irresponsibility, puerile or malign misbehavior, etc. After all, criminals such as Manson become heroes; people live vicariously through them. These episodes are not what I mean by coherent novelty. - -My psychology is inherently an introspective inquiry. Another principle is required which I do not expound here. The reader has to classify him or herself. The dishonest reader cheats him or herself, no more and no less. All these supporting principles are discussed in my depth psychology or in person-world analysis.) - -The notion of steering toward an identity coming from the future belongs in a reconstituted discipline of psychology. All the more so because the problem of predicting individual outcomes has received so much attention in psychology–not only in the highly professionalized field of psychological testing, but in impromptu and unwritten appraisals made by psychoanalysts, etc. In turn, there are repercussions for the notion–so characteristic of sociology–that the individual’s identity is an imposition by society. There are repercussions for the notion that greatness is a gift which society gives to the individual; and there are repercussions for the interpretation of the metamorphosis of societies. - -Retroactive signification means that a notion of deterministic evolution fails because of the emergence of coherent novelty. Even a liberal version of the scientific method, extrapolated to socio-psychology, would not be able to predict what certain people would become: because what they would become would in fact displace the reigning hermeneutic with an unprecedented hermeneutic. In other words, science would have to applaud its own death in order to predict the outcome. - -To use the surprising outcome to upgrade the "laws" by which you analyze the "initial data" would deprive us of the lesson which the phenomenon affords. The earlier period’s "ignorance" is an essential feature of the realm being studied. It’s not scientific ignorance in the sense of lack of enough data-points to fit the curve. What the future brings are knowledges which blow up the scientist’s entire "personality." Faculties that the earlier scientist doesn’t have; successes that crush him as a person. The outcome exposes his life as a lie or sham. He is caught worshipping the wrong god. - -This means that the locus of retroactive signification in the first instance is one person’s life: a course which is inherently individual, and which involves interests and ideas which fragment, conflict, and unite. The subject-matter is inherently about the antagonism of ideas and interests, about antagonisms in what anthropologists call culture. Retroactive signification is "psychological" and interpretative. - -In the perspective of retroactive signification, only the future can teach the scientific observer what the past meant. He or she couldn’t have made an analysis of the past on past evidence which would have divined where it was going. It is impossible to know what the initial data mean when they appear. They are the germ of something incommensurate with his or her framework for appraisal. - -The scientist of the later generation responds to coherent novelty by "growing" a new sort of "personality." He sees, in the past, what a past scientist could not have seen even if more "facts" had been provided. - -That is not to say that the notion of the window to the future does not have risks–which I will note as I proceed. Why wouldn’t we blame Marx for Stalin, or Jesus for the Crusades? Here there is an answer: our interest is in the genuinely novel idea which arises. That this idea is put to use by selfish or psychopathic interests is important to the casualties–and to the historian–but does not prove that selfish or psychopathic aggression stems uniquely from the idea in question. - -° - -Can the notion of destiny, here called retroactive signification, be aggregated–applied to social totalities? I found retroactive signification to be almost vanishingly rare. It played the role of an exception to our much more usual apprehension that society shapes the individual. - -I asked, earlier in this manuscript, whether average people could be said to have destinies which, since they are not awesomely surprising, should be called routine. My considered answer was no. To say that a person consummates a routine destiny cannot be distinguished from saying that the person is determined by the past, by circumstances. - -History does not give us the same opportunity to contrast the rare outcome with the commonplace outcome that a consideration of individuals does. If one imagines that the rise of modernity in Europe was a rare outcome relative to societies which could be considered static or essentially repetitive, nevertheless modernity became prevalent and did not remain an individual possession. If modernity spreads and affects everybody, then it is indistinguishable from a Marxist "stage," or from a stage of civilization. - -The rare individual’s "career" brings forth a coherent novelty which changes the basis of "knowing." Let me first clarify the connection I make between crystallization and "the future." The novel identity progressively focuses–in an individual life. That led me to say that it comes from "the future." Actually, there are cases in which the person focuses, but the public does not respond. John Philoponus. It took one thousand years for his work to be redone by successful men, and 1500 years for him to become famous. - -I am suspicious of transferring the notion of an individual life-course to society so that we have the notion of a society’s career. Nations do not have selves; they are already chimeras. - -The difficulty is not that there are not candidates for coherent novelty at the level of societies. [National cultures are such candidates.] Rather, a new liability appears. I was willing to recognize contributions from individuals which were diverse and relative. If we do that at the level of nations, we end up lionizing those myths which became successful. The subjective moment is lost, and all we are left with is a dominating myth. There is nothing wrong with it, except that it has lowered the discussion to the level of social history or history-of-ideas. Then we get involved with chauvinistic triumphalism. - -Again: there have been many novelties at the level of national cultures which were underestimated by Establishments. But there are arguments against assigning destinies to national cultures: - -1) Societies don’t have selves. - -2) To recognize diverse and relative contributions at the level of societies can only mean taking successful myths as the topic. - -Suppose we assume that European modernity is the fruition of humanity’s existence. To surround modernity with congratulation is dubious, since modernity brings terrible penalties from which we need to be rescued. Another profound difficulty: modernity’s judgment of the meaning of an earlier age is not necessarily worth more than that age’s own judgment of its meaning. - -A major lesson emerges here. The perspective of retroactive signification is always discarding the past as merely anticipatory. But isn’t that too triumphalist? Past eras had their own values–which the future may not improve on. - -When the future has the character of a regression to the status quo ante (as it often does)–possibly combined with a displacement of society’s preoccupations to other axes of antagonism–then the notion that this outcome consummates a destiny is disappointing. When the future can be conceived as a regression or mere displacement, then the future’s judgment of the past’s meaning can be a retreat into retardation. (Philosophy’s judgment of Hume, which regressed from his achievement.) - -Is modern natural science the fruition of Greek natural philosophy? The trouble is that we may learn far more from Aristotle if we do not simply read him to see where he agreed with "us." - -Ancient Judaism was underestimated by pagan élites, and so presaged coherent novelty. But what was its fruition? There is not a unique answer. To give an answer will almost automatically be invidious; unless we confine ourselves to commonplaces about the generic influence of Biblical religion. Again, that is a theme for history-of-ideas or social history. - -Again, to apply the notion of destiny to society would only converge with Marx’s stages of history or with history-of-ideas. Surely retroactive signification’s liberating implications lie in a different direction. - -° - -Sociology has promulgated the cliche that society shapes the individual–or even that the individual’s identity is an imposition by society. Retroactive signification is credible in the individual life: that militates against sociological causation of the individual. A reconception of the way the individual is "inlaid" in society is demanded. Recall that one’s private conflicts over the skills with which one has been indoctrinated can evince vital dilemmas and vital ventures for the interpersonal arena. - -Sociological causation of the individual is impressive only to the cynic. Personhood theory refuses to acknowledge people as objectivities in a deterministic process. One who adopts the person-world standpoint cannot consider his or her choices and life as a revocable mishap. Personhood theory cannot consider palpable choices and lives as chimeras–or as revocable. - -In the rare case that one's authentic identity-theme comes from the future, guiding oneself toward it remains a matter of pronounced willfulness in a context of uncertainties. It is possible to drift rather than to push toward the distant identity-theme. And subjectively I often have to gamble–even if my purpose remains fixed. (By upholding or relinquishing the identity-theme from the future, one guarantees or nullifies it as a future?) - -The scope of "choice" includes the possibility of shaping your loyalties. Such shaping of loyalties covers - -–reconceiving effectiveness and gratification; - -–reconceiving the purpose of life; - -–reconceiving the arena of action. - -In speaking of altering your loyalties, everything up to and including the determination of reality is open. When the individual is being "attracted by" an unprecedented fate, choice in a moment of crisis can be seen as a phenomenon in which the remote future contacts the present. The crisis gives one some choice over the way one's distant future shapes one's present. - -The "career" which is interpreted as retroactive signification is correlative to seriousness and originality–and seriousness and originality cannot be instilled by outside manipulation. In turn, whether the individual will be cognitively protean, which is what I wanted to know, presumably depends on seriousness and originality. - -Because we are talking about a novelty which depends on vital dilemmas for the collectivity which the collectivity doesn't acknowledge, the person who expresses the novelty refuses the depersonalization of social role. - -• • • - -E. Dissolution of Natural Society - -Let me now consummate the dissolution of natural society and its rectilinear career as an ontological category. Drawing on previous writings, I sketch a hypothetical civilization outside the plane of natural society. [That means appealing even more urgently to personhood theory.] - -In this hypothetical civilization, the collective can freely change the laws of nature. That presupposes claims, made previously and elsewhere, that scientific reality can be superseded. There is a dispelling of deceit and gullibility, concomitantly with the awakening of faculties, and with emotional sensitization: yielding intellectual techniques which supersede the compartmentation of faculties characterizing the present culture. Thereby, new mental abilities are invented. The community is open to avenues of metamorphosis of the life-world. The comprehensively assembled "meta-technology" would be self-conscious about the inherited view of factual reality, going beyond it in an operative way. Again, my perspective is that of a novel arena which outruns what was formerly considered factual reality. (My meta-technological writings, etc., are a prerequisite for understanding the terminology of the requirements to follow.) - -The envisioned mode of life invokes dimensions of human potentiality which hitherto were supported only by different cultures. I'm seeking a unitary experience which transmits many dimensions of potentiality. - -My interest here is with the ramifications of these claims for interpersonal life. If meta-technology could be implemented collectively, we would accede to an uncanny life-world. To express the matter from a present-day standpoint, the new mode of life would be a waking-dream reality or enchanted reality. - -In order for a collective to be able freely to change the laws of nature, all persons would have to have parity of "station in life" and parity of authority in the culture. Moreover, the total of menial and routine labor would have to decrease to the vanishing point. - -Let me consolidate here all the consequences of direct import for the present discussion. - -× One intellectual consequence is that the realism of history would be placed in suspension. The higher civilization would consign history to a lesser grade of realism. The supposed edifying effect of history is dispensable. Whereas today, we need to preserve traditional culture as a bulwark against dehumanization by the current culture, the higher civilization would mean a revival of personalistic and hallowed expression, on a new level: "soul" would not longer reside only in old languages, old buildings, old statues, old texts. - -From another angle, the motive for people to keep score as to their ancestral status (or lack of it) would disappear. "Consciousness" could break free of its material antecedents (circumstances). - -× The higher civilization presupposes an intellectual defeat for physics; for Marx’s materialism; and for all the doctrines which hold that capitalism is necessitated by physico-biological nature itself. See (A) and (1) below. - -× The new mode of life is not compatible with a social order in which most people are consigned to material servitude. Not only would the sought-for inspiration not appear; the uncanny instrumental activity or meta-technology would not appear. - -So it's not like Pakistan and the atomic bomb (or the priesthood in ancient Egypt)–advanced technology coexisting with a population of paupers or slaves. See (E) below. - -° - -The following principles are requirements–expressed as if from within the new mode of life, in the new terminology. Parenthesized numbers refer to comments on each statement, collected in the following section. - -A. The life-world (lived experience) is understood as an integration of: - -–substantial, operative interdependencies of awareness and objectivity; - -–the conventionalistic grading of experiences (as to "realism"); - -–logically impossible situations (states of the world)–i.e. situations requiring simultaneous mutually exclusive descriptions in the medium of thought inherited from scientific civilization. - -The principle of the personality's orientation in "reality" is: consciously to maneuver through the logically impossible world-states, manifesting instrumental mastery over objectivities inherited from the previous civilization. (I.e. scientific objectivities). (1) - -B. The foregoing cannot be achieved merely by adopting a neutral, inert mental state, by positioning oneself mentally relative to propositions.* Sustainable inspiration (exalted centered activation and presence) and uncanny states of consciousness are required. - -C. The principles of evaluational processing of experience (or grading of experience) which underlie a novel determination of reality are shared or collective. Only thus can novel determinations of reality be promulgated in the life-world. - -D. The novel determinations of reality are linked to emotionally supportive intersubjectivity. Only thus can the novel determinations of reality appeal to a community. - -E. The other persons have parity of "station in life" and parity of authority in the culture with "the self" ("this individual," myself). Only thus can they stimulate inspiration and uncanny states in "this individual." - -F. The community from which people concretely originate and "learn to feel" becomes the same community that pursues mastery over scientific objectivities and gains an uncanny or ecstatic sense of the world. Inasmuch as the required shared principles of grading experience, and the required intersubjective emotional gratification, connect, a person-configuration freed from demeaned pragmatism is evinced. (2) - -G. The individual experiences "desirables" as qualitatively specific. - -H. The individual insists on the satisfaction of the qualitatively specific and unequal needs of self and peers for the material requisites of life. (To recognize inequality of individual needs does not mean endorsing different grades of reward. To resolve competing claims, a representative body is needed.) (3) - -I. Production of the material requisites of life is planned by a representative body to shrink necessary labor time. (Automated collectivism.) - -J. Individual and the collective entertain spontaneous "amusement" or "play" ("brend"), without seeking to displace or objectify it. - -K. Sensuous-concrete vehicles for the collective expression of exalting values are encouraged. - -L. Individual and collective are receptive to future novelty which is unpredictable and incomparable and yet is coherent or thematic. (4) - -° - -Next, the commentary, which is expressed in the old terminology. - -(1) Self-subsistent objectivities, and affirmative consistent theories, would no longer be sought as foundations of reality. As far as the physical world is concerned, a fragment of what I envision is provided by my "Superseding Scientific Apprehension of the Inanimate World: The Phenomenological Basis of Physics" (1990). - -(2) Here uncanniness and ecstasis are positioned as notions reactive to everyday banality. In the new mode of life such counterposition would no longer be necessary. - -(3) This statement on satisfaction of needs is pertinent so long as a separate sphere of material requisites of life can be distinguished. - -(4) To the present civilization, the new mode of life would seem a waking-dream-reality or enchanted reality. - -\visbreak - -F. Recapitulation - -Let me try again to specify the object of social science. A world-wide aggregate of humans on a geological or biological time-line whose future is determined by efficient causation. No author but me would remark that this object is a phantom. Nonetheless, the urgency of rotating out of social science stems from considerations in lived experience; considerations which envision a novel existence whose preconditions have begun to be worked out in theory. These are concerns unique to me which have occupied me for many years. - -The exposition is rambling and not yet sorted out. (That applies especially to the overhanging progressivist identitifcation of ‘futural’ with ‘superior’.) But never mind that. The "society" discerned by social science is a hypnotically instilled hallucination. The notion of causation which subtends it is humiliating and enslaving. I have exposed crucial junctures at which sociological causation–deeply plausible though it may be–is annulled. Beyond that, there comes a point in historical time at which the historical time-axis evaporates. The collectivity awakens from, outgrows, the imaginary order with which it had surrounded itself.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blueprint.tex b/blueprint.tex index c88f76d..4525667 100644 --- a/blueprint.tex +++ b/blueprint.tex @@ -18,6 +18,7 @@ \usetikzlibrary{calc} \usepackage[pagestyles]{titlesec} \usepackage{hanging} +\usepackage{fancyhdr} % fonts \newpxfont @@ -74,6 +75,13 @@ \end{figure}} \begin{document} +\pagestyle{fancy} +\fancyhead{} % clear all header fields +%\fancyhead[RO,LE]{\thepart} +\fancyfoot{} % clear all footer fields +\fancyfoot[LE,RO]{\thepage} +%\fancyfoot[LO,CE]{\thechapter} +%\fancyfoot[CO,RE]{\thesection} \frontmatter \graphicspath{{img/}} @@ -114,7 +122,6 @@ \clearpage -\pagestyle{empty} \tableofcontents* \clearpage @@ -183,4 +190,5 @@ \input{extra/radicalism_of_unbelief.tex} % input{extra/philosophy_of_concept_art.tex} + \end{document} diff --git a/essays/dissociation_physics.tex b/essays/dissociation_physics.tex index 5255df0..5badaf1 100644 --- a/essays/dissociation_physics.tex +++ b/essays/dissociation_physics.tex @@ -8,23 +8,58 @@ Because of the topic, our discussion will often seem psychological and even phil Throughout much of the discussion, we have to assume that the human physicist exists before the sight-touch split occurs, that he continues to exist after it occurs, and that he functions as a physicist after it occurs. Therefore, we begin as follows. A healthy human has a realm of sights, and a realm of touches: and there is a correlation between the two which receives its highest expression in the concept of the object. (In psychological jargon, intermodal organization contributes to the object Gestalt. Incidentally, for us \enquote{touch} includes just about every sense except sight, hearing, smell.) Suppose there is a change in which the tactile realm remains coherent, if not exactly the same as before, and the visual realm also remains coherent; but the correlation between the two becomes completely chaotic. A totally blind person does not directly experience any incomprehensible dislocation, nor does a person with psychogenic tactile anesthesia (actually observed in hysteria patients). Let us define such a change. Consider the sight-touch correlation identified with closing one's eyes. The point is that there is a whole realm of sights which do not occur when one can feel that one's eyes are closed. -Let $T$ indicate tactile and $V$ indicate visual. Let the tactile sensation of open eyes be $T_1$, and of closed eyes be $T_2$. Now anything that can be seen with closed eyes---from total blackness, to the multicolored patterns produced by waving the spread fingers of both hands between closed eyes and direct sunlight---can no doubt be duplicated for open eyes. Closed-eye sights are a subset of open-eye sights. Thus, let sights seen only with open eyes be $V_1$, and sights seen with either open or closed eyes be $V_2$: If there are sights seen only with closed eyes, they will be $V_3$; we want disjoint classes. We are interested in the temporal concurrence of sensations. Combining our definitions with information about our present world, we find there are no intrasensory concurrences (eyes open and closed at the same time). Further, our change will not produce intrasensory concurrences, because each realm will remain coherent. Thus, we will drop them from our discussion. There remain the intersensory concurrences, and four can be imagined; let us denote them by the ordered pairs $(T_1, V_1)$, $(T_1, V_2)$, $(T_2, V_1)$, $(T_2, V_2)$. In reality, some concurrences are permitted and others are forbidden, Let us designate each ordered pair as permitted or forbidden, using the following notation. Consider a rectangular array of \enquote{places} such that the place in the $i$th row and $j$th column corresponds to $(T_i, V_j)$, and assign a $p$ or $f$ (as appropriate) to each place. Then the following state array is a description of regularities in our present world. +Let $T$ indicate tactile and $V$ indicate visual. Let the tactile sensation of open eyes be $T_1$, and of closed eyes be $T_2$. Now anything that can be seen with closed eyes---from total blackness, to the multicolored patterns produced by waving the spread fingers of both hands between closed eyes and direct sunlight---can no doubt be duplicated for open eyes. Closed-eye sights are a subset of open-eye sights. Thus, let sights seen only with open eyes be $V_1$, and sights seen with either open or closed eyes be $V_2$: If there are sights seen only with closed eyes, they will be $V_3$; we want disjoint classes. We are interested in the temporal concurrence of sensations. Combining our definitions with information about our present world, we find there are no intrasensory concurrences (eyes open and closed at the same time). Further, our change will not produce intrasensory concurrences, because each realm will remain coherent. Thus, we will drop them from our discussion. There remain the intersensory concurrences, and four can be imagined; let us denote them by the ordered pairs $(T_1, V_1)$, $(T_1, V_2)$, $(T_2, V_1)$, $(T_2, V_2)$. In reality, some concurrences are permitted and others are forbidden, Let us designate each ordered pair as permitted or forbidden, using the following notation. Consider a rectangular array of \enquote{places} such that the place in the $i$\textsuperscript{th} row and $j$\textsuperscript{th} column corresponds to $(T_i, V_j)$, and assign a $p$ or $f$ (as appropriate) to each place. Then the following state array is a description of regularities in our present world. -\begin{equation}\begin{pmatrix} p & p\\ f & p \end{pmatrix}\end{equation} +\begin{equation} + \begin{pmatrix} + p & p \\ + f & p + \end{pmatrix} +\end{equation} So far as temporal successions of concurrences (within the present world) are concerned, any permitted concurrence may succeed any other permitted concurrence. The succession of a concurrence by itself is excluded, meaning that at the moment, a $V_1$, is defined as lasting from the time the eyes open until the time they next close. We have said that our topic is a certain change; we can now indicate more precisely what this change is. As long as we have a $2\times2$ array, there are 16 ways it can be filled with $p$'s and $f$'s. That is, there are 16 imaginable states. The changes we are interested in, then, are specific changes from the present state (\ref{physpresent}) to another state such as \ref{physafter}. -\vskip 1em{\centering\parbox{0.9\textwidth}{\centering \parbox{1.5in}{ \begin{equation}\label{physpresent}\begin{pmatrix} p & p \\ f & p\end{pmatrix} \end{equation}}\parbox{1.5in}{\begin{equation}\label{physafter}\begin{pmatrix} p & f \\ p & p\end{pmatrix}\end{equation}}\par}\par}\vskip 1em +\vskip 1em{\centering\parbox{0.9\textwidth}{\centering + \parbox{1.5in}{ + \begin{equation} + \label{physpresent} + \begin{pmatrix} + p & p \\ + f & p + \end{pmatrix} + \end{equation}} + \parbox{1.5in}{\begin{equation} + \label{physafter} + \begin{pmatrix} + p & f \\ + p & p + \end{pmatrix} + \end{equation}}\par} + \par} +\vskip 1em However, we want to exclude some changes. The change that changes nothing is excluded. We aren't interested in changing to a state having only $f$'s, which amounts to blindness. A change to a state with a row or column of $f$'s leaves one sight or touch completely forbidden (a person becomes blind to open-eye sights); such an \enquote{impairment} is of little interest. Of the remaining changes, one merely leaves a formerly permitted concurrence forbidden: closed-eye sights can no longer be seen with open eyes. The rest of the changes are the ones most relevant to perception-dissociation. They are changes in the place of the one $f$; the change to the state having only $p$'s; and finally -\vskip 1em{\centering\parbox{0.9\textwidth}{\centering \parbox{0.75in}{\raggedleft $\begin{pmatrix} p & p \\ f & p \end{pmatrix}$} \parbox{0.5in}{\centering \huge $\rightarrow$ } \parbox{0.75in}{$\begin{pmatrix} f & p \\ p & f \end{pmatrix}$}}}\vskip 1em +\vskip 1em{ +\centering\parbox{0.9\textwidth}{ + \centering + \parbox{0.75in}{\raggedleft + $\begin{pmatrix} + p & p \\ + f & p + \end{pmatrix}$} + \parbox{0.5in}{\centering\huge$\rightarrow$} + \parbox{0.75in}{$\begin{pmatrix} + f & p \\ + p & f \end{pmatrix}$} +}} +\vskip 1em In general, we speak of a partition of a sensory realm into disjoint classes of perceptions, so that the two partitions are $[T_j]$ and $[V_j]$. The number of classes in a partition, m for touch and n for sight, is its detailedness. The detailedness of the product partition $[T_j]\times [V_j]$ is written $m\times n$. This detailedness virtually determines the $(mn)^2$ imaginable states, although it doesn't determine their qualitative content. Now suppose one change is followed by another, so that we can speak of a change series. It is important to realize that by our definitions so far, a change series is not a conposition of functions; it is a temporal phenomenon in which each state lasts for a finite time. (A function would be a general rule for rewriting states. A $2\times2$ rule might say, rotate the state clockwise one place, from \ref{physegcwa} to \ref{physegcwb}. -\vskip 1em {\centering\parbox{0.9\textwidth}{\centering\parbox{1.25in}{\raggedleft\begin{equation}\label{physegcwa}\begin{pmatrix}a & b \\ c & d\end{pmatrix}\end{equation}}\parbox{1.25in}{\begin{equation}\label{physegcwb}\begin{pmatrix}c & a \\ d & b\end{pmatrix}\end{equation}}}} \vskip 1em +\vskip 1em {\centering\parbox{0.9\textwidth}{\centering\parbox{1.25in}{\raggedleft\begin{equation}\label{physegcwa}\begin{pmatrix}a & b \\ c & d\end{pmatrix}\end{equation}}\parbox{1.25in}{\begin{equation}\label{physegcwb}\begin{pmatrix}c & a \\ d & b\end{pmatrix}\end{equation}}}} \vskip 1em But a composition of rules would not be a temporal series; it would be a new rule.) Returning to the sorting of changes, we always exclude the no-change changes, and states having only $f$'s. We are unenthusiastic about \enquote{impairing}changes, changes to states with rows or columns of $f$'s. Of the remaining changes, some merely forbid, replacing $p$'s with $f$'s. The rest of the changes are the most perception-dissociating ones. @@ -32,7 +67,7 @@ As for changes in the succession state in the eye case, either they leave the fo If we simply continue with the material we already have, two lines of investigation are possible. The first investigation is mathematical, and apparently amounts to combinatorial algebra. The second investigation concerns the relation between concurrences and commands of the will (observable as electrochemical impulses along efferent neurons). If a change occurs, and the perceptual feedback from a willed command consists of a formerly forbidden concurrence, is it $T$ or $V$ that conflicts with the command? Is it that you tried to close your eyes but couldn't get the sight to go away, or that you were trying to look at something but felt your eyes close anyway? -Before we carry out these investigations, however, we must return to our qualitative theory. If one of our eye changes happens to a physicist, he may immediately conclude that the cause of the anomaly is in himself, that the anomaly is psychological. But suppose that starting with a state for an extremely detailed product partition describing the present world, a whole change series occurs. Let $p$'s be black dots and $f$'s be white dots, and imagine a continuously shaded gray rectangle whose shading suddenly changes from time to time. We evoke this image to impress on the reader the extraordinary qualities of our concept, which can't be conveyed in ordinary English. Suppose also that to the extent that communication between scientists is still possible, perhaps in Braille, everybody is subjected to the same changes. If the physicist turns to his instruments, he finds that the anomalies have spread to his attempts to use them. The changes affect everything---everything, that is, except the intrasensory coherence of each sensory realm. Intrasensory coherence becomes the only stable reference point in the \enquote{world.} The question of \enquote{whether the anomalies are really outside or only in the mind} comes to have less and less scientific meaning. If physics survived, it would have to recognize the touch-sight dichotomy as a physical one! This scenario helps answer a question the reader may have had: what is the methodological status of our states? They don't seem to be either physics or psychology, yet it is quite clear how we would know if theasserted regularities had changed; in fact, that is the whole point of the states. The answer is that the states are perfectly good assertions (of observed regularities) which would acquire primary importance if the changes actually occurred. In fact, the changes would among other things shift the boundaries of physics and psychology; but we insist that our interest is in the physicist's side of the boundary. To complete the investigation we have outlined, the relation between what the states say and what existing physics says should be established, so that we will know what has to be done to the photons and electrons to produce the changes. It is the same as with time travel: the hard part is deciding what it is and the even harder part is making it happen. +Before we carry out these investigations, however, we must return to our qualitative theory. If one of our eye changes happens to a physicist, he may immediately conclude that the cause of the anomaly is in himself, that the anomaly is psychological. But suppose that starting with a state for an extremely detailed product partition describing the present world, a whole change series occurs. Let $p$'s be black dots and $f$'s be white dots, and imagine a continuously shaded gray rectangle whose shading suddenly changes from time to time. We evoke this image to impress on the reader the extraordinary qualities of our concept, which can't be conveyed in ordinary English. Suppose also that to the extent that communication between scientists is still possible, perhaps in Braille, everybody is subjected to the same changes. If the physicist turns to his instruments, he finds that the anomalies have spread to his attempts to use them. The changes affect everything---everything, that is, except the intrasensory coherence of each sensory realm. Intrasensory coherence becomes the only stable reference point in the \enquote{world.} The question of \enquote{whether the anomalies are really outside or only in the mind} comes to have less and less scientific meaning. If physics survived, it would have to recognize the touch-sight dichotomy as a physical one! This scenario helps answer a question the reader may have had: what is the methodological status of our states? They don't seem to be either physics or psychology, yet it is quite clear how we would know if the asserted regularities had changed; in fact, that is the whole point of the states. The answer is that the states are perfectly good assertions (of observed regularities) which would acquire primary importance if the changes actually occurred. In fact, the changes would among other things shift the boundaries of physics and psychology; but we insist that our interest is in the physicist's side of the boundary. To complete the investigation we have outlined, the relation between what the states say and what existing physics says should be established, so that we will know what has to be done to the photons and electrons to produce the changes. It is the same as with time travel: the hard part is deciding what it is and the even harder part is making it happen. \visbreak @@ -40,7 +75,7 @@ However, the foundations of our qualitative theory are not yet satisfactory, We These criticisms are based on the fact that our simple perceptions are actually learned, \enquote{unconscious} interpretations of raw data which by themselves don't look like anything. This fact is demonstrated by a vast number of standard experiments in which the raw data are distorted, the subject perceptually adapts to the distorted data, and then the subject is confronted with normal sensations again. The subject finds that the old familiar sensation of a table looks quite wrong, and that he has to make an effort to see the table which he knows is there. -Consider a modification of the clock-bell simultaneity experiment. The subject sits facing a large clock with a second-hand. His hearing is blocked in some way. Behind him, completely unseen, is a device which can give hima quick tap, a tactile sensation. There is also an unseen movie camera which photographs both the tactile contact and the clock face. The subject is tapped, and must call out the second-hand reading at the time of the tap. We expect a discrepancy between what the subject says and what the film says; but even if there is none, the experiment can proceed. Tell the subject that he always placed the tap earlier than it actually occurred, and that he will be given a reward if he learns to perceive more accurately. The purpose of the experiment is to demonstrate to the subject that even his perception of subjective simultaneity can be consciously modified. In the course of modification, he may not even know whether two perceptions seem simultaneous. +Consider a modification of the clock-bell simultaneity experiment. The subject sits facing a large clock with a second-hand. His hearing is blocked in some way. Behind him, completely unseen, is a device which can give him a quick tap, a tactile sensation. There is also an unseen movie camera which photographs both the tactile contact and the clock face. The subject is tapped, and must call out the second-hand reading at the time of the tap. We expect a discrepancy between what the subject says and what the film says; but even if there is none, the experiment can proceed. Tell the subject that he always placed the tap earlier than it actually occurred, and that he will be given a reward if he learns to perceive more accurately. The purpose of the experiment is to demonstrate to the subject that even his perception of subjective simultaneity can be consciously modified. In the course of modification, he may not even know whether two perceptions seem simultaneous. This criticism of the changes defined earlier is important, but it may not be insurmountable. Although Stratton became used to his trick eyeglasses, the image continued to seem distorted. There is some stability to our identification of our perceptions. Also, the physicist in our earlier scenario might ultimately adapt to the changes. He might realize that it is possible separately to identify sights and touches. Only the sight-touch correlation is unidentifiable; and the concept of such a correlation might become an abstract concept of physics just as the concept of particle resonance is today. diff --git a/essays/propositional_vibration.tex b/essays/propositional_vibration.tex index 9df1a7f..5750f8d 100644 --- a/essays/propositional_vibration.tex +++ b/essays/propositional_vibration.tex @@ -137,20 +137,7 @@ SPV notation, the "range" of the "variable" will be that of conventional logic. You cannot write '\cubeframe' for '$x$' in the statement matrix '$x=\cubeframe$'. -We must now elucidate at considerable length the uniqué properties of -SPV. When the reader sees an SPV figure, past perceptual training will cause -him to impute one or the other orientation to it. This phenomenon is not a -mere convention in the sense in which new terminology is a convention. -There are already two clear-cut possibilities. Their reality is entirely mental; -the external, ink-on-paper aspect does not change in any manner whatever. -The change that can occur is completely and inherently subjective and -mental. By mental effort, the reader can consciously control the orientation. -If he does, involuntary vibrations will occur because of neural noise or -attention lapses. The reader can also refrain from control and accept -whatever appears. In this case, when the figure is used as a notation, -vibrations may occur because of a preference for one meaning over the -other. Thus, a deliberate vibration, an involuntary vibration, and an -indifferent vibration are three distinct possibilities. +We must now elucidate at considerable length the uniqu\'e properties of SPV. When the reader sees an SPV figure, past perceptual training will cause him to impute one or the other orientation to it. This phenomenon is not a mere convention in the sense in which new terminology is a convention. There are already two clear-cut possibilities. Their reality is entirely mental; the external, ink-on-paper aspect does not change in any manner whatever. The change that can occur is completely and inherently subjective and mental. By mental effort, the reader can consciously control the orientation. If he does, involuntary vibrations will occur because of neural noise or attention lapses. The reader can also refrain from control and accept whatever appears. In this case, when the figure is used as a notation, vibrations may occur because of a preference for one meaning over the other. Thus, a deliberate vibration, an involuntary vibration, and an indifferent vibration are three distinct possibilities. What we have done is to give meanings to the two pre-existing perceptual possibilities. In order to read a proposition containing an SPV diff --git a/extra/apprehension_of_plurality.tex b/extra/apprehension_of_plurality.tex deleted file mode 100644 index eee4290..0000000 --- a/extra/apprehension_of_plurality.tex +++ /dev/null @@ -1,1199 +0,0 @@ -\chapter{The Apprehension of Plurality (1987)} - -% if we end up needing to add it: -% https://henryflynt.org/studies_sci/reqmath.html - -{\centering\itshape -(An instruction manual for 1987 concept art)\par} - -\section{Original Stroke-Numerals} - -Stroke-numerals were introduced in foundations of mathematics -by the German mathematician David Hilbert early in the twentieth -century. Instead of a given Arabic numeral such as `6', for example, one -has the expression consisting of six concatenated occurrences of the -stroke, e.g. `$||||||$'. - -To explain the use of stroke-numerals, and to provide a background -for my innovations, some historical remarks about the philosophy -of mathematics are necessary. Traditional mathematics had -treated positive whole-number arithmetic as if the positive whole -numbers (and geometrical figures also) were objective intangible -beings. Plato is usually named as the originator of this view. Actually, -there is a scholarly controversy over the degree to which Plato espoused -the doctrine of Forms---over whether Aristotle's \booktitle{Metaphysics} put -words in Plato's mouth---but that is not important for my purposes. -For an intimation of the objective intangible reality of mathematical -objects in Plato's own words, see the remarks about "divine" geometric -figures in Plato's \essaytitle{Philebus.} Aristotle's \booktitle{Metaphysics}, -1.6, says that mathematical entities -\begin{quotation} -are intermediate, differing from things perceived in being eternal and -unchanging, and differing from the Forms in that they exist in copies, -whereas each Form is unique. -\end{quotation} - -For early modern philosophers such as Hume and Mill, any such -"Platonic" view was not credible and could not be defended seriously. -Thus, attempts were made to explain number and arithmetic in ways -which did not require a realm of objective intangible beings. In fact, -Hume said that arithmetic consisted of tautologies; Mill that it -consisted of truths of experience. - -Following upon subsequent developments---the philosophical -climate at the end of the nineteenth century, and specifically -mathematical developments such as non-Euclidian geometry---Hilbert proposed -that mathematics should be understood as a game played with meaningless marks. -So, for example, arithmetic concerns nothing but formal -terms---numerals---in a network of rules. Actually, what made arithmetic -problematic for mathematicians was its infinitary character---as -expressed, for example, by the principle of complete induction. Thus, -the principal concern for Hilbert was that this formal game should not, -as a result of being infinitary, allow the deduction of both a proposition -and its negation, or of such a proposition as $0=1$. - -But at the same time (without delving into Hilbert's distinction -between mathematics and metamathematics), the stroke-numerals -replace the traditional answer to the question of what a number is. The -stroke-numeral '||||||' is a concrete semantics for the sign `6', and at the -same time can serve as a sign in place of `6'. The problem of positive -whole numbers as abstract beings is supposedly avoided by inventing -e.g. a number-sign, a numeral, for six, which is identically a concrete -semantics for six. Let me elaborate a little further. A string of six copies -of a token having no internal structure is used as the numeral `6', the -sign for six. Thus the numeral is itself a collection which supposedly -demands a count of six, thereby showing its meaning. Hans Freudenthal -calls this device an "ostensive numeral." - -So traditionally, there is a question as to what domain of beings -the propositions of arithmetic refer to, a question as to what the -referents of number-words are. \emph{Correlative to this, mathematicians' -intentions require numerous presuppositions about content, and -require extensive competancies---which the rationalizations for math- -ematics today are unable to acknowledge, much less to defend.} - -For example, if mathematics rests on concrete signs, as Hilbert -proposed, then, since concrete signs are objects of perception, the -reliability of mathematics would depend on the reliability of percep- -tion. Given the script numeral -{\plainbreak{1}\centering\includegraphics[width=1in]{img/oneortwo}\plainbreak{1}} -which is ambiguous between one and two, conventional mathematics -would have to guarantee the exclusion of any such ambiguity as this. -Yet foundations of mathematics excludes perception and the reliability -of concrete signs as topics---much as Plato divorced mathematics from -these topics. (Roughly, modern mathematicians would say that reliability -of concrete signs does not interact with any advanced mathematical -results. So this precondition can simply be transferred from the requisites -of cognition in general. But it would not be sincere for Hilbert to -give this answer. Moreover, my purpose is to investigate the possibility -of reconstructing our intuitions of quantity beyond the limits of the -present culture. In this connection, I need to activate the role of -perception of signs.) - -But the most characteristic repressed presuppositions of mathematics -run in the opposite, supra-terrestrial direction. Mathematicians' -intentions require a realm of abstract beings. Again, it is academically -taboo today to expose such presuppositions. -\footnote{G\"{o}del and Quine admit the need to assume the non-spatial, abstract -existence of classes. But they cannot elaborate this admission; they cannot -provide a supporting metaphysics.} But to recur to the -purpose of this investigation, concept art is about reconstructing our -intuitions of quantity beyond the limits of the present culture. This -project demands an account of these repressed presuppositions. To -compile such an account is a substantial task; I focus on it ina collateral -manuscript entitled "The Repressed Content-Requirements of Math- -ematics." To uncover the repressed presuppositions, a combination of -approaches is required.\footnote{One anthroplogist has written about \enquote{the locus of -mathematical reality}---but, being an academic, he merely reproduces a stock answer outside -his field (namely that the shape of mathematics is dictated by the physiology of -the brain).} I will not dwell further on the matter here--- -but a suitable sample of my results is the section "The Reality-Character -of Pure Whole Numbers and Euclidian Figures" in \emph{The Repressed Content-Requirements.} - -Returning to the original stroke-numerals, they were meant -(among other things) to be part of an attempt to explain arithmetic -without requiring numbers as abstract beings. They were meant as -signs, for numbers, which are identically their own concrete semantics. -Whether I think Hilbert succeeded in dispensing with abstract entities is -not the point here. I am interested in how far the exercise of positing -stroke-numerals as primitives can be elaborated. My notions of the -original stroke-numerals are adapted from Hilbert, Weyl, Markov, -Kneebone, and Freudenthal. For example, how does one test two -stroke-numerals for equality? To give the answer that "you count the -strokes, first in one numeral and then in the other," is not in the spirit of -the exercise. For if that is the answer, then that means that you have a -competency, "counting," which must remain a complete mystery to -foundations of mathematics. What one wants to say, rather, is that you -test equality of stroke-numerals by "cross-tallying": by e.g. deleting -strokes alternately from the two numerals and finding if there is a -remainder from one of the numerals. This is also the test of whether one -numeral precedes the other. So, now, given an adult mastery of quality -and abstraction, you can identify stroke-numerals without being able -to "count." - -In the same vein, you add two stroke-numerals by copying the -second to the right of the first. You subtract a shorter numeral from a -longer numeral by using the shorter numeral to tally deletion of strokes -from the longer numeral. You multiply two stroke-numerals by copying the second as many times as there are strokes in the first: that is, by -using the strokes of the first to tally the copying of the second numeral. - -To say that all this is superfluous, because we already acquired -these "skills" as a child, misses the point. The child does not face the -question, posed in the Western tradition, of whether we can avoid -positing whole numbers as abstract beings. To weaken the requirements -of arithmetic to the point that somebody with an adult mastery -of quality and abstraction can do feasible arithmetic "blindly"---i.e. -without being able to "count," and without being able to see number-names -('five', 'seven', etc.) in concrete pluralities---is a notable exercise, -one that correlates culturally with positivism and with the machine age. - -To reiterate, the stroke-numeral is meant to replace numbers as -abstract beings by providing number-signs which are their own concrete -semantics. Freudenthal said that we should communicate positive -whole numbers to alien species by broadcasting stroke-numerals to -them (in the form of time-series of beeps). Still, Freudenthal said that -the aliens would have to resemble us psychologically to get the point.\footnote{\booktitle{Lincos}, pp. 14--15.} - -When Hilbert first announced stroke-numerals, certain difficulties -were pointed out immediately. It is not feasible to write the -stroke-numerals for very large integers. (And yet, if it is feasible to write the -stroke-numeral for the integer n, then there is no apparent reason why -it would not also be feasible to write the stroke-numeral for n+1. So -stroke-numerals are closed under succession, and yet are contained in a -finite segment of the classical natural number series.) Moreover, large -feasible stroke-numerals, such as that for 10,001, are not surveyable. - -But this is not a study of metamathematical stroke-numerals. And -I do not wish to go into Hilbert's question of the consistency of -arithmetic as an infinitary game here; "The Repressed Content-Requirements" -will have more to say on the consistency question. The -purpose of this manual, and of the artworks which it accompanies, is to -establish apprehensions of plurality beyond the limits of traditional -civilizations (beyond the limits of Freudenthal's "us"). Moreover, these -apprehensions of plurality are meant to violate the repressed presuppo- -sitions of mathematics. I refer back to original stroke-numerals because -certain devices which I will use in assembling my novelties cannot be -supposed to be intuitively comprehensible---certainly not to the -traditionally-indoctrinated reader---and will more likely be understood -if I mention that they are adaptations of features of original stroke- -numerals. Let me mention one point right away. In our culture, we -usually see numerals as positional notations---e.g. 111 is decimal -$1\times 10^2+1\times 10^1+1$ or binary $1\times 2^2+1\times 2^1+1$. But stroke-numerals -are not a positional notation (except trivially for base 1). Likewise, my -novelties will not be positional notations; I will even nullify the -reference to base 1. (Only much later in my investigations, when broad -scope becomes important, will I use positional notation.) So the -foregoing introduction to stroke-numerals has only the purpose of -motivating my novelties. And references to the academic canon are given -only for completeness. They cannot be norms for what I am "permitted" to posit. - -\section{Simple Necker-Cube Numerals} - -In my stroke-numerals, the printed figure, instead of being a -stroke, is a Necker cube. (Refer to the attached reproduction, "Stroke- -Numeral.") A Necker cube is a two-dimensional representation of a -cubical frame, formed without foreshortening so that its perspective is -perceptually equivocal or multistable. The Necker cube can be seen as -flat, as slanting down from a central facet like a gem, etc.; but for the -moment I am exclusively concerned with the two easiest variants in -which it is seen as an ordinary cube, either projecting up toward the -front or down toward the front. - -{\center\includegraphics[width=4in]{img/neckercube}\plainbreak{2} -\includegraphics[width=2in]{img/neckerkey}\par} - -Since I will use perceptually multistable figures as notations, I -need a terminology for distinctions which do not arise relative to -conventional notation. I call the ink-shape on paper a \term{figure}. I call the -stable apparition which one sees in a moment---which has imputed -perspective---the \term{image}.\footnote{I may note, without wanting to be precious, that a bar does not count as a Hilbert stroke unless it is vertical relative to its reader.} -As you gaze at the figure, the image changes -from one orientation to the other, according to intricate subjective -circumstances. It changes spontaneously; also, you can change it -voluntarily. - -Strictly---and very importantly---it is the image which in this -context becomes the notation. Thus, I will work with notations which -are not ink-shapes and are not on a page. They arise as active interactions -of awareness with an "external" or "material" print-shape or -object. - -So far, then, we have images---partly subjective, pseudo-solid -shapes. I now stipulate an alphabetic role for the two orientations in -question. The up orientation is a \term{stroke}; the down orientation is called -"\term{vacant}," and acts as the proofreaders' symbol $\closure$, meaning "close up space." -(So that "vacant" is not "even" an alphabetic space.) Now the -two images in question are \term{signs}. The transition from image to sign can -be analogized to the stipulation that circles of a certain size are (occurances -of) the letter "o."\footnote{And---the shape, bar, positioned vertically relative to its reader, is the symbol, Hilbert stroke.} I may say that one sees the image; one -apprehends the image as sign. - -When a few additional explanations are made, then the signs -become plurality-names or "numerals." First, figures, Necker cubes, -are concatenated. When this is done, a display results. So the -stroke-numeral in the artwork, as an assembly of marks on a surface, is a -display of nine Necker cubes. An image-row occurs when one looks at -the display and sees nine subjectively oriented cubes, for just so long as -the apparition is stable (no cube reverses orientation). I chose nine -Necker cubes as an extreme limit of what one can apprehend in a fixed -field of vision. (So one must view the painting from several meters -away, at least.) The reader is encouraged to make shorter displays for -practice. Incidentally, if one printed a stroke-numeral so long that one -could only apprehend it serially, by shifting one's visual field, it would -be doubtful that it was well-defined. (Or it would incorporate a feature -which I do not provide for.) The universe of pluralities which can be -represented by these stroke-numerals is "small." My first goal is to -establish "subjectified" stroke-numerals at all. They don't need to be -large. - -The concatenated signs which you apprehend in a moment of -looking at the display are now apprehended or judged as a -plurality-name, a numeral. At the level where you apprehend signs (which, -remember, are alphabetized, partly subjective images, not figures), the -apparition is disambiguated. Thus I can explain this step of judging the -signs as plurality-names by using fixed notation. For nine Necker cubes -with the assigned syntactical role, you might apprehend such -permutations of signs as -\begin{enumerate}[label=\alpha*.] - \item $|\closure\closure||\closure\closure\closure|$ - \item $|\closure\closure\closure\closure\closure|||$ - \item $||||\closure\closure\closure\closure\closure$ - \item $||||\closure\closure\closure\closure|$ - \item $\closure\closure\closure\closure\closure\closure\closure\closure\closure$ -\end{enumerate} - -My Necker-cube stroke-numerals are something new; but (a)--(e) are -not---they are just a redundant version of Hilbert stroke-numerals -(which nullifies the base 1 reference as I promised). The "close up -space" signs function as stated; and the numeral concluded from the -expression corresponds to the number of strokes; i.e. the net result is -the Hilbert stroke-numeral having the presented number of strokes. So -(a) and (b) and (c) all amount to $|||$. (d) amounts to $|||||$. - -As for (e), it has the alphabetic role of a blank. My initial interpretation -of this blank is "no numeral present." Later I may interpret the -blank as "zero," so that every possibility will be a numeral. Let me -explain further. Even when I will interpret the blank as "zero." it will -not come about from having nine zeros mapped to one zero (like a sum -of zeros). (e) has nine occurrences of "close up space," making a blank. -There is always only one way of getting "blank." (A two-place display -allows two ways of getting "one" and one way of getting "two"; etc.) -The notation is not positional. It is immaterial whether one "focuses" -starting at the left or at the right. - -Relative to the heuristic numerals (a)--(e), you may judge the -intended numerals by counting strokes, using your naive competency -in counting. (It is also possible to use such numerals as (a)--(e) "blindly" -as explained earlier. This might mean that there would be no recognition -of particular numbers as gestalts; identity of numbers would be -handled entirely by cross-tallying.) The Necker-cube numerals, however, -pertain to a realm which is in flux because it is coupled to -subjectivity. My numerals provide plurality-names and models of that -realm. Thus, the issue of what you do when you conclude a numeral -from a sign in perception is not simple. \emph{We have to consider different -hermeneutics for the numerals---and the ramifications of those hermeneutics.} -Here we begin to get a perspective of the mutability which my -devices render manageable. - -For one thing, given a (stable) image-row, and thus a sign-row, you -can indeed use your naive arithmetical competency to count strokes, -and so conclude the appropriate numeral. This is \term{bicultural hermeneutic}, -because you are using the old numbers to read a new notation for -which they were not intended. We use the same traditional counting, of -course, to speak of the number of figures in a display. - -(This prescription of a hermeneutic is not entirely straightforward. -The competency called counting is required in traditional mathematics. -But such counting is already paradoxical "phenomenologically." I -explain this in the section called "Phenomenology of Counting" in \essaytitle{The -Repressed Content-Requirements}. As for the Necker-cube numerals, -the elements counted are not intended in a way which supports the -being of numbers as eternally self-identical. So the Necker-cube -numerals might resonate with the phenomenological paradoxes of -ordinary counting. The meaning of ordinary numbering, invoked in -this context, might begin to dissolve. But I mention this only to hint at -later elaborations. At this stage, it is proper to recall one's inculcated -school-counting; and to suppose that e.g. the number of figures in a -display is fixed in the ordinary way.) - -Then, there is the \term{ostensive hermeneutic}. Recall that I explained -Hilbert stroke-numerals as signs which identically provide a concrete -semantics for themselves; and as an attempt to do arithmetic without -assuming that one already possesses arithmetic in the form of competency -in counting, or of seeing number-names in pluralities. My -intention was to prepare the reader for features to be explained now. -On the other hand, at present we drop the notion of handling identity of -numerals by cross-tallying.\footnote{Because this notion corresponds to a situation in which we are unable to appraise image-rows as numerals, as gestalts.} -For the ostensive hermeneutic, it is crucial -that the display is short enough to be apprehended in a fixed field of -vision. - -With respect to short Hilbert numerals, I ask that when you see -e.g. - -$$||$$ - -marked ona wall, you grasp it asa sign for a definite plurality, without -mediation---without translating to the word "two." A similar intention -is involved in recognizing -$$\sout{||||}$$ -as a definite plurality, as a gestalt, without translating to "five." - -Now I ask you to apply this sort of hermeneutic to Necker-cube -stroke-numerals. I ask you to grasp the sign-row as a numeral, as a -gestalt. (Without using ordinary counting to call off the strokes.) Fora -two-place display, you are to take such images as - -\newcommand{\neckup}{\includegraphics[width=1in]{img/neckerup}} -\newcommand{\neckdown}{\includegraphics[width=1in]{img/neckerdown}} - -{\centering\neckup\neckdown\par} -and -{\centering\neckup\neckup\par} -as plurality-names without translating into English words. (Similarly - -{\centering\neckdown\neckdown\par} - -in the case where I choose to read "blank" as "zero.") Perhaps it is -necessary to spend considerable time with this new symbolism before -recognition is achieved. Again, I encourage the reader to make short -displays for practice. I have set a display of nine figures as the upper -limit for which it might be possible to learn to grasp every sign-row as a -numeral, as a gestalt. - -The circumstance that the apprehended numeral may be different -the next moment is not a mistake; the apprehended numeral is supposed -to be in flux. So when you see image-rows, you take them as -identical signs/semantics for the appearing pluralities. - -But who wants such numerals---where are there any phenomena -for them to count? For one thing, they count the very image-rows which -constitute them. The realm of these image-rows is a realm of subjective -flux: its plurality is authentically represented by my numerals, and -cannot be authentically represented by traditional arithmetic. - -A further remark which may be helpful is that here numerals arise -only visually. So far, my numerals have no phonic or audio equivalent. -(Whereas Freudenthal in effect posited an audio version of Hilbert -numerals, using beeps.) - -To repeat, by the "ostensive hermeneutic" I mean grasping the -sign-row, without mediation, as a numeral. But there is, as well, the -point that the Necker-cube numerals are \term{ostensive numerals}. That is, -the (momentary) numeral for six would in fact be an image-row with -just six occurrences of the image "upward cube." (Compare e.g. -$|||\closure\closure||\closure|$) The numeral is a collection in which only the "copies" of -"upward cube" contribute positively, so to speak; and these copies -demand a count of six (bicuturally). This feature needs to be clear, -because later I will introduce numerals for which it does not hold. - -Let me add another proviso concerning the ostensive hermeneutic -which will be important later. I will illustrate the feature in question -with an example which, however, is only an analogy. Referring to -Arabic decimal-positional numerals, you can appraise the number-name of -$$1001$$ -(comma omitted) immediately. But consider -$$786493015201483492147$$ -Here you cannot appraise the number-name without mediation. That -is, if you are asked to read the number aloud, you don't know whether -to begin with "seven" or "seventy-eight" or "seven hundred eighty-six." -Lacking commas, you have to group this expression from the right, in -triples, to find what to call it. An act of analysis is required. - -In the case of Necker-cube numerals and the ostensive hermeneutic, -I don't want you to see traditional number-names in the pluralities. -However, I ask you to grasp a sign-row as a numeral, as a gestalt. I now -add that the gestalt appraisal is definitive. I rule out appraising image-rows -analytically (by procedures analogous to mentally grouping an -Arabic number in triples). (I established a display of nine figures as the -upper limit to support this.) - -The need for this proviso will be obscure now. It prepares for a -later device in which, even for short displays, gestalt appraisal and -appraisal by analysis give different answers, either of which could be -made binding. - -\breatk - -The bicultural hermeneutic is applied, in effect, in my uninterpreted -calculus \textsc{"Derivation,"} which serves as a simplified analogue of -my early concept art piece \textsc{"Illusions."} (Refer to the reproductions on -the next four pages.) Strictly, though, "Derivation" does not concern a -Necker-cube stroke-numeral. The individual figures are not Necker -cubes, but "Wedberg cubes," formed with some foreshortening to make -one of the two orientations more likely to be seen than the other. What -is of interest is not apprehension of image-rows as numerals, but rather -appraisal of lengths of the image-rows via ordinary counting. As for the -lessons of this piece, a few simple observations are made in the piece's -instructions. But to pursue the topic of concept art as uninterpreted -calculi, and derive substantial lessons from it, will require an entire -further study---taking off from earlier writings on post-formalism and -uncanny calculi, and from my current writings collateral to this essay. - - -1987 Concept Art --- Henry Flynt -"DERIVATION" (August 1987 corrected version) - - -Purpose: To provide a simplified analogue of my 1961 concept art piece "'IIlusions'' which is -discrete and non-''warping.''* Thereby certain features of "'Illusions'' become more -clearly discernible. - - -Given a perceptually multistable figure, the ""Wedberg cube," which can be seen in two -orientations: as a cube; as a prism (trapezohedron.) - -Call what is seen at an instant an /mage. - -Nine figures are concatenated to form the display. - - -An element is an image of the display for as long as that image remains constant (Thus, -elements include: the image from the first instant of a viewing until the image first -changes; an image for the duration between two changes; the image from the last -change you see in a viewing until the end of the viewing.) - - -The /ength of an element equals the number of prisms seen. Lengths from O through nine -are possible. Two different elements can have the same length. Length of element X -is written /(X). - - -Elements are seen in temporal order in the lived time of the spectator. | refer to this order by -words with prefix 'T'. T-first; T-next; etc. - - -Element Y succeeds element X if and only if -i) (X) = KY), and Y is T-next after X of all elements with this length; or -ii) ¥ is the T-earliest element you ever see with length /(X) + 1. -Note that (ii) permits Y to be T-earlier than X: the relationship is rather artificial. - - -The initial element A is the T-first element. (/(A) may be greater than O; but it is likely to be O -because the figure is biased.) - - -The conclusion C is the T-earliest element of length 9 (exclusive of Ain the unlikely case in -which /(A) = 9). - - -A derivation is a series of elements in lived time which contains A and C and in which every -element but A succeeds some other element. - - -Discussion - -To believe that you have seen a derivation, you need to keep track that you see each -possible length, and to force yourself to see lengths which do not occur spontane- -ously. - - -You may know that you have seen a derivation, without being able to identify in memory the -particular successions. - - -"Derivation" is not isomorphic to "Illusions" for a number of reasons. ''Illusions" doesn't -require you to see individually every possible ratio between the T-first ratio and unity. -"Illusions" allows an element to succeed itself. The version of 'Derivation' pres- -ented here is a compromise between mimicking "'Illusions"' and avoiding a trivial or -cluttered structure. Any change such as allowing elements to succeed themselves -would require several definitions to be modified accordingly. - - -*In "Illusions," psychic coercion, which may be called "false seeing" or "warping," is -recommended to make yourself see the ration as unity. In ''Derivation," this warping is not -necessary; all that may be needed is that you see certain lengths willfully. - - -ABABA AAS - - -Concept Art Version of Mathematics System 3/26/6l(6/19/61) - -An "element"is the facing page (with the figure on it) so long -as the apparent, perceived, ratio of the length of the vertical -line to that of the horizontal line (the element's "associated -ratio") does not change. - -A "selection sequence" is asequence of elements of which the -first is the one having the greatest associated ratio, and -each of the others has the associated ratio next smallerthan -that of the preceding one. (To decrease the ratio, come to -see the vertical line as shorter, relative to the horizontal -line, one might try measuring the lines with a ruler to con- -vince oneself that the vertical one is not longer than the -other, and then trying to see the lines as equal in length; -constructing similar figures with a variety of real (measured) -ratios and practicing judging these ratios; and so forth.) -(Observe that the order of elements in a selection sequence -may not be the order in which one sees them.] - - -An elaboration of "Stroke-Numeral" should be mentioned here, -the piece called "an Impossible Constancy." (Refer to the facing page.) -As written, this piece presupposes the bicultural hermeneutic, and that -is probably the way it should be formulated. The point of this piece, -paradoxically, is that one seeks to annul the flux designed into the -apprehended numeral. Viewing of the Necker-cube numeral is placed -in the context of a lived experience which is interconfirmationally -weak: namely, memory of past moments within a dream (a single -dream). Presumably, appraisals of the numeral at different times could -come out the same because evidence to the contrary does not survive. -So inconstancy passes as constancy. Either hermeneutic can be -employed; but when I explained the hermetic hermeneutic, I encour- -aged you to follow the flux. Here you wouldn't do that---you wouldn't -stare at the display over a retentional interval. - - -As for the concept of equality with regard to Necker-cube numerals, -what can be said about it at this point? We have equality of numbers of -figures in displays, by ordinary counting. We have two hermeneutics -for identifying an apprehended numeral. In the course of expounding -them, I expounded equivalence of different permutations of "stroke" -and "vacant." Nevertheless, given that, for example, a display of two -figures can momentarily count the numeral apprehended from a dis- -play of three figures,* we are in unexplored territory. Cross-tallying, -suitable for judging equality of Hilbert numerals, seems maladapted to -Necker-cube numerals; in fact, I dismissed it when introducing the -ostensive hermeneutic. - -If the "impossible constancy" from the paragraph before last were -manageable, then one might consider restricting the ultimate definition -of equality to impossible constancies. That is, with respect to a single -display, if one wanted to investigate the intention of constancy (self- -equivalence of the apprehended numeral), one might start with the -impossible constancy. Appraisals of a given display become constant -(the numeral becomes self-equivalent) in the dream. Then two displays -which are copies might become constantly equivalent to each other, in -the dream. - -Such is a possibility. To elaborate the basics and give an incisive -notion of equality is really an open problem, though. Other avenues -might require additional devices such as the use of figures with distinc- -tions of appearance. - - -*that it is not assured that copies of a numeral will be apprehended or -appraised correlatively - - -1987 Concept Art --- Henry Flynt -Necker-Cube Stroke-Numeral: AN IMPOSSIBLE CONSTANCY - - -The purpose of this treatment is to say how a Necker-cube stroke numeral may be -judged (from the standpoint of private subjectivity) to have the same value at different -times; even though the conventional belief-system says that the value is likely to change -frequently. - - -This is accomplished by selecting a juncture in an available mode of illusion, namely -dreaming, which annuls any distinction between an objective circumstance, and the -circumstance which exists according to your subjective judgment. In the first instance, | -don't ask you to change your epistemology. Instead, to repeat, | select an available juncture -in lived experience at which the conventional epistomology gets collapsed. - - -You have to occupy yourself with the stroke-numeral to the point that you induce -yourself to dream about it. - -When, in apprehending a stroke-numeral, you "judge" the value of the numeral, the -number, this refers to the image you see and to the number-word which you may conclude -from the image. - -Suppose that in a single dreamed episode, you judge the value of the numeral at two -different moments. Suppose that at the second moment, you do not register any discre- -pancy between the value at the second moment and what the value was at the first -moment. Then you are permitted to disregard fallibility of memory, and to conclude that the -values were the same at both moments: because if your memory has changed the past, it -has done so tracelessly. A tracelessly-altered past may be accepted as the genuine past. - - -Refinements. The foregoing dream-construct may be "'lifted" to waking experience, as -per the lengthy explanations in ""An Epistemic Calculus."' Now you are asked to alter your -epistemology, selectively to suspend a norm of realism. - -Now that we are concerned with waking experience, a supporting refinement is -possible. Suppose | make an expectation (which may be unverbalized) that the value of the -numeral at a future moment will be the same that it is now. This expectation cannot be -proved false, if: the undetermined time-reference 'future moment" is applied only at those -later moments when the value is the same as at the moment the expectation was made. -(Any later moment when the value is not the same is set aside as not pertinent, or forgotten -at still later moments when the value is the same.) - - -As a postscript, there is another respect in which testing a fact requires trust in a -comparable fact. Suppose | make a verbalized expectation that the value of the numeral in -the future will be the same as at present. Then to test this expectation in the future depends -on my memory of my verbalization. My expectation cannot be belied unless | have a sound - -"memory that the number | verbalized in my expectation is different from the number | -conclude from the image now. - - -HT. Inconsistently-Valued Numerals - - -As the "Wedberg cube" illustrates, a cubical frame can be formed -in different ways, altering the likelihood that one or another image is -seen. With respect to the initial uses of the Necker-cube stroke-numeral -a figure is wanted which lends itself to the image of a cube projecting -up, or of a cube projecting down, with an approximately equal likeli- -hood for the two images---and which makes other images unlikely. -Now let a Necker cube be drawn large, with heavy line-segments, with -all segments equally long, with rhomboid front and back faces; and -display it below eye level. - - -As you look for the up and down orientations, there should be -moments when paradoxically you see the figure taking on both of these -mutually-exclusive orientations at once---yielding an apparition which -is a logical/ geometric impossibility. The sense-content in this case is -dizzying. - -That we have perceptions of the logically impossible when we -suffer illusions has been mentioned by academic authors. (Negative -afterimages of motion---the waterfall illusion.) Evidently, though, these -phenomenaare so distasteful to sciences which are still firmly Aristote- -lian that the relations of perception, habituation, language, and logic -manifested in these phenomena have never been assessed academically. -For me to treat the paradoxical image thoroughly here would be too -much of a digression from our subject, the apprehension of plurality. -However, a sketchy treatment of the features of the impossible image is -necessary here. - -To begin with, the paradoxical image of the Necker cube is not the -same phenomenon as the "impossible figures" shown in visual percep- -tion textbooks. The latter figures employ "puns" in perspective coding -such that parts of a figure are unambiguous, but the entire figure - - -cannot be grasped as a gestalt coherently. Then, the paradoxical Necker- -cube image is not an inconsistently oriented object (as the reader may -have noted). It is an apparitional depiction of an inconsistently oriented -object. But this is itself remarkable. For since a dually-oriented cube (in -Euclidean 3-space) is self-contradictory by geometric standards, a -picture of it amounts to a non-vacuous semantics for an inconsistency. -Another way of saying the same thing is that the paradoxically- -oriented image is real as an apparition. - -If one is serious about wanting a "logic of contradictions"---a logic -which admits inconsistencies, without a void semantics and without -entailing everything---then one will not attempt to get it by a contorted -weakening of received academic logic. One will start from a concrete -phenomenon which demands a logic of contradictions for its authentic -representation---and will let the contours of the phenomenon shape the -logic. - -In this connection, the paradoxically-oriented Necker-cube image -provides a lesson which I must explain here. Consider states or proper- -ties which are mutually exclusive, such as "married" and "bachelor." -Their conjunction---in English, the compound noun "married -bachelor"---is inconsistent.* On the other hand, the joint denial -"unmarried nonbachelor" is perfectly consistent and is satisfied by -nonpersons: a table is an unmarried nonbachelor. "Married" and -"bachelor" are mutually exclusive, but not exhaustive, properties. Only -when the domain of possibility, or intensional domain, is restricted to -persons, so "married" and "bachelor" become exhaustive properties. ** -Then, by classical logic, "married bachelor" and "unmarried nonbache- -lor" both have the same semantics: they are both inconsistent, and thus -vacuous, and thus indistinguishable. For exhaustive opposites, joint -affirmation and joint denial are identically vacuous. - -But the paradoxically-oriented Necker-cube image provides a -concrete phenomenon which combines mutually exclusive states---as -an apparition. We can ascertain whether a concrete case behaves as the -tenets of logic prescribe. As I have said, various images can be seen ina -Necker cube, including a flat image. Thus, the "up" and "down" cubes - - -*If I must show that it is academically permitted to posit notions such as -these, then let me mention that Jan Mycielski calls "triangular circle" incon- -sistent in The Journal of Symbolic logic, Vol. 46, p. 625. - -**] invoke this device so that I may proceed to the main point quickly. If it -is felt to be too artificial, perhaps it can be eliminated later. - - -are analogous to "married" and "bachelor" in that they are not exhaus- -tive of a domain unless the domain is produced by restriction. Then -"neither up nor down" is made inconsistent. (It is very helpful if you -haven't learned to see any stable images other than "up" and "down.") -The great lesson here is that given "both up and down" and "neither up -nor down" as inconsistent, their concrete reference is quite different. To -see a cube which manifests both orientations at the same time is one -paradoxical condition, which we know how to realize. To see a cube -which has no orientation (absence of "stroke" and absence of "vacant" -both) would be a different paradoxical condition, which we do not -know how to realize and which may not be realizable from the Necker- -cube figure. I don't claim that this is fully worked out; but it intimates a -violation of classical logic so important that I had to mention it. When -concept art reaches the level of reconstructing our inferential intuitions -as well as our quantitative intuitions, such anomalies as these will surely -be important. - -Referring back to the Necker cube of page 210, let us now intend it -as a stroke-numeral (display of one figure). Let me modify the previous -assignments and stipulate that "blank" means "zero," rather than "no -numeral present." (It is more convenient if every sign yields a numeral.) -When you see the paradoxical image, you are genuinely seeing "a" -numeral which is the simultaneous presence of two mutually exclusive -numerals "one" and "zero" ---because it is the simultaneous presence of -images which are mutually exclusive geometrically.*** - -It's not the same thing as - - -| - - ----because these are merely ambiguous scripts. In the Necker-cube case, -two determinate images which by logic preclude each other are present -at once; and as these images are different numerals, we have a genuine - - ----or as an alternative, - - -*For brevity, I may compress the three levels image, sign, numeral in -exposition. - - -inconsistently-valued numeral. - -This situation changes features of the Necker-cube numerals in -important ways, however. Lessons from above become crucial. We -transfer the ostensive hermeneutic to the new situation, and find an -inconsistent-valued numeral. But this is no longer an ostensive -numeral. We have a name which is one and zero simultaneously, but -this is because of the impossible shape (orientation) of the notation- -token. What we do not have is a collection of images of a single kind -(the stroke) which paradoxically requires a count of one and a count of -zero. "Stroke" is positively present, while "vacant" is positively present -in the same place. We will find that a display with two figures can be -inconsistent as zero and two; but it is not an ostensive numeral, because -the number of strokes present is two uniquely.* Here the numerals are -not identically their semantics: for the anomaly is not an anomaly of -counting. The ambiguous script numeral is a proper analogy in this -respect. To give an anomaly of counting which serves as a concrete -semantics for the inconsistently-valued numerals, I will turn to an -entirely different modality. - -From work with the paradoxical image, we learn that the Necker -cube allows some apprehensions which are not as commonas others--- -but which can be fostered by the way the figure is made and by -indicating what is to be seen. These rare apprehensions then become -intersubjectively determinate. If one observes Necker-cube displays for -a long time, one may well observe subtle, transient effects. For exam- -ple, you might see the "up" and "down" orientations at the same time, -but see one as dominating the other. In fact, there are too many such -effects and their interpersonal replicability is dubious. If we accepted -such effects as determining numerals, the interpersonal replicability of -the symbols would be eroded. Also the concrete definiteness of my -anomalous, paradoxical effects would be eroded. So I must stipulate -that every subtle transient effect which I do not acknowledge explicitly -is not definitive, and is unwanted, when the display is intended as a -symbolism. - -Let me continue the explanation, for the inconsistently-valued - - -*Referring to my "person-world analysis" and to the dichotomy of -Paradigm | and Paradigm 2 expounded in "Personhood III," this token which -is two mutually exclusive numerals because its shape is inconsistent is outside -that dichotomy: because established signs acquire a complication which is -more or less self-explanatory, but the meanings do not follow suit. - - -numerals, for displays of more than one figure. When the display -consists of two Necker cubes, and the paradoxical images are admitted, -what are the variations? In the first place, one figure might be seen (ina -moment) as a paradoxical image and the other as a unary image. -Actually, if it is important to obtain this variant, we can compel it, by -drawing one of the cubes in a way which hampers the double image. -(Thin lines, square front and back faces, the four side segments much -shorter than the front and back segments.) Then we stipulate that the -differently-formed cubes continue to have the same assigned interpre- -tation. - - -Reading the two-figure display, then, the paradoxical and unary -images concatenate so that the resulting numeral is in one case one and -two at the same time; and in the other case zero and one at the same -time. Of course, it is only ina moment that either of these two cases will -be realized. At other moments, one may have only unary images, so -that the numeral is noncontradictorily zero, one, or two as the case may -be. (If it is important to know that we can obtain a numeral which is -both one and two at the same time without using dissimilar figures, -then, of course, we can use a single figure and redefine the signs as "one" -and "two.") - -Now let us consider a display of two copies of the cube which lends -itself to the paradoxical image. Suppose that two paradoxical images -are seen; what is the numeral? Here is where I need the proviso which I -introduced earlier. Every sign-row is capable of being grasped as a -numeral, as a gestalt; and the appraisal of image-rows as numerals, -analytically, is ruled out. Let me explain how this proviso applies when -two paradoxical images are seen. - -Indeed, let me begin with the case of a pair of ambiguous - - -script-numerals: ] ] - - -When these numerals are formed as exact copies, and I appraise the -expression as a numeral, as a gestalt, then I see 11 or I see 22. ("Conca- -tenating in parallel") I do not see 21 or 12---although these variants are -possible to an analytical appraisal of the expression. In the gestalt, it is -unlikely to intend the left and right figures differently. This case is -helpful heuristically, because it provides a situation in which the percep- -tual modification is only a matter of emphasis (as opposed to imputa- -tion of depth). To this degree, the juncture at issue is externalized; and it -is easier to argue a particular outcome. On the other hand, the mechan- -ics differ essentially in the script case and the Necker-cube case. - -In the Necker-cube case, one sees both the left and the right image -determinately both ways at once. This case may be represented as - - -stroke stroke -vacant vacant - - -Analytically, then, four variants are available here, - - -stroke-stroke - -stroke-vacant -vacant-stroke -vacant-vacant - - -However, to complete the present explanation, only two of these -variants appear as gestalts, - - -stroke-stroke -vacant-vacant - - -I chose to rule out the three-valued numeral which would be obtained -by analytically inventorying the permutations of the signs afforded in -the perception. The two-valued numeral arising when the sign-row is -grasped as a gestalt is definitive. - -Let me summarize informally what I have established. Relative to -a two-figure display with paradoxical images admitted, we have a -numeral which is inconsistenly two and zero. We can also have a -numeral which is inconsistently one and zero, and a numeral which is -inconsistently two and one. (In fact, these variants occur in several -ways.) But we don't have a numeral which is inconsistently zero, one, -and two---even though such a variant is available in an analytical -appraisal---because such a numeral does not appear, in perception, asa -gestalt. - -Academic logic would never imagine that there is a situation -which demands just this configuration as its representation. Certain - - -definite positive inconsistencies are available in perception. Other defi- -nite positive inconsistencies, very near to them, are not available. Once -again, if one wants a vital "logic of contradictions," one has to develop -it as a representation of concrete phenomena; not as an unmotivated -contortion of received academic logics. - - -But what is the use of inconsistently-valued numerals? I shall now -provide the promised concrete semantics for them. This semantics -utilizes another experience of a logical impossibility in perception. This -time the sensory modality is touch; and the experienced contradiction -is one of enumeration. Aristotle's illusion is well known in whicha rod, -placed between the tips of crossed fingers, is felt as two rods. (Actually, -the greater oddity is that when the rod is held between uncrossed -fingers, it is felt as one even though it makes two contacts with the -hand.) I now replace the rod with a finger of the other hand: the same -finger is felt as one finger in one hand, as two fingers by the other hand. -So the same entity is apprehended as being of different pluralities, in -one sensory modality. - -Let me introduce some notation to make it easier to elaborate. -Abbreviate "left-hand" as L and "right-hand" as R. Denote the first, -middle, ring, and little fingers, respectively, as 1, 2,3, and 4. Now cross -L2 and L3, and touch R3 between the tips of L2 and L3. One feels R3 as -one finger in the right hand, and as two fingers with the left hand. As -apparition, R3 gets a count of both one and two, apprehended in the -same sensory modality at the same time. Here is a phenomenon -authentically signified by a Necker-cube numeral which is both "1" and -"> - -The crossed-finger device is obviously unwieldy. The possibilities -can, however, be enlarged somewhat, to make a further useful point. -For example, touch L1 and R3, while touching crossed L2 and L3 with -R4. Here we have a plurality, concatenated from one unary and one -paradoxical constituent, which numbers two and three at the same -time. - -Then, we may cross L1 and L2 and touch R3, while crossing L3 -and L4 and touching R4. Now we have a plurality which is two and -four at the same time. In terms of perceptual structure, it is analogous -to the numeral concatenated from two paradoxical images. As gestalt, -we concatenate in parallel. In the case of the fingers, we do not find a -plurality of three unless we appraise the perception analytically (block- - - -ing concatenation in parallel). - -If one wants the inconsistently-valued numerals to be ostensive -numerals, then one can use finger-apparitions to constitute stroke- -numerals. Referring back to the first example, if we specify that the -stroke(s) is your R3-perception, or the apparition R3, then we obtaina -stroke which is single and double at the same time. Now the -inconsistently-valued numeral is identically its semantics: it authenti- -cally names the token-plurality which constitutes it. - -I choose not to rely heavily on this device because it is so unwieldy. -The visual device is superior in that considerably longer constellations -are in the grasp of one person. Of course, if one chose to define fingers -as the tokens of ordinary counting, one might keep track of numbers -larger than ten by calling upon more than one person. The analogous -device could be posited with respect to the inconsistently-valued -numbers; but then postulates about intersubjectivity would have to be -stated formally. I do not wish to pursue this approach. - -It is worth mentioning that if you hold a rod vertically in the near -center of your visual field, hold a mirror beyond it, and focus your gaze -on the rod, then you will see the rod reflected double in the mirror. This -is probably not an inconsistent perception, because the inconsistent -counts don't apply to the same apparition. (But if we add Kant's -postulate that a reflection exactly copies spacial relations among parts -of the object, then the illusion does bring us close to inconsistency.) The -illusion illustrates, though, that there is a rich domain of phenomena -which support mutable and inconsistent enumeration. - - -IV. Magnitude A rithmatic - - -I will end this stage of the work with an entirely different approach -to subjectively variable numerals and quantities. I use the horizontal- -vertical illusion, the same that appeared in "Ilusions," to form numer- -als. The numeral called "one" is now the standard horizontal-vertical -illusion with a measured ratio of one between the segments. The -numeral called "two" becomes a horizontal-vertical figure such that the -vertical has a measured ratio of two to the horizontal segment. Etc. If -"zero" is wanted, it consists of the horizontal segment only. - -The meaning of each numeral is defined as the apparent, perceived -length-ratio of the vertical to the horizontal segment. Thus, for exam- -ple, the meaning of the numeral called "one" admits subjective varia- -tion above the measured magnitude. For brevity, I call this approach -magnitude arithmetic---although the important thing is how the mag- -nitudes are realized. - - -In all of the work with stroke-numerals, numbers were determina- -tions of plurality. An ostensive numeral was a numeral formed from a -quantity of simple tokens, which quantity was named by the expres- -sion. The issue in perception was the ability to make gestalt judgments -of assemblies of copies of a simple token. - -The magnitude numerals establish a different situation. Magni- -tude numerals pertain to quantity as magnitude. They relate to plural- -ity only in the sense that in fact, measured vertical segments are integer -multiples of a unit length; and e.g. the apprehended meaning of "two" -will be a magnitude always between the apprehended meanings of -"one" and "three"---etc. - -Once again we can distinguish a bicultural and an ostensive -hermeneutic. The bicultural hermeneutic involves judging meanings of -the numerals with estimates in terms of the conventional assignment of -fractions to lengths (as on a ruler). I find, for example, that the -magnitude numeral "two" may have a meaning which is almost 3. -(Larger numerals become completely unwieldly, of course. The point of -the device is to establish a principle, and I'm not required to provide for -large numerals.) - -Then there must be an ostensive hermeneutic, a "magnitude- -ostensive" hermeneutic. Here the subjective variations of magnitude do -not receive number-names. They are apprehended (and retentionally -remembered) ostensively. - -As I pointed out, above, the concept of equality with regard to -Necker-cube numerals is at present an open problem. To write an -equality between two Necker-cube displays of the same length is not -obviously cogent; in fat, it is distinctly implausible. For magnitude -numerals, however, it is entirely plausible to set numbers equal to -themselves---e.g. - - -The point is that it is highly likely that copies of a magnitude numeral -will be apprehended or appraised correlatively. This was by no means -guaranteed for copies of a Necker-cube numeral displayed in proximity. - - -Upon being convinced that these simplest of equations are mean- -ingful, we may stipulate a simple addition, "one" plus "one" equals -"two." (It was not possible to do anything this straightforward with -Necker-cube numerals.) Continuing, we may write a subtraction with -these numerals. There may now appear a complication in the rationale -of combination of these quantities. The "two" in the subtraction may -appear shorter than the "two" in the addition. A dependence of percep- -tions of these numbers on context may be involved. - -We find, further, that "readings" of these equations according to -the bicutural hermeneutic yield propositions which are false when -referred back to school-arithmetic---e.g. the addition might be read as - - -I'/s + 1's = 24/s - - -So the effect of inventing a context in which a relationship called "one -plus one equals two" is appraised as 1!/5 + 1!/; = 24/5 (where there is a -palpable motivation for doing this) is to erode school-arithmetic. - -Another approach to the same problem is to ask whether magni- -tude arithmetic authentically describes any palpable phenomenon. The -answer is that it does, but that the phenomenon in question is the -illusion, or rationale of the illusion. The significant phenomenon arises -from having both a measured ratio and a visually-apparent ratio, which -diverge. This is very different from claiming equations among non- -integral magnitudes without any motivation for doing so. Indeed, given -that the divergence is the phenomenon, the numerals are not really -ostensive in a straightforward way. - -One way of illustrating the power of the phenomenon which -models magnitude arithmetic is to display ruler grids flush with the -segments of a horizontal-vertical figure. - - -What we find is that the illusion visually captures the ruler grids: it -withstands objective measurement and overcomes it. We have a non- -trivial, systematic divergence between two overlapping modalities for -appraising length-ratios---one modality being considered by this cul- -ture to be subjective, and the other not. - - -In "Derivation" I used multistable cube figures to give a simplified, -discrete analogue of the potentially continuous "vocabulary" in "Illu- -sions." I could try something similar for magnitude numerals. Take as -the magnitude unit a black bar representing an objective unit of twenty -20ths, concatenated with a row of five Necker cubes. Each cube seen in -the "up" orientation adds another 20th to the judged magnitude of the -subjective unit, so that the unit's subjective magnitude can range to 14. -When, however, we write the basic equality between units, it becomes -clear that this device does not function as it is meant to. In particular, -the claim of equality applied to the Necker-cube tails is not plausible, -because it is not guaranteed that these tails will be apprehended or -appraised correlatively. I have included this case as another illutration -of the sort of inventiveness which this work requires; and also to -illustrate how a device may be inadequate. - - -* * * - - -This completes the present stage of the work. Let me emphasize -that this manual does little more than define certain devices developed -in the summer of 1987. These devices can surely give rise to substantial -lessons and substantial applications. - -There is my pending project in a priori neurocybernetics. Given -that mechanistic neurophysiology arrives at a mind-reading machine--- -called, in neurophysiological theory, an autocerebroscope---devise a -text for the human subject such that reading it will place the machine in -an impossible state (or short-circuit it). Such a problem is treated -facetiously in Raymond Smullyan's 5000 B.C.; and more seriously by -Gordon G. Globus' "Mind, Structure, and Contradiction," in Con- -sciousness and the Brain, ed. Gordon Globus et al. (New York, 1976), p. -283 in particular. But I imagine that my Necker-cube notations will be -the key to the first profound, extra-cultural solution. - -In any case, this essay is only the beginning of an enterprise which -requires collateral studies and persistence far into the future to be -fulfilled. (I may say that I first envisioned the possibility of the present -results about twenty-five years ago.) - - -Background References - - -David Hilbert, three papers in From Frege to Godel, ed. Jean van Heijenoort -(1967) - -David Hilbert, "Neubegrundung der Mathematik" (1922) - -David Hilbert and P. Bernays, Grundlagen der Mathematik I (Berlin, 1968), -pp. 20-25 - -Plato, "Philebus" - -Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1.6 - -Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elements, tr. Glenn -Morrow (Princeton, 1970), 54-55 - -Hans Freudenthal, Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse -(Amsterdam, 1960), pp. 14-5, 17, 21, 45-6 - -Kurt Godel in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, ed. Paul Schilpp (1944), p. -137 - -W.V.O. Quine, Mathematical Logic (revised), pp. 121-2 - -Paul Benacerraf, "What numbers could not be," in Philosophy of Mathemat- -ics (2nd edition), ed. Paul Beneacerraf and Hilary Putnam (1983) - -Leslie A. White, "The Locus of Mathematical Reality: An Anthropological -Footnote," in The World of Mathematics, ed. J.R. Newman, Vol. 4, pp. -2348-2364 - -Herman Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science (Princeton, -1949), pp. 34-7, 55-66 - -Andrei Markov, Theory of Algorithms (Jerusalem, 1961) - -G.T. Kneebone, Mathematical Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics -(London, 1963), p. 204ff. - -Michael Resnik, Frege and the Philosophy of Mathematics (Ithaca, 1980), pp. -82, 99 - -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathe- -matics (1976), p. 24; but p. 273 - -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammer (Oxford, 1974), pp. 330-331 - -Steven M. Rosen in Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time, ed. David -R. Griffin (1986), pp. 225-7 - -Edgar Rubin, "Visual Figures Apparently Incompatible with Geometry," -Acta Psychologica, Vol. 7 (1950), pp. 365-87 - -E.T. Rasmussen, "On Perspectoid Distances," Acta Pschologica, Vol. Il -(1955), pp. 297-302 - -N.C.A. da Costa, "On the Theory of Inconsistent Formal Systems," Notre -Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Vol. 15, pp. 497-510 - -FG. Asenjo and J. Tamburino, "Logic of Antinomies," Notre Dame Journal -of Formal Logic, Vol. 16, pp. 17-44 - - -Richard Routley and R.K. Meyer, "Dialectical Logic, Classical Logic, and the -Consistency of the World," Studies in Soviet Thought, Vol. 16, pp. 1-25 - -Nicolas Goodman, "The Logic of Contradiction," Zeitschr. f. math. Logik und -Grundlagen d. Math., Vol. 27, pp. 119-126 - -Hristo Smolenov, "Paraconsistency, Paracompleteness and Intentional Con- -tradictions," in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (1982) - -J.B. Rosser and A.R. Turquette, Many-valued Logics (1952), pp. 1-9 - -Gordon G. Globus, "Mind, Structure, and Contradiction," in Conciousness -and the Brain, ed. Gordon Globus et al. (New York, 1976), p. 283 - - diff --git a/extra/personhood_ii.tex b/extra/personhood_ii.tex deleted file mode 100644 index 0a058ee..0000000 --- a/extra/personhood_ii.tex +++ /dev/null @@ -1,573 +0,0 @@ -\chapter{Personhood II: Attachment's Turbulent Causation (May 1981, rev. 1991)} - -CONTENTS - - A. Preliminary: Ordinary Personhood - - B. Object-Perception and Personal Identity - - C. Longitudinal Identity and Modes of Existence - - D. Language and Human Self-Image - - E. Language and Thought - - F. Propositional Knowledge and Personal Identity - - G. Attachment to an Experience-World - - H. Mental Stability and Biographic Identity - - I. Other People and Self-Objectification - - J. Culture as a Phase Discriminated in the Person-World - - K. Community; Society as a Grandiose Other - - L. The Ostensible World as a Delusion - - M. Imminent Character as an Invariant to Psychedelics - - N. Thematic Personal Identity - - O. Fixation to a Cumulating Social Role - - P. Attachment's Turbulent Causation - - Q. The Determination of Personal Fate - - Afterward: An Orientation for Personhood II - -[I presented my first "paradigm of personhood" in a manuscript of December 5, 1980. I followed it with a series of critical manuscripts; then I embodied critique and elaborations in a second paradigm, Personhood II (May 1981). - -In this revision of Personhood II, I proceed at once to the exposition. Context for the venture is supplied by my other writings on personhood, especially "Personhood IV" (1984; 1991).] - -\section{Preliminary: Ordinary Personhood} - -"Ordinary personhood" is the realm of functioning which encompasses the following. - -There is a bonding of my direct awareness (including feelings, urges, moods) to "objectivities." I interact with objectivities fragmentarily and sequentially while conceiving them as persisting wholes. I seek logico-perceptual coherence of the objectivities, sorting them out by identifications, distinctions, memories, expectations, appellations, etc. (It may be helpful to note that objectivities have a circumstantial and hearsay character.) A definite logico-perceptual collation of objectivities is called a perception-world or perception-reality. - -I can act, producing change or expending effort. (Mental action, somatic action, action upon exterior objectivities are all included.) - - a. I can realize a preference in action: implemented choice or willful action. - - b. I may act contrary to my preference: "loss of self-control." - - c. There is a spectrum of actions between those which are acutely willful and those which are acutely unwanted: habit, being enthralled, lassitude, etc. - -I can be self-conscious: direct awareness. - -I can fantasize, etc.: imagistic mentation, etc. - -More fundamental than the above: "the totality" is polarized as self and non-self (or world). The features characterizing self are centered activation, presence, drive. These features can be attenuated in a fever and in some other modes of existence. - -* - -B. Object-Perception and Personal Identity - -1. The perception-world is polarized into well-behaved perceptions on the one hand, and perceptions which are shared or replicable but which are segregated as misbehaved, on the other. The latter perceptions are called illusions, multistable figures, intermediate-zone perceptions (a phrase I coined for e.g. ringing in the ears), etc. It is normal to experience - - the waterfall illusion, - - the crossed-fingers tactile illusion, - - the half-immersed dowel which seems bent, - - contact at the tip in tapping with a stick, - - double image of a dowel held vertically in the visual field, - - perspective-reversal of the Necker cube, - - the Necker cube with concurrent incompatible orientations, - - ringing as the after-effect of a bang, - -and many other examples with which I assume familiarity. These perceptions are segregated and stigmatized as perversities. In effect, the segregated perceptions carry a label which says - - YES THIS HAPPENS BUT IT DOESN'T COUNT - -Why? Because the illusions are already incongruities in the mandated reality. They belie tenets such as the following. - - a. detachment of object from awareness (cf. the Necker cube); - - b. intersensory unity of the object (cf. the half-immersed dowel); - - c. contentlessness of inconsistency (cf. the waterfall illusion, the paradoxical Necker cube). - -[1991. The dichotomy of veridical and illusory perceptions is required in the intensive analysis to follow. But I may note that this dichotomy understates the problematicity of perception. The straightforward perceptions are achieved by tendentious selectivity and mental reversal of the sense-evidence. Veridical perceptions are something like habitual paranoid imputations to sense-contents. You continually seize on obscure cues in the apparition to mentally twist the apparition into your pre-selected theory of the substantial world. "An object in front of a wall is really a shadow on the wall if it doesn't move relative to the wall when you move." All perception involves cues which you learn to spot, a pre-selected theory of the substantial world, and a twisting of the apparitions into the theory. - -The dowel touched to the tips of crossed fingers vs. the dowel placed between the tips of uncrossed fingers. In the latter case, you "truly" sense one dowel; but this is false to the sensation, which is of two finger-contacts. (Hold a two-stick sheaf between uncrossed fingers: now each finger contacts a different stick, and you falsely perceive one stick.) - -In looking at a dowel held vertically in the center of your visual field, there is an alternative: your gaze falls "in focus" or "in the distance." Parity of the right and the wrong. - -And consider the cartoon of the climbing bear. You imaginatively adduce an entire bear from outline paws on a outline trunk. What is more, a different reading of the image is possible. - -(figure) - -2. These considerations pose the question of where personhood theory is positioned (showing the answer of the 1980 theory to have been inadequate). The analysis has not yet ventured beyond my "mind." Yet I sense the presence of culture: which dictates to me which perceptions are well-behaved, and which designates some shared, replicable, normal perceptions as misbehaved (even as threats to reason and logic--as with the Necker cube and paradoxical Necker cube). The discussion hasn't even arrived at verbalization, I am still talking about non-appellative sight, touch, etc., and already I am faced with culture's determined segregation of certain normal perceptions because they threaten reason and logic. - -It may be that this discussion pertains to one culture more than others--namely modern rationalism--which sees these illusions as threats which have to be segregated. So this discussion may pertain to modern rationalist personhood; and other cultures may have treated the person-world constituents differently. [Well, this may hold as a generality; but facile relativism is not helpful. Other cultures are just as pragmatic and as stern as ours in insisting that perception find the substantial object. Does China or India want you to believe that the half-immersed dowel is bent? I will leave it open whether I am speaking of culture in general or of the present culture.--1991] - -3. I now begin the intensive exposé. The standard illusions are supposed to be replicable; but my personal researches have found that a number of "unimpaired" individuals do not experience them. These individuals happen to be involved in natural science as a career. There is an obvious speculation: that the vested interest of these individuals in reason and logic is so great that they have to block normal perceptions which mock reason and logic. - -(I don't know if a psychology experiment would confirm my findings. I met the scientists while they were off their institutional platforms, and I challenged their vocations. They knew that if they admitted seeing the illusions, they would lose arguments with me about their lives. Nobody would consent to having their life shown up like this as an experiment.) - -There is a species of perceptions stigmatized as undesirable by the culture which are not interpersonally replicable. I refer to hallucination, and to fantasy so intense as to verge on hallucination. (Cultural psychiatry finds that half the population has at some time had a hallucination of a deceased relative.) This area allows an observation which complements my observation about the blocking of normal illusions by scientists. Evidently there are, or were, identifiable groups in the population for whom it is culturally more acceptable or normative to have non-replicable illegitimate perceptions. - -In any case, my contacts with scientists show that I want to involve this analysis in respects in which individuals differ. I don't want to be limited to my unique self/world relationship, or to a universal self. In order to lay open simple, non-appellative perception, I have to acknowledge groups of people, and to acknowledge that the present culture, specifically, mandates a slight specialization in reality as between groups. (Appropriate perceptions for scientists as opposed to housewives.) Of course mandated norms and group behavior need not be borne out by every individual. - -I began, in (A), with the sense-of-self, being an "I," as fundamental. Does the culture mandate that the sense-of-self should have different degrees for different groups? In speculating about social groups, I don't want to descend to facile social psychology. Moreover, the mentioned groups might differ at a level less elemental than selfhood. The differences I have noted could be culture-correlated character differences. All this will be developed below. Selfhood and character need to be distinguished; but they could also overlap. - -Let me return to the scientists who do not even experience normal illusions. The circumstance that there are shared perceptions which are approved by (the) culture seems to require no special justification. But what of the circumstance that there are perceptions which are disapproved by the culture, but which nevertheless are very widely shared, but which however fail to be experienced by a handful of zealots of rationalism? If normal interaction with the Necker cube is acquired only through being taught--or is an imposed deformation of the psyche--then the implication is that the culture vigorously instills perceptions it doesn't want people to have. As for the zealots who don't have these perceptions, are they manifesting deficiency, or repression? Considerations in (C) below suggest that they are manifesting repression. - -[1991. I can no longer postpone the question of where this investigation is positioned: the methodological equivocations are crushing. I adopt the standpoint of my self/world relationship, yet periodically I shuttle to depositions about cultures (including those to which I do not belong), and about other people's subjectivities. In the preceding paragraph, I went so far as to discern a conflict in the culture's mandates (as if I were ascribing conflicting wants to a grammar of people's behavior). Moreover: who is my reader? - -In this vintage view of Personhood II, the answer is that at first I allow myself to speak of culture and of other minds as externalities with which I am unaccountably conversant. Later it turns out that I am making discriminations within my self/world relationship. (Example: I do not pronounce "sure" the way I spell it. That is my behavior, but I don't take the credit for it.) Then I explain mandated (fantasized) objectivities via these observations. It is also crucial that the investigation does not have to yield an affirmative creed. (I am unfolding the incoherence for instrumental purposes.) So there is a rotation from conventional reality-assumptions to the person-world in the course of the essay--as I speak about language, other minds, culture, etc. The definitive explanation is in "Personhood IV," and I should emphasize that it is not simple. My principles of astute hypocracy and of levels of credulity are involved. I have chosen not to sort out this version of Personhood II because that would eliminate its vintage value; moreover, the essay would become too counter-intuitive for the uninitiated reader. - -As a sidelight, I may mention common sense as a vernacular world-model. Common sense - - a. privileges those perceptual gestalts which are held to be material realities; - - b. tries to abstract the world from any idiosyncratic standpoint; and - - c. declares my mind, and other minds, to be limited entities in the world. - -Natural science presupposes the common-sense world-model operationally. At the same time, common sense is rationally indefensible, and is known to be so.] - -* - -C. Longitudinal Identity and Modes of Existence - -There is a conceptual partition of my existence into - - waking, - - dreaming, - - hypnagogic hallucination, - - "morning amnesia" (a phrase from my "Critical Notes on Personhood"), fever, - - psychedelic episodes, - -etc. The culture mandates this partition. It demands that I keep track of whether I am awake or dreaming. But in a given state, I may not assign it to its classification; and at times I am not capable of assigning the immediate state to its classification (e.g. in the dreaming/waking dichotomy). In order to keep score, I have to view my existence in retrospect, and classify entire episodes and modes of existence differently from the way I classified them while they occurred. The circumstance that this distinction is demanded is of the greatest importance. Even if I still limit the discussion to the logico-perceptual collation of objectivities (to the way I glean substantial objects in perception, discern the insubstantiality of shadows, etc.), this collation manifests asymmetrical variation in tandem with dream/waking alteration. With respect to waking states, there is a consistency of collation from one state to the next. The waking collation is stipulated by the culture to be standard and to be desirable: my visual vantage-point never moves outside my body; shadows never detach and become objects; etc. - -Collations in dreams, hypnagogic hallucinations, psychedelic episodes, etc., are variable and idiosyncratic. The culture construes them as threats to reason and logic and demands that they be segregated. The segregated states are assigned a label which says - - YES THIS HAPPENS BUT IT DOESN'T COUNT - -Again, these considerations pose the question of where personhood theory is positioned, and show the 1980 theory to have been premature. That theory pretended that my existence could be a continuum of waking states only, so that it was only required to portray the waking, or standard, or desirable logico-perceptual collation of objectivities. But that was a misrepresentation; and the theory is now faced with the following choice. If the paradigm is a paradigm of the immediate moment, then collations and indeed the entire "synthesis of a world" are so different as between dreaming and waking existence that more than one paradigm is required just for one ordinary person. But if all of one ordinary person's existence is to be covered by a single unified paradigm, then that paradigm must allow for variations in "the system of synthesis of a world" in short-term personal history. But then, even though the discussion is focused on the immediate moment, I am already confronted with personal history and retrospection or memory. I claim (or am directed by the culture to claim) an extrusion "behind" the immediate moment which is all "me" and only "me" even though it incorporates drastic variations in "the system of synthesis of a world." (And that is not even to mention that in dreams my identity as myself can be compromised or confused even in the present moment; and that in fever and morning amnesia my selfhood can be thinned out or shut down.) - -That is not all. I am required to make the retrospective judgment that a mode or episode of existence was a dream even though I judged the state to be a waking state during its occurrence. I am required to make conceptual, judgmental connections of my present with my extrusion behind the present (longitudinality), and to characterize whole phases of my existence as something different from what they were as they occurred. Here we have the phenomenon of delusion in the conventional sense. The culture requires me to confess that my whole existence can be a delusion (as often as once every night). But mightn't my whole existence at any present moment then be a delusion? The culture assigns this question a label which says - - YES THIS IS UNANSWERABLE BUT IT DOESN'T COUNT - -Viewed from another angle, I can make an observation similar to one I made about illusions. The culture vigorously instills in me the capacity to ask a question it doesn't want me to ask. And there is a further parallel with illusions. A handful of individuals remember no dreams. Once again, some of these individuals are scientists, and there is an obvious inference that they have to block phases of their whole existence which threaten reason and logic (which are equated with the waking "system of synthesis of a world"). Perhaps other individuals who never remember dreams are uncomfortable with sexuality; etc. I propose that scientists who don't experience illusions or remember dreams are manifesting repression rather than deficiency. But this is extraordinary. It means that scientists mutilate their basic perception: that they perform a feat as remarkable as cancelling all shoes out of reality or cancelling all eating out of reality. As for the majority of people, they are, if anything, in a stranger condition: the culture forces them to undergo phases of existence which it doesn't want them to have or notice in some respect. - -* - -D. Language and Human Self-Image - -1. Let me focus on language as one of the objectivities. Language is a peculiarly configured heterogeneous phenomenon, of quite a different order from the objectivities I have already discussed. At one level, language consists of "physical events" whose important feature is that they can be duplicated--the tokens. At another level, these tokens occur or are produced in patterns (cf. moves in chess). At yet another level, "comprehension of a message" requires the addressee routinely to associate ideation to the token-pattern with which he or she is confronted. A fourth feature is that changes in pattern correspond not only to differences in ideation but to different "modes of address": statement, question, command, definition. And one mode of address, the statement, has two alternative functions. It can picture or portray (narrative fiction). It can also claim or avow. - -If I write on a chalkboard "There is a chalkboard in this room," a curious circuit is established: from patterned smudges on a chalkboard, to associated ideation on the part of whoever reads, back to the chalkboard or the reader's perception of the chalkboard (establishing that the proposition is authentically descriptive or "true," according to traditional wisdom). Of course this account is simplified, one-sided, and unfashionable; but it focuses some important peculiarities of language. - -Here I may have to affirm that I am talking about the person-world in modern rationalist culture. Modern rationalist culture is comfortable with things or objects, and with "social" phenomena as thing-to-thing relationships (e.g. a command to close the door has been understood if the addressee closes the door). Modern rationalist culture is phobic toward subjectivity, thought, mind. Thus, accounts of language relentlessly seek to exclude ideation from the linguistic process--and to exclude name/referent connections also. Language is conceived solely in terms of its thingist extrusions; images are provided of language as tokens, token-patterns, and behavior. Of course these rationalist images of language are misrepresentations. For example, the circumstance that an addressee does not obey a command does not at all prove that he or she has not understood the command.[1] And if language were no more than token-patterns, it would not be capable of describing token-patterns. (The rules of chess cannot be formulated in chess moves.) But what is most instructive is that so misrepresentative an image of language could have achieved any plausibility and acceptance at all. Natural-language use is a remarkable species of activity which connects subjective mentation, perception, and subjective intentions (cf. lying) to physical events, and their patterns, and overt behavior. The point is that the physical events are sufficiently separable from the subjective ideation that scientific linguistics can pretend that there isn't any subjective ideation, and not be ridiculed into oblivion. - -[1991. This essay does not treat language, as common-sensically believed to exist, exhaustively. On one hand, language is a phenomenon of consciousness. It involves ideation of meanings and the speaker's wants. Indeed, with respect to conscious understanding, language is comparable to despair or romantic affection in being a "generic subjectivity." On the other hand, no individual's mental contents account for language as common-sensically believed to exist. In that perspective, the individual merely "borrows" natural language, which has a grammatical agenda that remains opaque to native speakers. But to pursue the alienness of language to the speaker in the obvious way would, again, stray from the person-world orientation. This alienness has to be treated as I will later treat culture. A further consideration--the existence of natural languages which I know of but don't know--exposes the person-world orientation as highly counter-intuitive. Again, "Personhood IV" is devoted to confronting these junctures vigorously.] - -2. There is an arcane aspect to the speaking person's involvement with ideation which I wish to discuss here. The scientific linguist says "I want to talk about token-patterns but not about subjective ideation." But how can this demarcation, this non-interdependency or non-interpenetration, be contrived? - -When I count a row of objects silently, then token-patterns are subjective ideations. The conscious "observation" of a pattern in a congeries of simultaneously present, persistent things is subjective ideation. - -Indeed, at some point I will have to recognize that patterns in things are assertionally imputed. Cf. the six-bar image in which any of three patterns can be seen, and which the initiated can see without pattern. - -figure - -Then, mere patterns cannot make claims about--i.e. describe--patterns. - -And when the linguist identifies the printed number series - -1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - -with the vocalization of that sequence or the silent reading of that sequence, he or she declares language to be a phenomenon in which a manifestation of simultaneously present, persistent things is the same as a succession, of discrete sounds or subjective mental events, which appear and disappear in time. In the scientist's self-interpretation, this "knowledge" that "they're the same" must subsist and be validated without subjective thought. We are supposed to know that a manifestation of simultaneously present, persistent things is a succession of subjective mental events which appear and disappear in time--without any involvement of subjective thought in this uniting of incomparable phenomena. But the lesson is that the claim of language as a thingist structure presupposes wildly imaginary reality-types. Let me anticipate and mention the case of different selves claiming the pronoun "I." The full meaning of this locutory protocol cannot be explicated by scientism. - -The culture's replies to the observations in this subsection are - - YES THIS HAPPENS BUT IT DOESN'T COUNT - -and - - YES THIS IS UNANSWERABLE BUT IT DOESN'T COUNT - -3. The challenge for person-world analysis, then, is that language connects physical events to subjective thoughts in a way which lends credence to the denial of that connection. It is not enough, to support the culture, that there should be a a medium of communication (and avowal). All recognized media of communication (including music as well as speech) must be capable of being pictured as physical events independent of subjective thought. The culture requires communication and doctrinal loyalty without thought and mind. If the medium of communication did not have a separable thingist facet, then it would continually, blindingly belie the thingist ideology of the culture. - -The culture cannot subsist on the basis of means which straightforwardly and candidly perform their functions. It must have means contorted to seem so different from what they are that we finally, impatiently, say "they are required to be not what they are." - -Can the tortuous conformisms which are being elucidated be supposed to subsist without stress, force, or fear? - -* - -E. Language and Thought - -I turn now to the involvement of language in my immediate existence and state-of-action. Through language, I name phenomena, formulate expectations, etc. Via language, I make factual judgments (or espouse beliefs) about objectivities--thereby further determining the objectivities. I may conceive my beliefs to be guesses; or I may conceive my beliefs to be assured facts (yet I can find them to be refuted on their own terms by subsequent occurrences). - -1. Consider the future, the next moment--the future toward which urge and action are directed. I have saved the topic for now because avowed expectations, and thereby a future conceived as a future, are inseparable from linguistic expression. (Do animals have avowed expectations, do they make express predictions?--as when a cat crouches beside a mouse hole?) - -An avowed expectation is not arisen when one merely enacts a future in fantasy non-verbally: what the latter lacks is assertion (and the capacity therefor). - -If discomfort impels action, without verbal thought, a representation of a future has not arisen. Experiential memory can be taken as assertive, but that is because the past is taken as being already decided. So the experiential or non-verbal memory is conceived as an echo relative to an assured actuality, an episode lived through. As for the future, and non-verbal anticipation or projection, they are not taken as having the relation of a decided event to an echo. The notion of remembering the future--i.e. of rigorous pre-cognition--is a minority notion, not found in the consensus. The mainstream, as I know it, conceives of non-verbal anticipation or projection of a future as being fantasy and nothing more, until it has been implemented and can be represented as a past. - -2. Consider the claim that language solves the problem of intersubjectivity, that it guarantees that observations are communicated. Suppose I and another person stand before a house. Suppose the other person says "I see a house." The culture's preferred interpretation is that this interpersonal corroboration proves the objective reality of the house. But the culture also gives me the capacity to speculate that the other person is lying to please me. Or to speculate that the other person sees what I would call an elephant and calls it a house.[2] Pragmatically, we curb such miscommunication by prolonged cross-checking. But in the moment--or in principle--the alternatives are indistinguishable. The culture assigns this observation a label which says - - YES THIS IS UNANSWERABLE BUT IT DOESN'T COUNT - -Again, the culture has instilled in me the capacity to see a gap which it doesn't want me to see. - -3. As another aspect of language, let me focus on the relation of conceptualization to perception in connection with the significance ascribed to logical consistency . For a concept x to be well-established, there must be a decision program which splits the world or the multiplicity of picturable (possible, intensional) entities in two, and attaches x exactly to one section and non-x exactly to the other. Non-x is the exact reverse, in a partition of everything, in which x is the obverse. To say this is to proclaim that x and non-x do not apply simultaneously to any entity which may be under consideration. Such is the basis of the culture's tenet that x is not non-x or that "x-and-non-x" is an empty concept, a null concept. - -Language has an arbitrary, stipulative character in the sense that the word "prestidigitation" is expendable relative to the word "legerdemain," etc. At another level, however, language is not "optional" at all. Conventional thought requires stable, agreed-upon distinctions. The community indoctrinates its new members in language as an integral part of enculturing them generally. Thus, there emerges a close correlation between linguistic categories and the individual's ingrained interpretations of sensation--what is called perception. In the process of enculturation, perceptual distinction becomes deeply correlated with linguistic distinction. Recognizing this correlation, linguistic distinctions can no longer be considered "mere" stipulations. [Again, I am unaccountably making social psychological declarations. The discussion would have to be derived differently to become uniform with the person-world standpoint.--1991] - -Relative to a given concept x, we have a conventional, ingrained, perceptual and linguistic program to attach x, or else to withhold x and attach non-x, to everything we may encounter, every picturable entity. But in certain cases, we are confronted with a picturable entity which, our decision program tells us, we must simultaneously call an x and a non-x. That is, our ingrained perceptual routines tell us we must simultaneously call it an x and a non-x. The choice of labels here is not optional or whimsical; it is as mandatory as appellative judgments can be. - -A case of such a picture, or visual image, is the waterfall illusion. (And we are back to misbehaved perceptions and B.1.c.) One's perceptual routines are disoriented; one's capacity to use concepts at all and to keep reality tidy begins to crumble. The experience of a logical impossibility in the waterfall illusion cannot, again, be dismissed as a mere effect of whimsical appellative stipulations. While any given word is arbitrary relative to the existence of foreign languages, etc., in practice our capacity to use concepts at all results from a community consensus which is linked to our most ingrained perceptual routines. To repeat, inculcation of logic connects with the designation of illusions as misbehaved perceptions, as treated in (B). - -* - -F. Propositional Knowledge and Personal Identity - -1. Aside from the action of illusions as conceptual-logical anomalies, natural-language conceptualization is pervasively inconsistent in the sense that inferential extrapolation of any concept at the level of assertional discourse, relative to culturally mandated doctrine as a whole, will yield contradictions. In the present account of concrete, substantive features of the person-world, we continually encounter incoherencies--whose propositional expressions comprise paradoxes. At the level of doctrine as a separate activity, common sense (the culturally mandated conceptual medium of ordinary apprehension of the world and ordinary interpersonal interaction) can be codified. Numerous contradictions in common sense are listed in my "Paradoxes of Common Sense" (1988). - -I find the culturally mandated conceptual medium to be a disguised biased inconsistent system: naive inferential extrapolation will yield inconsistencies everywhere. Some of these inconsistencies are welcomed or at least tolerated, while others are suppressed; but the self-image of the medium is that it is not inconsistent, or that it can be repaired and made consistent. - -Thus, it is indispensable to the culture to deploy a conceptual system which quite literally violates its own foremost logical principle that x should not be non-x. - -It was very difficult for me to admit how the bias of the inconsistent system was maintained, that is, how wanted contradictions were divided from unwanted contradictions. The rationalist culture's mystique suggested that the "grading process" would have to be described by hundreds of pages of intricate symbolic logic. What the culture's orientation did not encourage me to recognize was that the mystery of grading is a matter of barefaced lying defended by naked interpersonal coercion--yet that now seems to be the main secret of grading. As this account proceeds, I will mention numerous methods by which culturally mandated incoherencies are sustained. - -2. One abstract incoherency in particular repeatedly comes up. Space and time are identified although they are qualitatively incomparable. Already this identification was invoked when I said that my past "extended behind" me. Perhaps movement can be offered as a basis from which these correlations which equate space and time can be derived. But in any case, the identification of qualitatively incomparable aspects of experience is not something that can ever be "proved to be true." (It goes without saying that many other aspects of time, such as the procession of the present moment, are occasions of paradox.) - -3. Let me briefly consider abstract knowledge, as an aspect of language and conceptualization. I take mathematics as the case in point. How is it established that it is proper to use the same numbers to count qualitatively different species of entities? In particular, what is the relation of the "real-world" enumeration which metamathematics must use to count token-occurrences in mathematical expressions to "real-world" enumeration generally? - -Then, to count a row of objects, orally or silently, is to pair a manifestation of simultaneously present, persistent things with a succession of events which appear and disappear in time. How is it established that the result of this procedure is meaningful? - -Or consider 1/0, 0/0, and 00. An individual who pursues mathematics - -in seclusion, naively performing the indicated operations on the basis of an initial understanding of the symbols, probably will not arrive at the solutions to 1/0, 0/0, and 00 mandated today by the mathematics profession. Authority is required to stipulate which answers are institutionally significant. - -4. From the beginning, when I was only talking about non-appellative perception, I said that one strives for logico-perceptual coherence of the objectivities. By now, it is clear that such coherence is never remotely achieved. Yet one typically does not judge oneself to be insane; and one typically feels that there is an adequate degree of coherence of the objectivities; because the gibberish one espouses is culturally approved gibberish. One who is under the action of interpersonal approval can live so amicably with barefaced lies as to crazily experience them as constituting coherence. We are already confronted with extreme phases of knowing self-deception in tandem with the culture. - -* - -G. Attachment to an Experience-World - -1. A situation in which objectivities are conjoined with my feelings, urges, expectations, and anticipations fixates me on a system of factual judgments and a system of actions. In more detail, the situation fixates me on a logico-perceptual collation of objectivities, on a system of factual judgments, on a method of ascertaining facts, and on an action-system or praxis (including skills, judgments of feasibility, etc.). I can be fixated by anticipation (involving discomfort, fear, or hope), by emotional dependence on other people, etc. This situation may be called an attached state of consciousness (as distinguished from detachment). Attachment does not have to be all-encompassing; I can be attached in part and aloof or contemplative otherwise. Attachment must not be thought of as the outcome of a pragmatically calculated choice; it is altogether involuntary while it occurs. - -Roughly, an attachment-content consists of a logico-perceptual collation of objectivities, a system of factual judgments, a method of ascertaining facts, and skills and judgments of feasibility. Attachment-contents would vary from person to person. At the same time, there would have to be considerable interpersonal congruence--otherwise there would be no human mutuality. As I say throughout, enculturation's aim is congruence. [Here again I unaccountably speak of selves other than mine.] - -In regard to the "factual aspect of perception," to say that I am fixated on a logico-perceptual collation of objectivities is to say that I habitually "impute contexts of objectivity" to my sensations. When I see a parked automobile, I automatically assume that it is an object, with a reverse visual side, with tactile solidity, etc. Indeed, by mentally denoting the apparition as an automobile, I use language to express just these assumptions. [And here I have finally come to the problematicity of straightforward perceptions as mentioned in B.1; and to the example of the "climbing bear."] - -2. Although it is normal in the waking state to be attached, it is also normal not to be attached, so that the option of suspending a familiar, habitual belief is available if I want it. Indeed, when confronted with a dowel partly submerged in water which appears to bend at the water's surface, I have been warned that I will find an exception to the prescribed belief that "sight and touch will correspond and thereby prove that my senses apprehend a single objectivity." - -When I have the option of suspending conventional beliefs, then I can modify the conventional determination of reality by exercising this option. But in dreams and some other states, I completely lose this option of suspending belief. - -I call the difference between a state in which attachment is partial, and a state in which it is all-embracing, a difference in "cognitive morale." - -3. In an attached state, I am impelled to realize preferences in action, based on anticipation and on the factual judgments and the praxis to which I am fixated. I am imminently forced to formulate preferences on the basis of guesses and to realize these preferences in action. While a condition of "operating on automatic pilot" is possible for me (habit?), I am here forced off automatic pilot. - -The ideology of determinism which says that my preferred action is predetermined by prior objectivities is meaningless and useless to my praxis here. This is where so-called empirical freedom of the will comes in--but my characterization is a great improvement on "freedom of the will." - -I can rehearse for a future situation in fantasy. - -* - -H. Mental Stability and Biographic Identity - -1. Not only can I observe and denote; I can "observe" and denote my functioning. - -I can pass judgment on myself with respect to my performance and my level of satisfaction. - -a. I can judge whether my actions are effective, and can judge what achievements are feasible for me. (Pragmatic self-judgment.) - -b. I can judge my level of fulfillment, especially according to the standards provided by the beliefs I am fixated on. I can judge e.g. whether I act out of intimidation, or out of loyalty and affirmation. (Cathetic self-judgment.) But I must add that the discussion has shown that there is a whole layer of intimidation which is palpable but which is nevertheless overlooked or "not counted." An illustration is the scientist whose dreams, and experiences of illusions, are amputated from his life. - -c. I judge whether I am "sane." Here "sanity" is used in a vernacular sense as pertaining to my composure regarding my cognitions. "Insanity" is a feeling of cognitive insecurity and panic, possibly accompanied by disordered desires and moods and conative futility. (So I am not concerned with the man who smugly believes he is Napoleon and rationalizes all external evidence to the contrary.) - -My judgment of my sanity involves whether I am maintaining the pretense of logico-perceptual coherence of objectivities; whether my desires and moods are sufficiently coherent; and whether I can act effectively more often than not. It can also involve sophisticated issues of my relation to the community which will be stated in L.5. It is not usual, incoherent thinking which makes one feel insane. Rather, having usual thinking exposed as incoherent may make one feel insane. Yet such an exposé will not discompose most people because they don't take matters of principle seriously--a topic I will address intensively in later sections. - -Tampering with personhood immediately places sanity at risk. - -2. I have a biographic identity: a remembered personal history, and a projection of my future. But we have already encountered the issue of personal identity relative to personal history and memory; and we saw that the persisting personal identity was complicated by such modes as fever, morning amnesia, and above all dreaming. What is now the lesson? That the 1980 personhood theory corresponded to the the personal identity which the culture mandates for me: the fiction that "my life" can be a continuum of waking states only, so that "the system of synthesis of a world" which is consistent through my waking states is the only personal identity I have to cope with. As for the phases of my existence which clash with this solution, the culture assigns them a label which says - - YES THIS HAPPENS BUT IT DOESN'T COUNT - -3. Out of context, the phrase "knowing self-deception" seems paradoxical. But paradoxical or not, by now it is beginning to seem the most frequent feature of personhood. So far, I have discussed culturally mandated self-deception; but there is also knowing self-deception as a personal variation or idiosyncratic adaptation. - -One important and extreme procedure of knowing self-deception is to obtain gratification from mental play-acting. When a personally motivated representation of your identity is concerned, you engage in a representation of yourself which you know is untrue to the present (and to past and future as well). (A Walter Mitty fantasy.) But also, a group of people can engage in mental play-acting with respect to impersonal doctrine. My phrase for this [as of 1991] is a shared pretense or consenting sham. Culturally supplied doctrines seem pervasively to have the character of consenting shams. Where these culturally approved fantasies are concerned, the mere circumstance that a doctrine is a manifest lie or that an activity or enterprise is a manifest fraud is not an objection to it. The manifest lie is accepted as a source of gratification. The individual lives amicably with the lie. The lie is sustained by non-"cognitive" motives. - -Other procedures of knowing self-deception are presented as personal adaptations; but certainly they can be systematically encouraged in groups of people. - -a. I can suppress painful self-consciousness by frantically affirming what I doubt or disbelieve, or by repressing what I suspect. - -b. Instead of acting upon objectivities to get what I want, I can withdraw to gratification in fantasy, or imaginary gratification. - -c. I can becloud the imperative of implemented choice-making, in order to dull its risks and loneliness. (One of the most vivid risks is that of subsequent self-condemnation if my choice proves to be regrettable.) Affirmation and denial of choice-making are both intensified by repetition, by habituation. - -* - -I. Other People and Self-Objectification - -1. It has taken a long discussion to reach the stage where it is appropriate to focus on other people. I can identify other people as objectivities. One implication is that I interact with other people fragmentarily and sequentially, and only thus; nevertheless, I sort them out as persisting wholes. - -Given other people as objectivities, I can additionally conceive them as conscious, willful counterparts of myself. Other people have consciousnesses which are counterparts to my own but to which I have access only by the actions of their bodies (e.g. speech). It is implausible to deny other consciousnesses, because I identify so many of my thoughts as penetrations of myself by the others' consciousnesses. (This is the issue of culture, which I will focus on below.) But then other people have mental lives in which I do not participate and whose conclusions can be withheld from me. Other people, whom I encounter as elements within "my" world, have "worlds" of their own which meet mine but are in another respect wholly outside mine. I conceive of other people as objectivities among other objectivities, and yet as being persons to themselves, and as "locations" of minds which can meet my mind. (I may further conceive of other people's implemented choices as being determined in advance by objectivities--so that they, who are counterparts to me, are in a deterministic process while I, in the moment of realizing choice, am not.) These notions are massively incoherent. And they force me into even more extreme incoherencies in order to apprehend another person's death. - -A case which further complicates the conception of other people is any encounter I may have with the mentally deficient. In this case, it is no longer "obvious to common sense" that other people are counterpart sentiences to myself. Here is a zone in which the culturally mandated interpretations are less confident. But observe further that any other person manifests variations in sentience: when in stupor, shock, illness, sleep, etc. That I can conceive the other person as sustained in spite of these variations in sentience is notable too. - -2. Through reflection, I may conceive of myself as a counterpart to other people. I become an objectivity to myself. (And I can imagine that my implemented choices are determined in advance by objectivities--even though this notion is useless at the moment of realizing choice and is a denial of that moment.) - -Thus, I am supposed in the end to conceive of myself as one object in a "world" of objects. This notion is violently incoherent at the most elemental level. Only the pressure of the culture keeps me from feeling insane (in the sense of H.l.c above) as I espouse this notion. - -3. I may be in overt conflict with another person. - -I can be emotionally dependent on another person; and on his or her conscious reaction to me. Thus, I may judge myself by comparison with him or her, or by acceding to his or her judgments of me. - -I can obscure my choice-making by becoming another person's vassal. - -I have one degree or another of emotional sensitization or capacity, which must be attributed to my interaction with other people. - -I may seek gratification through solidarity and intimacy with another person. - -I can knowingly deceive another person. - -I judge whether another person is knowingly deceiving me. - -I judge whether another person's self-deception is misleading me. - -Past involvement with another person which was emotionally stressful can have involuntary echoes in the present. Here is an example. I may have a public quarrel with another person, and I may cope with that quarrel by pursuing it in my fantasy as well as in public action. Then that person may die or otherwise become irrelevant as an "actual" antagonist. But I may continue the fantasy-quarrels--even though common sense says I will never again see this person outside of fantasy. - -My sincere opinion of another person's qualities can be sharply different from his or her presumably sincere opinion of his or her qualities. - -* - -J. Culture as a Phase Discriminated in the Person-World - -1. In the foregoing discussion, I have repeatedly related constituents of personhood to "culture" as their source--a source which is often antagonistic or coercive. It is now necessary to focus on culture, both to clarify a paramount influence in the person-world and also to extend and complete the account of the interpersonal arena. - -"Culture" is comprised by those phenomena which are in one respect my "skills," but which I want to credit to other people and through which I meet other people in consciousness. [1991. Here, then, is the rotation to the person-world promised in B.3. Culture is drawn in to my self/world relationship.] A favorite example is English orthography. I know English orthography fairly well, and conform to it to make my written communications less irritating, but I consider it perverse, and do not wish to suppose that I am the origin of it. - -Similarly with the natural language generally. I hear other people talk, and it is a "skill" of mine to supply thoughts to their utterances; I credit the thought-content to the other people and not myself. [1991. Well, as I mentioned in D.1, natural language as common-sensically believed to exist has aspects which no individual authors. Here I abstract from that complication.] - -Similarly with practical mathematics. Similarly with creeds and ideologies which I may reject, but pretend to espouse in casual encounters because other people expect them. I "know" to remove a hat when entering a building; and how to tie a Windsor knot. I know that I must obtain "the" answer to 1/0, 0/0, or 00 from an authoritative textbook or professional mathematician, rather than trying to compute it on the basis of definitions learned in elementary school. I see a man wearing a clerical collar, and it is one of my "skills" to recognize that the collar makes a statement which is not purely idiosyncratic to its wearer. - -Indeed, culture has a meaning which generalizes beyond the specific people I encounter. When I hear people speak Chinese, which I do not understand, it is nevertheless a skill of mine to recognize that they are conversing, and that their language is Chinese. The significance of this foreign language extends beyond the specific people I encounter as its users. There are Chinese books, newspapers, etc. [1991. Again, the existence of languages I don't know is a sharp challenge to the person-world orientation. Not until "Personhood IV" do I address that challenge head-on.] - -2. By emphasizing that aspect of culture which is alien or hostile to me, I emphasize that I cannot afford to deny that this phase of my person-world is special. "Culture" is comprised by my skills, by constituents of myself; but they are skills I don't wish to claim the balance of responsibility for. - -On the other hand, it would be a dangerous oversimplification to leave the impression that culture is merely regrettable. All of my skills have a cultural aspect. My self-expression and self-assertion may consist in evolving personal variations and recombinations of the culturally supplied procedures. But even my personal variations are influenced by my assessment of the community's situation; and my personal variations are contrived with the intent that they will feed back into the culture and the interpersonal arena. I am getting way ahead of the immediate topic, but it is urgent to establish a viable attitude toward value judgments of culture. Culture is like "people," or "life," or "the world." I may experience culture as hostile; it may be self-protecting and nurturing of me to define it as regrettable. But it is unavoidable as a raw material; and the quality of my self-assertion is a matter of what I make of this raw material, of the astuteness of my selectivity toward it and my compromises with it. - -Take, for example, my natural-language skills. Of course the natural language is extremely traumatized and deleterious; but merely to proclaim that it is "bad" is too easy and changes nothing. The natural language is a medium in which we find ourselves willy-nilly. To understand that it is deleterious is self-protecting and nurturing. But a mere proclamation that it is "bad" does nothing to release us from the natural language's consequences. An effective struggle against the natural language can come only from the dedication to make sophisticated compromises with it, to employ it to struggle against the "mode of life" supporting it. We can be delivered from the debasing culture only by acceding to an enchanted community/higher civilization. But poseur extremism is not to be identified with that accession. Only dedication will gain results of substance. The issue is not whether to compromise, whether to turn inherited media against themselves; it is rather the astuteness, the sophistication, the placement of the compromises. The issue is to understand the difference between an extreme proclamation without action, and a drastic action which nevertheless can succeed because its risks are mostly matters of phantom barriers erected by cultural indoctrination. - -* - -K. Community; Society as a Grandiose Other - -1. Resuming with ordinary personhood, other people and culture are palpable to me. Other people and culture jointly constitute the interpersonal arena--or community. - -2. I now arrive at the issue of "society." Society is the aggregation which is hypothesized as subtending the (palpable) community. Society is the kingdom, the race, the nation. It is an abstraction, a matter of faith, to which allegiance is demanded by palpable specific people. - -Indeed, in mentioning society I am for the first time mentioning a "grandiose Other." Each of the grandiose Others is supposed to be the ultimate source of meaning, the ultimate source of my emotional gratification and judgmental self-consciousness; but is at the same time primarily speculative and outside "my ostensible world." - -The universe of physics must be mentioned in this connection as hypothetical, inferential, derived, and assuredly grandiose. However, it is emphatically not claimed to be a source of meaning. (That is the locus of a screaming incoherency in the modern rationalist outlook. Scientists make officious, sententious, unctuous moral pronouncements; but their intellectual stance provides no basis whatsoever for them to do so.) - -In modern rationalist culture, society has priority among the grandiose objectivities. (Codified in theory by figures such as Comte, Marx, Spencer, Pareto, and Sumner.) Society's claim on us as persons (even when we are treated as pawns) is far broader and more important than the physical universe's claim on us. Attachment makes society more urgent than the physical universe. (Except that for a diabetic, for example, belief in insulin is more important than belief in the United States.) Grandiose Others of the past included - - the personal Deity or Heavenly King (Judaism), - - supra-mundane worlds (polytheism; neo-Platonism), - - cosmic consciousness (Vedanta). - -Here again, context already narrows the discussion. The latter Others have already lost credibility for modern rationalism. Person-world analysis would agree with the rationalist debunkers here, if nowhere else. Conceptions of supra-mundane worlds are unavoidably extrapolations of conceptions of community and society. I may "renounce Man for God," but not without encountering Man first. Also, the deity who has served the actual function of religion has been a heavenly father and king. Even the god of the philosophers had to be a person who made laws. (And we come upon science's embarrassing secret, perhaps best codified by Leibniz: that without God's guarantee of sufficient reason, there is no physics, not one physical occurrence anywhere. Secretly, modern rationalism has not advanced beyond God; it is desperately wedded to God. But I never said that modern rationalism was cogent. Meanwhile, the avowed loyalties in modern culture are to society.) - -3. Extending from one's emotional involvement with other people, society becomes an object of one's passionate belief. The hypothesized abstraction seems to be a living presence--as when people march off to war for the Nation. That is attachment. Because society is an object of passionate belief, because it becomes a hallucinatory living presence, it cannot be sharply distinguished from community (which is palpable), even though it remains impalpable (a hypothesized abstraction). So society has a close and compelling connection to the palpable phenomena of other people and culture. For the only time in this investigation, let me derive the palpable from the hypothesized--and say that culture is that palpable aspect of society which is interior to me and at the same time is an externality broader than other people as individuals. Recognizing how close society is to community in belief, I propose to be flexible with regard to whether the person is conceived in a communal or a social context. - -4. The community confronts me with symbols and offices which imply an organized collective, legitimation, manifestations of a group will, etc. - -One cultural phase of community life includes the community's "tradition," symbolism, ritual, etc.--all of which are emotionally charged. This phase must be considered one source of my emotional sensitization or capacity. - -The community may force upon me a significance, and an assortment of privileges and disadvantages--so much so that I am forced to carry out this "imposed social role" or to grapple with it. The role may place me in competition or conflict with other people. I can also be gratified by the celebration in ritual of my imposed status (although I do not earn this gratification). - -I have a greater or lesser degree of autonomy, relative to the community, in respect to being supplied with pursuits and goals, and in respect to making judgments of every sort. - -I can obscure my choice-making by becoming a vassal of "society"--of a legitimated organization or institution. - -I may engage in a pursuit which I suspect to be dishonest or otherwise contemptible because the community approves of it. Of course I do so to gain tangible rewards, in analogy with knowingly deceiving another person to benefit myself. But something beyond my craftiness is involved here. I maintain a knowing self-deception and vassalage in which legitimacy means more to me than sincerity. - -5. My judgment of whether I am "sane" (H.1.c) can involve two aspects of my relation to the community. - -a. Culture amounts to a system of ideology-saturated interpersonal, even social, relationships in my mind. Normally it is a matter of habit for me to maintain the (sham) coherence of that system. But if this sham coherence is subverted by an "indigestible" experience or idea, then I undergo a "personality-death" and the entire society undergoes a "personality-death" inside my mind. My sanity is placed in doubt. - -b. Certain sorts of condemnations by the community of my inclinations, my urges, the "possible personality" which represents my penchant and loyalty can challenge my sanity. - -6. The interpersonal arena is a source of meanings to me. My connections to the interpersonal arena in regard to praxis, emotional sensitization, indoctrination, etc. have an effect on my sense of sanity, my personal identity, my level of fulfillment, etc. Thus, the interpersonal arena can be a source of skills worthy to be sustained and regenerated. It can also be a source of acute dilemmas and destructiveness impinging upon me. In either case, the interpersonal arena is a source of problems and missions. - -Moreover, the problems and missions can appear in my consciousness as consequences of my skills. Having been indoctrinated with little choice in the matter, that indoctrination now surfaces in the guise of my skills, for one thing. (Examples at the level of the present discussion are language use, mathematics, music, profit maximization.) If I do not consciously review my indoctrination, then I will carry it with me by default. Moreover, my private and idiosyncratic dilemmas with the language, with mathematics, with art, with profit maximization, etc.--and my private and idiosyncratic ventures in these fields (e.g. I might seek to prove that 1+1 != 2 or that intrinsic pricing is a delusion)--can represent vital dilemmas and ventures for the interpersonal arena. - -But the community's destructiveness or bankruptcy may consist precisely in its inability to embark upon vital ventures--and in its fostering of individual pursuits which disregard and exacerbate its dilemmas. - -I can undertake a vital venture or address a vital problem; or I can avoid doing so. And I can belong to a community which wants such a task addressed; or to a community which discourages attention to such a task. The possible ramifications of the community attitude, for my judgment of myself, are complicated. Inner pride or lack of it can run counter to express community approval or contempt. - -* - -L. The Ostensible World as a Delusion - -The ordinary ostensible world is a delusion in the following precise sense. My ostensible world--that is, the perceptions and beliefs which inform it--are palpably affected and sustained by emotions of anticipation, by emotional dependence on other people, by morale, by esteem, by realized choices (volition), by knowing self-deception, etc. In this sense, one's ostensible world is the resultant of deformations. One unwittingly undergoes a deformation of perception and attitude (which one does not feel as illness). Nevertheless, as I have done here, the deformations can be analytically exposed and introspectively recovered. - -* - -M. Imminent Character as an Invariant to Psychedelics - -Let me return to the individualized or idiosyncratic constituents of personhood. But I shall now treat constituents which presuppose explicit consideration of culture and community in order to be comprehensible. Perhaps I am not introducing new constituents here. I may be making a different selection from constituents already described. I may be selecting certain tendencies in the person-world because they involve issues of pressing interest. - -Let me borrow the word "character" as a word for a facet of personality, and give it a new definition specific to this discussion. Imminent character consists of certain inclinations which inform my realized choices. (I am stretching "imminent" to mean in-the-moment.) One way of delimiting character is to mention that it is a constituent of the person-world which the psychedelic experience is unable to affect (unlike sense-of-self and perception-world). - -The following questionnaire elucidates some alternative inclinations. - -a. Referring back to G.1, am I able to differentiate my sensations from my habits of imputing contexts of objectivity to them--from the assumptions which I impose by appellation? [Can I realize that the cartoon does not show a climbing bear?] Further, can I refrain from carrying assumptions imposed by labelling over to previously unclassified sensations (such as the psychedelic experience of twinkling air, or such as any hypnopompic hallucination)? - -b. Do I assert autonomous cognitive norms? Or do I equate truth with what convinces the group, with group beliefs? - -c. Do I manifest a capacity for painstaking effort? - -d. Do I seek to asset my sincerity and concern in the interpersonal arena--even to force my sincerity into the interpersonal arena which it is not especially welcome? Do I refrain from asserting my sincerity in the interpersonal arena, out of fear or weariness? Am I willing for all my interaction with other people to consist of play-acting dictated by them, or to consist of disengaged manipulation? Do I manifest my sincerity only in fantasy, only in imaginary gratification? Do I pay attention to other people in a way that goes beyond disengaged manipulation (do I "grant other people's right to exist")? - -e. Do I make a distinction between what the community wants and what it needs? If so, how do I proceed as a consequence? - -f. Can I function self-satisfactorily in the face of community norms which are hostile to my penchant and loyalty? [1991. Well, this trait is common to a genius and a sociopath. I am not providing sufficient conditions for worthiness here. (Language, after all, is a crude medium of determination.) I am indicating traits which under certain interpretations are crucial to my undertaking.] - -g. Do I already have a hunch "that the 'synthesis of a world' can be effected with a different system," that is, that the totality could be appropriated according to a different principle? Or do I already have a glimpse of a gratification which everyday existence, or the established compartmentation of faculties, denies to us? And what is the state of my emotional sensitization? - -h. Am I capable of admitting, if I should find myself in danger--in conjunction with having an illusion shattered--that I was partly responsible for creating the illusion and the danger? Can I admit a mistake in judgment while not equating that mistake with my whole self? Or do I have to believe that the only reason I ever find myself in danger is because other people betray me? - -i. Am I able to plough through disillusionment to an outcome which is absurd and extreme by conventional standards; and then to review that outcome repeatedly until I can extract a new cogency from it? - -j. Do I express the attitude that "nothing makes any difference" and that "I don't care about anything?" - -* - -N. Thematic Personal Identity - -There is a level of self-consciousness at which my whole, thematic identity is at issue. Earlier, I explained some conventional sources for the concoction of this identity--and I say "concoction" advisedly. My life is a venture, a sojurn, which has a meaning or outcome to me, or fails to have one. I have a personal history toward which I feel regret or satisfaction, and a future of which something must be made. - -1. I have said that (in an attached state) choice-making is forced upon me. I am impelled to realize preferences in action, based on anticipation and on the factual judgments and the praxis to which I am fixated. I am imminently forced to formulate preferences on the basis of guesses and to realize these preferences in action. In the moment of realizing choice, my choice may be cued by perceived "external" conditions of the moment. But my realized choice cannot be reduced to, that is, derived from a perceived external condition. Realized choice and external condition are alongside each other; they are equal constituents of a single "world." - -2. My choice-making can explicitly pertain to my whole, thematic identity. But choice-making at this level is occasional, not continual. Choice-making is usually frivolous or pragmatic. (The existentialist notion that all choice-making is implicitly the actualization of a whole, thematic identity is an example of a vogue making an easy, empty universal out of a phenomenon which is significant only when it is specific and explicit.) - -Already my capacity to admit a past mistake in judgment without equating that mistake with my whole self--and my capacity to plough through disillusionment--implied that I have a whole, thematic identity. - -3. As far as choice pertaining to my thematic identity is concerned, one avenue of choice concerns how I conceive the arena of action, and thus how I shape my loyalties (how I reconceive and redirect my loyalties). A concomitant avenue of choice concerns how I conceive effectiveness and gratification, and then pursue those conceptions. - -In more detail, my past can manifest distinguishable thematic identities which may be incongruous. In other words, different identity-themes can be possible for me. I am forced to formulate a preference for one identity-theme as opposed to another and to realize that preference in action. An identity-theme may represent intimidation from without; or it may represent my penchant and loyalty. For convenience, let me call the latter my authentic identity-theme. My authentic identity-theme can be already disclosed; yet I can repress it because I assume that other people will censure me for it. I can also disregard it, or at least fail to uphold it, just because it takes special effort or painstaking effort to uphold it. - -Whether to uphold my authentic identity-theme is a dilemma in which one or another realized choice must occur. To pursue my authentic identity-theme means that I must be vigorously willful in a context of uncertainties. After all, it is also an option to drift. And, subjectively I often have to gamble--notwithstanding that my purpose remains fixed. - -* - -O. Fixation to a Cumulating Social Role - -I come to another topic which requires me to be unaccountably conversant with more than my self-world relationship. It is commonplace for a person's whole thematic identity to be a matter of attachment to one's social identity as it has cumulated in the past. One is overwhelmed by the significance society thrusts upon one. One is overwhelmed by the pursuits, goals, and cues for one's judgments which society thrusts upon one. I have already said that culture is a part of yourself for which you are not exclusively responsible. But the dynamic balance of attachment can be such that your self is submerged by parts which come from society and for which you are not exclusively responsible--by the assortment of privileges and disadvantages which society has thrust upon you. Your self is submerged by what has been done to you by your intimate associates and by the more impersonal community--and the assessments of the "venture of living" which you have formed therefrom. - -This submergence of the person by a cumulating social role is one alternative in which the person is guaranteed to be traumatized, stigmatized, impaired, truncated. It is a specific feature of personhood theory that it demands this conclusion. Certainly, in some cultures or communities, socially acclaimed and validated roles can also allow intrinsic splendor. (Even so, we must not allow the doctoring of history to obscure the fact that these socially approved achievements had great difficulty coming to the surface in the first place--and subsequently were dishonored by deteriorating communities.) But to exist in fixation to a cumulating social role is always a depersonalized, mythified existence--even when it is producing useful output. Of course, being submerged in a social role is only one of a number of ways in which existence can be depersonalized and mythified. "Mortification of the self to please God" is another way--which, however, has already been sidelined by modern rationalism. - -Imminent character, for the person submerged by a social role, is necessarily a zone of desperation and impairment. The dynamic balance of this desperation and impairment can be analyzed, but it is not assured that such analysis can change anything. In the cases I am aware of, the desperation and impairment consequent on being submerged in a social role are destructively self-reinforcing. - -In the remarks to follow, I want to bear witness to my experiences with academics and other "aware" people. I want to characterize them as I found them; neither idealizing them nor scorning them. To begin with, as I said, scientists amputate their perceptions to protect their belief-system. Unfortunately, this condition is self-reinforcing: just the perceptions which would give the lie to their belief-system have been expunged. - -A published account of a personal crisis was Zdenek Mlynar's Nightfrost in Prague (New York, 1980). Mlynar was a Czech Communist official who, after the invasion in 1968, was removed to Moscow with his colleagues. During the invasion, he had realized that he could be shot at any time. In Moscow he was subjected to stress negotiations to force him to authorize a permanent Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. He began to have visions, and underwent an instantaneous conversion from Communism without logic or analytical thinking. The outcome of his crisis was that, after seven years in limbo, he escaped to Vienna and (evidently) became a NATO intelligence officer. Today, world public opinion would laud his defection. I cannot quarrel with his disillusionment. Yet his salvation was as banal as the Readers' Digest. An experience verging on the supernatural propelled Mlynar to become an officer of techno-capitalism. That capitalism is the older and continuing basis of the dilemmas which my undertakings address. - -My view of Mlynar and of the generality of "aware" people I have known is that analysis is not likely to uncover escape hatches in the dynamic balance of their desperation and impairment. Even an experience verging on the supernatural--one far beyond any pressure I could bring to bear--only taught Mlynar that salvation means being an officer of global capitalism. - -* - -P. Attachment's Turbulent Causation - -The preceding section poses a problem of explanation, a problem which has been implicit throughout this manuscript. A social role's submergence of a person is cited by personhood theory as a cause of - - amputated perceptions, - - emotional numbness, - - mutilation of faculties (the science/poetry and science/occultism dichotomies in modern rationalist culture), - - "success"-directed striving (in the American sense), - -etc. More accurately, the social role is said to fixate the individual to mutilated perception, for example. But I then say that the social role is a sort of ideology and skill which the individual is fixated to. These formulations give social role--or thematic identity--or imminent character--the guise of a self-caused cause or looped cause. - -Let me try to resolve this. The circuit of attachment through the person-world is not a linear causal phenomenon; it is a phenomenon of scrambled or turbulent causation. It is a dynamically balanced confined turbulence. What is awful about being submerged by a social role in the cases known to me is precisely that such submergence is self-reinforcing. Shame can live with itself only by glorying in shame. To expand on this conclusion, it is appropriate to mention some of the "ruinations" of social identity. - -1. The culture may mutilate a child's faculties (again science/poetry and science/occultism) and inculcate him or her with debasement (secularism's world consisting exclusively of things)--and yet not push the child to the point where he or she demands escape as a right or becomes a precocious social critic. - -(Yet we encounter again the social doctoring of history, this time biographic history. Children do cry out, they do demand escape as a right, they are precocious social critics until they are subjugated. Higher and higher tolerances for anguish, or compensating rewards, have to be developed.) In due course, the child begins to perpetuate the stigmas in him or herself. At the least, he or she acquiesces; at the most, he or she may become a well rewarded advocate of the community. - -By the time one becomes an adult, though, one must have experienced enough diversity and enough responsibility to begin to know manifest degradation and mutilation for what they are. An undercurrent of shame appears; one begins to suspect oneself, if not to despise oneself. If one's abasement is then suddenly spotlighted by somebody else's acts of courage and splendor, one's shame may be magnified and become a matter of crisis. But there is another possibility: that because of the mutilation of one's faculties, acts of courage and splendor will be invisible to one. In a crisis of shame, the person submerged in the social role of e.g. the renowned and well-paid professor of economics can only flee his shame by affirming and advocating debasement and mutilation. - -Moreover. It is commonplace for all academic personnel to be exposed while they are graduate students to the idea that their discipline is a hoax; and for them to react, after a period of faltering, by redoubling their efforts to rise in the profession which they now know is a fragile, protected swindle. (A good satire on this is found in Joel Kovel, The Age of Desire, Ch. 1). - -2. Consider American middle class elements in the Seventies who flocked to cults and to entertainment which ritualized degradation ("punk"). The normal course of life of these middle class elements led them into occupations (or, more generally, into a culture) consisting of hoaxes, silliness, and impoverishment. At the same time, they were too intimidated and unimaginative to attempt a genuine escape. Consequently, we must conceive them as despising themselves. They sought stupefaction, and they sought rituals of shame and mortification. In this way, manifest hoaxes, silliness, and desensitization became sought-after-experiences for the urban middle class in the Seventies. (I don't want to demean this manuscript by naming names; I assume a reader familiar with the history.) The individual was encouraged to become a swindler (a cult member, for example); or to conduct rituals of shame. Ultimately, people ritually abased themselves because they were rewarded for doing so, and in order to express their shame.--And they knew that they were sordid because they occupied and sustained themselves by ritually abasing themselves. Ritual abasement became a preferred experience; and people knew that they were sordid because they preferred ritual abasement. - -Social history is superficially changeable. The American Establishment launched a campaign to win back the middle class in the Eighties; and the latest thing was to be a Yuppie. Then, with the recession at the end of the Eighties, the Yuppie role became tarnished. These ebbs and flows are not the level I should address. Let me summarize what should be understood here. First, the cults and the ritualized degradation were only the most graphic symptoms of the lasting trend of techno-capitalist civilization. Secondly, we should ponder the cults and the ritualized degradation whether they are in vogue or not. Negatively, they revealed personhood in an exposed manner. (If I defile myself in a public ritual, what am I that I can do this?) - -* - -Q. The Determination of Personal Fate - -1. Let me refer back to (N), and to my choice-making regarding my whole, thematic identity. There is a case which evidently is extremely rare; but which deserves mention because it is hopeful. In retrospect, I may judge that my thematic identity is far more vivid and well-organized now than anything I could have imagined or even understood earlier in life. Furthermore, it may be that my thematic identity has no overall outside cue, paradigm, or promoter--so that I am unlike people who accomplish something they did not expect because they are pressganged by the consumers of their talent. I may then claim that the thematic identity which represents my penchant and loyalty comes from the future: from a systematic and coherent but incomparably novel future. This notion is supported if the thematic identity is tied to a pressing task (confronting an acute dilemma) which is an implication of my skills (an implication of the culture) but which has no community acknowledgement or sponsorship. - -In the rare case that one's authentic identity-theme comes from the future, guiding oneself toward it remains a matter of pronounced willfulness in a context of uncertainties. It is possible to drift rather than to push toward the distant identity-theme. And subjectively I often have to gamble--even if my purpose remains fixed. The dilemma of whether to uphold an authentic identity-theme coming from the future is a crisis which compresses one's future into one's present--a moment in which future and present touch each other. The crisis gives one some choice over the way one's future shapes one's present. (By upholding or relinquishing the identity-theme from the future, one guarantees or nullifies it as a future?) - -[1991. I include this speculation because I am looking for escape hatches. It's rather romantic--and never before articulated. It may exceed the restriction to palpable phenomena which I have endeavored to uphold in person-world analysis. Retroactive signification. Unprecedented fate.] - -2. Let me now resume my discussion of the person submerged by a social role. That person emerges as a person who is "done to." In contrast, the person who e.g. upholds an authentic identity-theme coming from the future emerges as a person who "does" or "does to." But why is a given person one way or the other?--and can he or she be switched from one type to the other?--and does a person who is always one type nevertheless have a potential for the other type? - -This question requires thoughtful distinctions. Medieval serfs were illiterate and never saw money in their entire lives. Today their descendents in Western Europe all read, possess money, and spend money every day. The reason why serfs did not learn to read or to allocate money was that (in effect) they were not recruited and given cultivation to these ends. - -There is a view which would say that the serfs, as a multitude which had been assigned the same fate, became aware that they were being taken advantage of in a common way, and fought for the cultivation (schools, etc.) which they subsequently received. This is not false (the French Revolution); but it is misleading. It does not take into account that the descendents of the serfs remained outside the controlling class--that the "toilers" have never commanded the system. The collapse of the workers' paradises makes this observation all the more decisive. - -It is more realistic to say that advanced capitalism continually revolutionizes technology and continually erases and replaces social relationships. (Capitalism also spurs developments such as the dissolution of the nuclear family, and feminism, which the Establishment did not calculate.) As a result, the achievements and satisfactions which are possible to people come to be seen as results of how much cultivation the Establishment gives them. - -But in personhood theory, the question of why people are what they are focuses in a different way. The topic was anticipated in (O) and (P). One reason why I turned to personhood theory was that presumably clear and blunt presentations of the invalidity of the scientific outlook, and of elements of post-scientific culture, were simply shrugged off by the "aware" people (the cognoscenti, the intellegentsia, academia, bohemia), and remained invisible even after campaigns to publicize them. - -What, then, was the nature of the "aware" people's adherence to the intellectual status quo which made them impenetrable to whatever I (or Hennix) had to say? Attempts were made to transfer sociological analysis (such as the one above about serfs) to this question. It was said that people were not "geniuses" because they had been deprived in childhood--they had not been given sufficient cultivation--their "genius" had been suppressed. People were waiting to explode with "genius" once the right button was pushed. - -As I said at the end of (O), all of my experience in the matter runs counter to this. It would be unwise of me to assume that the reason why the "aware" people shrug me off is that the Establishment did not give them enough cultivation. Somehow, the sociological perspective, which is tacitly tied to a doctrine of underprivilege and socially engineered redemption, misses the point. Let me present a shock-question to clarify the issue. - - Would a Nobel-prizewinning physicist agree - - that he believes physics because his naiveté - - was exploited by malicous elders, because he - - was crushed by his elders, because his elders - - did not give him enough cultivation? - -The sociological perspective--in the name of recognizing that the serf's backwardness was imposed from without--treats the serf's effects on other people as if they were imaginary or didn't matter. It treats the serf's choices and life as if they were tuberculosis--a fatal disease which a few pennies' worth of medication could have cured. We have been living with sociology ever since Comte, and we don't realize how odd it is. Capitalist technology and centralization have created the possiblity of imposing changed fates on entire populations. A member of the administrative class can regard all the choices and lives of a population as a reversible condition. Then people really are what the administrator chooses to make them by pushing this or that button. People are so thrilled by the prospect of human manipulation on this level--or by the prospect that the Establishment is due to give them cultivation--that they overlook that the sociological perspective makes all their choices and their lives chimerical (or revocable). "You did it because you were programmed improperly." How do you choose and act if you believe that your choices and actions have the ontological type of a disease, an error in past programming? And who says that the serf's life was "bad" or unnecessary? And yet people have learned to think in these terms--to want to be told that what their betters permit them is what they are. - -The ambition to transfer social engineering to seriousness and originality, by vaccinating people with seriousness and originality, is an ill-conceived ambition. Seriousness and originality are not "done to"; they "do (to)." They are not implanted. They appear unpredictably. (Of course, my attempt to assert my sincerity and to make the intepersonal arena conducive to it may reawaken seriousness and originality in another person.) I included the speculation about the authentic identity-theme which comes from the future to show that one need not assume the social engineers' cause-and-effect. We do not even have to believe that "solutions" are fabricated from past to present. - -Having speculated in Q.1 about such a thing as unprecedented fates, could average people be said to have routine fates? My considered answer is no. That is because to say that a person fulfills a routine fate cannot be distinguished from saying that that person is determined by the past, by circumstances. - -I entertained the notion of an unprecendented fate because a novelty arises in how we conceive or apprehend, understand or appreciate. - -According to Hennix, the "aware" people (the Ph.D. physics candidates) are not really inert or smug. They are torn by deep inner conflict and terror (or inadequacy). We don't see that, because they unstintingly conceal it. They resolve their anguish by doing the understandable and presentable thing at any given moment, whatever that may be. Hennix, then, does not see stagnancy tied to sheer lack of "genius." And yet one would expect Hennix to insist on the role of genius. - -3. Let me resume the definitive pronouncements of personhood theory. Personhood theory refuses to acknowlege people as objectivities in a deterministic process. (Except to acknowledge that this conception itself is one of the characteristic nonsensical fantasies.) One who adopts the person-world outlook cannot consider his or her choices and life as a reversible mishap. Personhood theory cannot consider palpable choices and lives as chimeras or as revocable. - -The demand for a calculus of society is, in the light of personhood theory, an ill-conceived demand. Again, I included the speculation about the authentic identity-theme coming from the future to show that one need not assume the social engineers' cause-and-effect. We do not even have to believe that "solutions" are fabricated from past to present. - -Let me make some last comments about the question of seriousness and originality. - -a. Stigmatization is typically self-reinforcing. The conformist opportunist has to be displaced to a whole different environment even to be able to acknowledge his or her shame. And then he or she may be destroyed by his or her self-visibility. - -b. Seriousness and originality cannot be thrust upon any given person by outside manipulation. Metaphorically, escape hatches are opened by the future, as coherent novelty, in conjunction with moments in which choice is forced--moments in which the arena of action might be reconceived, loyalty might be shifted, effectiveness and gratification might be reconceived, etc.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/extra/repressed_content.tex b/extra/repressed_content.tex deleted file mode 100644 index 125a4e4..0000000 --- a/extra/repressed_content.tex +++ /dev/null @@ -1,526 +0,0 @@ -% \newcommand{\jarule}{\vskip 1em \centering \hrule height .2pt depth .2pt width 2in \vskip 1em \par} -\newcommand{\jarule}{{\centering \vskip 1em \rule{0.5\textwidth}{0.5pt} \vskip 1em \par}} - -\newcommand{\sectioncount}[1]{\vskip 1em \textbf{#1}.} - -\chapter{The Repressed Content-Requirements of Mathematics (1987, 1994)} - -\textbf{A.} Mathematics, as it is conceived in the twentieth century, has presuppositions about perception, and about the comprehension of lived experience relative to the apprehension of apparitions, which are repressed in professional doctrine. It also has presuppositions of a supra-terrestrial import which are repressed. The latter concern abstractions whose reality-character is an incoherent composite of features of sensuous-concrete phenomena. - -In the twentieth century, mathematicians have been taught to say by rote, \enquote{We are beyond all that now. We are beyond psychology, and we are beyond independently subsisting abstractions.} This recitation is a case of denial. Indeed, if this recitation were true, it would allow mathematics nowhere to live. Certainly social conventions---beloved by the Vienna Circle---are too unreliable to found the truths which mathematicians claim to possess. (Truths about the decimal value of $\pi$, or about different sizes of infinity, for example.) - -To uncover the repressed presuppositions, a combination of approaches is required. (One anthropologist has written about \enquote{the locus of mathematical reality}---but, being an academic, he merely reproduces a stock answer outside his field, namely that the shape of mathematics is dictated by the physiology of the brain.) - -The competence called \term{counting} is required in mathematics. But such counting is paradoxical \enquote{phenomenologically.} The first portion of my conclusions concerns the phenomenology of counting, with particular reference to enumeration in the life-world. - -Mathematics as an activity of thought has a \enquote{phenomenology.} I'm not even referring to the \enquote{discovery} of new knowledge. Just the successive contemplation of terms of a series, or the counting of abstract entities, as may happen when reviewing a proof, has a paradoxical phenomenology. Brouwer made explicit and incredible claims for mathematics as a mental activity. - -Realistically, also, the comprehension of an important proof is quite unlike the mechanical checking of a formal proof. So a portion of my conclusions concerns the phenomenology of abstract ratiocination. - -Husserl attempted to \emph{defend} mathematics on a psychological or phenomenological basis. But that is not at all what I do here. I'm not an apologist for mathematics. I have no motive to protect its claim to be knowledge. Indeed, I argue that the abstract rigidity of the mathematical elements, combined with the mystical obscurity of infinite structures, is a delusion associated with a specific lineage of civilizations. I am investigating this delusion not because I want to protect it, but because I want to exit to a different civilization. - -To continue, mathematicians' intentions require a realm of abstract beings. (Frege, G\"{o}del, Quine, etc., admit the need to assume the non-spatial, abstract existence of classes.) But mathematicians are unable to expound the tenet of celestial existence of abstractions. Not since the seventeenth century, perhaps, has anyone attempted to provide a supporting metaphysics for whole numbers, geometric figures, and infinities. In this connection, a portion of my conclusions concerns the repressed content-requirements regarding independently subsisting abstractions: whole numbers, geometric figures, etc. - -No twentieth-century philosopher of mathematics has dared to undertake the substantiation of e.g. whole numbers as celestial beings. (Whole numbers are explained as formal terms or numerals in a network of rules.) \emph{And yet}, naive arithmetic continues to be used---along with the language of words in which theories are expounded. - -At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hilbert convinced the profession to conceive consistency as the paramount question of the validity of mathematics. Another portion of my observations will concern how the content of mathematics is molded by the choice of allowable proof-methods, and by tendentious adjustments to the definition or test of consistency. - -\jarule - -\textbf{B.} It is a lesson in intellectual history that mathematicians have been taught to say by rote, as I noted above, that \enquote{we are beyond all that now.} The enterprise of foundations of mathematics was contrived to push Platonic questions and psychological questions underneath the \enquote{trading floor} of frenzied effort---where it was hoped that they would remain unnoticed. In other words, foundations of mathematics, which promised to find the bottom of mathematics, pushed the real bottom under the floor and hoped that it would remain unseen. - -Also, foundations of mathematics evolved as an intricate computational science \emph{inside of} number theory. The mirage was cultivated that intricate computational exercises in different degrees of infinity, and so forth, could validate our right to do naive elementary arithmetic as it is done in the present civilization. - -A minority among the foundationalists additionally learned to say by rote: we are beyond Platonism, we are beyond extensional logic, we are beyond impredicativity, we are beyond nonconstructibility. Again---as long as we are talking about published research with a professional career\footnote{Errett Bishop, Nicolas Goodman, Edward Nelson, Michael Beeson, etc.}---the claims to be \enquote{beyond it all} are instances of denial. Again, mathematical truth is demanded to have a rigidity, an absoluteness, that is tantamount to Platonism. Again, the Platonic, logic-of-actuality base of the supposed novelties is pushed under the floor, where it is supposed to live unseen. - -A notable lesson is provided by D. van Dantzig's paper on what is essentially Brouwer's inconsistency proof of classical analysis.\footnote{\papertitle{Comments on Brouwer's Theorem on Essentially-negative Predicates,} \journaltitle{Indigationes Mathematicae}, Vol. 11, pp. 347--55.} In the first place, van Dantzig does not say that the topic is an inconsistency proof; evidently that would be too provocative. In any case, the paper is almost the only one ever published which sketches the heretical agenda which Brouwer's subjectivism would introduce. I have appended the key pages from the paper to my Bibliography. Is the mathematician's death a result in mathematics? What if two mathematicians disagree about what is a proof? van Dantzig lists these issues under the heading \enquote{Terminological remarks.} They are only terminology, he tells his readers, and so they are quickly thrust aside. The pretense of eternal, super-human truth persists because it is professional suicide to drop it. - -Even those who claim that mathematics is a purely syntactical discipline are unable to avoid content---or to avoid naive arithmetic -\begin{itemize} -\item in syntactical enumeration; -\item when positing that a symbol can be an abstraction;, -\item when demanding that rules must address classes of cases. -\end{itemize} - -\jarule - -\textbf{C.} Let me focus on Hilbert's program. For Hilbert, the whole of mathematics came down to the consistency of uninterpreted calculi. Let me spell out Hilbert's problematic to see where it stands relative to the repressed content-requirements. - -One posits an \term{a priori} conceptual system embodied in language and symbols. - -Is the system defined by contents (i.e. a pre-established realm of abstract referents)? Or---is the system defined by rules? \textit{[syntactical infinity]}\footnote{See the inset remark below.}[As in the stock analogy with chess---which is discussed by Frege if not prior to him.] - -The system is codified in token-strings whose purpose is to assert. (Strings called propositions.) - -The derivation of certain classes of propositions from other classes of propositions is mandated (by the system or in the system). But then the abstract objects called classes are required to exist. \textit{[syntactical infinity]}\editornote{sic} - -The system has classical negation. The preferred intuitive picture of negation is that it is the splitting of a universe of discourse in two. But this is a definition by model, which has to be translated into status-of-propositions. In the sectarian jargon, when a universe of discourse is exhausted by set $A$ and its complement $~A$, then `$x\in A$' is true if and only if '$x\in\lnot A$' is false. [The interrelation of set complementation, negation, and truth.] - -The system has an infinity of objects or terms. \term{[syntactical infinity]}\footnote{Whatever that may mean. The notion of splitting a universe of discourse into exhaustive disjoint sets becomes weirdly problematic when infinities are admitted. Now there are particular objects you will never see.} - -[An entire separate branch. I presented a prima facie objection to infinity of terms, and to classical nonnegative integers. \essaytitle{Intuitive Objections to Numerical Infinity} (1991).] - -The outcome, in Hilbert's doctrine: the fate of all of mathematics hangs on a single question. \textbf{Can the a priori conceptual \textit{system} be refined until it becomes \textit{impossible} for a proposition and its negation both to be derived?} Impossibility of $\vdash A$ and $\vdash\lnot A$? - -What happens in this approach is that the consistency judgments become the locus of the negotiation. Manipulations of judgments of consistency become the source of mathematical content. I will return to this phase at the end. - -\textbf{\textit{Syntactical infinity.}} How can one speak of having an infinity of terms if `[infinity]' is not given except as an uninterpreted sign within the game? - -Foundations of mathematics takes as its problem to start from nothing and vindicate the concept of infinity. In order to do this, it assumes infinities in the world---without being able to say what that means---so that these infinities can provide a lexicon or semantics for the formal axiom of infinity. Bolzano, Dedekind, Tarski. Tarski sweeps these questions into footnotes. They are \enquote{difficult questions,} but also \enquote{superfluous complications.}\footnote{\booktitle{Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics}, pp. 174, 282.} - -How can one speak of a symbol as an abstraction---unless there is a realm of abstract objects which are \textit{mathematical} objects, or are just like them?\footnote{Carnap says in \booktitle{Logical Syntax of Language} that the letter \enquote{o} is the geometric figure called a circle---the Platonic figure. Tarski dances around the question in \textit{op. cit.}, pp. 156, 174, 282.} - -Rules have to address classes of cases: classes have to exist. - -\jarule - -\textbf{D.} My commentary is addressed in the first instance to a tradition which devolves from Platonism by the formalist route. As for L.E.J. Brouwer, he claimed that he conceived mathematics as a languageless, solipsistic activity of consciousness. It is an elementary exercise to show that Brouwer's subjectivism was either untenable or insincere. After all, Brouwer claimed the absoluteness of mathematical truth as vehemently as anyone else.\footnote{I have a manuscript, \essaytitle{Brouwer's Inconsistency Proofs of Classical Mathematics} (August 1988).\editornote{Henry Flynt has this, but we don't.}} - -But all that is a distraction in this inquiry. Brouwer and his adherents claim that he is the one man in three thousand years who has nothing in common with the others---and who gets it perfectly right every time. It is all too familiar: for academics to claim to overturn the world via an application of prejudicial skepticism.\footnote{I have a manuscript on prejudicial skepticism.\editornote{We're jealous.}} We shame ourselves when we humor the professors' self-importance. This manuscript addresses the entire enterprise of mathematics; it seizes the crisis in foundations of 1900 as an object-lesson, but is in no way confined to that crisis. - -{ \itshape Note on sources. I propose in this manuscript to discuss questions which are rationally defined and do not have to be referred to specific authors. Mathematical knowledge is not supposed to depend on the word of a particular authority---on citations which have the character of Biblical verses. I will keep citations to a minimum. The references which substantiate my claims about how issues are construed by the profession are collected at the end. The reader is welcome to read all references cover to cover.} - -\jarule - -\section*{E. Phenomenology of Counting} - -Let the question be the one asked in foundations of mathematics: do we have the right to do elementary arithmetic as we do? Let us cancel the right of pure mathematicians (and foundations-of-mathematics specialists) to rig the \enquote{disputation} on this question. Let us begin an inquiry on this question which is not pledged to protect any one disciplinary orthodoxy. - -When it is said that the same numbers count -\begin{itemize} -\item emotions -\item shadows -\item wooden blocks -\item hours elapsed -\end{itemize} -is that supposed to be a absolute law self-evident to consciousness from the beginning of time? There is no such thing as a proof, prior to all thinking, that the positive integers exist as abstractions capable of attaching themselves to every apparitional situation which involves plurality. - -Greek philosophy claimed notions to be self-evident which not only are not self-evident, but are not evident at all, to most cultures. (Frege claimed precisely that whole numbers are universally applicable. His treatment already pushed the life-world competance of reckoning under the floor.) - -\jarule - -What does it mean when, in the process of \enquote{comprehending} lived experience, one counts \enquote{apparitions}? - -When two shadows suddenly become one, did two shadows coalesce and persist in superposition, or did one shadow stop existing while the other survived? If we choose sense-specific apparitions as our \enquote{entities} (or \enquote{isolates}), then these isolates do not behave as things: they are evanescent. I can discard \enquote{positions,} or images, in my visual field by turning my head. So the images are evanescent (somewhat like soap bubbles). Arithmetic is not an abstract representation of the way \textit{phenomena} cumulate. Arithmetic is a sort of imaginative violence which remakes the phenomena into fixed unit-things. Teaching arithmetic is a matter of instilling, as natural, the habit of identifying\\ -\parbox{4.25in}{\vskip 0.75em \centering\itshape combination of abstract units \vskip 0.75em}\\ -and \\ -\parbox{4.25in}{\vskip 0.75em \centering\itshape combination of concrete phenomena \vskip 0.75em}\\ ----when they are manifestly divergent. So applied enumeration resembles the delusions induced in experiments in hypnosis. - -Explicit counting must be carried out temporally, using tokens which appear and disappear in time. I count a manifestation of simultaneously present, persistent \enquote{things} by pairing them with a succession of thought-events which appear and disappear in time. By the time I think the enumerative token \textit{two}, \textit{one} is gone. What is supposed to make the result of this procedure meaningful? The empirical possibility of mathematics depends not as much on stable notation-tokens as on evanescent notation-tokens, since explicit counting is carried on with evanescent tokens. - -In order to sustain belief that $1+1=2$ is validated by the way concrete things taken as units cumulate, you have to select the aspect in each case that agrees with $1+1=2$. - -If you count simultaneously present, enduring entities by a purely mental procedure, then the entities are viewed under the aspect of endurance, while the procedure of numbering them takes place under the aspect of flux (since the silent counting labels \textit{one}, \textit{two}, etc. successively happen and vanish). So different \enquote{sides} of \enquote{the world} are apprehended under mutually exclusive world-aspects. - -When you count a (displayed) unsymmetrical stable multitude by an exclusively mental procedure, you assign to the members a succession of thought-events which appear and disappear in time (exhaustively and without repetitions, which means that the procedure is also an ordering). One apprehends different \enquote{sides} of \enquote{the world} under mutually exclusive temporal world-aspects. - -If you count via the expressions in a memorized sequence whose number-assignments you don't know immediately, then the procedure will yield an expression, but will not of itself tell you the number. Using the English alphabet, what is it that makes $s$ intend differently from the label $19$? - -For quantity to be felt to be a reliable property, one must be surrounded by phenomena conceived as enduring and changeless (and discrete). But one's sensuous experience of a stone is fluid---and intermittent---so that at the least, an interpretation is required to extract the enduring, changeless stone from the impressions. Moreover, the counting labels have to comprise a fixed protocol, accessible by repetition. Yet \enquote{the world} has to be a flux for enumeration to be a process of comprehension. Various countings actively substitute, for the given problem, a different problem which has the character of inertness and discreteness. The establishment of equinumerousness between phenomena having different reality-statuses is crucial in supporting quantity as a property. The required permanent, discrete objects, and their required relationship to the flux-aspect and to repetition, have to be willfully imputed. Mathematicians would not be able to imagine their ideal numbers if they could not interpret their surroundings as allowing permanence, flux, and their interconvertibility, as I have discussed. - -\jarule - -One can apprehend temporality under the aspect of world-endurance, and also of world-flux (as events, and world, appear and then disappear into the past). Endurance and flux are both \emt{totalized} world-conditions. There was a philosophy---its name doesn't matter now---which said that we always deploy both vantage-points at once. What is more, it was said, there is no problem of logical conflict between the vantage-points. So what is claimed? On the one hand, an enduring world in which positional relationship---configuration---is supreme. On the other hand, a world which vanishes into the past and appears anew at every moment, in which sequence is supreme. The now-forgotten philosophy evidently said that the uniting of these mutually exclusive world-aspects is the precondition for there to be any cognitive apprehension whatever. The lesson is that when one excavates the constituents of elementary thought in order to validate them, one sinks deeper and deeper into quicksand. - -\jarule - -One may record the lapse of a multiplicity of full moons by marking a permanent surface (a rock face) at each full moon. In this case, the transitory events are so much separated that they can only be compared in recollection; moreover, memory is not a convincing medium to cumulate the observations of dozens of full moons. So a \enquote{repeating event} with a period far outside the scope of an experienceable time-lapse is modelled by a display of continually and simultaneously present marks. - -\jarule - -Mathematics wishes to define positive whole numbers which are so ideal that they do not reflect phenomenal considerations or reality-features. It may be noted that Brouwer invoked a reality-feature: he based number on flux---the comprehension that time has \enquote{crept.} But this step is insincere, since Brouwer does not adopt any of its ramifications, such as the point that in an entirely time-directed world, nothing would be repeatable. - -Even though mathematics now claims to address ideal numbers which can therefore have any assigned content or no content, mathematics is completely dependent on \enquote{real-world} enumeration at the level of counting notations (or reading stoke-numerals, for that matter). This circumstance guarantees the general observation that mathematicians would not be able to imagine their ideal numbers if they could not interpret their surroundings as allowing permanence, flux, and their interconvertibility. - -The claim of the objective realism of modern arithmetic (including all the infinitary properties of the natural number series, which outrun all phenomenal considerations, and whose explicit treatment forms much of the content of pure mathematics) is a fantasy. - -Insofar as mathematics uses real-world enumeration while relentlessly denying it, mathematics has produced a series of abstract explanations of number which amount to circular solutions of spurious problems. Let us leave aside the claims that the whole numbers outrun any concrete notation, and in fact comprise an infinite series. (Such claims outrun phenomenal analysis.\footnote{Except for the "psychological proof of infinity" given by Bolzano and Dedekind. The observations I make here make the rebuttal of that proof trivial.}) After ruling out what are pejoratively called psychological explanations, mathematics comes to identify the numbers with any ordered series of labels that has a first member and an infinite tail ($a'$ after $z$, etc.). It dismisses as unnecessary the requirement that the whole numbers be \enquote{equally spaced} (the intuitive metric); and it purports to determine the whole numbers without defined addition. If this doctrine were sound, then $s$ would be the same as $19$ to immediate comprehension. What we learn is that the most \enquote{basic} branch of modern pure mathematics is a nonsensical fantasy that has grown out of the repression of the phenomenal character of enumeration. - -\jarule - -Hans Freudenthal's \booktitle{Lincos}, one of the first studies in the field of Communication with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, wants us to initiate contact with advanced extraterrestrial beings by broadcasting number theory to them. What arrogance, to suppose that this is how humans should proclaim their genius to the cosmos. I am not worried that advanced intelligent beings might fail to understand the transmission because of their \enquote{stupidity} or culture-boundedness. Freudenthal's dangerous assumption is that advanced intelligent beings will admire earthlings for sending this transmission. - -\jarule - -\section{Abstract Thought-Processes} - -Progressive specification is required to isolate ideal geometric figures from background space. Progressive specification is required for proof-constructions, including geometric superposition. Nevertheless, it is forbidden to include these mental acts as constituents of mathematics. - -When sequential procedures are used, this does not mean that the mathematical objects flow and change. Rather, the mathematician's attention moves from one rigid, eternal object to the next. This movement of attention is excluded as a constituent of mathematics. - -Mathematics requires mental acts, conceptual steps, to be carried out uniformly and without resistance an infinite number of times. - -\jarule - -\section{Concrete Imprints of Thinking} - -The signs, notation-tokens of mathematics, are forbidden to yield different images to different people, or yield different images at different times. - -Inasmuch as geometry depends on representing positional relationship in a extended field by the practice of drawing, there must be an equivocation between ideal entities, and the proxies for them which are produced by drawing. By definition, a tangent to a circle actually intersects the circle; it is not merely adjacent to it. Protagoras held that knowledge can only concern the perceptible. He observed that a palpable tangent to a circle in fact touches the circle not at a single point, but always along an arc. - -Drawing requires actual motion and involves figures which evolve in time. - -An intention is required to make a flat drawing into a figure of plane geometry, as opposed to a figure of solid geometry (also to understand that the figure remains flat when a page is bent, etc.). It is forbidden to include intentions as constituents of mathematics. - -\jarule - -\section{The Reality-Character of Pure Whole Numbers and Euclidian Figures} - -Let me continue with my conclusions regarding mathematical entities conceived as self-subsistent. - -% 1. Mathematical objects must be strictly separate from the self, and strictly impersonal. -\sectioncount{1} Mathematical objects must be strictly separate from the self, and strictly impersonal. - -Mathematical entities have no personal specialness. Things which are partially capable of being ranked can be exhaustively linearly ranked. - -Mathematical objects which are specified alike (specified similarly), are absolutely identical, without miniscule differentiations. (Ones, in a sum of ones; circles with the same radius.) - -Cumulation cannot produce qualitative change. - -Objects are intangible, immaterial. - -Objects are rigidly self-identical for eternity. - -There is no difference between possibility and actuality.\footnote{In mathematical logic, you can define an entity which is not actual; any such definition, however, is claimed to be inconsistent!} (But what about infinity?) - -\sectioncount{2} Whole numbers are unextended. - -Whole numbers are qualitatively homogeneous or qualityless. - -Units (ones) have exactly the same magnitude. - -Units retain their distinctness in combination. ($1+1=2$, not $1+1=1$.) - -The series of whole numbers continues uniformly and regularly \enquote{to infinity} without confusion of identity between numbers. - -\sectioncount{3} Space is that which is left when all material bodies are removed from the world. - -Portions of this space can be isolated, by stipulation, from the background space, and given an identity as \enquote{figures.} - -The identity of a figure persists when the figure is moved. In the first instance, only figures in a single plane are considered. - -The test of equality is rigid superposition; so that figures must be movable, while retaining their identity. - -Figures are absolutely intangible, may be infinitely thin, and must be absolutely permeable; but are absolutely rigid. - -Superposition in plane geometry may necessitate flipping a figure out of the plane. - -\sectioncount{4} Zero, the whole number for nothing. Elementary counting applies only to discrete phenomena and is done in \enquote{cells} of one---even absences are counted as positive whole numbers. \enquote{Zero} would have to mean \enquote{none} or \enquote{nothing to count.} But the situation \enquote{nothing to count} becomes a quantity which enters into computations such as $2\times 0=0$ or $0\div 0$ or $0^0$. \enquote{Nothing to count} is given the reality-character of a whole number, as declared in {\S}2. - -von Neumann's interpretation of zero as Zermelo's empty set. Here a nothing---a collection with zero members---is posited to exist as a bordered (or delimited), fixed, pre-established entity. Every ontological category becomes a determinate and calculable thing, including that which by definition is not. Nothing is asserted to exist as a determinate thing. So twentieth-century scientism arrives at the very idea which Carnap railed against in his paper against Heidegger.\footnote{Note Husserl's 1891 attack on the empty set.} - -Explaining \enquote{zero} as a number for nothing is not the only explanation possible. But the alternative is highly unworkable. To sketch this alternative, we have to hypothecate that counting refers to a fixed collection of tokens, say 100 tokens. Then no number above 100 can be counted. Counting becomes binary sorting of the collection of tokens: to count 3 items means \enquote{3 tokens used, 97 unused.} Now zero can be defined without any reference to nothing, as \enquote{100 tokens unused.} The total number of tokens must be fixed, because if zero were defined as \enquote{all tokens unused,} it would only create a new mystery around the indefinite word \enquote{all.} What is the cardinality of \enquote{all}? A further subtlety is that this approach works only in a universe in which possibility and actuality are the same thing. (\enquote{Zero unicorns are present} is translated to some definite positive number of unicorns claimed to be absent!) - -\jarule - -\section{How Allowed Proof-Methods Shape the Content of Mathematics} - -I have surveyed the content-requirements of mathematics with special reference to covertly demanded metaphysical properties of mathematical entities. However, I do not suppose that these contents are really pre-established in Heaven. On the contrary, I propose that the contents arise conjointly with \textit{the method of ratiocination}. One can survey this co-conditioning synchronically, relative to a contemporary rational reconstruction of mathematics. Or, one can take history as a parable, and consider how mathematical objects were progressively focused in ancient Greece---in the wake of Thales' demand for a break with pragmatic reckoning. - -Mathematics is an application of Parmenides' logicism to problems of quantity and magnitude. To establish an assertion logically has the effect of constraining vernacular concepts to rigid, literal meanings. This leads to the abstraction of a perfect line (etc.). Then Plato's question, \enquote{Where does a perfect line live? Where does an abstraction live?} - -Ancient Greek thought furnishes an example that construing language dogmatically leads to conclusions which are unnecessarily paradoxical. If \enquote{one} means \enquote{wholeness,} how can there be two ones?---how can there be three ones?---etc. - -Protagoras held that knowledge can only concern the perceptible. On that basis, he rejected the logicists' law of contradiction. Arrange three tanks of water in order: cold, lukewarm, hot. Put your hands in the cold and hot tanks. Then put both hands in the lukewarm tank. You feel the same water to be cold and hot at the same time. To Protagoras, that rebutted the law of contradiction. - -A \enquote{cultural style} view of the discovery of mathematical theorems and mathematical proofs. Begin with a \enquote{quicksand culture} in which prohibition of \enquote{wrong} thoughts is by superstition, not by rationality. - -Axiomatic mathematics: try to shrink the cultural quicksand to give unique results by rational restrictions. Some of these results are intuitively welcome; some are deeply counter-intuitive. Rig the geometry game so that the perpendicular to a line at a given point is unique. Two right angles (added) give identically a straight line. - -Draw a right angle whose legs are equal segments, and draw the two circles which have those segments as diameters. The circles intersect in \enquote{right angles.} But the supplementary right angles fail to be equal anywhere but at the points of intersection---what sort of right angles are these? - -If the right angles are defined by tangents, let us remember Protagoras' observation: a tangent to a circle in fact touches the circle not at a single point, but always along an arc. The Greeks already knew these and many other counter-examples to Euclidian geometry; but chose not to insist on them. - -We should not read old mathematics from the standpoint of a modern mathematician who knows all the \enquote{right} answers. We should ask what it meant to them, in a non-condemnatory way. - -The purpose of a proof is to exemplify and intimate all the restrictions on vernacular thinking required to produce unique results which are simple and elegant. The number of prime numbers is infinite. Every natural number is either prime or composite. - -Euclidian uniqueness of the right angle is a \textit{cultural style} which is buttressed by all the explicit and implicit provisos. If the Greeks had allowed non-zero angles too small to see, their proofs of uniqueness would not work. [Also: erecting a perpendicular at a straight line's \enquote{endpoint at infinity.}] - -Proof by contradiction. The objection is that you have not considered that the opposite hypothesis may also produce a contradiction. Aquinas' proof of God: infinite regress of causes is a contradiction. Why isn't a finite regress of causes a contradiction also? - -Brouwer, \textit{1933}, p. 444 says that every proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra was by contradiction.\editornote{I believe Flynt is referring to \essaytitle{Willen, weten, spreken $\lBrack$Volition, knowledge, language$\rBrack$}.} - -Theorem and proof in Platonic mathematics. The enterprise is not reducible to legality in a game. (Formal satisfaction of the terms \emt{axiom}, \emt{proposition}, \emt{proof}, \emt{theorem}.) Parmenides' glossomorphism\footnote{Felix Cleve} is used to negotiate a world of absolute beings out of the empirical and the vernacular, the casual or flexible. The intuitively preferred abstractions, and the logic of proof, are co-determined. - -The uniqueness of the perpendicular to a line at a given point is proved by contradiction. Simultaneously adjust the determination of the geometrical figure, and the logic of proof, to give the preferred result. - -Formal proof is like the positivist explanation of scientific theory as an interpreted formal calculus. It's not enough. The formal calculi which mathematicians take seriously have traditional mathematical content smuggled in somewhere---it's invoked in the meta-language, for example. (Finsler and Brouwer protested that a formal proof is not a genuine mathematical proof.) - -Proof of infinity of primes in Euclid etc. The mathematician thinks he discovers constructive or computational tricks which enable him to directly see intricate regularities in infinite collections of abstractions. In fact it is only a guess, or a program for what rationalism wishes to be the case. - -Such a seeing of regularity in the infinity of abstract objects is an illusion. There is also a strong component of \enquote{God won't deceive me} in the method. God won't make a truth which seems to have a clear proof, but later fails because of a tiny loophole. Well, what about the loopholes in Euclid's geometry that M. Pasch closed two thousand years later, the axioms of order? Glaring loopholes that Euclid overlooked, for some reason. The mind-boggling denouement of Frege's \booktitle{Grundgesetze}. He writes for pages about how lucid, transparent, exact, and precise his work is; then confesses in an Appendix to Vol. ii, added as the work was going to press, that his system has been wrecked by Russell's paradox. - -The \enquote{rationalist} (Plato, Descartes) believes in an objective abstract realm which he can know because the ostensible truth is not misleading. Consider the tenet of chess that a king and two bishops cannot mate against a king. The tenet can be disproved if a computer is used, and large numbers of moves with no humanly discernable theme or purpose are allowed. The formal approach with a powerful computational machine (to a finite problem in abstract pattern) rebuts the result obtained by rationalism. - -A proof may be pictured as making a guess plausible. (The number of primes is infinite.) In classical logic, that gives $A$ credibility over $\lnot A$. But also: The allowed method of proof creates content in the Heaven of numbers. The content of the Heaven of numbers is not unaffected by what proof-methods are allowed. - -Does the effort to obtain unique answers produce \textit{new contradictions}? It definitely produces new \enquote{failure theorems.}\footnote{The coinage I expound in \essaytitle{Anti-Mathematics} (1980).} If the right angle is not absolute, then irrational numbers cannot be coerced into existence. - -The astounding outcome of logicist \enquote{narrowing} is the irrationality of the diagonal of a square, of \scalebox{0.8}{$\sqrt{2}$}. Proof has the role of coercing a bizarre and unwelcome result. Controlling a result too counter-intuitive to be controlled by common sense or pragmatic thinking. (But why isn't it simply inconsistent?) - -Without logicism, there is no infinity and there are no irrationals and consequently there are no perfect geometric figures. The Greeks could have gotten rid of irrational numbers by claiming that there are no perfect figures. After all, that is plausible: when discussing physical reality. - -The ex post facto claim of the rational absolutism of mathematical knowledge. In Plato's \enquote{Meno,} the slave is made to \enquote{remember} a geometrical theorem, namely how to prove the trick for doubling the square. - -There is an infinite number of primes because Heaven so established it; and then we \textit{remembered} it or \textit{found} it. - -Aristotle, in \booktitle{Metaphysics}, says that a geometrical relationship is discovered by adding lines to the diagram. (Doubling the square in the \enquote{Meno} was an extraordinary instance of this.) - -Cavalier proof-methods dictate what metaphysical properties the mathematical entities must have, as in {\S}H. They also dictate the claims for thought-processes, as in {\S}F. - -\begin{itemize} -\item proof by contradiction -\item induction -\item transfinite induction -\item bar-induction -\item axiom of choice -\item uncountable infinities of operations (unorganizably many operations) -\item diagonal argument -\item interpacking of infinite decimals -\item self-reference; the Diagonalization Lemma -\end{itemize} - -\jarule - -\section{Proof-theoretic Consistency and Mathematical Content} - -In {\S}I, I noted that I do not imagine that the repressed content-requirements are pre-established in Heaven. I proposed that the contents arise conjointly with the method of ratiocination. Now I want to extend this observation into the twentieth century, when, as we saw in {\S}C, mathematics was reduced to one question. - -{\vskip 1em \centering\parbox{3in}{\textbf{Can the a priori conceptual system be refined until it becomes impossible for a proposition and its negation both to be derived?}}\vskip 1em \par} - -How are the content-requirements co-conditioned by the demand for proved consistency? The protocol for consistency proofs has a circular relationship with the ground-mathematics to which the mathematician commits, and which the mathematician seeks to prove consistent. Three junctures are especially notable. - -\begin{itemize} -\item What is it that \emt{establishes} a system; how does that react on the question of its consistency? -\item With all the talk of consistency, the reality-characters of mathematical entities, and \enquote{phenomenological} enumeration, are \emt{incoherent}. (As in {\S}E and {\S}H.) -\item Mathematics relies almost entirely on proof by contradiction. -\end{itemize} - -\jarule - -Hilbert's reduction of mathematics to proof-theoretic consistency was incredibly insincere. (Aside from the setback which was administered by the Incompleteness Theorems.\footnote{For the exposition of how one knows the Incompleteness Theorems and still insists on formalism, cf. Carnap's \booktitle{Logical Syntax of Language}.}) -{\vskip 1ex} -\begin{enumerate}[itemsep=1ex, label=\roman*)] -\item The actual historical responses to discoveries of inconsistency in favored theories. Infinitesimal calculus; Russell's paradox and Frege's system; etc. -\item The pre-eminent theories in mathematics are obtained by sanitizing notions which at the outset are manifestly inconsistent. Infinitesimal calculus; divergent series. -\item The paramount importance in mathematics of results which are \enquote{paradoxical} but escape inconsistency by a technicality. The standards for consistency, and the expectations from consistency, are progressively lowered. Galileo's paradox, Leibniz's series, nonstandard integers, w-inconsistency, Hausdorff-Banach-Tarski paradox (hereafter HBT), L\"{o}wenheim-Skolem paradox, Feferman's dot, etc. -\item Disagreements in mathematics over whether steps in proofs are legal. Brouwer's inconsistency proof of classical analysis was proclaimed illegal by almost all of Brouwer's supporters. Other provocative junctures. The proof of HBT requires uncountable infinities of rotations. Cantor's interpacking of infinite decimals to disprove the invariance of dimensions. Wittgenstein's arguments against Cantor's infinities---in turn considered idiotic by most mathematicians. -\end{enumerate} {\vskip 1ex} - -The larger issue in the foregoing is as follows. Hilbert's picture was that there is a court of logic in which theories are tried once-for-all, so that a theory convicted of inconsistency is banished summarily and forthwith. What a misrepresentation! In fact, what rules the court is the favored idea which is brought to it for adjudication. Either a legal code is rotated in to produce the desired verdict; or else the idea gets an unlimited reprieve so that it can be made more presentable. In fact, the question whether the irrationality of [root]2 makes sense has been in free fall for about three thousand years; if one gets past the stalling tactics, one finds that the matter is not resolved. - -\jarule - -\begin{enumerate}[resume*] -\item Recalling {\S}E and {\S}H. Despite the mystique of consistency, mutually exclusive demands are placed on the reality-character of mathematical entities. (Incidentally: infinitesimals in early calculus had to be both equal and unequal to zero.) Performing enumeration is \enquote{phenomenologically} paradoxical. -\end{enumerate} - -\jarule - -\begin{enumerate}[resume*] -\item \textit{The question of how a conceptual system gets established} -\end{enumerate} - -When is an a priori conceptual system (embodied in language) considered to be established? At the beginning of the \booktitle{Grundgesetze der Arithmetik}, Frege makes the following observations: - -\begin{itemize} -\item Are abstractions made to exist by stipulative definition? No, humans cannot create an abstraction. -\item Can abstractions be identified with their linguistic tokens? No! -\item Do abstraction and structure live in the knower's mind? No! -\item Can a logic based in psychology account for the difference between `2 exists' and `a square root of 4 exists'? No! -\end{itemize} - -When is a meaning brought into objective existence? When does a public object acquire a structure absolutely inherent in it? (Looking at the following figure,\\ -\parbox{4in}{{\centering\vskip 0.7em \includegraphics[width=3in]{img/strokes}\vskip 0.7em\par}} \\ -are there two groups of three, or four sets of singles and pairs?\footnote{Or, much worse, are there three bracketed gaps?}) - -And, how does this interact with the compulsion to recognize that a derivation is legal? - -Referring once again to the canard that mathematics can be explained by analogy with chess, chess is defined by rules \textbf{which depend on naive arithmetic and logic for their expression.} Moreover, mathematics is obviously not chess because mathematics is infinitary. - -Could chaos in ordainment make a preposterous move legal?---or would it just cancel the system? Suppose one considers the rules of chess meaningless; or considers the claim that chess rules are meaningful to be inconsistent. Are matters then so chaotic that Kt--K6 is arguably legal as an opening move? - -(Regarding chess, judgments of legality are fluid, negotiable---as they are in mathematics. Rules are altered in connection with tournament play. Also, the possible wins in chess change when very long, unintuitive games are allowed.) - -\jarule - -Nicholas Goodman says that it may not be true that all natural numbers are either prime or not---because for very large specific numbers the determination is too long to actually be done. So \enquote{unknowable} has to be added as a third truth-value. - -But: -\begin{enumerate}[label=\arabic*), itemsep=1ex] -\item Merely adding \enquote{unknowable} as a third truth-value does not explicate Brouwer's logic---so that fails as a motivation. -\item The classical mathematician may reasonably say that it is much more convenient to idealize mathematical reality, and avoid the nuisance of the third truth-value, by imagining that all questions which extrapolate feasible questions in a homogeneous way have definite answers \enquote{known to God.} (Is that just mathematical induction?) You invent the mathematical universe this way because it is convenient or elegant. -\end{enumerate} - -Can it then be guaranteed that structures which are trans-feasible and chosen for elegance will preclude $\vdash A$ and $\vdash\lnot A$? \enquote{Assuming that every question (including \enquote{infeasible} ones) has exactly one answer will not produce an inconsistency.} - -Brouwer sought to prove that if the conventional classical assumption is made that \enquote{questions we cannot answer have definite answers for God,} one can get counter-examples to mandatory tenets of classical analysis. Classical mathematicians hit back by rejecting the key step in Brouwer's proof as illegal. - -Goodman's objection to Brouwer is that Brouwer has a capricious attitude which itself doesn't take care to exclude inconsistency. But the same complaint is made against classical mathematics and its attitude of \enquote{Why not posit that all mathematical questions already have answers every though we don't know the answers now and may never know them?} - -\jarule - -The only rationale of mathematics which foundations of mathematics is prepared to defend metaphysically is formalism. (I don't mean that most twentieth-century mathematicians are formalists; I mean that Platonists such as Frege himself were not prepared to be forthright prophets of the supra-terrestrial world. \enquote{Chain of being} doctrines were expounded only by theosophists.) More narrowly, foundations of mathematics is prepared to champion only a concept of whole numbers relative to which the notion of a number's magnitude is meaningless. (Again, that doesn't mean that mathematicians don't hold far more traditional beliefs.) - -It was when I offered concept art to some mathematical logicians that I ran into the real loyalties, which are atavistically traditional and theological. (Particularly when I presented \essaytitle{1966 Mathematical Studies} to Peter Ungar at Courant Institute in 1967, also when I presented it to Dennis Johnson at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1970. One may also consult the writings on foundations of mathematics by my schoolmate Nicholas Goodman.) - -When one composes truly uninterpreted calculi (calculi which do not point to a naive-arithmetical interpretation)---or when one defines whole numbers which have the \enquote{wrong} magnitudes---then professional mathematicians want no part of the exercise. - -\section{Bibliography} -\begin{hangparas}{2em}{1} - - Aristotle, \booktitle{Metaphysics} - - Michael Beeson, \booktitle{Foundations of Constructive Mathematics} (1985) - - Eric T. Bell, \booktitle{The Development of Mathematics} (1945) - - P. Benacerraf \& H. Putnam, eds., \booktitle{Philosophy of Mathematics} (1964) - - P. Bernays, \booktitle{Sur le platonisme} (1935) - - E.W. Beth, \papertitle{Remarks on Intuitionistic Logic,} in A. Heyting, ed., \booktitle{Constructivity in Mathematics} (1959) - - Errett Bishop \papertitle{Mathematics as a Numerical Language} in \booktitle{Intuitionism and Proof Theory}, ed. A. Kino, J. Myhill, \& R.E. Vesley (1970) - - David Bloor, \booktitle{Knowledge and Social Imagery} (1976) - - Bernard Bolzano, \booktitle{Paradoxes of the Infinite} (tr. 1950) - - L.E.J. Brouwer, \papertitle{The Rejected Parts of Brouwer's Dissertation on the Foundations of Mathematics,} \booktitle{Historica Mathematica 6} (1979) - - L.E.J. Brouwer, \booktitle{Collected Works, Vol. 1} - - George Spencer Brown, \booktitle{Laws of Form} (1979) - - Rudolf Carnap, \papertitle{The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,} in \booktitle{Logical Positivism}, ed. A.J. Ayer (1959) - - Rudolf Carnap, \papertitle{Pseudoproblems in Philosophy,} in \booktitle{The Logical Structure of the World} (tr. 1967) - - Rudolf Carnap, \booktitle{Logical Syntax of Language} (1937) - - Rudolf Carnap, \booktitle{Meaning and Necessity} (2nd ed., 1956) - - Felix Cleve, \booktitle{The Giants of Pre-Sophistic Greek Philosophy} (1965) B188.C55 - - Richard Dedekind, \booktitle{Essays on the Theory of Numbers} (1901) - - J.J. de Iongh, \papertitle{Restricted Forms of Intuitionistic Mathematics,} in Evert Beth, ed., \booktitle{Proceedings of the Xth International Congress of Philosophy} (1949) - - Ren\'{e} Descartes, \papertitle{Rules for the Direction of the Mind,} in \booktitle{The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I} (1985) - - Michael Dummett, \booktitle{Elements of Intuitionism} (1977), pp. 10--11 - - Euclid, \booktitle{Elements} (tr. 1956, 2nd ed.) - - Paul Finsler, \papertitle{Gibt es unentscheidbare s\"{a}tze,} in \booktitle{Commentarii mathematici Helvetici} (1944), pp. 310--320, reviewed by Alonzo Church in \journaltitle{Journal of Symbolic Logic}, Vol. 11, pp. 131--132 - - Gottlob Frege, \booktitle{The Foundations of Arithmetic} (tr. 1950) - - Gottlob Frege, selections from \booktitle{Grundgesetze der Arithmetik}, in \booktitle{Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege} (2nd ed., 1960) - - Hans Freudenthal, \booktitle{Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse} (1960) - - James Gleick, \papertitle{Machine Beats Man On Ancient Front}, \journaltitle{The New York Times}, August 26, 1986, p. C1 (about Dr. Kenneth Thompson, AT\&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey) - - Nicolas Goodman, \papertitle{Mathematics as an Objective Science}, \journaltitle{American Mathematical Monthly} (1979), pp. 540--551 - - Nicolas Goodman in F. Richman, \booktitle{ed., Constructive Mathematics} (1981) - - R.L. Goodstein, \booktitle{Constructive Formalism} (1951) - - I . Grattan-Guinness, \booktitle{The Development of the Foundations of Mathematical Analysis from Euler to Riemann} (MIT, 1970) - - Emil Grosswald, \booktitle{Topics from the Theory of Numbers} (1966), pp. 27--8 - - Thomas Heath, \booktitle{A History of Greek Mathematics} (1921) - - Thomas Heath, \booktitle{Mathematics in Aristotle} (1949) - - Arend Heyting, \booktitle{Intuitionism: An Introduction} (1971) - - David Hilbert, \booktitle{Foundations of Geometry} - - David Hilbert \& P. Bernays, \booktitle{Grundlagen der Mathematik} (1934-39) - - David Hilbert \& W. Ackermann, \booktitle{Principles of Mathematical Logic} (1950) - - Edmund Husserl, \booktitle{Philosophie der Arithmetik} (1891) - - Edmund Husserl, \journaltitle{G\"{o}ttinger gelehrte Anzeigen}, 1891, No. 7, p. 272 \linebreak{} - [Husserl attacks the empty set] - - Edmund Husserl, \booktitle{The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness}, tr. James Churchill (Bloomington, 1964) - - Morris Kline, \booktitle{Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times} (1972) - - G.T. Kneebone, \booktitle{Mathematical Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics} (1963) - - Imre Lakatos, ed., \booktitle{Problems in the Philosophy of Mathematics} (1967) - - Imre Lakatos, \booktitle{Mathematics, Science, and Epistemology} (1978) - - \booktitle{Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science}, ed. Nagel, Suppes, and Tarski (1962) - - Andrei A. Markov, \booktitle{Theory of Algorithms} (1961) - - Gregory Moore, \booktitle{Zermelo's Axiom of Choice} (1982) - - Jan Mycielski, \papertitle{Analysis Without Actual Infinity}, \journaltitle{Journal of Symbolic Logic}, Vol. 46, p. 625 - - Edward Nelson, \booktitle{Predicative Arithmetic} (1986) - - Plato, \booktitle{Meno} - - Plato, \booktitle{Philebus} - - Plato, \booktitle{Timeaus} - - Emil Post in Martin Davis, ed., \booktitle{The Undecidable} (1964) - - Proclus, \booktitle{A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elements}, tr. Glenn Morrow (1970) - - W.V.O. Quine, \booktitle{Mathematical Logic} (revised) - - W.V.O. Quine, \booktitle{Methods of Logic} - - Frank P. Ramsey, \booktitle{The Foundations of Mathematics} (1931) - - Hans Reichenbach, \booktitle{Elements of Symbolic Logic} (1947) - - Michael Resnik, \booktitle{Frege and the Philosophy of Mathematics} (1980) - - Gabriel Stolzenberg, \papertitle{Can an Inquiry into the Foundations of Mathematics Tell Us Anything Interesting about Mind?}, in \journaltitle{Psychology and Biology of Language and Thought} (1978) - - Alfred Tarski, \booktitle{Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics} (1956) - - Alfred Tarski, \papertitle{The Semantic Conception of Truth,} \journaltitle{Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4} (1944) - - Dirk van Dalen, \booktitle{Logic and Structure} (1983) - - D. van Dantzig, \papertitle{Comments on Brouwer's Theorem on Essentially-negative Predicates}, \journaltitle{Indagationes Mathematicae}, Vol. 11, pp. 347--55 - - Jean van Heijenoort, ed., \booktitle{From Frege To Godel} (1967) - - B. van Rootselaar, \papertitle{On Subjective Mathematical Assertions}, \booktitle{Intuitionism and Proof Theory}, ed. A. Kino, J. Myhill, \& R.E. Vesley (1970) - - C.F. von Weizsäcker, \booktitle{The Unity of Nature} (1980), pp. 78-9 - - Stan Wagon, \booktitle{The Banach-Tarski Paradox} (1985) - - Hermann Weyl, \booktitle{Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science} (1949) - - Leslie A. White, \papertitle{The Locus of Mathematical Reality: An Anthropological Footnote,} in J.R. Newman, ed., \journaltitle{The World of Mathematics}, Vol. 4 - - A. Whitehead and B. Russell, \booktitle{Principia Mathematica} - - Ludwig Wittgenstein, \booktitle{Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics} (1976) - - Ludwig Wittgenstein, \booktitle{Philosophical Grammar} (1974) - -Ludwig Wittgenstein, \booktitle{Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics} (1978 ed.) -\end{hangparas} - - diff --git a/extra/the_art_connection.tex b/extra/the_art_connection.tex deleted file mode 100644 index 90dc709..0000000 --- a/extra/the_art_connection.tex +++ /dev/null @@ -1,409 +0,0 @@ -\newcommand{\topnote}[1]{{\vskip 1em \raggedleft \parbox{2.5in}{\raggedleft \textit{#1}} \vskip 1em}} -\newcommand{\Pb}{\plainbreak{2}} -\newcommand{\Db}{\fancybreak{{$\diamond$}}} -\newcommand{\arttitle}[1]{\textit{#1}} -\newcommand{\sidenote}[1]{\vskip 1em {\raggedleft \parbox{2.75in}{\raggedright\itshape #1}\vskip 1em}} -\newcommand{\asidenote}[1]{{\footnotesize{#1}}} - -\newcommand{\lilsection}[2]{{\Large \textbf{{#1}.} \hskip 2em \textit{#2} \hspace\fill}} -\newcommand{\lilsubsection}[2]{\vskip 0.75em {\large\textbf{{#1}.} \hskip 2em \textit{#2} \hspace\fill} \vskip 0.75em} - -\chapter[\textsc{The Art Connection: My endeavor's intersections with art (2005)}][\textsc{The Art Connection}]{The Art Connection: My endeavor's intersections with art} - -\topnote{26 October 2005} - -If you ask me to review the art world or the institution of art, it's not an interesting question if I am asked to speak like an art critic. On the other hand, I have a great deal to say about the art institution if I am allowed to view it as a piece of a civilization, and to practice censorious sociological aesthetics. Beginning in 1963 especially, I made appraisals of fine art as: an elite institution which distinguishes modern European civilization from other civilizations. - -But that critique of the status quo is less interesting to me right now than autobiography. - -I can legitimately say that taking art as a the thematic axis for a chronicle of my work is not fair to the work. In the first place, from the beginning I was interested in the correlation of arts. I quickly graduated to \enquote{interdisciplinary projects} such as concept art, which had art as a precedent, but stemmed from my iconoclastic philosophy of 1960, and had outgrown art. To force my projects back into the art mold made it impossible to understand them. - -That bears directly on this recitation. From the beginning, I was committed to correlation of the arts and of all culture. I used compositional techniques from \enquote{new music} in visual works, and I used \enquote{abstract expressionist} drawings as pitch-time graphs, etc. The early story cannot be fairly told unless unless I can move freely among the disciplines. Concept art was assembled from works formerly called music and works formerly called mathematics. - -As I turned to new ethnic music, my musical practice became more separable---and I will keep references to it to a minimum. But that is still artificial, because various artists I have known have been musicians, Conrad, Hennix, and my exchanges with them are not compartmentalized into disciplines. - -In the late Eighties, I revived concept art for tactical reasons. Then I learned all over that one can't force the public to \enquote{get} concept art. As long as its premise is unacceptable---outside the civilization---it will be received as \enquote{art junk.} - -My engagement with art had many distinctly different periods. Because I am unprecedented or iconoclastic, that's what I want to review. I'm going to be autobiographical. - -\Pb - -During 1957--60, I fell in with an (American) crowd whose trailblazers made a mystique out of newness. (Definable as \enquote{baffling \'{a} la Dada.}) I had probably dismissed opera, dance, and even fiction as corny in my teens. I went through a rapid evolution in which I talked myself out of the branches into which culture was divided such as painting, sculpture, poetry, music. I felt invited, by Young and his entourage, to charge ahead into the bafflingly unprecedented and the iconoclastic. By late 1962, I had rejected art altogether, along with entertainment and competitive pastimes such as bridge and checkers. In fact, in spring 1962 I called for \textbf{the civilization in one mind.} By early 1963, I had convinced myself that Marx's social critique and social utopianism had to be integrated into the perspective of culture; the relatively apolitical postures of Cage and Young were incomplete at best and collaborationist at worst. - -\Pb - -I took positions at the beginning of my twenties which I may still admire. But I periodically have retreated from my severe positions for tactical reasons. As to the Marxism, I disagree with what I formerly talked myself into assenting to. However, it had great plausibility to be a Leftist in the early and mid-Sixties---I can't regret it. - -At certain junctures in my life, it seemed that I was hopelessly isolated, that I was limited to mere survival while I piled up work that nobody knew or cared about. I changed direction, sometimes retreating from my severe positions to do so. - -In some cases I'm comfortable with these retreats. - -In other cases, I feel that I was imposed on, that there was a social pressure which pigeon-holed me in ways that were unfair to my work. However, there were redeeming features to the pigeon-holing. My relationships with the impresarios, Maciunas and Harvey, were much richer than the usual artist-dealer relationship. They were my support systems and confidants. (Not that any \enquote{big} dealer ever recruited me or ever followed through after we had met.) - -\Pb - -\newcommand{\Ed}[1]{\textit{#1} --- } % "enumDate" -\begin{enumerate}[label=\Alph*] -\item \Ed{1958 or 1959 through 1960} College and the first year out of college. My modern art pilot projects, so to speak. Correlation of the modern arts---formalism. - -\item \Ed{1961} Approximate date of my first in-person meeting with La Monte Young. The period of \essaytitle{Philosophy Proper} and my \enquote{iconoclastic interdisciplinary projects,} particularly concept art. - -\item \Ed{1962} Continuing the \enquote{iconoclastic interdisciplinary projects}; beginning of my anti-art crusade. First printing of \booktitle{An Anthology}. - -\item \Ed{1963--4} Affiliation with Marxism. Adding a censorious sociological aesthetics as preface to the anti-art theory. Accusation of political imperialism in the way musics were ranked in high culture. - -\item \Ed{1965--6} Bearing down on a number of agendas simultaneously. I reconfigured my critique of culture as a Communist program in culture. The rock songs with Walter De Maria. I begin aggressively to recast my \enquote{interdisciplinary projects.} - -\item \Ed{1967--8} Return to anti-art utopianism. Down with participation. The absolutization of subjectivity. Publication of two more \enquote{interdisciplinary works} from 1961--2 (in \journaltitle{Ikon} magazine). - -\item \Ed{1970--1984} Inactivity in \enquote{visual art,} except for photographing the SAMO\scalebox{1.2}{\textcopyright} Graffiti and except for the \enquote{archeology} embodied in my 1982 Backworks show. - -\item \Ed{1985--1989} I begin to revive concept art for tactical reasons. - -\item \Ed{1989--1993} Having joined Emily Harvey's gallery, I become a career artist, defining what I do as concept art, modern art, and fantasy. - -\item \Ed{1994--1999} My art career on hold. Occasional pieces in group shows. - -\item \Ed{2000--2005} Development of my attack on \textbf{modern art} as a turn in European civilization which crystallized at the beginning of the twentieth century. \enquote{Baffling without substance, cult of the lurid, impoverishment chic, making the collector pay to be scammed.} - -\item \Ed{2005} Commence making abstract cinemas as an extension of abstract painting: pilot projects. Only a small venture so far. -\end{enumerate} - -\Db - -\lilsection{A}{1958 or 1959 through 1960. College and the first year out of college. My modern art pilot projects, so to speak. Correlation of the modern arts---formalism.} -\lilsubsection{A}{Starting my sophomore year in college and lasting through my first year out of college.} - -Roughly, works surviving, or reconstructed, as \arttitle{Grey Planes}, \arttitle{Ugly Drawing}, \arttitle{Poems 1--4}, \arttitle{Aleatoric Painting}, \arttitle{Spirit-World Paintings} (originally a single cartoon with multiple titles). \enquote{An abstract expressionist} drawings for music, namely November 1960 No. 2 \scalebox{0.9}{[survives].} - -Aleatoric Painting was oils on canvas board. The others were drawings on bond paper or notebook paper, physically diminutive. - -Retrieval in this period depends on my memory, and remakes of various pieces from surviving fragments. (a random number table for Grey Planes; the \enquote{English translation} of \arttitle{Poem 4}.) A few works survive intact in the collections of others. Ugly Drawing. Musical scores from late 1960. - -These works, whch were carefuly thought through before I executed them, had three sources. My sincere preference for abstract painting, especially Pollock. My willingness to entertain modern poetry, which fell short of actual love for it. My affiliation with the so-called new music. I had arrived at college as a Bartok fan, was told that that was passe. To be respected by the people whose respect I wanted, I had to get on the \enquote{new music} bandwagon. I was very enthusiastic about Pollock, but knew it only from reproductions. (I did not stand in the presence of a Pollock until I was 65.) - -{\vskip 1em \raggedleft \parbox{3in}{\itshape \textsc{Note}: The credibility of ethnic music for me, which means that I find the potential for a complete musical experience in musical languages learned by ear: \textit{I do not find an analogy in visual art.} Genre painting, if that is what it is called, folky painting, is kitsch to me. As a visual artist, the prospect of trying to \textit{be Southern} never interested me in the least. I am a critic of modern art, but I am not even slightly an aesthetic conservative, a classicist. I was never able to commit to visual art based on rendering. - -To me, iconic painting amounts to a handmade photograph with elements of cartooning. I could not commit to it as a goal. Maybe just cartooning. - -I respect rendering in ancient Egypt, but nowhere else. I have no interest in duplicating that achievement which united their language and their mythology. It would be utterly anachronistic. - -In fact, I think that abstract cinema is a better medium than painting because painting is a handcraft medium. (The problem with abstract cinema is that its practitioners did not know what they ought to be doing. Also abstract cinema has needed the \textsc{dvd} to come into its own.)}\vskip 1em} - - From the outset, say 1958, the division of art, culture, into categories which became separate professions meant nothing to me. I simply disrregarded the compartmentation of culture, and assumed that I should pass freely among philosophy, exact science, linguistics, poetry, painting, music, whatever. Using each to illuminate the others and transferring methods from one to the other. My first \enquote{flat visual works} were precisely translations from serial music and so-called chance music. My poems also. - - While enrolled at Harvard, I began familiarizing myself with jazz recordings. I had begun a conversion away from modern music. - -There had been an exchange about the latest jazz via Young's correspondence with Conrad. - - The direction of everything I did was given by investigations in \enquote{epistemology} or whatever you call it which were unique to me. I espoused positivism in high school and while enrolled in college, but quickly moved far beyond it. Chomsky told me in 1960 that Philosophy Proper, Version 1 (it must have been Version 1) was worthless. - - -\lilsubsection{B}{My attitude toward success, 1958--60.} - - Those I fraternized with at Harvard who were trying their luck at the creative pursuits were not mercenary. Wilder, who introduced us to the new music, did not become a career composer. Conrad showed no interest in specializing in music. Christian Wolff was satisfied to be a succes d'estime and did not intend to specialize in music. - - At Harvard I proceeded as if art were pursued for its own sake as a branch of worthy human possibility. I took it for granted that I should \enquote{be creative,} and I approached my encounters with $<$ the culture in play in my milieu $>$ $<$ as the early Marx assumes it will be in a pure Communist society>: the exploration of human possibility for its own sake. - - I was aware that there was grumbing that Universal Edition was manipulatively promoting International Style. Obviously Stockhausen, a product of apprenticeships with famous composition teachers, had to be a master at securing funding. But I didn't take any of that as a signal of what to do. - - All in my circle in e.g. 1959--61 assumed that the arts were a phase of worthy human possibility. As far as I saw at the time, we were non-mercenary. De Maria and Morris may have known that they would quickly begin to earn. Young soon became a career composer but the affluence did not come until later. Cale would become commercially successful by crossing to Pop. I didn't see that. I assumed that our efforts were labors of love. We were knowledgeable and competitive but we were not earning. - - The commercially successful artists I was aware of were i) Johns, ii) the Pop Artists, who would be a smash in the early Sixties. The Pop Artists meant nothing to me as role models. - - I left Harvard on probation for low grades to write my first philosophical monograph, Philosophy Proper Version 1. The orientation for everything else I ever did. The warrant for my iconoclasm toward cognitive claims for art, laws of art; the warrant for my transfer of \enquote{intederminacy} etc. into the exact sciences. - -\Pb - - - Probably 1960, I attended a John Tate lecture which began with algebraic varieties and passed to ringed space. \textit{[Tate's specialty, class field theory]} It inspired me to write a one-page text as a parody. I seem to have anticipated the proliferating diagrams of category theory, and to have used color and non-alphanumeric symbols. Cf. Wette for color. - -Bafflingly out there, and I could not substantiate its cogency. Like double-talk. - -Mathematicians would have said then, and now, that it was worthless, but that's too easy. Composers were producing scores that amounted to notational double-talk. Indeterminacy had become a feature of ordained structure in \enquote{serious music.} It had to translate to the \enquote{exact sciences} (and the very label would become a misnomer). - -Increasingly I would come to see a legitimate role for indeterminate mathematics. Mathematics waiting for its content to be focused. - -\sidenote{[That actually happens in mathematics, Miles Tierney cleaned up topos theory. Then Hennix blurred it again.]} - -${}^\circ$ It's the idea that a text can be indeterminate, can be ahead of its substantiation. comes back in full strength in \essaytitle{1966 Mathematical Studies}, then in the proposal for \journaltitle{Journal of Indeterminate Mathematical Investigations.}\editornote{Referred to in \essaytitle{Creep}} - - - -\lilsection{B}{\Ed{1961} Approximate date of my first in-person meeting with La Monte Young. The period of Philosophy Proper and my \enquote{iconoclastic interdisciplinary projects,} particularly concept art.} - - I met Young in person and met his entourage (as I thought of them). - -{ \vskip 1em -\begin{enumerate}[label=\alph*)] -\item Young challenged the \enquote{infinitely new and radical} claims of International Style and Cage. his response: word pieces, monotony (minimalism) - -\item Young absolutized the mystique of the new. New was the definition of best. If I had listened, I would have realized that his associates did not subscribe to this. -\end{enumerate} -\vskip 1em} - - I interpreted all this as an exploration of human potential that had become engrossed in being enigmatic. art was not an arena in which it was the greatest achievement to discover a new beauty. The greatest achievement was to baffle and frustrate the audience. - -I was told that the Dadaists were the greatest precedents because they had been the most extreme, and the most extreme always won. Young's entourage made sure that I knew about \booktitle{The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert Motherwell} (1951). Young's greatest coups had to do with dismantling the art process logically and with baffling the audience. (E.g. \opustitle{Compositions 1961}, identical pieces performed before they were composed.) - -\Pb - -Young and I rejected opera and dance as intrinsically corny. -Young was also the first jazz musician with whom I truly fraternized socially. December 1960. That confirmed the conversion I had been undergoing. Young also confirmed my already estabished attraction to Hindustani music. He was already knowledgeable about the vocal music, and introduced me to many phases of Hindustani music. (Conrad had recordings of some prominent Carnatic musicians.) - -After being presented Young's word pieces in December 1960, I did numerous pieces directly prompted by them. - -\Pb - -\begin{itemize} -\item My first formalist system (mathematical logic), January 1961, had what amounted to an abstract color drawing as the \enquote{system's base,} with plastic overlays a la Cage. -\item Möbius strip piece. \opustitle{Piece No. 2 (2/3/61)}. \enquote{The instructions for this composition are on the other side of this strip} - -the fact I did these pieces is now proved by surviving works and their references to no longer existing pieces and by correspondence.\editornote{They're also viewable in MOMA's online collection.} -\item 1961. Each point on this line is a composition. -\item Music of the future. \asidenote{[composition ordained that some music a thousand years from now was the composition's content]} -\item Rationale of concert held in my mind. -\end{itemize} - -\Pb - -At some point in the first half of 1961, I completely lost interest in the \enquote{art professions,} music, painting, sculpture, poetry. My works at this time were \enquote{interdisciplinary projects} or out-of-category projects---which were shaped by my philosophical perspective, which I continued to refine throughout the spring. When I mailed \essaytitle{Philosophy Proper, Version 3} to Carnap in 1961, he didn't reply. \asidenote{[if not \essaytitle{Version 1} in 1960]} - -At that time I saw a unity between intellectual innovations and artistic embodiment: concept art. But I would continuously re-examine my own premises for rationality. - -\Pb - -As I arrive at concept art, June 1961, I part company with the syllabus of art school---because everything I did stands or falls on the intellectual premises. I'm not going to browbeat you about logic or philosophical linguistics. You are the products of specializations which I happen to regard as derelict and irresponsible and retarded. - -\Pb - -People who are actually comfortable with this culture love the idea of the artist as a raging creature of instinct, who vomits emotion onto a canvas. Who hops around like a jungle shaman. As a matter of fact, post-war art music was not like that: it was pseudo-scientific. In fact, as everyone knows, many successful visual artists intimidated or baffled by being clinical and sterile. However, their \enquote{blank wall} art was all posture---the equivalent of looking cool by wearing dark glasses---it made no intellectual contribution. - -The larger public still loves the mystique of artists as a caste which channels irrationalism and superstition and instinct. Of course the instinctual artist is a fraud, since what they turn out is dictated far more by an evolving stylistic consensus. - -The assumption that infantile incompetence better qualifies one to \enquote{get feeling into the object} was a notion of European painting as classic painting disintegrated in the $19^{th}$ century. Regression, insanity, etc. Stockhausen's \opustitle{Aus den Sieben Tagen}. Totally contemptible. - -[[I accept that an artist would be intuitive and would draw on alternative consciousness. I don't like the caste role assigned to the artist as a raging savage. Artists supposed to be intellectually vacant. Not to mention the art theory produced by critics and curators: pseudo-intellectual trash. (\#) - -\Pb - -back to me: I began to do \enquote{interdisciplinary} projects: \\ -\begin{itemize} -\item \essaytitle{Concept Art}, which became \essaytitle{1966 Mathematical Studies}, \essaytitle{The Apprehension of Plurality}, etc. -\item \essaytitle{Mock Risk Games} \asidenote{[its publication history in \journaltitle{Ikon}]}\editornote{That is: published 1961 as \essaytitle{Exercise Awareness States}, disavowed and/or lost, re-created from memory as \essaytitle{Mock Risk Games}, then anthologized as \essaytitle{Exercise Awareness States} after all.} -\item \essaytitle{Energy Cube Organism}, which ended as \essaytitle{Choice Chronology Project} -\item \essaytitle{Perception-Dissociator} which became \essaytitle{Superseding} \asidenote{[the unfinished work of 1962 redone and published in 1968]} -\end{itemize} - -\Pb -\textbullet WSTNOKWGO\\ -another step in indeterminate mathematics (or specification of structure) \\ ----instructions for performance in letter to Young, late 1961 \\ -structural black box: \\ ----extra-terrestrial broadcasts that earth theoretically capable of intercepting. \\ ----actually existing verbalizations, texts, that are irrecoverably lost (aside from my destroyed work) \\ - -\Pb - -When I met Maciunas in connection with appearing in his gallery in 1961, he made some favorable remarks about the Soviet Union. in the same evening, Jackson MacLow was making caustic remarks along non-Communist Left lines. (MacLow had been a rigorous anarchist-apacifist in the Forties.) Dick Higgins seemed to be making gestures in the direction of the CPUSA. I began to convert myself to Marxism. - -\Pb - -As of 1960 I was spoiled because so many people seemed to be admired for being iconoclastic and intransigent. Cage and Ornette Coleman were just now famous. In 1961 Young's entourage told me that Dada was the best because it had been the \enquote{most radical.} - -The artists whom I met through Young did not seem to be full-time artists. Only De Maria was already a \enquote{power artist}; I didn't register it because in person he was affable and generous and because I had signed off on the art machine almost before I knew what it was. Morris, a student of Lippold at Hunter, explicitly condemned wanting to get rich and famous in a letter to Young. In other words, Morris nominally rejected the actual purpose of major public art, which is professional success. (The golden paintbrush.) - -\textbf{In the second half of 1961,} after half a year of active association with Young and his entourage, I began to imagine that I could gain recognition and earn my living by playing improvised music in clubs with Young. I thought we could follow in the wake of Ornette Coleman. (I did not register that Coleman got disgusted with club performance and quit.) - -\Pb - -That being said, I did nothing shrewd to pour myself into the mold of success. I only cared about doing what had my enthusiasm. I experienced the avant-garde as a crisis situation; I cared deeply about whether activity in the crisis situation was rational. I was never shrewd about cultivating the exhibition system or giving the audience what it wanted. I was happy to be naive and heedless. - -I would write \enquote{The Exploitation of Cultural Revolutionaries in Present Society} in fall 1961. I would take cases like Galois, Abel, and Van Gogh, and make an issue of them. The cultural judges couldn't get it right because cultural revolution upset the standards of excellence themselves. At the same time, there was a legitimate role for arcane work which could not be asked to support itself commercially. I experienced this as an appalling trap: for the cultural revolutionary, life was a death march. The only real solution would be a Communist utopia as envisioned by the early Marx. \textbf{I converted to Communism out of self-interest, because of a \textit{rare} personal problem, before I began to worry about the masses and to endorse institutional Communism.} - -\lilsection{C}{\Ed{1962} Continuing the \enquote{iconoclastic interdisciplinary projects}; beginning of my anti-art crusade. \enquote{First printing} of \booktitle{An Anthology}.} - -Begins 1961 but takes shape in 1962. I realized that I was involved in a knock-down drag-out competition---the neo-Dada avant-garde---and I began to wonder if it was not like being a college student. Being forced to compete on demeaning terms, being immersed in a demeaning subject-matter. - - I become more and more uncomfortable that artists were offering things that inrinsically weren't worth doing, whose only payoff was to leave the audience feeling baffled and frustrated. They were competing for social approval on that basis. They were making careers out of bluff, posture, hoodwinking the experts into giving approval for what nobody would do without the social context. - - Already at the time of the loft appearances, Feb. 1961, when I had the ability to garner respect from the people whose opinion I most valued\slash whose approval mattered to me\slash I was bothered by the game we were playing. \\ - -the Harvard concert of 1961: the reason it was \enquote{possibly Henry Flynt} and I didn't perform. - -{\itshape \footnotesize -[Despite all the talk about new new new, the artistic fraternity could only deal with painting this, sculpture that. their inovation consisted in brandishing postures at each other for social effect. by definition they were intellectually vacant. - -{\scriptsize [it's all posture, a game being played inside an elite institution, the self-important overpriviledged cognosenti, posture game or intimadation game. this cognoscenti does not have anything to say about philosophy, science, economics, government that I respect in the least.] } - -they were not seeking interdisciplinary or out-of-category innovation. Thus, the works which I poured myself into developing went utterly over their heads. drew a blank. - -Substantial innovation, e.g. concept art, went over their heads.]} - -I passed from the mystique of the avant-garde to the conviction that art had a flawed premise. Cage had already said it, with a different rationale. But he didn't mean it. {\itshape \footnotesize [Later, Ben Vautier would deliberately use anti-art as a ploy, the collectors paid him to scam them.]} - -\Pb - -All the while, the \enquote{first printing} of An Anthology, with Concept Art, was 1962. Definitive printing 1963. - -\Pb - -\begin{itemize} -\item My New Concept of General Acognitive Culture was first presented publicly with the creep lecture, Harvard, May 15, 1962 - -\item New York, June 5, 1962 acognitive culture talk. Young was mainly responsible for assembling the audience. Almost all were people who were or would be famous in the \enquote{creative world.} Like the February 1963. I was attacking art to an audience of fledgling famous artists. - -\item lecture \essaytitle{Pure Recreation}, Harvard, August 7, 1962 - -\item publication in \journaltitle{decollage No. 3} -\end{itemize} - - \lilsection{D}{\Ed{1963--4} Affiliation with Marxism. Adding a censorious sociological aesthetics as preface to the anti-art theory. Accusation of political imperialism in the way musics were ranked in high culture.} - -In 1962--63 I became deeply interested in artistic culture as a phase of modern European civilization: for the purpose of a destructive critique, a hostile or censorious sociological aesthetic. I spoke to audiences of culture professionals who would go on to become icons. I told them to destroy their work and renounce art. - -I converted myself to Marxism and began to require that everything I was doing be squared with a basic Marxist premise: that market democracy was intolerable, it had to be opposed. it was unacceptable to be at peace with it. Mills' \booktitle{Listen Yankee}, apartheid in South Africa, what become the Vietnam war, the history of bourgeois-democratic intervention in primary producer nations. It seemed that bourgeois democracy was incapable of supporting the bourgeois-democratic revolution and in fact saw every liberation as a threat. - -How could I espouse a closed and \asidenote{[doctrinaire]} ideology like Marxism? At that time, as far as I knew, the progressive forces had become embodied in vast institutions. One was honor-bound to support them, as opposed to remaining on the sidelines. \asidenote{[There is not a single person in this audence who would recommend remaining on the sidelines during the Second World War, who would be neutral between the Allies and the Axis.]} - -Marxism had several versions, and had already redefined itself several times, as the locus of insurgency moved. (Not the Western proletariat, but the colonial subject, then the college student.) It was the only tradition that touched the essential bases and that aligned itself institutionally with liberation struggles. Namely: -\begin{enumerate}[label=\roman*)] -\item \textbf{[market democracy was wage slavery and ruthless imperialism]} \\ -economic individualism said it was the greatest good for the greatest number \\ -why wasn't it the greatest good for the least number? -\item \textbf{a just social order could and should be built, based on economic collectivism.} \\{} -[at that time, I assumed that Cuba was what its supporters said it was] \\ -\end{enumerate} -I agreed with Marxism that there was no future for the reversion to the simple life. (In the Seventies, there would in fact be rural comune experiments. They all failed, of course.) The new society would be planned, would cultivate and extend technology. Its economic laws would be counter-intutive at first: not entrepreneurs producing for profit. The general population would have more disposible time. It would not mean becoming indolent and taking longer vacations; it would mean the exploration of human possibility without regard for market signals. The life-style I spent my life fighting to have, I wanted to make it possible for many people. - -[\textbf{I admit to self-deception out of desperation.} my interests isolated me so profoundly that the only thing I had to look forward to was mere physical survival, maximizing the length of life. I had to find a way to break out. - -\Pb - -Precepts (i)--(ii), found in Marx, became deeply interwoven in my sociological aesthetic. - -my rejection of European art music for black and East Indian music. \asidenote{[or for that matter, Rumanian gypsy music, the one music on the continent of Europe which had my enthusiasm]} - -the official aesthetic dispensation, e.g. the musicology departments, which put the best music at the back of the bus---I tied this to colonialism. the victorious empire could impose a culture which was intimidating, which incorporated technology and massed forces, but which was otherwise poison. - -\Pb - -{\itshape\footnotesize[$\diamond$ I continued musical activity right through the anti-art period, even though I unfortunately destroyed my earliest \enquote{new ethnic music} recordings. - -Why wasn't I attracted to Southern ethnic music when I lived there as a child? As a child I did not have the confidence or \enquote{creativity} to imagine the world for myself. I saw, accurately, that Southern ethnic music was a truncated cultural experience. It was associated with a brawling life-style and with obscurantist Protestantism. - -the idea that there could be a refined Southern music which would engage the whole person. I single-handedly invented that. The role model I needed at 15: I had to become that role model, and it did not crystallize until the Seventies at the earliest.]} - -\Pb - -Another key issue was competition among artists. If art was gratuitous self-expression, how could one artist be competitively superior to another? My peers tried to define it, and gave answers such as new or the most extreme or the best ideas. - -Meanwhile, I looked back on my sojurn in classical music as an episode of competiting in a demeaning contest. The horror of classical music to the competitive student---how I felt is indicated by a July 26, 2005 news story: - -Bryan O'Lone was scheduled to play at a competitive recital in Carnegie Hall. He prepared Chopin. When he arrived, they told him he must play something he hadn't prepared. When he played the Chopin anyway, the music teacher who sponsored the recital walked onto the stage and shut the keyboard cover on his fingers. He sued her for a million dollars. This quirky story, to me, is emblematic of the entire experience of being a competitive classical music student. The National Music Camp and Bloody Friday. - -\Pb - -The demonstrations against Stockhausen in 1964. - -\lilsection{E}{\Ed{1965--6} Finds me bearing down on a number of agendas simultaneously. I reconfigured my critique of culture as a Communist program in culture. The rock songs with Walter De Maria. I begin aggressively to recast my \enquote{interdisciplinary projects.}} - -Communism was an actual constellation of nations and insurgent organizations, stemming from the early Soviet Union, claiming an inspiration from the doctrine of Marx. - -I give my sociological aesthetic the guise of a cultural program for this Communism. Perhaps the exercise sounds dully compliant and subservient, but it was nothing of the sort. At that time we supported their social objectives, or thought we did, but I and Maciunas ripped the consensus Marxist cultural program to pieces. Our argument was that the entire Marxist tradition had gotten culture all wrong. - -I reconfigured \essaytitle{From Culture to Brend} (1963--4?) to an avowedly Communist program for what culture should be. E.g. protest rock. I give my sociological aesthetic the guise of a cultural program for Communism. This was iconoclastic because it was a break with the official Soviet view of culture unheard-of on the hard Left. I was the first person who said that rock ought to be politically radical. - -The perspective on music was my most obvious innovation in Left cultural appraisal. But we re-examined the entire range of Communist cultural policy---to some extent converging with early Soviet figures like Rodchenko, although I did not know of him at the time. - -I was the first person in the Marxist Left to say that black music, and rock, were not American decadence, but rather musical languages [created] collectively by the very people our movement claimed to speak for. The idea that Beethoven was wealth which transcended class, about which the Party ought to instruct the proletariat (like a Metropolitan Museum art appreciation course) was one of Communism's immense mistakes. - -I was also an innovator relative to rock practice, because rock had been configured as saleable entertainment, and had not been concerned to find a political interest against patriotism and the existing economic order. In 1966 I made my recommendations concrete by recording what was released forty years later as \opustitle{I Don't Wanna.} - -{\itshape\footnotesize [I was more comfortable with music because I admired traditional musical languages and the possibility of renewing or broadening them through innovation. Visual art: I find traditional languages corny (after ancient Egypt). I adhered to the modernist principle that visual art needs to create the language as it goes, not to work with a long-practiced language.]\par} - -\Pb - -Even during the years of ostensible Marxism, I never surrendered my intellectual gains. Primary Study was published in 1964. \essaytitle{Mathematical Studies} came in 1966. As I saw it: I found the necessary elements of a complete perspective embedded in various hidebound traditions or disciplines. What I wanted was uniformity, to bring each necessary element up to the level of the other. So that you didn't have to switch ideologies on different days of the week. - -At the same time, I was transferring concept art and the other \enquote{interdisciplinary projects} out of art altogether---and into exact science formats or foundations of science formats. \\ -1966 Math. Studies \\ -Perception-Dissociation of Physics \\ - -What began as concept art etc. now became insane extremism in mathematical logic and foundations of science. - -\lilsection{F}{\Ed{1967--8} Return to anti-art utopianism. Down with participation. The absolutization of subjectivity. Publication of two more \enquote{interdisciplinary works} from 1961--2 (in \journaltitle{Ikon}).} - -I left the organized Left because I was now willing to bet my life that the Communist regimes could not become the utopia of the future via \enquote{regeneration.} I decided that the Stalinist regimes were a new exploiting class. If they aren't, it doesn't vindicate Trotsky; it means that the regime he headed and unconditionally defended was a crackpot version of capitalism which gained its credibility from an \enquote{oppressed people} ideology. - -I became willing to forego \enquote{participation.} I revived the utopianism of my cultural position. What ought to be was so far from what was socially feasible that there was no bridge between them. I chose to again emphasize what ought to be. It was a drop-out stance which combined utopian social speculation with solitary self-realization. - -My interest in technical economics began at this point, probably beginning 1968. I began to realize how badly I had been served by the Left's economic illiteracy, or rather, denial. It became one of my projects to substantiate the utopia in technical economcs. - -I left the organized Left because I became convinced that Leninism could never deliver the utopia Marx had promised, it was as far from that utopia as capitalism was. To characterize the Soviet Union is still an unsolved problem, but those who called it state capitalism were on the right track. The prospect of being a cultural administrator for official socialism lost all interest for me. - -I resumed the pure rejection of art. - -I returned to the [devotion to] subjectivity and individuality as the necessary outcome of avant-garde positions. I was prepared to forego the participatory dimension of culture. In fact, I rarely enjoyed attending concerts. I almost always preferred to listen alone to recordings. At concerts, other members of the audience became the message. - -\journaltitle{Journal of Indeterminate Mathematical Investigations}, November 1967. Another reconfiguration of the interdisciplinary projects of 1961. - -HF, \opustitle{Lecture on Brend}, was Film-Makers' Cinematheque, Feb. 14, 1968 - -I was prepared to forego the use of culture as symbols of a social tendency. - -\Pb - -\lilsection{G}{\Ed{1968--1984} Inactivity in \enquote{visual art,} except for photographing the SAMO\scalebox{1.2}{©} Graffiti and except for the \enquote{archeology} embodied in my 1982 Backworks show.} -\begin{itemize} -\item \Ed{1975} publication of \booktitle{Blueprint} - -\item \Ed{1977} Hennix arrives in New York and we quarrel because Hennix chose to show the Algebras in an art gallery. Hennix wants the art world to subsidize radical thought. I object that it just demeans the work. - -\item \Ed{1979} I photographed SAMO© - -\item \Ed{1982} Backworks: \opustitle{Fragments of a Destroyed Oeuvre} -\end{itemize} - -\lilsection{H.}{\Ed{1985--1989} I begin to revive concept art for tactical reasons.} - - I am asked to remake a 1961 concept art piece for a show in 1985. 1987, Avenue B Gallery, I make new work. revival of concept art to publicize the joint work of myself and Hennix, to ask the belated reward for our pioneering, to unfold concept art to a much greater extent than I had in the beginning. \opustitle{Stroke Numeral}, \opustitle{Tritone Monochord}. I kept a concept art journal. I sought to unfold concept art and showcase it. There was an entire series of concept art signs and only a few got made. -\begin{itemize} -\item Self-Validating Falsehood -\item Short Additive Semigroup -\item One True Sentence -\item Two Honest Texts -\end{itemize} - -\lilsection{I}{\Ed{1989--1993} Having joined Emily Harvey's gallery, I become a career artist, defining what I do as \textbf{concept art, modern art, and fantasy.}} -\begin{itemize} -\item \Ed{1987} new concept art works. $\diamond$ the art career, the attempt to become successful by asking to be rewarded for my pioneering. I became an art soldier. $\diamond$ - -\item First one-person show 1989 - -\item \opustitle{One True Sentence}. the wallpaper. a piercing self-reference anomaly. muted yellows, kitchen wallpaper, a mild tone. If somebody actually used it for the intended purpose, it would be like residing next to one of the civilization's intellectual fault-lines. - -\item \opustitle{Logically Impossible Space} - -\item last one-person show 1993 - -\item SAMO\scalebox{1.2}{©} at the Lyon Biennale. -\end{itemize} - -it was not a waste of time, but I did not enjoy a \enquote{success.} I had to submit to being pre-classified as a Fluxus artist although that didn't make any sense. - -\Pb - -\lilsection{J}{\Ed{1994--1999} I let my life as a career artist lapse. Occasional pieces in group shows.} - -The joint appearance of Flynt and Hennix at MELA was 18 May 1997. - -\lilsection{K}{\Ed{2000--2005} Development of the attack on modern art as a turn in European civilization which crystallized at the beginning of the twentieth century.} - -\enquote{Baffling without substance, cult of the lurid, impoverishment chic, making the collector pay to be scammed.} - -$<$ All the while, my practice embraces one or two tenets of modern art, such as the move from rendering to abstraction. $>$ - - -\lilsection{L}{\Ed{2005} Commence making abstract cinemas as an extension of abstract painting: pilot projects. Only a small venture so far.} - |