Nesting Selves and the Logos

This is an idea that seems both natural and appealing to me, but will face resistance and mockery out there in the marketplace of ideas.

I am a self -- some sort of holon or integrated, self-organizing system which exists within an ecosystem perhaps of other similar holons. That doesn't mean that I don't have parts, many of which themselves might be such holons: a nerve cell, my digestive system, an atom of calcium in my left forearm. I might also be a subself of other holons: my family, my species, Phillies fandom. I want to grant all holons some form of consciousness.

It's relatively easy to take seriously myself and my subselves as existent things; a bit harder to give the same sort of reality to my superselves. Would the Freudian superego count, for example, as a super- or subself? A subself worthy of its name should further both its own interests and the interests of at least one superself. My digestive system is trying to regulate and preserve its selfhood while providing me with the nourishment for my own regulation and preservation. The calcium atom likewise serves its own continuance and mine

The human layer of the nesting seems to deserve special status for a variety of reasons. In particular, it possesses a mind machine that gives undeniable (?) meaning to the human's efforts to sustain and reproduce itself and to form connections with other human selves and other selves (pets?) and superselves. It also has arms and legs and persuasive powers to realize its aims. The mind/consciousness of my digestive system or a nerve cell is hard to identify and/or grant reality to. Just as hard to do the same for the collective consciousness of humanity or Democrats. Zeitgeist, maybe. Where, in these other levels, does mind or intentionality or consciousness reside? One might be able to grant a nascent form of raw consciousness or brute awareness or sensitivity to the other levels, but what good is such a thing without memory or computation or even a means of developing and acting on its "preferences."

I feel as if these problems can be overcome. That is, I think that the atom of calcium does have preferences and the means to realize them. Likewise for a human mob. Maybe they both have a memory as well, if memory is mere access to the actual past. The big missing part is the "mind machine" or intelligence. For reasons unknown, this makes me suspect that brains aren't computational mind machines for producing intelligence at all -- merely machines that facilitate access to some other source of intelligence and/or computation. That is, it revives my interest in the brain-as-radio metaphor. I hate introducing an infinite regress or reductio situation that just pushes back where the miracle occurs, but I don't think that's the case here. (If it is okay to sometimes take on the assumption that everything is trying to happen at once, as I've claimed, it is relatively easy to land on a kind of logos permeating reality. See LOGIC=LOGOS)

Intelligence (or something else a lot like intelligence) is naturally out there -- the tendency of ideas to fall together. Our brains are merely a way of accessing this naturally self-forming order. Some people (smart people) are more skilled in accessing that order. OMG, I sound totally fruity. Also this sounds remarkably like Plato's realm of forms. But the version of the universe where everything is trying to happen at once (and is mostly perpetually failing) -- that which conforms to the Axiom of Fecundity -- leaves plenty of room for such a possibility. That is, the solution to the problem you haved posed for yourself is also trying to happen, and successful thinking involves holding off the cancelling tendencies. This is either a major development in my philosophical speculations or the utter downfall of same. Gosh but it fits in well with relaxing the antijump muscles.

The computing brain has always been objectionable to me, obviously. So I'm not exactly objective about it.

I've pinned my hopes on the idea of multiple describability of actual facts via axiomatic shifts. The actual fact of the computer brain and the actual fact of the anti-jump mind are totally in contradiction, so this might be an example that really tests multiple describability

Socrates (via Plato) says that we already know geometric truths but must just remember them. All learning is remembering what the soul already knows from its previous existence in the world of ideas.

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(from wikipedia)

Dialogue with Meno's slave

Socrates responds to this sophistical paradox with a mythos ('narrative' or 'fiction') according to which souls are immortal and have learned everything prior to transmigrating into the human body. Since the soul has had contact with real things prior to birth, we have only to 'recollect' them when alive. Such recollection requires Socratic questioning, which according to Socrates is not teaching. Socrates demonstrates his method of questioning and recollection by interrogating a slave who is ignorant of geometry.

Socrates begins one of the most influential dialogues of Western philosophy regarding the argument for inborn knowledge. By drawing geometric figures in the ground Socrates demonstrates that the slave is initially unaware of the length that a side must be in order to double the area of a square with 2-foot sides. The slave guesses first that the original side must be doubled in length (4 feet), and when this proves too much, that it must be 3 feet. This is still too much, and the slave is at a loss.

Socrates claims that before he got hold of him the slave (who has been picked at random from Meno's entourage) might have thought he could speak "well and fluently" on the subject of a square double the size of a given square.[19] Socrates comments that this "numbing" he caused in the slave has done him no harm and has even benefited him.[20]

The blue square is twice the area of the yellow square

Socrates then adds three more squares to the original square, to form a larger square four times the size. He draws four diagonal lines which bisect each of the smaller squares. Through questioning, Socrates leads the slave to the discovery that the square formed by these diagonals has an area of eight square feet, double that of the original. He says that the slave has "spontaneously recovered" knowledge he knew from a past life[21] without having been taught. Socrates is satisfied that new beliefs were "newly aroused" in the slave.

After witnessing the example with the slave boy, Meno tells Socrates that he thinks that Socrates is correct in his theory of recollection, to which Socrates agrees:[16][22]

Some things I have said of which I am not altogether confident. But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know; that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power.

— translated by Benjamin Jowett, 1871

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I vaguely remember the feeling when I first encountered this dialogue in college that the reasoning was alien at least and probably naive and primitive. Does Socrates take seriously this notion that all knowledge is inherent? Wow! How prescientific! How clueless about brains and development! On the other hand, it made enough of an impression that I remember it 48 years later. Frankly, it still feels a little like meaningless sophistry, but I do enjoy its resonance with my own Axiom of Fecundity -- speaking of meaningless sophistry: All possibilities are available and ready to embody themselves except for the problem that fecundity itself implies -- the critical density of competing and nullifying "vectors." The trick of thinking in this context is to somehow hold at bay just the correct contrary chaotic multitude that allows a thought to come through the traffic uncancelled and begin to materialize. It's hard to overstate (to myself) how absurd and foolish this will sound to almost everyone since we are culturally and probably biologically committed to a worldview in which such things cannot possibly work. Oh well. I stand by it anyway.

Can it be that this holding-at-bay could be "homeomorphic" to conventionally conceived brain computation and thus save face for all concerned? Maaaaaaybe, but I doubt it. It may correspond better to some other conventional model of mind. We'll see. I haven't really thought productively about what "holding at bay" is about. I have that image of drilling a hole in a hollow planet (which causes gravitation movement in the opposite direction) or turning off one of the electric fans in the circle (causing wind-aided movement toward that fan), but that doesn't get me very close to squaring that circle! (!) There is also the image of the uncancelled quantum probability vectors that make reflecting photons behave as expected. That may be the most productive angle of the three. Probabilities seem like things that can be nudged to create desirable outcomes. Maybe the reflection metaphor is helpful, since my nested selves are a lot like Leibnizean monadic mirrors... Ugh. Unfortunately, quantum probabilities are probably beyond my capacity to usefully imagine.

I'm quickly getting away from nesting selves, but this side trip may end up being worth it for me. What is it like to stand in the fecund world and what are the rules of navigation? What is the substance of the myriad influences. What is personal intelligence if it's not about solving but about removing impediments to the solution? What are the impediments and how does one go about removing them.

The impediments to event X are any vectors pushing away from X in event space, in particular ones trying to cause/create anti-X. If event X is me getting up and going to the kitchen for a snack then... what are all the things working against that? There are a lot both visible and invisible.

Knowledge that

1) It's easier to remain in my seat

2) I want to lose weight

3) Pretty soon, I'll need to pee so maybe I should do that first.

4) I also want to go for a walk before it gets dark. A snack might impede progress

5) My back is stiff. My sprained toe will ache

6) We're out of my preferred snack.

This sounds like weighing possibilities to come to a decision, and that decision involves blocking for the moment those contrary impulses. Mundane as hell. It's not wild at all to suggest that a decision between options involves blocking out the losing options in order to amplify the winner. But these only include things in the conscious narrative or can be brought into the conscious narrative. That's the tip of the iceberg.

There's also the tendency for

7) My wife to walk in and distract me from my plan

8) Me to have a heart attack

9) A car to crash through my window

10) the world to spontaneously end

I have said repeatedly that we should be free to switch assumptions -- at least in a particular way that exchanges yin and yang orientations. This may not be possible with all assumptions. My rule of thumb has been to seek out situations where both A and not A are sometimes the case -- like staying the same or changing -- and the switch involves taking each in turn as the natural, presumptive case and the case in need of explanation.

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LOGIC=LOGOS

My Plenum Postulate (or axiom of fecundity) that everything is trying to happen at once but failing mostly has gotten new juice for me lately with the thought that this allows cogitation to be something other than computation-based (as it allows, I suppose, for pretty much anything at all?). If every thought -- both insightful and not -- is already out there in the Melonquescence, our minds don't have to make them but merely to cultivate them, allow them, cancel their opposites, etc. What a wild idea! Craziest one yet that I've actually taken seriously. "I'm a radiohead, picking up something good." I've thought playfully that the brain's architecture of capacitors is more suited to tuning and amplifying than to computing, but I never took the next step seriously because it just pushed off the question of where the "thinking" was actually happening to a remote location. Now, miraculously the answer can be that the thoughts are trying to happen nowhere and everywhere and all the time!

[The Melonquescence, I should say, is something I came up with as a silly 17-year-old (rather than the silly 67-year-old I am today). I defined it as "the set of all things that have yet to be imagined," and I pretended it was a place or a mathematical space, an island of lost toys. I'm guessing the inspiration for it was my early exposure to Russell's mindbending "set of all sets that do not contain themselves as members." I think the name is a combination of quintessence and Mellotron -- the 1960s art rock instrument. Just sounded cool to me.]

Last night (10/28/2024) I had the strangest dream (I ever had before). Too strange to conjure into a narrative existence. There was a torrent of felicitous thoughts in my dream that I can't begin to reconstruct, but -- and this is the strangest part -- a vestige of my waking consciousness told me I ought to distill this torrent into a brief phrase that I might be able to remember later. The phrase I came up with was "Logic equals Logos." Several times thereafter in the night I woke briefly and forced myself to remember and repeat the phrase. Each time it seemed more and more remote and meaningless. But in my normal waking consciousness, the phrase had done its work, and I have an inkling of what my dreaming self may have meant; it relates to mind as a receptive agent rather than a constructive one. What's more, this occurred to me out of nowhere and without trying...in a dream! Self-exemplifying.

Logos is an idea I've encountered a number of times in the context of both Greek philosophy and Christian theology. Never paid it much mind except in the phrase, "In the beginning was the Word." So Logos translates as "the word of God" or "universal mind" or maybe the inherent intelligence of the world. Christian writers sometimes equate Jesus with the Logos , Godliness made manifest (as in "the word was made flesh"). It's very unmodern, unphysicalist. Sources indicate that Heraclitus was an early adopter of the term which makes sense in the context of his formulation of an idea kind of close to my plenum postulate -- all is flow/change.

Anyway, I hadn't ever connected Logos to my radiohead ideas, but the relationship is clear enough, I guess. If intelligence is baked into reality, then radioheads can conceivably have access to it.

But it's "logic" and not "thinking" per se that's equal to the inherent intelligence of the world in this formulation. My twisted dream was trying to solve a paradoxical problem I've thought about a lot. The problem boils down to this: If, as I've said, thinking evolved from scratch through evolution and thus isn't a God-given pathway to truths about the world, then from what does the astounding power of deductive and inductive logic derive? These are Plato's eternal forms again. Logicality, a seeming aspect of maps, somehow pervades the Territory? If not, how can logic work so well? Well, since Map-world is part of the Territory, it must be "made of" the same stuff, which apparently includes Logos/Logic. So human language/thought may be evolved from scratch in a sense, but the scratch ingredients include "the Word of God" or some inherent intelligence or logic. This isn't deeply convincing to a science- or results-oriented mind. It needs at minimum a bit more detail or specificity. How can one characterize the order or intelligence of the Territory? What could it mean? Remember too that -- via the allegory of the cafe -- our maps infiltrate the Territory as imperfectly cancelled signals that create their own cacophony within the cafe. In this way, the map and the territory kind of bootstrap together -- at least in the explicate order. That is, there may remain an untouched and unmediated implicate order of the territory. Wow, sure sounds like a load of crap! The mismatch propounded by the multiplication rule rears its ugly head again. Keep treading lightly.

I have made some effort to call into question all kinds of assumptions. "I'm doing the best I can," said the fish swimming in this sea of assumptions! But one thing I can't begin to call into question is the validity of deductive logic as a way to filter ideas, perceptions, etc. into legit and not legit piles. That is, in my little world, logic transcends the limitations of map-territory connectivity. And that's a big deal! It's right at the heart of all the big questions of philosophy. Logic=Logos!

It's just like the dearth of good examples I have for picturing a Plenum Postulate world. What can it possibly look like for things to try to happen and be either canceled or let through? I need a few more clarifying examples. The hollow planet or the circle of fans give only the scantest bit of traction. These are canceling vectors. Can all of the competing influences be conceived of as vectors in some sort of infinite dimensional space?

So, I guess I'm saying the universe has deductive and inductive logic or Reason built in but no built-in or correct assumptions to go with the logic? Weird. Logos precedes Gnosis. Nice catchphrase

The only source of truly legitimate assumptions is from stuff we "know"

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I just dug into Heraclitean fragments a bit. I find it all interesting and poetic, but, in the end, too frustrating for my taste... like Zen koans.

I'm not seeking transcendence of the phenomenal world here -- I'm not sure that's possible or even desirable -- but I want rather to approach an appreciation of the transcendent Territory via conventional thinking. That's the idea of assumption switching. I should remind myself and everyone else here that, in my assumption-switching grand scheme, the quasi-validity of the Plenum Postulate doesn't preclude the simultaneous but contradictory validity of the standard postulates of science. That's pretty hard to keep in mind when I'm considering such off-the-wall possibilities. Your kneejerk rejection to such poppycock might stop you in your tracks. But remember: duck and then rabbit; vase and then faces. The two halves exist simultaneously, but you can only see and appreciate them one at a time. The jumping muscles and the anti-jump muscles.

Makes me think about how these three concepts relate: the Dao, the Territory, and the Logos. More on this later, I suspect.

Heraclitus: All things are in flux; the flux is subject to a unifying measure or rational principle. This principle (logos, the hidden harmony behind all change) bound opposites together in a unified tension, which is like that of a lyre, where a stable harmonious sound emerges from the tension of the opposing forces that arise from the bow bound together by the string.

Good science can produce statements like : If action A is carried out under conditions B, then measurable events C are reliably achieved. Ideally the narrative doesn't go much beyond that

I remember thinking as a young person that it's futile to ask why something is true because you can never get to the real reason. An infinity of further questions necessarily follow. We can only get a kind of resolution when the question is how rather than why. This is precisely the superiority of statistical description over narrative explanation. "Explanations try to answer why X is true where good science merely show that X is true," he explained.

A phrase I latched onto early in my philosophical thinking is "the infinite possibility of reality." That really is the bottom line of my obsession. Again, it probably flowed out of thinking about the Melonquesence. And it leads right to assumption switching and the allegory of the cafe.