Friday, 29 April 2016

Patentological Strategies towards a Fuller Understanding of a Geometry for Artificial Thought



In order to deal with the vast input of signals from the world around us by evolution we have developed the process of thinking. Thinking is a process of putting aside irrelevancies, so that we can focus on what is really important. Phenomena which are too big or too small are filtered out to give a so-called “considerable set” of information for our consideration. Hence per definition and by nature we deal with incomplete information, so that we can never grasp the complete truth of a phenomenon mentally.


In order to be able to filter out the relevancies, we have developed different kinds of sieves in the form of “schemes” to organise information in chunks which are easy to swallow.



Historically, mankind has tried to make classification schemes based on the elementary substance nature of objects, from gross to more subtle in the form of earth, water, fir, air and ether and based on our corresponding senses, smell, taste, sight, feeling and hearing. In the Vedic tradition Indian classifications add to this fivefold division Mind (Manas), Intellect (Buddhi) and Ego (Ahamkara), resulting in an eightfold division. As we also distinguish 8 tones in a scale and 8 colours in the rainbow, often mention is made of “octaves of existence”.



Philosophers have thought a great deal about schemes. We know the dialectics from Hegel, in which a thesis is followed and opposed by an antithesis, the tension of which is resolved in a synthesis accommodating elements of both and transcending the polarities.



In more modern times we also find trialectics and quadralectics. The Quadralectic system is strongly based on architectural and sociological notions of how a group of people orient in the search for a settlement (orientation), settle (determination), defend their settlement (urbanisation) and develop into an integrated society (politeia).



Aristotle also applied a fourfold division in his analysis of purposes (entelechia), which can be final, formal, material or efficient.



Even in the Vedic tradition we find in Patanjali’s Yoga sutras a fourfold scheme to apprehend the world: Visesha considers the specific objects one by one, in Avisesha via induction universal properties of a class are assessed, Linga abstracts a phenomenon to an articulated image or glyph and Alinga transcends the differences between the phenomena by their reductive sameness. Besides that he proposes an eightfold system, the Asthanga Yoga, to explore consciousness.



In my book Technovedanta I proposed a 7-step algorithm of intelligence, which is basically twice a fourfold process, but in which I declared the fourth state of the first set to be the first state of the second set after a metasystem transition. This can easily be extended into an eightfold octave scheme by including the metasystem transition itself as a state.



 I was surprised to discover recently in the book “Synergetics” a scheme which bears great resemblance to my “algorithm for intelligence”. Buckminster Fuller (hereinafter called “BF”), the author of “Synergetics” describes a very useful way how we apprehend the world and come to an understanding thereof, which he names the “Geometry of thinking”.





And not only are these notions of BF useful for our understanding of the outside and inside world, BFs notions could actually be implemented in artificial general intelligence.
....
More of this chapter can be found in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.

Monday, 25 April 2016

The Golden Ratio of the Erisian Apple: When Logic is Nonsensical and Sense Alogical



Hail Eris!


In 1965 Greg Hill ( Malaclypse the Younger) with Kerry Wendell Thornley (Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst published the  "Principia Discordia or How The West Was Lost". The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger, Wherein Is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything. 



An ambitious and humourful title.

As I claim to include Everything in my Technovedas, I cannot leave out this book, which is therefore incorporated by reference.


It is an absolutely exquisite text (here available: http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/pridisc.htm), which uses humour and absurdity as a basis to come to a religion.

Discordianism puts everything upside down. In fact it is the religion of perspectivism:
 
All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.“


It is useful to get familiar with some of the concepts of Discordianism, in order to be able to even transcend this paradigm, which is a transcending paradigm itself.

“... HERE FOLLOWS SOME PSYCHO-METAPHYSICS.

If you are not hot for philosophy, best just to skip it.



The Aneristic Principle is that of APPARENT ORDER; the Eristic

Principle is that of APPARENT DISORDER. Both order and disorder are man made concepts and are artificial divisions of PURE CHAOS, which is a level deeper that is the level of distinction making.



With our concept making apparatus called "mind" we look at reality through the ideas-about-reality which our cultures give us. The ideas-about-reality are mistakenly labeled "reality" and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact that other people, especially other cultures, see "reality" differently. It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T True) reality is a level deeper that is the

level of concept.



We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is in the GRID. That is the Aneristic Principle.



Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be True. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians call the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Some grids can be more useful than others, some more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be more True than any other.



DISORDER is simply unrelated information viewed through some particular grid. But, like "relation", no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an idea about sex. To say that male-ness is "absence of female-ness", or vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is the ERISTIC PRINCIPLE.



The belief that "order is true" and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the ERISTIC ILLUSION.



The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered.

              

Reality is the original Rorschach. (Note by me: the Rorschach inkblot test, the Rorschach technique, or simply the inkblot test) is a psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation)



Verily! So much for all that.

...


Which Is Real?
Do these 5 pebbles REALLY form a pentagon?
Those biased by the Aneristic Illusion would say yes. Those biased by the Eristic Illusion would say no. Criss-cross them and it is a star.

An Illuminated Mind can see all of these, yet he does not insist that any one is really true, or that none at all is true. Stars, and pentagons, and disorder are all his creations and he may do with them as he wishes. Indeed, even so the concept of number 5.
The real reality is there, but everything you KNOW about "it" is in your mind and yours to do with as you like. Conceptualization is art, and YOU ARE THE ARTIST.

Conviction causes convicts.


 ...


The words of the Foolish and those of the Wise Are not far apart in Discordian Eyes.

(HBT; The Book of Advise, 2:1)



The PODGE of the Sacred Chao is symbolized as The Golden Apple of Discordia,

which represents the Eristic Principle of Disorder. The writing on it,

"KALLISTI" is Greek for "TO THE PRETTIEST ONE" and refers to an old myth about

The Goddess. But the Greeks had only a limited understanding of Disorder, and

thought it to be a negative principle.



The Pentagon represents the Aneristic Principle of Order and symbolizes the HODGE. The Pentagon has several references; for one,, it can be taken to represent geometry, one of the earliest studies of formal order to reach elaborate development;* for another, it specifically accords with THE LAW OF FIVES.



THE TRUTH IS FIVE BUT MEN HAVE ONLY ONE NAME FOR IT.

                                                             -Patamunzo Lingananda



It is also the shape of the United States Military Headquarters, the Pentagon Building, a most pregnant manifestation of straightjacket order resting on a firm foundation of chaos and constantly erupting into dazzling disorder; and this building is one of our more cherished Erisian Shrines. Also it so happens that in times of medieval magic, the pentagon was the generic symbol for werewolves, but this reference is not particularly intended and it should be noted that the Erisian Movement does not discriminate against werewolves—our membership roster is open to persons of all races, national origins and hobbies.

...

The Law of Fives states simply that: ALL THINGS HAPPEN IN FIVES, OR

ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR ARE MULTIPLES OF FIVE, OR ARE SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR

INDIRECTLY APPROPRIATE TO 5.

               The Law of Fives is never wrong.
....”

As you can see Discordianism denies all forms of beliefs, including itself, which is a great way to demonstrate the fallacy of logic and dualistic thinking.

The Principia Discordia is highly self-contradictory from a logical perspective, or at least self-paradoxical. E.g. If the Law of Five is True, this means everything  is profoundly ORDERED, but that is known as the Aneristic Illusion. But this is the beauty of the system: it says the same about disorder as the Eristic illusion. From the standpoint of perspectivism, every notion is somehow right, in some persepective and somehow wrong in another prespective: there are no absolutes here. Parts can never be fully known.

But the Absolute, the whole , the knower  is implicitly hidden in this (anti-)philosophy, as we’ll see later.

The Symbol of the Discordian Movement are five dots seemingly ordered in the form of a Pentagon and a Golden Apple of Discordia with Kallisti written on it.


I share the notion of perspectivism strongly with the Principia Discordia. Everything we name, see and try to understand by means of our left-hemisphere is a way of logically connecting the dots, which is not necessarily the TRUTH. It is just a perspective, there are many other ways to connect the dots. Mind creates order out of a filtered reality. Whether the basis of the underlying REALITY is order or chaos, is for the moment not so important. In the phenomenal world these are but relative concepts. Just when you are zooming in on a picture. From far away it may not have any meaning, suddenly you start to see things in there, you start to connect dots in a certain way, but if you look closer, you see something else etc. ad infinitum until you arrive at pixels, but then you can go on with ma microscope and an electron microscope and at any level you will see different things.. But it is not so that one concept you see is wrong and the other other right: all concept are in a sense Mind-projections depending on the granularity of observation. You can say all notions are true in a certain way, in a certain magnification of the lens, but they are also simultaneously false from the perspective of another magnification level. You cannot know what is really there by Mind. Via relations and relativism you cannot know the thing per se and in se. As Kant would say the Noumenon.  Order and Disorder are relative concepts arising from an incomplete experience. Relativity and incompleteness, undecideability are different aspects of the same illusion of Mind.
....
More of this chapter in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.

Sunday, 24 April 2016

Mahakala's Quantime and the frame-rate of the Universe



Time is a difficult concept which scientists and philosophers have been unable to properly define and understand. As a result there are no technological applications known, which really involve some manipulation of time. In our quest of knowledge and mastery of nature, it is therefore indispensable that we arrive at a true knowledge of time, which will be confirmed by our ability to technologically manipulate it

The approach in this essay is explorative and speculative. Whereas I am not a fan of speculation, as by itself it will not lead us to knowledge, it is however an essential tool to come up with a plurality of hypotheses to account for a phenomenon, which hypotheses can be verified or falsified. If more than one hypothesis remains after verification, usually we will choose the hypothesis with the least number of assumptions. This principle is known as Occam’s razor, which is an intuitive but unproven principle.

In ancient times Time was usually associated with the periodicity of a natural phenomenon such as tides, seasons or the movement of celestial bodies. Time has been associated with movement or with change in general. In recent times, the arrow of Time from past via present to future, which as of yet seems to be irreversible, has been connected to the notion of entropy: Time can only progress in the direction of an overall increase of chaos or increasing entropy: This is known as the second law of thermodynamics.

Einstein has made major contributions to our grasp of the notion of time by showing that time is relative and can be dilated if the speed at which we move approaches the speed of light. The speed of light has thus far been found to be an absolute limit to speed and when a photon travels at this speed -from the perspective of the photon- time is said to stand still. This is a consequence of Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity goes a bit further and combines space and time into a so-called four dimensional “space-time continuum”. A continuum, because nobody has ever been able to find discrete units of space, time or space-time.

Yet there are alternative theories, which equally well account for the speed of light as a limit to speed and which are functionally equivalent to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, albeit based on different concepts:
One of these is the MDT (Moving Dimensions Theory) of Elliot McGucken. Space-time itself is expanding at the constant rate of light speed. Langan’s “conspansion” is a variant thereof in which all objects are shrinking at the constant rate of light speed, whereas space itself remains unaltered.

In my panpsychic pancomputationalism T.O.E. I have relied heavily on the work of Steven Kaufman ("Unified Reality Theory"or URT), who describes space as a fabric of “reality” cells. The reality cells themselves are nothing more than consciousness forming a first relation with itself. The cells can have an energetic content or not, turning them into a kind of computational digit. Kaufman calls such an energetic content “distortion content” and this distortion content propagates through the reality cell or space matrix in a periodic manner creating a “period of content exchange”, which Kaufman equates with the speed of light. Time in Kaufman’s model is merely a measure of the periodicity of what he calls “compound processes”. When energetic content (or photonic entities if you wish) encounter each other, they start to attract each other due to their mutual attractive distortions radiating in all directions. Thus they start to turn around each other thereby forming “matter”, which is nothing more than a second order relationship of consciousness to itself.



In this view time is more of an emergent property resulting from the compounded dynamics of multiple energy content entities propagating through the energy matrix in compound processes called matter. Without matter there is no time in Kaufman’s model.

On the other hand, since the reality cells can function as a computational digit, which conveys information, I have argued that Kaufman’s theory is essentially a form of pancomputationalism. Since in Kaufman’s model every energetic relation is an expression of consciousness, I also indicated that Kaufman’s theory is a panpsychic theory, leading to the unusual terminology “panpsychic pancomputationalism”.
...
More of this chapter in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.